In 1748, three books were published that would change the face of Europe. Owing to the various regimes of censorship then operating there, none of them could appear with an honest title page. Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws came forth into the world without its author’s name, although the Baron de Secondat would soon accept responsibility. If controversy dogged it for a long time after its publication, so much of The Spirit of the Laws has become conventional wisdom that students now find it tedious. Societies obviously operate and change according to rules which we can know, and not divine mandate. Liberalism as a political philosophy makes no sense otherwise: in a way, The Spirit of the Laws marks the birth of a notion of a “civil society” from which the government might safely withdraw control. At the same time, Montesquieu formalizes a secular-scientific view of legislation that had been developing organically in France and England for some time. As most people now do, he approaches the problem of the laws from a standpoint of “governmentality” rather than justice stricto sensu.
Modern readers, as I said, have a difficult time understanding how these methodological prescriptions could provoke outrage. An example of how Montesquieu applied them may explain. Some sixty years earlier, Pierre Bayle had opened an enduring and heated debate by arguing that a society of atheists could be virtuous, perhaps even more virtuous than a society of Christians. Almost every enlightenment political theorist who came after felt obliged to take a position on this thesis. Montesquieu, predictably, sides with the conservatives: in his view, Christians are the best subjects a ruler could wish for. The reason for this, however, is not that Christianity makes people better. Rather, it tends to make them obedient; moreover, Christianity is unique among faiths in possessing a sacred text made up not of hard moral guidelines but of polite suggestions, which a king can overrule without concern for the consciences of his people.
Montesquieu thus (as often) reaches a conclusion to which his traditionalist contemporaries would have been amenable by absolutely scandalous means. He treats Christianity not as a religion, which can be true or false, but as a social condition which is adaptable to some purposes and not to others. In this, he stands at no great distance from the views set forth by Spinoza in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, one of the most reviled European books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Early critics were quick to recognize such echoes and to accuse The Spirit of the Laws of Spinozism, which is to say atheism. Despite Montesquieu’s denials, they were probably right to do so: from its opening pages, the book is shot through with Spinoza’s thought., which sets it at odds with the providential, god-governed world in which most of his contemporaries still lived.
More nakedly atheistic, and therefore more careful to cover its tracks, was Jean de la Mettrie’s L’Homme machine.* What Monstesquieu did for society, de la Mettrie did for the individual body: the centerpiece of his argument was to erase Descarte’s distinction between animals and humans and to assert that we, like the animals, are automata without souls. Vaucanson had constructed his famous mechanical duck, which was able not only to move about but also (apparently) to digest food, only ten years before; Descartes himself, in a paranoid state of mind, had wondered whether his neighbors might not actually be robots, and was rumoured to have built a robotic version of his daughter, Francine, after her death at age five. De la Mettrie’s book could thus be read not only as a bold philosophical argument but as part of a technological project that seemed on the verge of completion, namely the production of mechanical substitutes for “real” human beings.
From both perspectives, L’Homme machine has to be judged a failure. Despite using the most advanced medical science of its day (de la Mettrie was also a doctor of some reknown), the book fails to give a convincing substitute explanation for cognitive phenomena and entirely ignores the problems surrounding consciousness. Technologically, of course, we’re still waiting, 280 years later: the only androids we have are on our cell phones, and Apple users don’t even have that.
None of this has presented the thesis of L’Homme machine from becoming, like that of The Spirit of the Laws, conventional wisdom. Most young people now believe that humans belong on a continuum with animals and that, like them, we can be thoroughly explained via vulgar materialism. I don’t mean to contest that thesis, only to point out a tendentious application that sees our material makeup as fully determining social practice. This version of de la Mettrie’s argument (let’s call it the Thatcherite reading: there’s no such thing as society) is actually incompatible with Montesqueiu’s emphasis on the causal value of collective phenomena, society or culture. Yet lots of us manage to hold both ideas in our heads at once. Here’s hoping we never have to choose, but I’d ditch L’Homme machine if the choice were put to me.
By denying humans their souls, L’Homme machine staked out a position that was at the time heretical but has, in the interval, become central to all kinds of modern sciences. Nonetheless, it is by far the least historically significant of the three books I’m discussing. In that respect not even The Spirit of the Laws, as influential as it was, can hold a candle to Therese Philosophe, a now little-read pornographic novel published (of course) anonymously but probably authored by the Marquis d’Argens. One of the forbidden bestsellers of pre-revolutionary France, its popularity among the revolutionary classes allows us to rank Therese Philosophe among the chief literary causes of the events of 1789. Its self-consciously popularizing approach to serious questions of politics and religion (a hint to modern public intellectuals: sex sells, but that doesn’t mean people ignore everything else) foretold the anticlericalism and antinobilitarianism of Voltaire and his contemporaries. What Voltaire mocked with cerebral wit, D’Argens showed getting chased naked out of a housewife’s bedroom window.
An incident from early in the novel – in fact, the one that sets Therese on the path to becoming a philosophe – shows striking homologies with Montesquieu’s discussion of the political value of Christianity. Therese (a nymphomaniac and masturbation-fiend sent to live with nuns by her scandalized mother) happens to be looking through a hole in the wall when her friend goes to confession. The friend’s spiritual advisor, a typically “celibate” monk, proceeds to flog her with “the cord of St. James” in order to beat out her impurities. Obediently, Therese’s friend gets down on all fours and lowers her skirts (this isn’t the first time she’s been to confession, after all), but, lo and behold, the “cord of St. James” turns out to be intimately attached to the monk who wields it, and what he does with it could only very metaphorically be described as flogging.
Like Montesquieu, d’Argens depicts Christianity as a religion of obedience, and the casuistic self-defence which the monk offers up when caught puts me in mind of the ease with which, as Montesquieu says, even the hardest of Christian moral prohibitions can be bent. You can see why d’Argens’ presentation of these ideas might be better for inspiring revolutionary fervor, though. It’s one thing to think, in the abstract, about Christian subjects being made to put up with all kinds of injustices, even those that go against their convictions; it’s something else to think they’re being fucked, and then (if you’re a citizen of ancien regime France) to realize the person being fucked is you.
The spirit that animates Therese Philosophe, one that’s totally lacking in Spirit of the Laws or L’Homme machine, is what George W.S. Trow called “ordinary cynicism:” the ability to tell, in a given complex social situation, who’s getting paid off (in money, sex, etc.) to lie to you. Without this sensibility, we’re lost as political subjects, but it’s more of a knack than a knowledge, not the kind of thing you can teach in a university course. The greatest achievement of the generation of writers following d’Argens was that they were able to transmit this knack to their countrymen, broadly, which is what made the latter fearless enough to stage a revolution. That’s one lesson of 1748 that we need to relearn today.
* I see now that I’m fudging a bit, since L’Homme Machine actually first hit the presses in late 1747. I think I can be forgiven for this, since 1748 saw the publication of a much larger second edition as well as its translation into the other major European languages.