The spokesmen of the new class consisted of les hommes à talents, men of talent, who no longer depended on military or bureaucratic service, and who ‘conquered’, in Madame de Sta?l’s words, ‘by their talents that liberty of the press which was not accorded by statute’. Each of these men, Tocqueville claimed, ‘felt hindered daily in his fortune, person, well-being, or pride by some old law, some ancient political custom, some relic of the old powers’. Through their friendships, shared interests and resources, they formed a network – the first of its kind anywhere in the world.
A typical representative of the new Republic of Letters was Voltaire, the son of a lawyer. As a quick-witted young man, he had contemptuously won an argument with an aristocrat, and then found himself publicly flogged by the latter’s lackeys, and forced to flee to England in 1726. He soon became an Anglo-maniac, adoring his refuge as the shining example of a commercial society that enshrined individual liberty. ‘As trade enriched the citizens in England,’ Voltaire wrote, ‘so it contributed to their freedom.’ Voltaire echoed Montesquieu, who had also travelled to England in the late 1720s to learn the secrets of the country that had become, after its Glorious Revolution, so evidently the superior of France.
The philosophes aimed to reorganize society so that intrinsic human merit was acknowledged above traditional status. They had the freedom, as Tocqueville ruefully noted, ‘to philosophize almost without restraint about the origins of society, the essential nature of government, and the primordial rights of the human race’. In their hands, philosophy became a critique of hereditary privilege on behalf of all those – later termed the Third Estate in France – who did not belong to the old elite. It also became, as they rose higher in the world, a celebration and vindication of their own material comfort and hedonism.
The upstarts had to work hard initially to gather their means of upward mobility, and establish a supporting infrastructure for their periodicals, books and libraries; they had to seek the attention and support of rich aristocrats. During the course of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment philosophes moved from being outsiders to insiders: they were installed in academies and government offices. Princes, Russian and German as well as French, courted them; the public was eager to know what they thought.
This is how their notion of self-expansion – through unlimited growth of production, and the expansion of productive forces – steadily replaced all other ideas of the human good in the eighteenth century; it became the central objective of existence, with corresponding attitudes, norms, values, and a quantitative notion of reality defined by what counts and what does not count.
In this schema, now wholly internalized, the human being used the tools of theoretical and practical reason to expand his capacities; and all his reference points and norms were defined by the imperative of expansion. Progress for him denoted the endless growth of a society whose individuals are free but responsible, egocentric but enlightened. Adam Smith founded his political economy on the conception of a human being whose desires are mediated by the desires of others, and who pursues wealth not for well-being but because it is pursued by others. In Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim (1800), Kant was actually grateful for ‘spiteful competitive vanity’ and the ‘insatiable desire to possess or even to dominate’, since socially mediated ambitions ‘for honour, power, or property’ led human beings to undergo a ‘process of enlightenment’. It was evidently how a civil society of morally and rationally autonomous individuals could come into being. Voltaire himself showed how universal history with a cosmopolitan aim could work out (for some people at least): he was one of the richest commoners in Europe at the time of his death in 1778.
The Good Barbarian
A meritocratic society, in which people like themselves could flourish, was deemed ‘rational’ by the philosophes. In boosting this rationalism, they saw themselves as constituting a ‘party of humanity’. Their taste for ‘literary politics’, Tocqueville wrote, ‘spread even to people whose nature or situation would normally have kept them aloof from abstract speculation’ and who warmed to the ‘idea that all men should be equal’ and ‘that reason condemned all privileges without exception’. Thus, ‘every public passion disguised itself as philosophy’.
But the new society, though free of irrational old hierarchies, wasn’t meant to be democratic. Liberty primarily meant freedom for social mobility for the man of talent, the means, as Rousseau bluntly stated, of ‘acquiring without obstacle and possessing with security’. The social and intellectual power of his network was meant to benefit society as well, but it was not available to everyone or anyone. On the contrary, access to it required money, property, connections and talents.
Hierarchy would still mark the new society: the mass of the people would remain necessarily subordinate to the authentically enlightened at the top. Peter Gay argued in his Cold War history of the Enlightenment that the philosophes jointly participated in a ‘vastly ambitious program’ to foster ‘freedom in its many forms’, and that their ‘politics’ was essentially ‘modern liberal politics’, which called for ‘parliamentary regimes, political parties, widespread literacy, and a free press’. Until 1789, however, almost all major European thinkers saw progress as something imposed from above, through legislation and decree, not generated from the mass of people below them.
A powerful ruler was not only needed to check the power of Churches, estates and corporations; he was required to repress the ignorant and superstitious mass of people who threatened civilization, which meant social order, law and intellectual liberty for a select few rather than freedom in its many forms for all.
Voltaire, who wanted, as Goethe wrote in Poetry and Truth, a ‘relationship with the lords of the earth’, repeatedly expressed his hatred of the canaille – the ‘ignoble masses who respect only force and never think’. The Enlightenment philosophes sought and enjoyed the patronage of Frederick of Prussia and Catherine of Russia. With the radical exception of Rousseau, they were not interested in social equality. ‘We have never claimed,’ Voltaire wrote, ‘to enlighten shoemakers and servant girls.’