Voltaire had an uncomplicated view of self-love and self-interest: ‘Amour propre is the instrument of our preservation … we need it … it is as impossible for a society to be formed and be durable without self-interest as it would be to produce children without carnal desire.’ In contrast, Rousseau saw amour propre as a dangerous craving to secure recognition for one’s person from others, which tipped over easily into hatred and self-hatred.
‘Insatiable ambition,’ he charged, ‘the thirst of raising their respective fortunes, not so much from real want as from the desire to surpass others, inspired all men with a vile propensity to injure one another.’ Brought together by ‘mutual needs’ and ‘common interests’ while at the same time divided by their competing amour propre and pursuit of power, human beings were condemned to disunity and injustice. Violence, deceit and betrayal were rendered inevitable by a state of affairs in which ‘everyone pretends to be working for the other’s profit or reputation, while only seeking to raise his own above them and at their expense’.
Voltaire’s self-enrichment began in early eighteenth-century England; he accordingly hailed the London Stock Exchange, which had just become fully operational, as a secular embodiment of social harmony: the place where ‘Jew, Mohammedan and Christian deal with each other as though they were all of the same faith, and only apply the word infidel to people who go bankrupt.’
For Rousseau, ‘the word finance is a slave’s word’ and freedom turns into a commodity, degrading buyer and seller alike, wherever commerce reigns. ‘Financial systems make venal souls.’ Their secret workings are a ‘means of making pilferers and traitors, and of putting freedom and the public good upon the auction block’. Countering Voltaire and Montesquieu’s anglophilia, he claimed that the political and economic life of globalizing England offered a bogus liberty: ‘The English people think they are free. They greatly deceive themselves; they are free only during the election of members of Parliament. As soon as they are elected, the people are their slave, as if nothing.’
Presciently critiquing the neo-liberal conflation of free enterprise with freedom, Rousseau claimed that individual liberty was deeply menaced in a society driven by commerce, individual competitiveness and amour propre. Anticipating anti-globalization critics, he argued that finance money is ‘at once the weakest and most useless for the purpose of driving the political mechanism toward its goal, and the strongest and most reliable for the purpose of deflecting it from its course’. Liberty was best protected not by prosperity but the general equality of all subjects, both urban and rural, and balanced economic growth. Emphasizing national self-sufficiency, he also distrusted the great and opaque forces of international trade, especially the trade in luxuries.
Voltaire’s ‘Le Mondain’ presents its author as a refined connoisseur of the glorious present: a would-be aristocrat, surrounded with Gobelin tapestries, works of art, fine silverware and an ornate carriage. Rousseau hailed the wisdom of Fran?ois Fénelon, who in the most widely read book of the Enlightenment, The Adventures of Telemachus (1699), claimed that the Sun King’s project of grandeur through promotion of luxury had created deep economic, social and moral imbalances in France. He asserted that the moral order was imperilled by the rich, who, drowning in luxury, had cut themselves off from any possibility of sympathy for the poor.
Voltaire’s biggest foe was the Catholic Church, and religious faith generally. Rousseau, though an agnostic and deeply critical of religious authority, saw religion as having a crucial bearing on the morality of ordinary people; it also made the life of the poor tolerable. In his view, the Enlightenment philosophes, aligned with the rich, were contemptuous of the simple feelings of ordinary people. In his critique of Voltaire’s portrait of the Prophet Mohammed, Rousseau claimed that those attacking religious fanaticism were infected by its secular variant. ‘The most cruel intolerance,’ he wrote, ‘was, at bottom, the same on both sides.’ Voltaire riposted that Rousseau ‘speaks as many insults of the philosophers as of Jesus Christ’.
Voltaire saw monarchs as likely agents and allies of enlightened people like himself, who could expedite the making of history and the advance of reason. In his vision the rational man of action inevitably triumphs over the dumb hordes of ‘canaille’, such as the Poles, about whom he quipped: ‘One Pole – a charmer; two Poles – a brawl; three Poles – ah, that is the Polish Question.’ According to Voltaire, Russia under the modernizing autocrat Peter the Great ‘represented perhaps the greatest époque in European life since the discovery of the New World’. He exhorted Catherine to teach European enlightenment at gunpoint to the Poles and Turks.
Rousseau, on the other hand, believed that ‘liberty is not inherent in any form of government, it is in the heart of the free man’. He looked forward to a world without despots and monarchies. He thought of Catherine, whose partition of Poland had been applauded by Voltaire and other philosophes, as ‘a powerful and cunning aggressor’. Rousseau advised the Poles to enter into a pact with the Ottoman Empire; he told them that the Turks lacked in ‘enlightenment and finesse’ but had ‘more honesty and common sense’ than the Christian powers of Europe.
Getting to Like the Despots
The gulf between Voltaire and Rousseau was intellectual, moral, temperamental and fundamentally political. From the vantage point of the present, however, their disagreements over the meaning of modernity for backward peoples in the East have the profoundest implications.
Voltaire was an unequivocal top-down modernizer, like most of the Enlightenment philosophes, and an enraptured chronicler in particular of Peter the Great. Russian peasants had paid a steep price for Russia’s Westernization, exposed as they were to more oppression and exploitation as Peter tried in the seventeenth century to build a strong military and bureaucratic state. Serfdom, near extinct in most of Western Europe by the thirteenth century, was actually strengthened by Peter in Russia. Coercing his nobles into lifetime service to the state, postponing the emergence of a civil society, Peter the Great waged war endlessly. But among educated Europeans, who until 1789 saw civilization as something passed down from the enlightened few to the ignorant many, Russia was an admirably progressive model.