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The Enlightenment Philosopher as Social Critic

Catherine Wilson

To cite this article: Catherine Wilson (2008) The Enlightenment Philosopher as Social Critic,
Intellectual History Review, 18:3, 413-425, DOI: 10.1080/17496970802319326

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Intellectual History Review 18(3) 2008: 413–425

THE ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHER AS SOCIAL CRITIC

Catherine Wilson

Intellectual
10.1080/17496970802319326
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1749-6977
Original
International
302008
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cwilson@gc.cuny.edu
CatherineWilson
000002008
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History
SocietyReview
for Intellectual
(online)History

A philosopher invariably takes up some stance on the social and political norms and practices of his
times, and the persona of the philosopher is by no means fixed in this respect. Philosophers may try to
rationalize certain existing laws and customs, as did Aristotle and David Hume with respect to slavery
and female chastity respectively, or question them, like the Cyreniacs who rejected the customs and
conventions of modesty. They may excoriate them as pathologies, as did Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who
declaimed against the corruption of economics, government and manners in the eighteenth century; or
Friedrich Nietzsche who scorned Christian culture; or they may invent utopian alternatives, such as
Plato’s militaristic city of censorship and selective breeding, or Thomas Hobbes’s absolute monarchy
of peace and civic decorum. In this essay, I compare three differing modalities of the relationship of
the philosopher to the political and social environment. The first – that of René Descartes – is disengaged,
for intellectual and pragmatic reasons; the second – that of Denis Diderot – is fully engaged, again for
both sorts of reasons; and the third – that of Immanuel Kant – is both engaged and disengaged. Kant
created a new form of philosophical commentary that at once reflected his interest in and knowledge
of political and social reality, and that was at the same time anchored in an aloof critical philosophy
that excluded, on formal, philosophical, grounds, social critique.
Without ascribing more importance either to historical context or to individual personality than each
deserves, my aim is to bring to light some features of situation that make these mutually exclusive
philosophical roles possible, and some features of character that made each of them appealing. What
enabled and induced the Enlightenment philosophes to take up the role of moral and political critic, a
role shunned by one of their intellectual precursors, Descartes? What literary and philosophical mate-
rials were newly to hand? While it is absurd to ask why Descartes, that particular philosopher, did not
adopt the revolutionary postures of Diderot, it is not absurd to ask why no philosopher could have
occupied the role of Diderot in the 1640s. Further, to what extent was the role of the philosopher as
social critic a success or a failure, and why did this role come to imply a historiographical disqualifi-
cation where the formation of the philosophical canon was concerned? Why did Kant, deeply versed
in history, anthropology and moral philosophy, reject the role of the philosopher as social critic, and
why was this rejection so influential?
It is tempting to say that the philosophes were not rigorous and so disqualified themselves from the
entitlement to the mantle of philosophy in the eyes of posterity; but this answer is, on a moment’s
reflection, unsatisfactory. In their own eyes, and in the eyes of their contemporaries, the philosophes
were the philosophers, and they had earned that honorific title in the usual way: through their search
after and their perception of the truth. The imposition of the criterion of rigorousness, intended to

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414 C. WILSON

separate enthusiasts and visionaries from philosophers, did not reflect a discovery about the real
essence of philosophical practice, for there is no such real essence. Rather – so the hypothesis of this
essay, offered up in an experimental spirit – the criterion was brought into play and has remained in
play in the wake of the political and social upheavals of early modernity. It signified a new need for a
division between, on the one hand, incendiary writers, who were dangerous because, however well-
informed, they risked overstepping the boundaries of knowledge and adding to the quantity of
violence in the world through their desire to remodel it, and, on the other, reconciling writers, who,
claiming to know less, restricted their ambitions to the remodelling of the self and its adjustment to its
environment. Plato, it should be remembered, invented his Republic not to stimulate an Athenian
revolution, but to show men why, as individuals, they ought to be just.

II

An example of the disengaged modality with respect to politics and morals was furnished by
Descartes, who, in his Discourse on Method, enunciated several maxims with the aim of enabling
himself to ‘live as happily as I could’ while rebuilding the edifice of knowledge. The first of these was

to obey the laws and customs of my country, holding constantly to the religion in which […] I had been
instructed since my childhood, and governing myself in all other matters according to the most moderate and
least extreme opinions – the opinions commonly accepted in practice by the most sensible of those with
whom I should have to live.1

The second was to be ‘firm and decisive’; and the third again concerned the author’s relations with the
social world.

My third maxim was to try always to master myself rather than fortune, and change my desires rather than
the order of the world. In general I would become accustomed to believing that nothing lies entirely within
our power except our thoughts, so that after doing our best in dealing with matters external to us, whatever
we fail to achieve is absolutely impossible so far as we are concerned.2

In explaining to his readers his decision to adopt this morale par provision – a pretheoretical morality,
Descartes assured readers of his peaceful intentions with respect to religious authority, and in this he
was largely sincere. His political views, by contrast with those of Spinoza, seemed to involve a deep
respect for royalty and hierarchy in general, and reform of the social order was very far from his mind.
He also presented himself in this context in a familiar and trusted role, that of the philosophical guide
who advises the perplexed agent to expend his efforts only on matters over which he takes himself to
have complete control, that is, on arranging and developing his ‘thoughts’, rather than on trying to
satisfy all his ‘desires’, or striving to influence his ‘fortune’, or interfering with the ‘order of the
world’. The notion that ethics is a form of ‘care of the self’ is familiar from ancient philosophy,
especially Stoicism, and if Descartes was sceptical about the powers of the philosopher to change the
world, he was optimistic about the powers of the philosopher to change people one by one in such a
way that they were better adjusted to the world. He chose as an example of an irrational and hopeless
desire the acquisition of a foreign empire by an ordinary individual. His third maxim, he thought,

would be sufficient to prevent me from desiring in future something I could not get, and so to make me
content. For our will naturally tends to desire only what our intellect represents to it as somehow possible;
and so it is certain that if we consider all external goods as equally beyond our power, we shall not regret the

1 Descartes,
Discourse on Method, in Philosophical Writings, translated and edited by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch
and A. Kenny, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985–91), vol. 1, 122; (Descartes, Oeuvres, edited by C. Adam
and P. Tannery, 11 vols (Paris: Vrin, 1964–74), vol. 6, 23).
2 Descartes, Discourse, 123 (AT, vol. 6, 25).
 THE ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHER AS SOCIAL CRITIC 415

absence of goods which seem to be our birthright when we are deprived of them through no fault of our own,
any more than we regret not possessing the kingdom of China or of Mexico.3

Descartes offered two risk-reducing reasons, one epistemological, the other practical, for conformity,
which for him implied a refusal to judge the practices of his own society by comparison with other
systems of morals and politics. First, he said, questions of how to live were susceptible to various
opinions and could not be settled with certainty.

Where many opinions were equally well accepted, I chose only the most moderate, both because these are
always the easiest to act upon and probably the best (excess being usually bad), and also so that if I made a
mistake, I should depart less from the right path than I would if I chose one extreme when I ought to have
pursued the other.4

Second, he had to get along with others, and ‘although there may be men as sensible among the
Persians or Chinese as among ourselves, I thought it would be most useful for me to be guided by those
with whom I should have to live’.5
Descartes probably wrote the Discourse after leaving Paris for Amsterdam, and his adoption of a
complacent posture was facilitated by his location in the Netherlands, a country that was known for
religious tolerance, although the later ‘affair of Utrecht’ proved some of his assumptions about this
wrong. His reference to the kingdoms of China and Mexico has an aura of the fairy-tale to it. Writing
in the second quarter of the seventeenth century, Descartes, unlike Diderot and Kant, had little idea
what was involved in the acquisition and possession of an empire, and, unlike his successors, he did
not construe the acquisition and possession of empires as events in and conditions of the world that
might be morally evaluated; he merely fancied himself a king and then promptly abandoned the
fantasy. His non-combative posture also reflected perhaps his solitary habits, and his preference for
proving, in the mode of the mathematician, over debating probabilities, in the mode of the jurist. His
third maxim reflected, as observed, the classic and automatically respected self-presentation of the
sage; but his self-presentation also requires explanation in terms of his overall aims in natural philos-
ophy. Descartes knew that his physical and epistemological doctrines were upsetting. He was defend-
ing corpuscularianism, heliocentrism, the animal machine, the spontaneous formation of the cosmos,
and he was denying the system of Aristotle and the corruption of our epistemological faculties and
passions as a result of Original Sin.6 Descartes invested a great deal of effort in trying to forestall and
contain attacks on his philosophy and his motives. ‘The demolition of everything, so as to reconstruct
everything’ on a rational basis was a necessary stage, but Descartes had repeatedly to make it clear that
the building-razing preliminaries he required did not apply to morals, theology or politics. The morale
par provision and his focus on the remodelling of the self were consistent with his aim of avoiding
controversy as far as possible.

III

At the other end of the spectrum from the expression of a conforming, provisional morality by
Descartes was the confident and defiant social criticism of the engaged philosophers associated with
the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment. ‘Every writer of genius is born magistrate of his
country’, Diderot proclaimed.

3 Descartes,
Discourse, 124 (AT, vol. 6, 25–6).
4 Descartes,
Discourse, 122–3 (AT, vol. 6, 23–4).
5 Descartes,
Discourse, 23 (AT, vol. 6, 23).
6 For details of Descartes’s defensive posture with respect to the subject matter of his science, see S. Gaukroger, Descartes: An

Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 354ff.

416 C. WILSON

He should enlighten it, if he can. His right is his talent. Whether he is an obscure or a distinguished citizen,
whatever his rank or his birth, if his mind is always noble he is qualified by his intelligence. His court is the
whole nation; his judge is the public at large, not the despot who does not hear him, or the minister who does
not wish to listen.7

The targets of the philosophes included colonialism, luxury, austerity, hypocrisy, antifeminism (but
also some forms of feminism), monarchy, aristocracy, clergy, religion, physicians, and the arts and
letters.
The pre-Enlightenment conception of the philosophical sage, like that of the religious saint, seemed
to differentiate simply between the self and the world. The ‘world’ comprised dangers physical and
moral; for the Stoics, the threats of financial ruin, dishonour, political losses, exile, sickness and
decrepitude, and the loss of loved ones to death. Moral philosophy showed how to avoid or bear with
those world-induced evils. The new conception of the philosopher broke the world outside the self into
two components: a benign nature and a hostile, infectious society. The critical philosopher of the
Enlightenment was an advocate of nature, but an enemy of society. One might say that this act of
differentiation was prefigured in Descartes’s preference for physics and anatomy over social life and
politics, but this would be a misleading identification. The philosophes were highly social beings, and
indeed their critical practice depended on this.
Margaret Jacob comments, ‘The early stages of the Enlightenment were nurtured in a new genre’,
that of clandestine books and manuscripts, ‘[T]he persona of the philosophe took shape in the
shadowy world of hidden printing presses, coteries of bold talkers, and aspirants to living by the fruits
of one’s pen’.8 The clandestine literature included many seemingly rather trifling, memoires galantes,
illustrating the folly and dissipation of nobility and clergy; but it also comprised natural philosophy,
epistemology, moral and political philosophy, and theology:

It was not accidental that the first work ever to describe the new style of philosophizing, called Le Philosophe
appeared anonymously, probably with a phony imprint on its title page (Amsterdam, 1743). Never before in
the Christian West had the beliefs of the literate and educated fractured so openly, so publicly, in matters not
simply of doctrine – Protestants and Catholics had been quarreling for centuries – but around the very status
of Christian belief, its value and proofs.9

Jacob makes particular reference to banned works on theology, suggesting that the clandestine litera-
ture had its major impact – though not necessarily a permanent impact – in this regard. Theology is
important, but it is also the case that where moral and political philosophy are concerned, never
before in the Christian West, until the second half of the eighteenth century, had beliefs regarding
the appropriate treatment of human beings by other human beings fractured so openly. Banned as a
result were the writings of Shaftesbury, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvétius, La Mettrie and
Diderot. Books rejected by the censors, burned, or confiscated by police or customs officers,
included treatises on monarchy, despotism and colonialism, also works concerned with comparative
morals. Rousseau’s Social Contract and his Discourse on Political Economy were prohibited; so was
his Émile, which predicted the revolutionary overthrow of all monarchies.10 Remarkably, with the
exception of Hume, and possibly Rousseau, these philosophers, esteemed in their own time as such,
have been reclassified as literary figures.

7 Diderot, in Histoire philosophique et politique des établissemens et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes, edited by

G.-T. Raynal, third edition, 9 vols (Geneva, 1783), Bk XIX, ch. 2; translation in Diderot: Political Writings, edited by J. H. Mason
and R. Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 209. On Diderot’s political philosophy, see Y. Bénot, Diderot:
de l’athéisme à l’anticolonialisme (Paris: Maspero, 1970), and S. Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2003).
8 M. Jacob, ‘The Clandestine Universe of the Early Eighteenth Century’, 2001. This useful essay is currently accessible only in

an online version through http://www.pierre-marteau.com/html/studies.html.

9 Jacob.
10 R. Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (London and New York: Norton, 1995).
 THE ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHER AS SOCIAL CRITIC 417

Historians have pointed out real doctrinal continuities between Cartesianism and the radical
thought of the Enlightenment, mediated by the Cartesian confidence in the average intellect and by
Descartes’s view of the tight connections existing between psyche and soma, considered by his more
alert readers to offset his orthodox protestations about God and the incorporeal immortal soul; but the
Encyclopedists’ conception of the role of the philosopher is not Descartes’s, and this contributed to
their delisting. The philosophes conceived – or expressed a conception of – the philosopher’s role as
that of a historical actor, who, rather than focusing on the management of his ‘thoughts’, attempted to
change the world to fit with his desires, and who applied himself to external matters that he at the
same time recognized as largely outside his control.
The philosophes seemed further to take the human being as they found him or her, as a particular
kind of human animal, desiring, fated to suffer, to experience conflict and ambivalence, and finally to
die, but capable of and deserving of mundane happiness. The features natural to the species ought to
permit a modus vivendi, as its species-characteristics did in the case of any other animal. The important
sufferings of human beings were not, in their view, the effects of Original Sin; they were not even side
effects of the human constitution; they arose rather from repression, despotism, indoctrination, and the
abuse of power generally, from the distortions of the human personality induced by civilization, and
generally from ‘superstition’ and ignorance. The causes of individual and class misery, they thought,
were built into the basic institutions of European society, even when its roles were accepted with
docility and performed with complacency. The philosophes saw political philosophy as the means by
which the social world might be remodelled to suit people as they already were. The diagnosis and
remediation of this unhealthy condition of the body politic, as opposed to the unhealthy condition of
the individual, was the task of the philosopher.
Something of this naturalism about human preferences was already intimated by Descartes who
attached a positive value even to concupiscence:

[The passions] are all ordained by nature to relate to the body, and to belong to the soul only in so far as it is
joined with the body. Hence, their natural function is to move the soul to consent and contribute to actions
which may serve to preserve the body or render it in some way more perfect.11

Descartes did not follow through on this line of thinking, conceiving ethics as the study of the effective
employment of the mind’s power, indirect though it is, over the body. The term ‘slavery’ frequently
appears in seventeenth-century philosophical discourse as a metaphor applied to human beings who
have not learned to master their emotions. The outline prefacing Spinoza’s Short Treatise summarizes
its import as follows:

the Author explains his thoughts about Man’s existence, how man is subjected to and slave of the Passions;
then how far the use of his reason extends; and finally, by what means he may be brought to his Salvation
and perfect his Freedom.12

The philosophes had, by contrast, a political conception of slavery that rendered such figures as
Spinoza’s beside the point. After describing the slave trade in Guinea, Diderot, for example, went on
to remark that ‘in Europe, as in America, the people are slaves. The one advantage we have over the
blacks is to be able to break one chain to take on another’. He referred to the sad lot of tenant farmers,
workers and artisans, the dangers of quarries, mines, forges and navigation. The history of civilized
man has been only the history of his misery, he says, and ‘in a single society there is no class which
does not devour and is not devoured’.13

Most nations are in chains. The multitude is usually sacrificed to the passions of the privileged oppressors.
One hardly knows any regions where a man might flatter himself master of his conditions, to enjoy the fruits

11 Descartes,
Passions of the Soul, Pt II, § 137; in Philosophical Writings, I: 376; (AT XI: 429–30).
12 Spinoza,
Short Treatise, in Collected Works, edited and translated by E. Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985),
vol. 1, 55.
13 Diderot,
Histoire (1783) Bk XVIII, ch. 42, translated in Writings, 199–200.
418 C. WILSON

of his labour. The citizen, deprived of the product he has made by the unlimited desires of a greedy govern-
ment is continually frustrated in his attainment of the most legitimate means of satisfaction.14

This condition of slavery cannot be mitigated by self-discipline, in so far as the fault is not ours to
begin with, and the condition consists in our being deprived of ‘the most legitimate means of satisfac-
tion’. ‘Civilized people’, declared Diderot,

you are not fully aware of the calamities under whose weight you are suffering. The more grievous this
sensation becomes, the more you will have to pay attention to the true causes of your ills. Perhaps in the end
you will come to be convinced that they arise from the distortion of your opinions, the vices of your political
constitutions, and the bizarre laws which are a continual offense against the laws of nature.15

IV

The consolidation of state power by absolute despots, especially in the kleptocratic hands of Louis XV
and his ministers, efficient tax farming, and fierce intellectual policing, brought about the pacification
of Europe after the ruinous wars of the seventeenth century, but these measures also provoked resis-
tance. Examples of successful rebellion were meanwhile to hand. Diderot praised the New World
uprisings against the British, who were praised in turn for their intolerance of tyranny. The English had
legally executed one king and deposed another, Diderot thought, giving an example to everyone, and
in England the exact sciences flourished, along with genius, eloquence, dignity, personal liberty and
liberty of thought.16 At the same time, even in France, extreme sanctions for political and theological
expression had abated. Apprehension and imprisonment for the communication of heterodox views
was a constant threat, but no philosopher was executed in Europe after Giordano Bruno in 1600 and
Cesare Vanini in 1619. The clandestine press which linked like-minded critics, and linked them with
appreciative and moneyed readers, made it possible to carry out critical work and to achieve a form of
collegial support and financial reward for subversiveness, even at considerable psychological costs.
For a long time in the English context, dissident groups with distinctive conceptions of political
and social justice, often tied in with religious doctrine, had faced off against rulers and magistrates,
leading to cycles of repression and relaxation, culminating in the remarkable Act of Toleration of
1689. Hobbes and Locke did not perhaps agree on a great deal, but they did agree that the civil
powers should focus on controlling behaviour and ensuring civil peace. Opinions, unlike behaviour,
could not be legislated, and so conscience must be free. At the same time, however, their common
critique of religious enthusiasm had tended to purge of its claim to authority the very conscience that
had driven the Quakers, Ranters, Levellers, and other pacifist and egalitarian coteries to agitate
against war and for social equality, sexual freedom and religious tolerance. Epistemologically, the
English philosophers uncoupled conscience from the voice of God, making it mere opinion, which,
like other mental contents, had to be considered the work of the senses or the imagination. To
purchase toleration, radicalism had to be sacrificed.
Even with individual conscience stripped of moral authority by the critique of enthusiasm, there
remained federations occupying the morally conscientious role. They might be informal, invisible and
relatively innocuous, like the discussion group that Locke casually advised his readers had occasioned
his writing and publication of his Essay, or the heterodox precursors of the Encyclopedists, for exam-
ple, the Freemasons. The fact that such groups were composed of like-minded people whose opinions
and knowledge reinforced one another’s gave them a status that isolated individuals experiencing free-
dom of thought in foro interno did not enjoy. Reinhart Koselleck pointed to Locke’s remarks in Book
II of his Essay in which he referred to the ‘Philosophical Law’, namely,

14 Diderot,
Histoire, Bk XI: XXIV; second edition, 10 vols (Geneva, 1781), vol. 6, 192.
15 Diderot,
Histoire (1783); Bk XVIII, ch. 4, translated in Writings, 197.
16 Diderot,
Histoire, Bk XIV, Introduction, translation in Writings, 189.
 THE ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHER AS SOCIAL CRITIC 419

this approbation or dislike, praise or blame, which by a secret and tacit consent establishes itself in the
several societies, tribes, and clubs of men in the world; whereby several actions come to find credit or
disgrace amongst them, according to the judgment, maxims, or fashion of that place. For though men uniting
into politic societies have resigned up to the public the disposing of all their force, so that they cannot employ
it against any fellow-citizens, any farther than the law of the country directs; yet they retain still the power
of thinking well or ill, approving or disapproving of the actions of those whom they live amongst, and
converse with: And by this approbation and dislike they establish amongst themselves what they will call
virtue and vice.17

Although one might suppose either that what was so established were simply the rules of reputation
governing everyday social exchange, or that Locke was, as his critics maintained, endorsing moral
relativism, his comments left the door open for a more far-reaching interpretation of what the secret
and tacit consent of men could accomplish, namely moral disapproval of a regime, an economic order,
a social system, under which they were obliged for the moment to live. So Koselleck has suggested
that Locke’s scheme afforded a new, and more authoritative location for conscience, distinguished as
it was from Divine Law, which set universal, Scripture-based limits to human conduct, and Civil Law,
which defined actions as legal or illegal and applied external sanctions. Locke’s conception of
Philosophical Law virtually awarded it equal stature with the other two deontological powers, although
it was neither grounded in the will of God and enforced by divine punishment and reward, nor
grounded in the decree of the ruler and his deputies and sustained by their control of the institutions of
punishment, but legitimated only by the ‘secret and tacit consent’ of the enlightened.18

The background conditions mentioned, experienced acutely by the philosophes of the second half of
the eighteenth century, juxtaposed frank persecution by a fairly efficient police with technologies and
social institutions permitting the exchange, reinforcement and dissemination of critical views. These
technologies provoked and encouraged dissent, but they did not provide a language for criticism. The
concepts needed for social critique issued from philosophy, and they are widely agreed to have been
acquired through the following developments, conspicuous in early Enlightenment letters:

1) The revival of the materialist stance, embracing atheism, biological and evolutionary concep-
tualizations, and the rejection of teleology and the existence of natural hierarchies.
2) The elaboration of the theory of ‘moral sentiments’, in which the other-directed emotions of
altruism and sympathy, and the goal of universal well-being received particular emphasis.
3) The articulation of a conception of laws and moeurs as rules useful for social harmony and
cohesion and needing justification in those terms, rather than dictations of a wise supernatural
authority.19

Even if these philosophical notions had been fully available in 1640, the language and imagery of
critique would have been unavailable in the absence of eighteenth-century anthropology and what
came to be called ‘philosophical history’. The relevant conditions included:

1) A temporalized sense of laws and institutions as having an ancient history, emerging gradu-
ally, being subject to slow modification and cultural differentiation, according to different
national and ethnic identities.

17 Locke,
Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Bk II, ch. 28, §11, edited by P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 354.
18 R.
Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1987). Koselleck,
however, considered the Enlightenment a failure, for reasons that are not entirely clear from this study.
19 See I. Hunter, Rival Enlightenments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
420 C. WILSON

2) A broader travel literature, developing simultaneously with commercial and predatory

voyages, making evident in great and often sympathetic detail the manners and customs of
non-Europeans.
3) Awareness of the sufferings endured by entire classes of sensitive creatures – animals,
women, slaves, labourers – who existed in a condition of confinement, (‘chains’), by contrast
with the sufferings of free-roaming individuals originating in wounds, illness or emotional
troubles, addressed by classical philosophy.

VI

The Encyclopedists, with their materialist and anticlerical agenda, constituted a group of moralizing
dissidents, and so did the partially overlapping group surrounding the Abbé Raynal, the official author
of the multi-authored Histoire philosophique et politique des établissments et du commerce des
Européens dans les deux Indes. This work has attracted much attention from students of colonialism,
for as Sankar Muthu notes in this connection, the philosophes’ challenge to

the idea that Europeans had any right to subjugate, colonize, and civilize the rest of the word was….an
anomalous and understudied episode of political thinking. It is an era unique in the history of modern
political thought: strikingly, virtually every prominent and influential European thinker in the three hundred
years before the eighteenth century and nearly the full century after it were either agnostic towards or enthu-
siastically in favour of imperialism.20

Raynal’s philosophical history was a bestseller of its time. It went through fifty or so editions, and
stood in fifth place in terms of circulating copies in the entire list of forbidden books. Along with
Holbach’s System of Nature, it was one of the most popular books of the underground press. With ten
volumes of text and one of maps and tables, the Histoire, to which Denis Diderot contributed about
700 pages,21 combined the history of European conquests of the East and West Indies, that is, of the
Caribbean, Mexico, India and South Eastern Asia, with observations of manners, customs, modes of
life, and economics and political systems. The series ruminated on the theme of the savage and the
civilized, and praised the simplicity of true morals, citing ‘the fanaticism of religion and the spirit of
conquest’ as ‘the globe’s two perturbing causes’.22 The authors regarded the discovery of the ‘two
Indies’, as having perfected ‘the construction of ships, navigation, geography, astronomy, medicine,
natural history, other areas of learning, advantages accompanied with no inconveniences’.23 The
‘voyages across all the seas’, they thought, ‘weakened national chauvinism, inspired civil and religious
tolerance, revived the bond of universal brotherhood, inspired the principles of a universal morality,
founded on the identity of needs, sufferings, and pleasures’.24 However, they deemed illusory the
alleged benefits of empires, powers and riches. Like the much earlier treatise of Bartolomeo de las
Casas, The Destruction of the Indies (1552), published in violation of Spanish censorship laws, it
recounted the conquest of indigenous peoples, their enslavement and the conflicts between trading
nations that followed grabs for gold and silver, for land, and later, under the mercantilist system,
markets, expressing moral dismay over the misfortunes of the conquered and the corruption of the
conquerors.
The intention of the Histoire was not merely to lament the effects of European subjugation in the
Americas and in Southeast Asia, but to arouse anti-authoritarian scepticism and foment rebellion at
home. The frontispiece of the third, 1780 edition of the Histoire showed fleeing slaves, but also an
overturned throne, supervised by the figure of Liberty. Diderot used the space allotted him as a

20
Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire, 1.
21 Muthu, 72–3.
22 Diderot,
Histoire (1781), Bk VI, ch. 1; vol. 3, 290.
23 Diderot, Histoire, Bk XIX, ch. 15; vol. 10, 421.
24 Diderot, Histoire, vol. 10, 422.
 THE ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHER AS SOCIAL CRITIC 421

platform, not only for communicating his admiration for the non-European mode of life, expressed in
his Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, written in 1771–2, but not published in final form until
1796, which is concerned with the superiority of Tahitian mores and religion over European, but to
condemn the monarchy. The European despots of the age, Diderot declared with perfect justice, did
not seek to promote the happiness of their subjects, but the enlargement of their borders, increased
trade, personal riches and large armies. Regarding the imperial activities of Spain and the Netherlands
as extensions of domestic pathologies, Diderot presented the condition of institutionalized violence as
universal. Colonial adventures were the cause of misery to the national population, and, whether they
realized it or not, subjects were slaves. The monuments and statues of Europe should, he ventured,
recount oppressions, murders, and tyrannies instead of celebrating glorious victories.25

I do not propose myself to be the panegyrist of the conquerors of the other hemisphere. My judgement
does not allow itself to be corrupted by the force of their success, to the point of hiding from me their
injustices.26

Although he succeeded in interpolating a few references to Descartes, Newton and Leibniz, Diderot’s
contributions were philosophical chiefly in their free expression of critical views relating to militarism,
conquest, slavery, despotism, property and luxury. They were frequently marked by emotions untypical
in philosophical writing: despair, fury, pessimism. They took the form of furious jeremiads as well as
pathetic recitals: describing the lot of slaves in Santo Domingo in the West Indies, Diderot pretended
to eyewitness fidelity:

Those who have collapsed under their burdens are forced up with blows. There is no communication between
the sexes except in secret, men perish in the mines and the women in the fields which their weak hands till.
An unhealthy diet thins bodies overtaxed with fatigue; milk dries up in the chests of mothers expiring from
hunger, pressing against their dry breasts their dead or dying infants. Fathers poison themselves; a few hang
themselves from trees after having lost their children and their spouses. Their race is no more. I have to stop
for a moment’ my eyes fill with tears and I can no longer read what I am writing.27

Diderot’s imagery was often ghastly, the words ‘blood’ and ‘bloody’ appearing with a startling
frequency. Whereas the order and regularity of nature, supervised by God and brought under simple
and universal laws, were contrasted by orthodox theological writers with the disorders and upheavals
of human history, Diderot sided with the new naturalists who emphasized the chaotic history of the
earth, citing the effects of devastating collisions between the earth and comets. Catastrophe and
revolution are inscribed into the nature of things:

As commotions and revolutions are so natural to mankind, there is only wanting some glowing genius, some
enthusiast, to set the world again in flames […] A city that took two centuries to decorate is burnt and ravaged
in a single day […] You nations, whether artisans or soldiers, what are you in the hands of nature, but the
sport of her laws, destined by turns to set dust in motion, and to reduce the work again to dust?28

Peace, however, brings oppression. Here Diderot echoes Rousseau, who, in the opening pages of the
Discourse on Inequality, remarked that when we look on human society with calm and disinterested
eyes, ‘at first it seems to reveal only the violence of powerful men and the oppression of the weak’.
Everywhere, Diderot claims,

are extravagant superstitions, barbarous customs, obsolete laws suffocating liberty. Liberty will doubtless
return from the ashes one day. He awaits, he says, the revolutionary hero who will make all tyrants the prey
of iron and flame, and reestablish the rights of the human race.29

25
Muthu, Enlightenment, 116.
26 Diderot,
Histoire (1781), Bk VII, ch. 1; vol. 4, 1.
27 Diderot,
Histoire, Bk VI, ch. 7; vol. 3, 327.
28 Diderot, Histoire (1781) Bk XIX, ch. 12, translated by Muthu, Enlightenment, 119.
29 Diderot, Histoire, Bk XI, ch. 24; translated by Muthu, 199–200.
422 C. WILSON

The situation of someone restoring a corrupted nation is very different [from that of the founder of a nation].
He is an architect who sets out to build on a patch of land which is covered with ruins. He is a doctor who
tries to cure a gangrenous corpse. He is a sage preaching reform to the hardened. The present generation only
hate him and persecute him. He will not see the generation to come […] A nation is only regenerated in a
bath of blood.30

In his quieter moods, Diderot pointed out that

There is no society which cannot change its government, exercising the same freedom which its ancestors
used in setting it up. In this respect, societies are as if they were at the first moment of their civilization […]
Whoever thinks otherwise is a slave; he treats the work of his own hands as an idol.31

VII

The philosopher, as recognized and honoured today, has shed his role as social critic, relative to the
standard set by Diderot, as decisively as Diderot shed his entitlement to be recognized as a mainstream
philosopher by telling the truth in the outrageous, inflammatory and undialectical manner in which he
did. What we call philosophical rigour seems to call either for sustained repetition and development of
emotionally neutral points, or else a careful weighing of on-the-one-hand-but-then-on-the-other
considerations pertaining to emotionally charged material. Our tradition credits Diderot as an intellec-
tual historian, but he occupies no space in political theory between Hume and Kant. This fact calls for
explanation, in so far as to his contemporaries and in his own eyes, Diderot was a philosopher and an
important one. So too does Kant’s standing as the preeminent philosopher of the Enlightenment, when
the theorists with whom he was at odds might seem to have a greater claim to that title in virtue of their
naturalism and their humanitarianism.
Kant, without being a disengaged philosopher in the sense that Descartes intended to be and was,
stood apart from the philosophes, and resisted the path followed his former pupil Herder, who was
close to them. As John Zammito remarks in a related connection, Kant seems in certain ways strangely
cut off from the main currents of Enlightenment thought.32 His scientific interests – his reading of the
same travel literature as they did, indeed his reading of the Histoire – did not lead him to an apprecia-
tion of the kinship of man and animal, or to the interest in individuality and the evolution of human
capabilities, or to a broad sympathy for the sufferings of sensible creatures. His reactions can be
precisely documented in these respects. When Georg Forster returned with reports, if not of the idyllic
conditions in the South Seas described by Philibert Commerson and fictionalized by Diderot in the
Supplément, but of societies that nevertheless functioned tolerably well without European institutions,
Kant said that the observations were not part of a systematic anthropology, by which he meant an
anthropology that would establish the merely transitional nature of these ‘subsisting’ cultures.33 While
Herder was arguing that all men are of one race and that the African is our brother, Kant was writing
notes prophesying the extermination of the red and black races by the superior whites.34 After
Rousseau and Diderot had established that enslavement and exploitation were a basic mode of the
relation of human to human, Kant insisted that:

Man is an animal which, if it lives among others of its kind, requires a master. For he certainly abuses his
freedom with respect to other men, and although as, a reasonable being he wishes to have a law which limits
the freedom of all, his selfish animal impulses tempt him, where possible, to exempt himself from them. He

30 Diderot,
Histoire, Bk X1, ch. 4, Writings, 184.
31 Diderot, Histoire, Bk XVIII, ch. 42, translated in Writings, 200–1.
32 J.
A. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 190.
33 Kant’s critique of Forster appeared as Ueber den Gebrauch der teleologischen Prinzipien in der Philosophie (1788).
34 M. Larrimore, ‘Sublime Waste: Kant on the Destiny of the Races’, in Civilization and Oppression, edited by C. Wilson,

Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Supplementary Volume, 29 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1999), 99–125.
 THE ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHER AS SOCIAL CRITIC 423

thus requires a master, who will break his will and force him to obey a will that is universally valid, under
which each can be free.35

Kant expressed (before the Terror) his admiration for the French Revolution, and his revulsion against
militarism and glory, and at certain moments, he replicated the sentiments of the authors of the
Histoire. He brooded on the evils of men and their possible self-extinction, as well as the inevitability
of revolution and the indifference of nature in the notes comprising his Opus Postumum, as well as in
the Critique of Judgement of 1690: ‘Deceit, violence, and envy will always be rife around [man]’.

Moreover, as concerns the other people he meets: no matter how worthy of happiness they may be, nature,
which pays no attention to that, will still subject them to the evils of deprivation, disease and untimely death,
just like all the other animals on earth. And they will stay subjected to these evils always, until one vast tomb
engulfs them one and all […] and hurls them, who managed to believe that they were the final purpose of
creation, back into the abyss of the purposeless chaos of matter from which they were taken.36

In his political essays, however, Kant advanced a conception of progress that was fully teleological
and unsparing with regard to the sacrifices that had to be made to bring about the world government
he envisioned in his essay ‘Perpetual Peace’.37 The condition of pax universalis required, in his view,
the weaker races to give way to their more civilized conquerors, and ‘unsociable sociability’, rather
than tolerance and laissez vivre, was the vehicle for the progress of civilization.38
Happiness was not the aim of the rational man, Kant maintained, and the conditions of the happy
life were not the subject of the study of ethics;39 further, the well-being of citizens, by contrast with
the preservation of their freedoms, was not an aim of properly constituted governments.40 Liberty,
equality and fraternity were, one might say, understood differently by Kant than by the social critics
of the Enlightenment. Liberty, to him, meant the autonomy of moral responsibility, not the freedom to
pursue sources of satisfaction, however innocent; fraternity was not the sentiment of brotherhood,
which could be in his view only a pathological feeling, but a recognition of the universal scope of
moral duties; and equality pertained only to the noumenal realm and chiefly to duties and responsibil-
ities, not entitlements. Moral equality, said Kant, is ‘consistent with the greatest inequality in terms of
the quantity and degree of [men’s] possessions […] and in rights generally relative to others’.41 This
is true even, he allowed, if wealth results from dispossession and exploitation. He had no brief for
Rousseau’s theory that civilization spoils and corrupts men’s natural equality and their innate capacity
for pity and benevolence.
It would be difficult to explain Kant’s standing as an Enlightenment philosopher if he had merely
challenged a number of the core values of the Enlightenment in France and the progressive currents of
English philosophy. He acquired his place in the history of moral and political philosophy, one might
venture, by insisting on the purity of philosophy, and the independence of the academic faculty of
philosophy from the faculty of theology, while leaving room for spiritual and spiritistic concepts in his
moral theory. He promoted a metaphysical philosophy of history, that was his answer to and his
refutation of the conclusions of the Histoire. His insistence on the purity of moral philosophy, and its

35 Kant,
‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, translated by L. W. Beck, Kant: On History (India-
napolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 17–18. On Kant’s philosophy of history, see G. A. Kelly, ‘Rousseau, Kant and History’, Journal
of the History of Ideas, 29 (1968), 347–64; Y. Yovel, Kant and the Philosophy of History (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1980); A. Wood, ‘Unsociable Sociability: The Anthropological Basis of Kantian Ethics’, Philosophical Topics, 19
(1991), 325–51.
36
Critique of Judgement, translated by W. S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987, 452).
37 Kant, ‘Perpetual Peace’, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, translated by T. Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing

Company, 1983), 44.

38 Kant, ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, translated by Beck, 15–16.
39 Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals; translated by M. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),

48.
40 Kant, ‘On the Common Saying That May be Correct in Theory but It is of No Use in Practice’, in Immanuel Kant: Practical

Philosophy, translated and edited by M. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 291.
41 Kant, ‘On the Common Saying’, 292.
424 C. WILSON

separation not only from theology but also from anthropology and philosophical history, is
pronounced.

A completely isolated metaphysics of morals, mixed with no anthropology, theology, physics, or hyperphysics
[…] is not only an indispensable substratum of all theoretical and surely determined cognition of duties; it is
also a desideratum of utmost importance to the fulfillment of their precepts.42

Kant referred to the intrinsic dignity of man, but he most certainly rejected the principle that nature
endows human beings with species-specific dispositions, such as those of any other animal, that justly
claim attention. His moral theory revolved around the concepts of respect for a pure moral law that
was logically severed from considerations of happiness and welfare, and the posit of a noumenal will
that is absolutely free. He returned to the pre-Cartesian view of the passions as pathological, rather than
as important and generally beneficial features of the human economy, and he assigned the ‘will’ a
central role in their disciplining. Human beings are responsible – according to his normative doctrines
– for remodelling themselves; the condition of slavery is again individual, not social; it is ‘self-
imposed tutelage’.
Diderot regarded human history as pointless, an endless cycle of building and destruction:

Settlements have been formed and subverted; ruins have been heaped upon ruins; countries that were well-
peopled have become deserted; ports that were full of buildings have been abandoned; vast tracts that had
been ill cemented with blood have separated, and have brought to view the bones of murderers and tyrants
confounded with each another. It seems as if from one region to another prosperity had been pursued by an
evil genius that speaks our several languages, and which diffuses the same disasters in all parts.43

In Kant’s view, indulgence in such misanthropic sentiments – to which, as observed – he was somewhat
prone himself – led to moral despair, and to libertinism; and perhaps he was not very far wrong in
seeing an association between demoralization and the cultivation of private excesses. The philosopher
was morally obliged, in his view, to model for his readers the optimistic stance, and this duty issued in
his explication of a mystical theory of historical processes. Kant went so far as to predict extinction for
men if they did not renounce their conquistadorial instincts; but this renunciation, he thought, could
not happen through moral enlightenment, but only through the secret workings of the natural dialectic.
‘I put my trust,’ he said, ‘in the nature of things, which constrains one to go where one does not want
to go.’44 Exploitation, he predicted, would bring about its own elimination:

The advancing culture of states, along with their growing propensity to aggrandize themselves by cunning
or violence at the expense of others […] must give rise to higher and higher costs because of ever larger
armies […] the invention of a national debt, though certainly an ingenious expedient, is in the end a self-
defeating one; hence impotence must bring about what a good will ought to have done but did not do.45

In his optimistic moods, Kant saw, in the evolution of the orderly cosmos from its initial chaos, and
in cultural evolution from more primitive states around the globe, prognostic signs of a good
outcome for rational beings inhabiting the earth. This was a purely secular vision: Kant imagined a
world spontaneously evolving towards a condition of political harmony through the operations of
unsociable sociability. He looked forward to the day when the equivalent of the heavenly city – the
community of good beings – not necessarily men, perhaps rather the superior race which might
evolve from men – living under universal regulations and engaged in a universal commercium would
be manifest on earth. This creation of moral-political order from the present semi-chaos would be the
completion of the work begun by nature in the formation of the cosmos and living creatures.

42 Kant, Groundwork IV: 410; translated by Gregor, 22.

43 Diderot,
Histoire (1783), Bk IV, ch. 33; vol. 2, 499.
44 Kant,
‘On the Common Saying’, 309.
45 Kant, ‘On the Common Saying’, 308.
 THE ENLIGHTENMENT PHILOSOPHER AS SOCIAL CRITIC 425

These notions were adopted by Hegel, like Kant, a reader of the Histoire, who explicitly described
the methodology he had derived from Kant as a ‘theodicy’ in which:

the evil in the world [is] to be comprehended and the thinking mind reconciled with it. This reconciliation
can only be attained through the recognition of the positive elements in which that negative element
disappears as something subordinate and vanquished.46

This was history without tears, an uplifting Aufhebung. ‘When we contemplate this display of passions
and the consequences of their violence,’ Hegel mused,

the unreason which is associated not only with them, but even – rather we might say especially – with good
designs and righteous aims; when we see arising therefrom the evil, the vice and the ruin that has befallen
the most flourishing kingdoms […] we can hardly avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of
corruption […] In contemplating history as the slaughter bench at which the happiness of peoples, the
wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed, a question necessarily arises: To what
principle, to what final purpose, have these monstrous sacrifices been offered?47

Hegel’s answer was that the charnel house of history is purged of its horror and sadness and the mind
reconciled to it, not through acknowledgement of providence, but through the appreciation that ‘world
history is the exhibition of spirit striving to attain knowledge of its own nature’.48
Characteristic of the philosopher, and foreign to the philosophe, is that he looks for, and finds – that
is to say, constructs – an account of overall purpose and rationality in the institutions and customs he
considers, even when he distances himself from orthodox theistic providentialism or deontology.
Diderot was discredited as a philosopher, I suspect, in part because his rhetorical language of blood
and catastrophe came to seem repulsive to those who had lived through or observed at a distance the
terror succeeding the Revolution. Marx and Engels, for all their imprinting with Hegelian teleology,
were among his admirers, and they – as is well known – are not philosophers either, not according to
our standards; but it is not only their often threatening rhetoric that accounts for their exclusion. It is
also the case that open or tacit accusations of lack of profundity, absence of dialectical sense, and self-
indulgent eudaimonism were heaped on the heads of the social critics of the late eighteenth century for
failing to adjust themselves to what was inevitable in the order of the world, and failing to moderate
their aspirations for temporal happiness. The persona of the philosopher, I conclude, could not, over
the long run, accommodate that of the philosophe.

CUNY Graduate School

46 Hegel,
Introduction, Reason in History, translated by R. S. Hartman (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1953), 18.
47 Hegel,
Introduction, 21.
48 Hegel,
Introduction, 23.