The German philosopher and theologian Herder attacked the conceit of French philosophes, which was later manifested by intellectuals in many powerful countries, that they lived in the best of all worlds, and were a source of sweetness and light:
As a rule, the philosopher is never more of an ass than when he most confidently wishes to play God; when with remarkable assurance, he pronounces on the perfection of the world, wholly convinced that everything moves just so, in a nice, straight line, that every succeeding generation reaches perfection in a completely linear progression, according to his ideals of virtue and happiness. It so happens that he is always the ratio ultima, the last, the highest, link in the chain of being, the very culmination of it all. ‘Just see to what enlightenment, virtue, and happiness the world has swung! And here, behold, am I at the top of the pendulum, the gilded tongue of the world’s scales!’
But Herder, when he wrote this, was the little-known inhabitant of a politically incoherent country. So was the teenaged Fichte, the son of a rural weaver, as he fantasized in 1788 about writing a devastating satirical critique of the new ideal of luxury. As the century ended, intellectuals of the Atlantic West exalted the commercial ethos and argued against those stern Christians and civic republicans who had stressed the moral perils of economic egoism and sensual indulgence.
A whole new domain of human activity, now known to us by the words ‘economics’ and ‘economy’, opened up, and rapidly assumed a supreme value. Its publicists insisted, contra Montaigne, that individual interests, far from being opposed, could be harmonized by trade, and, more remarkably, such private gains were also congruent with the public good. Adam Smith envisaged an open global system of trade powered by envy and admiration of the rich. He argued that the human instinct for emulation of others could be turned, through a mechanism he called the ‘invisible hand’, into a constructive moral and social force. Montesquieu thought that commerce, which renders ‘superfluous things useful and useful things necessary’, would ‘cure destructive prejudices’ and promote ‘communication between peoples’. In Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville (1772), Diderot fantasized about the new boldly sensuous man, a connoisseur of:
the delights of society. He loves women, the theatre and fine food. He takes to the social whirl with the same good grace he displays when confronting the uncertain elements which toss him about. He’s affable and light-hearted. He’s a true Frenchman, balancing a treatise of integral and differential calculus on one side, with a voyage round the world on the other.
If Diderot hailed the cosmopolitan intellectual as a suave man of the world, even a proto-James Bond with his taste for philandering and lavish expense budgets, Voltaire exalted the globetrotting merchant in Philosophical Letters (1773), claiming that he ‘enriches his country, dispatches orders from his counting-house to Surat and Grand Cairo, and contributes to the well-being of the world’.
Voltaire himself became a paid-up member of the globally networked elite by joining a company that imported grain from North Africa to Marseilles and re-exported it to Italy and Spain. In the last years of his life he exported watches from his factory in Switzerland to Russia and Turkey, and also explored sales opportunities in Algeria and Tunisia. He died a very wealthy man, his fortune amassed through publishing royalties, royal patronage, real estate, financial speculation, playing the lottery, moneylending to princes, watchmaking. (He also practised some dishonourable methods: the German writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who worked for him in Berlin, thought his financial dealings were those of a scoundrel.)
The class of commoners in France to which Voltaire belonged had felt most acutely the mismatch between their sense of personal worth and the limited scope allowed to their abilities by the existing order. By the time of his death, he had put far behind the humiliation of being thrashed by the minions of a French nob. He parleyed on equal terms with princes and ministers. He had shown by personal example that the hero of the newborn secular society was the entrepreneur – intellectual as well as commercial.
The Interesting Madman
Against this moral revolution – the de-Christianization of European society and the self-consciously heretical programme of constructing Heaven on Earth through increased wealth and intellectual sophistication – Rousseau launched a counter-revolution. Indeed, it can be claimed without melodrama that one afternoon in October 1749, walking on a provincial road outside Paris, this ‘guttersnipe of genius’ inaugurated the characteristically modern revolt against modernity, with reverberations that grow stronger as the Crystal Palace extends around the world.
In his radical perspective, the new commercial society, which was acquiring its main features of class divisions, inequality and callous elites during the eighteenth century, made its members corrupt, hypocritical and cruel with its prescribed values of wealth, vanity and ostentation. Human beings were good by nature until they entered such a society, exposing themselves to ceaseless and psychologically debilitating transformation and bewildering complexity. Propelled into an endless process of change, and deprived of their peace and stability, human beings failed to be either privately happy or active citizens.
This is plainly the world view of a solitary and rootless exile; its interpretation cannot be divorced from the life and personality of Rousseau, and actually of the many uprooted men who raised their failure to adapt themselves to a stable life in society to the rank of injustice against the human race. Born in 1712 to a watchmaker in Geneva, Rousseau had a largely unsupervised childhood and adolescence. He lost his mother and was only ten years old when his father deposited him with indifferent relatives and left the city. At the age of fifteen he ran away from his guardians and found his way to Savoy, where he soon became the toy boy of a French noblewoman. She turned out to be the great love of his life, introducing him to books and music. Rousseau, always seeking in women substitutes for his mother, called her maman.