The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Commerce, Hume wrote, “rouses men from their indolence” and “raises in them a desire for a more splendid way of life than what their ancestors enjoyed.” Indeed, the more the power of self-interest is unleashed in commercial society, Hume concluded, the faster society progresses. That power is the secret of the progress of man and the wealth of nations.38

  That, of course, is the title of the most famous work to come out of the Enlightenment, one directly inspired by Hume and nearly the only one still deemed relevant today. Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is a great compendium, a kind of Enlightenment Summa, of three decades of research and thinking on the science of man. Smith knew and worked alongside Kames and Hume and Robertson; he had combed through the works of his French counterparts like Montesquieu and Voltaire. His own lectures at the University of Glasgow laid out a four-stage theory of society very similar to Kames’s.

  Today we tend to think of Wealth of Nations as a work on economics. It is in fact a treatise on the history of civil society and on the driving principles that give commercial society its dynamism and affluence. People usually identify that driving engine as the division of labor. In truth, the division itself springs from Hume’s power of self-interest, the desire of some (but not everyone) to so dramatically improve their lives materially that they focus entirely on that skill or trade that brings the greatest return. This in turn generates a surplus so abundant, so far in excess of that possible in other previous stages of society, that these entrepreneurs enrich not only themselves, but the rest of society—even the politicians and intellectuals who scorn the business class on whom their own prosperity ultimately rests.

  Smith tells us not everyone can be Steve Jobs or Dave Thomas or Richard Branson. But under capitalism, not everyone has to. A handful of such persons will be sufficient, provided their creativity and egos are given plenty of room, which is precisely what the free marketplace does.

  Smith had to agree with Hume: commerce and self-interest feed on each other. The more freedom we give to both, as happened in western Europe after the Middle Ages, the faster society grows and improves. Free markets free men’s minds, their bodies (Smith delighted in pointing out that slavery was not only unjust but less profitable than free labor), and their individual spirits, even as they fill their pocketbooks with the fruits of natural liberty unleashed.

  “All systems of preference or of restraint, therefore, being completely taken away,” Smith wrote, “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way.” The result is “so great a quantity of everything is produced, that there is enough to gratify the slothful and oppressive profusion of the great, and at the same time abundantly to supply the wants” of even the poorest and most despised member of society, to a degree that would boggle the minds of even the rulers of a barbarous society.39

  Smith recognized that not everything would be sunny in a society geared around the unleashing of self-interest and economic growth, what we call capitalism. Some people would inevitably be left out of society’s benefits—not its material ones (what welfare recipient doesn’t own both a TV and a cell phone?), but its cultural ones, as the grind of making a living deprives them of leisure and opportunity for enrichment of the spirit. Preventing this kind of “mental mutilation,” Smith wrote, deserved “the most serious attention of the government.”40

  Hume, too, worried that commercial society’s increasing reliance on the need for credit, coupled with a mounting national debt, would require massive tax hikes that might eventually consume everything in sight. “Either the nation must destroy public credit,” he wrote toward the end of his life, “or public credit must destroy the nation.” And as Scotsmen who could remember when armed Highlanders had roamed the streets of Edinburgh, Smith and Hume sensed the fragility of civilization in the face of barbarism, in ways some of their successors and admirers did and do not.

  Still, on the whole there was every reason to be hopeful. Commercial society would grow, and social and political institutions would grow with them. The system of modern liberty unleashed by capitalism would succeed in freeing men from tyranny, just as it freed them from material want. The American Revolution and then the Declaration of Independence in 1776 (ironically, the same year Smith’s Wealth of Nations appeared), which Smith and Hume both applauded,d seemed to prove their point. Everywhere, it seemed, the empirical hopeful spirit of Aristotle’s Enlightenment was winning out.

  Yet at that same moment, the new disciples of Plato were plotting their revenge.

  * * *

  * Including, some would argue, in Aristotle’s direction on slavery. Modern critics like to point to Locke’s Constitution of Carolina, which upholds chattel slavery in that colony, and passages in the Second Treatise of Government that deny the slave the same natural rights as free men, as proof of his hypocrisy on this issue. How fair it is to condemn an author’s views based on a standard that he, in a very different time and place, was the first to conceive, seems a matter for debate.

  † See chapter 23.

  ‡ In fact, the only Greek philosopher Jefferson mentions as an influence on his Declaration of Independence is Aristotle.

  § Although the Enlightenment did award the original credit for this insight to Aristotle. The Frenchman Nicolas de Condorcet praised Arisotle as the first thinker to realize that “even our most abstract ideas, the most purely intellectual as it were, owe their origin to sensation.”

  ‖ This is what his most famous opponent, Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753), would do.

  a One was the artist William Blake, who in 1793 engraved a set of drawings revealing the aftermath of a slave revolt in Surinam with its brutal reprisals, which fed his distaste and despair for modern civilization.

  b See chapter 22.

  c The heart of the problem, as the French philosopher Montesquieu explained, was that even the greatest ancient cities, like Rome and Alexandria, still lived in a world that was overwhelmingly rural, and that denigrated the value of commerce and “the lucrative arts” as unworthy of free men. Montesquieu noted Plato’s dictum in the Laws that no citizen shall ever be allowed to engage in business or trade.

  d “I am an American in principles,” Hume told Benjamin Franklin in 1775, “and wish we would let [them] alone to govern or misgovern themselves as they think proper.”

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78): He turned Plato’s Republic into a program for cultural renewal and political revolution.

  Twenty-two

  STARTING OVER: PLATO, ROUSSEAU, AND REVOLUTION

  You must make your choice between the individual and the citizen, you cannot be both.

  —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762

  O Liberty, what crimes are commited in your name!

  —Madame Roland, 1793

  “I enter with secret horror this vast desert of the social world.”1

  With downcast face, a pale young man with intense, troubled eyes, walked the streets of Paris toward his rooming house. It was 1742, and the city around him teemed with a sense of discovery and excitement. Paris was home to brilliant artists and writers, elegant salons, and an emergent political culture, led by men like Voltaire and the Baron de Montesquieu, that after the disasters of the Louis XIV years hoped to rebuild France on the principles of modern liberty that they had seen in Locke’s and Shaftesbury’s England.

  It was the heyday of the rococo, and Parisian galleries sparkled with the works of Watteau, François LeMoyne, and François Boucher. Shopwindows offered goods imported from four continents. Restaurants and cafés served delicacies to their sophisticated clientele. France’s finest architects like Jacques-Ange Gabriel vied to build opulent maisons for kings, aristocrats, and government officials. Here was commercial society at its most prosperous and refined.*

  It all meant nothing to the young man—or rather everyt
hing. A carriage with laughing young people, elegant in their powdered wigs and silken dresses, suddenly rolled past. He stared with burning eyes. He would have given anything to have been with them, but it was not to be.

  He sighed and looked up. He had reached his run-down hotel near the Sorbonne on Paris’s Left Bank. Long ago, these narrow streets had seen the darting figure of Peter Abelard and the lumbering form of Thomas Aquinas. Now they were plunged in a dank darkness, and a dismal stony silence greeted him as he opened his rooming house gate.

  He mounted the mold-covered stairs, each creaking under his weight. The fact that the rooming house he had chosen since coming to Paris had once been occupied by writers like himself who had gone on to greater things did nothing to relieve his disappointment and despair.

  He entered his tiny dingy room and slammed shut the door. From the leather case under his arm, sheets of music leaked out. They spread across the floor, the title page uppermost. “A Dissertation on Modern Music, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.”

  He was ruined, Rousseau told himself. He had come to Paris in hope of being recognized as a musical genius. He was already thirty years old but looked and acted younger than his age. Born in Geneva, Switzerland, he had grown up with a charming but irresponsible watchmaker of a father who abandoned him at ten, leaving him to be passed from one unwilling relative to another. (His mother had died giving him birth.) Jean-Jacques didn’t lack for brains or good looks or charm. A warm, passionate talker, he was the kind of sensitive young man whom older women regularly fall in love with—and vice versa. One of them, a Madame de Warens, had been his protector and lover, almost his substitute mother, for nearly a decade. From Geneva he had wandered through the Savoy to Venice, the city of Vivaldi and Casanova, dreaming of love and fame—especially literary fame.

  From his early twenties, Rousseau had tried his hand at poetry and drama and music (including a drama he titled, with no sense of irony, Narcissus). No one paid much attention. For all his efforts, all he had to show was a certificate from the French Academy of Sciences blandly thanking him for a new form of musical notation he had invented.2

  He returned home crushed by their polite indifference. “I was thirty years old,” he would write later. “I was on the streets of Paris, where one does not live for nothing.” As his savings dwindled, he took whatever odd jobs he could find, including copying sheet music—the most menial level of a musician’s life. He managed to find a publisher for his treatise on musical notation, but no one wanted to read it any more than they wanted to hear his operas or plays.3 “I gave up all hopes of advancement and fame,” he wrote later in his Confessions. Survival in the most cosmopolitan city in Europe had become his sole priority. For the next few years, he earned a meager income as an obscure literary hack.

  Then one day in 1749 he set out for a solitary walk in the gardens around the castle at Vincennes. On the way, an article in the newspaper Mercure de France caught his attention. It was on an essay contest being sponsored by the Academy of Dijon on the topic “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts tended to purify morals?” The term restoration is striking. The standard view of the time, shared by Voltaire, Shaftesbury, and others, was that the end of the ancient world had meant an end to the polite arts and sciences in Europe, which required the Renaissance to restore them to their proper place.

  Rousseau, at least, understood at once what was meant. Had the growth of polite society, the fruit of commerce and progress, made men and women more moral, as leading Enlightenment voices were claiming, or not? Just as suddenly, Rousseau had the answer. No, it hasn’t made human beings better, it has actually made them worse. Far from making people love virtue, commercial society had filled their heads with a love of luxury and vice. Far from making them respect and help their neighbors, it had unleashed an ugly selfishness—including, he realized, in himself. And instead of drawing people together, it had driven them apart, producing “only a frightful solitude” in which each person was a stranger to every other, “for no man dares to be himself.”4

  Rousseau rushed home. He feverishly composed an essay on the subject, which he later published as A Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences. Thanks to progress, it read, “a vile and deceiving uniformity reigns in our morals, and all minds seem to have been cast in the same mold: constantly politeness demands, propriety commands; constantly one follows custom, never one’s own genius.” Economic and social improvement may have brought with them luxury and ease, but also “a train of vices: no more sincere friendships; no more real esteem; no more well-founded trust.”5

  Instead, Rousseau wrote, “we have Physicists, Geometricians, Chemists, Astronomers, Poets, Musicians, Painters; we no longer have citizens” of the kind who once made Rome and Greece the pride of humanity, including his particular hero, Socrates. Socrates, “the wisest man in Athens,” had also realized that the sophisticates of his home city were ignorant of the real human virtues.6

  This was no coincidence. Even as “the conveniences of life increase,” his Discourse read, “the arts improve, and luxury spreads, true courage is enervated, the military virtues vanish.” Indeed, “the study of the sciences is much more apt to soften and effeminate men’s courage than to strengthen and animate it.”

  Far better, Rousseau rhapsodized, to live like the ancient Spartans, who fought and died for their country and banned all trade and artistic production; or even like the nomadic Germanic tribes. The Romans had branded them ignorant barbarians, yet they managed to topple the greatest empire in history “with no other treasures than their bravery and their poverty.” For the sake of humanity, Rousseau prayed to God at the end of his Discourse, “deliver us from the Enlightenment and the fatal Arts of our forefathers, and restore us to ignorance, innocence and poverty!”7

  It was a strange manifesto to appear in 1750, just two years after Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws and fully a quarter century before Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Rousseau sent a copy to Voltaire. The great man wrote back, saying he found the thesis interesting. “Unfortunately,” he added with a scornful smirk, “after sixty years I have lost the habit of walking on all fours.” Still, it says something about the temper of the age that Rousseau’s essay took first prize at Dijon. His friend Denis Diderot, who like Voltaire had his doubts about the thesis, told Rousseau that when the Discourse appeared in print, “it has gone up like a rocket; such a success has never been seen before.”8

  Rousseau had finally won the fame he craved: ironically, by savaging the character of the very society that now wholeheartedly embraced him. Some scoffed at him as the “new Diogenes”; and indeed like Diogenes, Rousseau discovered that the more he abused people, the more they sought his company.

  Yet Rousseau’s success was far more significant. It involved nothing less than a revolution in how people think about modernity and civilization. Rousseau would overthrow nearly every tenet of the Enlightenment by self-consciously drawing on the one book it most despised: Plato’s Republic.

  David Hume dismissed the Republic as “visionary ranting.” Rousseau, by contrast proudly pronounced it the first book on education ever written.9 Indeed, almost everything Rousseau wrote or thought after 1750 until his death in 1778 reflected one or another aspect of Plato’s works.

  This was not the mystical Plato of the Neoplatonists (even though he seems to have read the dialogues in Marsilio Ficino’s venerable translations) or Plato the sacred geometer of the neo-Pythagoreans.10 This was Plato in the raw, the unflinching moral absolutist who denounced the corruption of his native Athens and admired the austere warriors of Sparta. It was Plato the would-be Philosopher Ruler who wanted to banish the arts and private property and train children from birth in the art of nature instead; whom Rousseau saw as the man who could teach Western civilization how to start over, and thus save itself.

  Unlike Shaftesbury or Adam Smith or even Thomas Jefferson, Rousseau comes to the intellectual table as the student of no one. He was almost entirely self-tau
ght. As a lonely boy he turned to books—including Plato—as a source of inspiration and to feed his own prejudices rather than to deepen his understanding. In this way, he may be the first modern reader. Certainly he was more a journalist, albeit a brilliant one, than a genuine philosopher. He has a gift for eye-opening overstatement and for hammering his Enlightenment opponents—the “sellers of smoke to the highest bidder,” as he called them—at their strongest points, in ways that expose their unexpected vulnerability. All the same, the main thrust of his Platonic critique of his age boils down to two simple propositions.

  The first is that capitalism brings out the worst, not the best, in us. The belief that commerce and the pursuit of money corrupts good morals permeated Plato’s Laws as well as his Republic. The French philosophe Montesquieu had dubbed it “the Platonic complaint,” and Rousseau makes it very much his own.11 In 1755, he published his second essay for the Dijon prize, titled Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men. Almost a century before Karl Marx, it excoriates capitalism as the source of all man’s corruption, greed, and mindless materialism and denounces the establishment of private property as one of the great tragedies of history.

  Contrary to Locke, Rousseau believed that property was not a natural right, but a cruel afterthought. Man is everywhere born free, as Rousseau puts it in his most famous phrase, and is everywhere in chains. Why? Because of the invention of property. “How many crimes, wars, murders,” Rousseau complained, “how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared” if the institution had never been invented.12

  Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality stood John Locke and the Scots on their heads. Primitive and pastoral nomadic man, even man in the state of nature (sometimes misleadingly called Rousseau’s “noble savage”), turns out to be far happier than his civilized counterpart. “Nothing is more peaceable than man in his natural state,” he wrote. “Placed at an equal distance from the stupidity of animals and the fatal enlightenment of civilized man … he is restrained by natural pity from doing harm to anyone, even after receiving harm himself.” He mischievously even quoted Locke to prove his point: “Where there is no property, there is no injury”—and therefore no injustice.13