What the entire Enlightenment has in common is denial of the central Christian doctrine of original sin, believing instead that man is born either innocent and good, or morally neutral and malleable by education or environment, or, at worst, deeply defective but capable of radical and indefinite improvement by rational education in favourable circumstances, or by a revolutionary reorganisation of society as demanded, for example, by Rousseau. It is this denial of original sin that the Church condemned most severely in Rousseau’s Emile, despite its attack on materialism, utilitarianism and atheism. It is the powerful reaffirmation of this Pauline and Augustinian doctrine that is the sharpest single weapon in the root-and-branch attack on the entire Enlightenment by the French counter-revolutionary writers Maistre, Bonald and Chateaubriand, at the turn of the century.
One of the darkest of the reactionary forms of the fight against the Enlightenment, as well as one of the most interesting and influential, is to be found in the doctrines of Joseph de Maistre and his followers and allies, who formed the spearhead of the counterrevolution in the early nineteenth century in Europe. Maistre held the Enlightenment to be one of the most foolish, as well as the most ruinous, forms of social thinking. The conception of man as naturally disposed to benevolence, co-operation and peace, or, at any rate, capable of being shaped in this direction by appropriate education or legislation, is for him shallow and false. The benevolent Dame Nature of Hume, Holbach and Helvétius is an absurd figment. History and zoology are the most reliable guides to nature: they show her to be a field of unceasing slaughter. Men are by nature aggressive and destructive; they rebel over trifles – the change to the Gregorian calendar in the mid-eighteenth century, or Peter the Great’s decision to shave the boyars’ beards, provoke violent resistance, at times dangerous rebellions. But when men are sent to war, to exterminate beings as innocent as themselves for no purpose that either army can grasp, they go obediently to their deaths and scarcely ever mutiny. When the destructive instinct is evoked men feel exalted and fulfilled. Men do not come together, as the Enlightenment teaches, for mutual co-operation and peaceful happiness; history makes it clear that they are never so united as when given a common altar upon which to immolate themselves. This is so because the desire to sacrifice themselves or others is at least as strong as any pacific or constructive impulse.
Maistre felt that men are by nature evil, self-destructive animals, full of conflicting drives, who do not know what they want, want what they do not want, do not want what they want, and it is only when they are kept under constant control and rigorous discipline by some authoritarian élite – a Church, a State, or some other body from whose decisions there is no appeal – that they can hope to survive and be saved. Reasoning, analysis, criticism shake the foundations and destroy the fabric of society. If the source of authority is declared to be rational, it invites questioning and doubt; but if it is questioned it may be argued away; its authority is undermined by able sophists, and this accelerates the forces of chaos, as in France during the reign of the weak and liberal Louis XVI. If the State is to survive and frustrate the fools and knaves who will always seek to destroy it, the source of authority must be absolute, so terrifying, indeed, that the least attempt to question it must entail immediate and terrible sanctions: only then will men learn to obey it. Without a clear hierarchy of authority – awe-inspiring power – men’s incurably destructive instincts will breed chaos and mutual extermination. The supreme power – especially the Church – must never seek to explain or justify itself in rational terms; for what one man can demonstrate, another may be able to refute. Reason is the thinnest of walls against the raging seas of violent emotion: on so insecure a basis no permanent structure can ever be erected. Irrationality, so far from being an obstacle, has historically led to peace, security and strength, and is indispensable to society: it is rational institutions – republics, elective monarchies, democracies, associations founded on the enlightened principles of free love – that collapse soonest; authoritarian Churches, hereditary monarchies and aristocracies, traditional forms of life, like the highly irrational institution of the family, founded on life-long marriage – it is they that persist.
The philosophes proposed to rationalise communication by inventing a universal language free from the irrational survivals, the idiosyncratic twists and turns, the capricious peculiarities of existing tongues; if they were to succeed, this would be disastrous, for it is precisely the individual historical development of a language belonging to a people that absorbs, enshrines and encapsulates a vast wealth of half-conscious, half-remembered collective experience. What men call superstition and prejudice are but the crust of custom which by sheer survival has shown itself proof against the ravages and vicissitudes of its long life; to lose it is to lose the shield that protects men’s national existence, their spirit, the habits, memories, faith that have made them what they are. The conception of human nature which the radical critics have promulgated and on which their whole house of cards rests is an infantile fantasy. Rousseau asks why it is that man, who was born free, is nevertheless everywhere in chains; Maistre replies, ‘This mad pronouncement, Man is born free, is the opposite of the truth.’24 ‘It would be equally reasonable’, adds the eminent critic Émile Faguet in an essay on Maistre, ‘to say that sheep are born carnivorous, and everywhere nibble grass.’25 Men are not made for freedom, nor for peace. Such freedom and peace as they have had were obtained only under wisely authoritarian governments that have repressed the destructive critical intellect and its socially disintegrating effects. Scientists, intellectuals, lawyers, journalists, democrats, Jansenists, Protestants, Jews, atheists – these are the sleepless enemy that never ceases to gnaw at the vitals of society. The best government the world has ever known was that of the Romans: they were too wise to be scientists themselves; for this purpose they hired the clever, volatile, politically incapable Greeks. Not the luminous intellect, but dark instincts govern man and societies; only élites which understand this, and keep the people from too much secular education, which is bound to make them over-critical and discontented, can give to men as much happiness and justice and freedom as, in this vale of tears, men can expect to have. But at the back of everything must lurk the potentiality of force, of coercive power.
In a striking image Maistre says that all social order in the end rests upon one man, the executioner. Nobody wishes to associate with this hideous figure, yet on him, so long as men are weak, sinful, unable to control their passions, constantly lured to their doom by evil temptations or foolish dreams, rest all order, all peace, all society. The notion that reason is sufficient to educate or control the passions is ridiculous. When there is a vacuum, power rushes in; even the bloodstained monster Robespierre, a scourge sent by the Lord to punish a country that had departed from the true faith, is more to be admired – because he did hold France together and repelled her enemies, and created armies that, drunk with blood and passion, preserved France – than liberal fumbling and bungling. Louis XIV ignored the clever reasoners of his time, suppressed heresy, and died full of glory in his own bed. Louis XVI played amiably with subversive ideologists who had drunk at the poisoned well of Voltaire, and died on the scaffold. Repression, censorship, absolute sovereignty, judgements from which there is no appeal, these are the only methods of governing creatures whom Maistre described as half men, half beasts, monstrous centaurs at once seeking after God and fighting him, longing to love and create, but in perpetual danger of falling victims to their own blindly destructive drives, held in check by a combination of force and traditional authority and, above all, a faith incarnated in historically hallowed institutions that reason dare not touch.
Nation and race are realities; the artificial creations of constitution-mongers are bound to collapse. ‘Nations’, said Maistre, ‘are born and die like individuals’; they ‘have a common soul’, especially visible in their language.26 And since they are individuals, they should endeavour to remain of one race. So too Bo
nald, his closest intellectual ally, regrets that the French nation has abandoned its ideal of racial purity, thus weakening itself. The question of whether the French are descended from Franks or Gauls, whether their institutions are Roman or German in origin, with the implication that this could dictate a form of life in the present, although it has its roots in political controversies in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, now takes the colour of mystical organicism, which transcends, and is proof against, all forms of discursive reasoning. Natural growth alone is real for Maistre. Only time, only history, can create authority that men can worship and obey: mere military dictatorship, a work of individual human hands, is brutal force without spiritual power; he calls it bâtonocratie, and predicts the end of Napoleon.
In similar strain Bonald denounced individualism whether as a social doctrine or an intellectual method of analysing historical phenomena. The inventions of man, he declared, are precarious aids compared to the divinely ordained institutions that penetrate man’s very being – language, family, the worship of God. By whom were they invented? Whenever a child is born there are father, mother, family, language, God; this is the basis of all that is genuine and lasting, not the arrangements of men drawn from the world of shopkeepers, with their contracts, or promises, or utility, or material goods. Liberal individualism inspired by the insolent self-confidence of mutinous intellectuals has led to the inhuman competition of bourgeois society, in which the strongest and the fastest win and the weak go to the wall. Only the Church can organise a society in which the ablest are held back so that the whole of society can progress and the weakest and least greedy also reach the goal.
These gloomy doctrines became the inspiration of monarchist politics in France, and together with the notion of romantic heroism and the sharp contrast between creative and uncreative, historic and unhistoric individuals and nations, duly inspired nationalism, imperialism, and finally, in their most violent and pathological form, Fascist and totalitarian doctrines in the twentieth century.
The failure of the French Revolution to bring about the greater portion of its declared ends marks the end of the French Enlightenment as a movement and a system. Its heirs and the counter-movements that, to some degree, they stimulated and affected in their turn, romantic and irrational creeds and movements, political and aesthetic, violent and peaceful, individualist and collective, anarchic and totalitarian, and their impact, belong to another page of history.
1 Letter to Lavater, c.20 September 1780: p. 325, line 7, in Goethes Briefe (Hamburg, 1962–7), vol. 1.
2 Johann Georg Hamann, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Joseph Nadler (Vienna, 1949–57) (hereafter in this essay Werke), vol. 2, p. 208, line 20.
3 ibid., vol. 3, p. 285, line 15.
4 Johann Georg Hamann, Briefwechsel, ed. Walther Ziesemer and Arthur Henkel (Wiesbaden and Frankfurt, 1955–79), vol. 6, p. 331, line 22.
5 Werke, vol. 3, p. 225, line 3.
6 ibid., vol. 2, p. 197, line 22.
7 ibid., line 15.
8 Herder’s sämmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin, 1877–1913), vol. 5, p. 583.
9 Hamann, Werke, vol. 2, p. 172, line 21.
10 ibid., p. 171, line 15.
11 ibid., p. 164, line 17.
12 op. cit. (p. 252 above, note 1), vol. 18, p. 56.
13 See the part of the preface to his Osnabrückische Geschichte (1768) reprinted as ‘Deutsche Geschichte’ in Von Deutscher Art und Kunst (1773), by Herder and others: esp. p. 157 in the edition of the latter by Edna Purdie (Oxford, 1924).
14 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790): p. 127 in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, ed. Paul Langford (Oxford, 1981– ), vol. 8, The French Revolution, ed. L. G. Mitchell (1989).
15 J. M. R. Lenz, ‘Über Götz von Berlichingen’: p. 638 in Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, Werke und Briefe in Drei Bänden, ed. Sigrid Damm (Munich/Vienna, 1987), vol. 2.
16 op. cit. (p. 252 above, note 1), vol. 29, p. 366.
17 ibid., vol. 5, p. 538.
18 Dichtung und Wahrheit, book 11: p. 68, line 17, in Goethes Werke (Weimar, 1887–1919), vol. 28.
19 op. cit. (p. 195 above, note 2), book 4, pp. 584–6.
20 ‘Auguries of Innocence’, line 5: p. 1312 in William Blake’s Writings, ed. G. E. Bentley, Jr (Oxford, 1978), vol. 2.
21 ‘Laocoon’, aphorisms 17, 19: ibid., pp. 665, 666.
22 Die Räuber, act 1, scene 2: p. 21, line 29, in Schillers Werke, Nationalausgabe (Weimar, 1943– ), vol. 3.
23 Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Werke (Leipzig, 1812–25), vol. 1, p. 367.
24 Oeuvres complètes de J. de Maistre (Lyon/Paris, 1884–7), vol. 2, p. 338.
25 Émile Faguet, Politiques et moralistes du dix-neuvième siècle, 1st series (Paris, 1899), p. 41.
26 op. cit. (p. 266 above, note 1), vol. 1, p. 325.
THE ORIGINALITY OF MACHIAVELLI
I
THERE IS SOMETHING surprising about the sheer number of interpretations of Machiavelli’s political opinions. There exist, even now, over a score of leading theories of how to interpret The Prince and the Discourses – apart from a cloud of subsidiary views and glosses. The bibliography of this is vast and growing faster than ever.1 While there may exist no more than the normal extent of disagreement about the meaning of particular terms or theses contained in these works, there is a startling degree of divergence about the central view, the basic political attitude of Machiavelli.
This phenomenon is easier to understand in the case of other thinkers whose opinions have continued to puzzle or agitate mankind – Plato, for example, or Rousseau, or Hegel, or Marx. But then it might be said that Plato wrote in a world and in a language that we cannot be sure we understand; that Rousseau, Hegel, Marx were prolific theorists, whose works are scarcely models of clarity or consistency. But The Prince is a short book: its style is usually described as being singularly lucid, succinct and pungent – a model of clear Renaissance prose. The Discourses are not, as treatises on politics go, of undue length, and they are equally clear and definite. Yet there is no consensus about the significance of either; they have not been absorbed into the texture of traditional political theory; they continue to arouse passionate feelings; The Prince has evidently excited the interest and admiration of some of the most formidable men of action of the last four centuries, especially of our own, men not normally addicted to reading classical texts.
There is evidently something peculiarly disturbing about what Machiavelli said or implied, something that has caused profound and lasting uneasiness. Modern scholars have pointed out certain real or apparent inconsistencies between the (for the most part) republican sentiment of the Discourses (and the Histories) and the advice to absolute rulers in The Prince; indeed there is a difference of tone between the two treatises, as well as chronological puzzles: this raises problems about Machiavelli’s character, motives and convictions which for three hundred years and more have formed a rich field of investigation and speculation for literary and linguistic scholars, psychologists and historians.
But it is not this that has shocked Western feeling. Nor can it be only Machiavelli’s ‘realism’ or his advocacy of brutal or unscrupulous or ruthless policies that has so deeply upset so many later thinkers, and driven some of them to explain or explain away his advocacy of force and fraud. The fact that the wicked are seen to flourish or that immoral courses appear to pay has never been very remote from the consciousness of mankind. The Bible, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle – to take only some of the fundamental works of Western culture – the characters of Jacob or Joshua or David, Samuel’s advice to Saul, Thucydides’ Melian dialogue or his account of at least one ferocious but rescinded Athenian resolution, the philosophies of Thrasymachus and Callicles, Aristotle’s advice to tyrants in the Politics, Carneades’ speeches to the Roman Senate as described by Cicero, Augustine’s view of the secular State from one vantage-point, and Marsilio’s from another – all these had cast en
ough light on political realities to shock the credulous out of uncritical idealism.
The explanation can scarcely lie in Machiavelli’s tough-mindedness alone, even though he did perhaps dot the i’s and cross the t’s more sharply than anyone before him.2 Even if the initial outcry – the reactions of, say, Pole or Gentillet – is to be so explained, this does not account for the reactions of those acquainted with the views of Hobbes or Spinoza or Hegel or the Jacobins and their heirs. Something else is surely needed to account both for the continuing horror and for the differences among the commentators. The two phenomena may not be unconnected. To indicate the nature of the latter phenomenon let me cite only the best-known rival interpretations of Machiavelli’s political views produced since the sixteenth century.
According to Alberico Gentili3 and Garrett Mattingly,4 the author of The Prince wrote a satire, for he certainly cannot literally have meant what he said. For Spinoza,5 Rousseau,6 Ugo Foscolo,7 Luigi Ricci (who introduces The Prince to the readers of The World’s Classics)8 it is a cautionary tale; for whatever else he was, Machiavelli was a passionate patriot, a democrat, a believer in liberty, and The Prince must have been intended (Spinoza is particularly clear on this) to warn men of what tyrants could be and do, the better to resist them. Perhaps the author could not write openly with two rival powers – those of the Church and of the Medici – eyeing him with equal (and not unjustified) suspicion. The Prince is therefore a satire (though no work seems to me to read less like one).
The Proper Study of Mankind Page 39