Between Morality and Anthropology-Sociability

This article was downloaded by: [Archives & Bibliothèques de l'ULB]
On: 01 February 2015, At: 13:49

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
History of European Ideas

Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rhei20
Introduction: Between Morality

and Anthropology—Sociability in
Enlightenment Thought
a b
Eva Piirimäe & Alexander Schmidt
a
Institute of Government and Politics, University of Tartu, Estonia
b
Department of History, Friedrich Schiller University Jena,
Germany
Published online: 23 Dec 2014.
Click for updates
To cite this article: Eva Piirimäe & Alexander Schmidt (2014): Introduction: Between Morality
and Anthropology—Sociability in Enlightenment Thought, History of European Ideas, DOI:
10.1080/01916599.2014.987538
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2014.987538
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising
out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &
Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-
and-conditions
Downloaded by [Archives & Bibliothèques de l'ULB] at 13:49 01 February 2015
History of European Ideas, 2014
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2014.987538
Introduction: Between Morality and Anthropology—Sociability

in Enlightenment Thought
E VA P IIRIMÄE 1 * AND A LEXANDER S CHMIDT 2

1
Institute of Government and Politics, University of Tartu, Estonia
2
Department of History, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany
Summary
This introductory article sketches out the evolution of the concept of sociability in
moral and political debates from Grotius to the German Romantics, so as to elucidate
the range and scope of the contributions to this special issue. The article argues that the
concept of sociability serves as a bridge between moral theory, domestic politics and
international relations, just as it also connects the jurisprudential mode of enquiry to
subsequent Enlightenment enquiries into political economy, aesthetics, individual and
collective moral psychology, forms of government and philosophical history. Particular
attention is paid to sociability’s relationship to moral scepticism, and to its position
between morality and anthropology. The article highlights the central role of Rousseau
in radically reformulating the debate and in sparking new controversies up to the
nineteenth century.
Keywords: Natural law; epicureanism; stoicism; moral scepticism; patriotism;

cosmopolitanism.
Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
2. Origins of the Problem. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. Widening Controversy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
4. ‘States of Nature’ and ‘Conjectural History’ in the Middle of the Eighteenth
Century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
5. Political Relevance and Patriotism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
6. International Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
7. From Conjectural History to Philosophy of History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
1. Introduction
In his inaugural lecture of 1730 Glasgow professor Francis Hutcheson points to ‘a full-
blown dispute about the sense in which this social life can be said to be natural to man’.1
Hutcheson outlines some of the most significant issues that were at stake in this debate:
*Corresponding author. Email: eva.piirimae@ut.ee

1
Francis Hutcheson, ‘On the Social Nature of Man’, in Hutcheson, On Human Nature: Reflections on our
Common System of Morality and On the Social Nature of Man, edited and translated by Thomas Mautner
(Cambridge, 1993), 124–147 (134).
© 2014 Taylor & Francis

2 E. Piirimäe and A. Schmidt
… even if most recent writers have declared this sociability [sociabilitas] to be the
source of almost every duty, they nevertheless do not seem to have sufficiently
explained, in general, what things are properly called natural to man, nor, more
specifically, what this sociality [socialitas] of ours is, nor, finally, which parts of our
nature render us fit for and inclined towards society, be it civil society or a society
not subject to human authority.2
Hutcheson here sums up three key aspects of the concept of sociability. First, he refers to
the central role that sociability as a basic prescription of reason (human or divine) has
served in natural jurisprudence in grounding the norms of justice. Second, he highlights
the need to study the moral psychological foundations of sociability and the meaning of
‘natural’ itself. And finally, he indicates the importance that these foundations have for
theorising both the social and political order. Hutcheson thereby captured a central
question that puzzled nearly every Enlightenment mind: to what extent is society the
result of man’s benevolent drives, such as his need for companionship and self-
perfection? Or is it rather an adventitious artifice, founded in the course of human
history to guard our life and property against man’s selfish and dangerous qualities? The
sharp alternatives implied by the question first arose in the seventeenth-century Protestant
natural law discourse but soon came to be reformulated in other concomitant areas and
genres of debate, such as in anthropology, moral and political philosophy, political
economy, history, and aesthetics, up to the time of Immanuel Kant and into the nineteenth
century. The aim of the present volume is to explore some central areas of Enlightenment
thought in which the concept of sociability served as a nodal point and, by doing so, to
use that concept to elucidate the underlying connections between them.
Sociability was the leitmotif of the scholarly work of the late István Hont, the scholar
to whom the editors of and most of the contributors to this volume owe much of their
interest in sociability. In the last year of his life, Hont was working on a contribution to
this volume, with the working title ‘Bolingbroke on Sociability’, exploring the relation
between Bolingbroke’s views on natural theology, morality, and natural law. Unfortu-
nately, this piece was never completed. More than anyone else, however, István Hont in
his different works has highlighted the foundational character of the notion of sociability.
In an important early article, co-authored with Hans Erich Bödeker in 1989, Hont
envisaged an entire research programme for the study of the transformation of natural law
discourse from Grotius to Kant that would depart from the concept of sociability,
emphasising particularly the challenge of various kinds of scepticism in this transforma-
tion process. This radically new perspective offered the possibility of overcoming not only
the juristic fixation on the notion of right and rights, but also the standard conflicts
between ‘early’ and ‘late Enlightenment’, or between the representatives and critics of
natural law discourse, and hence to radically rethink the entire Enlightenment and its
legacy.3 As Hont has shown in his subsequent work, from the perspective of sociability,
subjects such as international relations, domestic politics and moral theory cannot and
should not be viewed as distinct domains: indeed, the crucial aspect of this concept in
early modern thought was precisely to serve as a bridge between these different contexts,
2
Hutcheson, ‘On the Social Nature of Man’, in On Human Nature, 127. (The translation has been modified to
reflect Hutcheson’s use of two different Latin terms—sociabilitas and socialitas—in this passage.)
3
Hans Erich Bödeker and István Hont, ‘Naturrecht, Politische Ökonomie und Geschichte der Menschheit. Der
Diskurs über Politik und Gesellschaft in der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Naturrecht – Spätaufklärung – Revolution,
edited by Otto Dann (Hamburg, 1985), 80–89.
Introduction 3
just as it also connects the jurisprudential mode of enquiry to subsequent Enlightenment

enquiries into political economy, individual and collective moral psychology, forms of
government and conjectural or civil philosophical history.4
This volume, too, attempts to take these various linkages seriously. In discussing
the transformations of the concept of sociability from Grotius to German Romantics,
particular attention will be paid to its relationship to moral scepticism as well as to
cosmopolitanism and patriotism as theories of human association. In the following pages
we will attempt to sketch out a broader contemporary historiographical picture of the
concept to elucidate the range and scope of the contributions to this volume.
2. Origins of the Problem

What are the origins of the problem of sociability? As Annabel Brett has recently
emphasised, sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Aristotelians—Catholics and
Protestants, scholastics and legal humanists alike—already recognised that Aristotle’s
influential notion of man as zoon politikon in the Politics called for clarification and
reinforcement in the face of a widening debate about both the sources of political
sovereignty and about the implications of reason of state for jurisprudence.5 Here, the
question of human sociability helps to clarify the pervasive engagement of seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century authors with Greek and Roman thought. This applies particularly
to the debates between the Hellenistic schools of moral philosophy, between the Stoics
and the followers of Epicurus which provided a polemical (and often eclectic) blueprint of
how to prioritise sociable and unsociable inclinations in human nature.6 Yet as Richard
Tuck has influentially argued, it was particularly the intensified reception of ancient
Scepticism, particularly moral scepticism, that posed a challenge which no moral theory
could ignore, and to which Grotius’s grounding of natural law on a universal principle of
human sociability can be viewed as an answer.7 The figure of Carneades of Cyrene, the
second-century BC Academic sceptic, and his denial of universal justice, including
4
István Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation State in Historical Perspective
(Cambridge, MA, 2005); István Hont, ‘The Early Enlightenment Debate on Luxury and Commerce’, in The
Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, edited by Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler
(Cambridge 2006), 379–418; István Hont, Politics and Commercial Society: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam
Smith, edited by Béla Kapossy and Michael Sonenscher (Cambridge, MA, forthcoming; we are very grateful to
the editors of this work for allowing us to read this manuscript). Cf. Friedrich Vollhardt, Selbstliebe und
Geselligkeit. Untersuchungen zum Verhältnis von naturrechtlichem Denken und moraldidaktischer Literatur im
17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Tübingen, 2001); Das Naturrecht der Geselligkeit: Anthropologie, Recht und Politik im
18. Jahrhundert, edited by Vanda Fiorillo and Frank Grunert (Berlin, 2009).
5
Annabel Brett, ‘“The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth”: Thomas Hobbes and Late Renaissance
Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics’, Hobbes Studies, 23 (2010), 72–102; Annabel Brett, Changes of State:
Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (Princeton, NJ, 2011), chapter 5.
6
There is a vast literature on this topic. For recent accounts, see Der Garten und die Moderne. Epikuräische
Moral und Politik vom Humanismus bis zur Aufklärung, edited by Gianni Paganini and Edoardo Tortarolo
(Stuttgart, 2004); Catherine Wilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford, 2008); Epicurus in the
Enlightenment, edited by Neven Leddy and Avi Lifschitz (Oxford, 2009); Christopher Brooke, Philosophic
Pride: Stoicism and the Politics of Self-Love from Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton, NJ, 2012). See also the
contributions by Hans W. Blom, Avi Lifschitz, and Alexander Schmidt to this volume.
7
Richard Tuck, ‘Carneades, Grotius and Hobbes’, in Grotiana, 4 (1983), 43–60; Richard Tuck, Philosophy and
Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), 55–56, 196–97; Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace:
Political Thought and the International Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford, 1999), 21–22. Cf. J. B.
Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, 1998), chapters
3–4. For a critical view of Tuck’s position, see Thomas Mautner, ‘Grotius and the Skeptics’, Journal of the
History of Ideas, 66 (2005), 577–601.
international justice, loomed large in this context, and indeed continued to do so

throughout Enlightenment debates on sociability.
Grotius’s response to the sceptical challenge and his association of sociability with the
concept of oikeiosis here can be viewed as a continuation of the efforts of the neo-
Aristotelians in a Stoic and Ciceronian idiom.8 But, as Benjamin Straumann has
emphasised, Grotius should be regarded most fundamentally as a student of Roman
law, coming to identify justice with a set of legal remedies that he turned into substantive
rights grounded on natural law.9 In an important recent article, Stephen Darwall has
started out from a similar understanding of Grotius’s notion of justice, asking in particular
about the ways in which sociability can generate obligation to natural law. It is the
authoritative (rather than ‘counselling’) character of moral obligation, Darwall claims, that
constitutes the distinctively modern aspect of Grotius’s theory, and which therefore
distinguishes Grotius’s ethical theory from the earlier Aristotelian or Stoic variants.10
From this perspective, sociability or ‘our common rational and sociable nature’ consists in
‘our equal standing to make reasoned claims and demands on one another’ and hence also
implies a conception of a cosmopolitan ‘moral community of mutually accountable
equals’.11
In his contribution to this volume and in an earlier related article, Hans Blom links up
with Straumann’s and Darwall’s work, yet comes to question the view that a definitive
solution to the problem of motivation for justice can be found in De jure belli ac pacis.
Tracing the genesis of the notion of appetitus societatis through Grotius’s various works,
Blom shows that Grotius arrives at this concept through a series of revisions. Initially—in
his early work—Grotius invoked the Ciceronian notion of fides (understood by Grotius as
a self-imposed obligation to honesty and trustworthiness) as the fundamental principle of
justice.12 Grotius views unresolved injustice as a condition of war, and war as an
instrument of justice. To provide for the necessities of life, humans require exchange
(commercium) both between individuals and nations, yet some societies break fides, and
resort to injustice. These societies are likely candidates to be punished by just war. Yet
was it possible to convince the sceptic of the correctness of our autonomous interest in
self-obligation? Blom argues that in engaging with Lactantius’s emphasis on the
connection between morality and truthfulness, Grotius attempted to do so, but came to
recognise the elitist quality of fides. Consequently, Grotius began to search for a more
universal—and indeed egalitarian—capacity that could be found in all humans and which
would have a more evident link to self-interest. The concept of an appetitus societatis or
8
Christopher Brooke, ‘Grotius, Stoicism and oikeiosis’, Grotiana, 29 (2008), 25–50, reprinted in Christopher
Brooke, Philosophic Pride, chapter 2. See also Benjamin Straumann, ‘Appetitus societatis and oikeiosis: Hugo
Grotius’s Ciceronian Argument for Natural Law and Just War’, Grotiana, new series, 24/25 (2003/2004), 41–66.
For the earlier, and contrasting, view that Grotius’s new ‘humanist’ tradition of natural law was grounded in a
sceptical assumption of self-interest, see Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, 5–6, 20–21, 78–108. Cf. Richard Tuck,
Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, 1979), 68–74.
9
Straumann, ‘Appetitus societatis and oikeiosis’; Benjamin Straumann, ‘Is Modern Liberty Ancient? Roman
Remedies and Natural Rights in Hugo Grotius’s Early Works on Natural Law’, Law and History Review, 27
(2009), 55–85.
10
Stephen Darwall, ‘Grotius at the Creation of Modern Moral Philosophy’, Archiv für Geschichte der
Philosophie, 94 (2012), 294–325. For a similar distinction between the scopes of ancient and modern moral
philosophy, see John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, edited by Barbara Herman
(Cambridge, MA, 2000), 1–3.
11
Darwall, ‘Grotius at the Creation of Modern Moral Philosophy’, 306, 319.
12
Hans W. Blom, ‘The Meaning of Trust: Fides between Self-interest and appetitus societatis’, The Roots of
International Law. Les fondements du droit international. Liber amicorum Peter Haggenmacher, edited by
Pierre-Marie Dupuy and Vincent Chetail (Leiden, 2014), 39–58.
Introduction 5
the desire to live peacefully in ordered human societies—something more basic but also
much less specific—was his final answer.
3. Widening Controversy
Grotius’s somewhat evasive formula left ample room for interpretation, generating a range
of long-lasting debates both on the intellectual pedigree of his notion of sociability and on
the relationship between his thought and that of subsequent natural lawyers.13 Yet it was
Thomas Hobbes’s denial of substantive moral and legal obligation in the state of nature as
well as his strong emphasis on the predominantly self-regarding basis of human
motivation that directly challenged much of the conceptual framework underlying early
modern political enquiry and hence brought sociability into the centre of moral and
political debate.14 Although Hobbes’s sharp juxtaposition of the state of nature and civil
state was in many respects a reworking of the Humanist opposition between the
civilisation of the city, on the one hand, and rude barbarism, on the other,15 his
straightforward rejection of natural sociability and his theory of sovereign power and the
state opened up a number of questions regarding the foundations of political order.16 In
response, subsequent thinkers set out to defend sociability as the foundation of natural law
and morality, while also using the notion for discussing the origins of political
government.
An impressive range of scholarship in recent decades has explored the relationship
between Hobbes and the German natural lawyer Samuel von Pufendorf.17 This can be
explained by Pufendorf’s central position in connecting Grotius’s and Hobbes’s natural
jurisprudence as well as his significance for the emergence of political economy as a
distinct domain of inquiry. On Tim Hochstrasser’s view, Pufendorf sought to combine
Stoic moral epistemology and a quasi-Hobbesian calculation of self-interest in his attempt
to specify the foundation and content of natural law.18 For Pufendorf, sociability was a
universal ‘law of nature’ that every adult was able to apprehend, while its authoritative
character resulted from its being a divine command. It is worth quoting his highly
influential formula of sociability here:
13
Compare Tuck, Rights of War and Peace; Werner Schneiders, Naturrecht und Liebesethik: zur Geschichte der
praktischen Philosophie im Hinblick auf Christian Thomasius (Hildesheim, 1971), esp. 62ff; Frank Grunert,
Normbegründung und politische Legitimität. Zur Rechts- und Staatsphilosophie der deutschen Frühaufklärung
(Tübingen, 2000), 109ff.
14
Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 20, 41–43, 164–69; John Robertson, ‘Sacred History and Political Thought:
Neapolitan Responses to the Problem of Sociability after Hobbes’, The Historical Journal, 56 (2013), 1–29.
15
Cf. Brett, Changes of State, chapter 5.
16
For Hont’s linking of Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty to his analysis of sociability, see Hont, Jealousy of
Trade, 128–30, 463–70.
17
István Hont, ‘The Language of Sociability and Commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the Theoretical Foundations
of the “Four-Stages-Theory”’, in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, edited by Anthony
Pagden (Cambridge, 1987), 271–316 (reprinted in Hont, Jealousy of Trade); Fiametta Palladini, Samuel von
Pufendorf discepolo di Hobbes (Bologna, 1990); Fiametta Palladini, ‘Pufendorf, Disciple of Hobbes: The Nature
of Man and the State of Nature: The Doctrine of socialitas’, History of European Ideas, 34 (2008) 26–60; Kari
Saastamoinen, The Morality of Fallen Man: Samuel Pufendorf on Natural Law (Helsinki, 1995); Horst Dreitzel,
‘Hobbes-Rezeptionen. Zur politischen Philosophie der frühen Aufklärung in Deutschland’, Politisches Denken
(2001), 134–74; Tim Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in the Early Enlightenment (Cambridge, 2000),
chapter 3.
18
For Pufendorf’s theory of obligation to natural law, see Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories, chapter 3; Horst
Dreitzel, ‘Samuel Pufendorf’, in Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie: Die Philosophie des 17.
Jahrhunderts, edited by Michael Albrecht, Enzo Baldini, Helmut Holzhey, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, and
Jean-Pierre Schobinger vols 1–4 (Basel, 1995–2001), IV.2, 757–812; Patrick Riley, The Philosophers’
Philosophy of Law from the Seventeenth Century to Our Days (Dordrecht, 2009), 69–74.
Any man must, inasmuch as he can, cultivate and maintain toward others a
peaceable sociality that is consistent with the native character and end of humankind
in general. For sociality, as we understand it here, is not merely a tendency to form
particular societies, whose purpose and manner of formation can also be evil, like
an association of thieves – as if just any intention for joining oneself to another
would do. Rather, we mean by it a kind of disposition whereby a man is understood
to be joined to every other man by ties of benevolence, peace, and charity, and
therefore by a mutual obligation. And so it is utterly false to claim that the sociality
we are introducing is indifferent as to whether a society is good or evil.19
To view and treat others in a sociable way, as Stephen Darwall reads this central passage,
‘is to view them as having rights and obligations that legitimate directive and sometimes
coercive action that would otherwise amount to brute force’.20 This involves certain
mutual obligations, especially giving other human beings’ valuation or esteem as rights-
bearing, moral persons. Pufendorf’s voluntarist theory of human obligation to natural law
came to be subject to vehement debate for at least a generation.21 Yet as Hont has
influentially argued, Pufendorf’s theory of sociability also reinforced neo-Aristotelian
understandings of society (civitas) as an independent entity below and next to the state
(res publica). While Pufendorf differed from Hobbes in his moral and political
philosophy, he borrowed Hobbes’s individualist methodology for explaining the rise of
society. Amending Hobbes’s account of state of nature, Pufendorf presented utility as a
central force of social integration.22 Pufendorf’s cognitive and utilitarian sociability
consisted essentially of humans’ mutual satisfaction of needs through cooperation, which
in turn is based on their capacity for role-switching and imagining one another’s needs or
motivations—an aspect that was to become central to the thought of Adam Smith.23
Pufendorf’s construction of natural jurisprudence around a somewhat utilitarian notion of
sociability came to be seen as the ‘beginning of a distinct and separate school of natural
jurisprudence’, one repeatedly labelled as ‘socialist’ in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.24 This ‘school’ not only had a novel approach to relationships between humans
both inside and outside the state; it was also the basis of a novel approach to the problem
of international conflict and law beyond the state.25
19
Samuel Pufendorf, The Political Writings of Samuel Pufendorf, edited by Craig L. Carr, translated by Michael
Seidler (New York, NY, 1994), 152. For the authoritative Latin edition, see Samuel Pufendorf, De jure naturae et
gentium, in Pufendorf, Gesammelte Werke, edited by Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann and others, vols 1–9 (Berlin,
1996), IV.1, 148 (I, 3, §15). For his earlier views on man’s destination to lead a sociable life see Samuel
Pufendorf, Two Books of the Elements of Universal Jurisprudence, translated by William Abbott Oldfather,
edited by Thomas Behme (Indianapolis, IN, 2009), 315ff (Obs. III).
20
Stephen Darwall, ‘Pufendorf on Morality, Sociability, and Moral Powers’, Journal of the History of
Philosophy, 50 (2012), 213–38 (222).
21
See Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment
(Cambridge, 1996), 42–43 and passim.
22
Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 45. Cf. Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann, ‘State of Nature versus
Commercial Sociability as the Basis of International Law’, in The Philosophy of International Law, edited by
Samantha Besson and John Tasioulas (Oxford, 2010), 33–52.
23
Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 175. Cf. Samuel Fleischacker, On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical
Companion (Princeton, NJ, 2004), 90–97.
24
Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 177. Cf. the contribution by Alexander Schmidt in this volume.
25
For a recent reconstruction and analytical comparison of Grotius’s, Hobbes’s and Pufendorf’s approaches to
sociability and international order, and the development of Pufendorf’s foundational approach by eighteenth-
century authors, see Benedict Kingsbury and Benjamin Straumann, ‘The State of Nature and Commercial
Sociability in Early Modern International Legal Thought’, Grotiana, 31 (2010), 22–44. Cf. Béla Kapossy,
‘Introduction: Rival Histories of Emer de Vattel’s Law of Nations’, Grotiana, 31 (2010), 1–21 (15–16).
Introduction 7
By now a vast body of scholarship has highlighted the convergence of various

intellectual streams in different European contexts at the end of the seventeenth century
and early eighteenth century—Lutheran and Calvinist moral theology, Protestant natural
law, various kinds of Catholic neo-Augustinianism—in explicating the psychological and
social consequences of human pride and self-regarding affections.26 This convergence
was noticed by contemporaries; it helped to highlight the problem of the unsociable
versus sociable propensities in human nature and also came to inform several new
approaches to the workings of modern society itself. Here, Bernard Mandeville’s
notorious exposure of the selfish foundations of modern monarchies in the many
mutations or disguises of (sinful) human pride and pleasure-seeking sent shockwaves
through the educated European public and ignited a protracted international debate on
both the character of modernity and the foundations of society and morality. It was with
this situation in mind that Francis Hutcheson redefined the debate about the ‘social nature
of man’ as one between modern reincarnations of the ‘Epicureans’ and ‘Stoics’:
Does all that benevolence toward the general public, which is concerned with the
protection and welfare of whole nations, spring from everyone’s poverty, weakness,
and need; namely, that there be those through whom everyone can obtain what he
needs, so that, by giving and receiving what is due, everyone can receive from
another what he is unable to obtain by himself? Or does benevolence rather arise by
nature, and do we have a natural inclination to beneficence, not for the sake of
favours, and without any thought of how much advantage may he gained from it?27
In responding to the ‘Epicureans’, Hutcheson represented and spearheaded a moderate
Protestant reaction to seventeenth-century thinkers’ emphasis on self-love and self-interest
as the sole or dominant motivation of human behaviour, including social and moral
behaviour.28 Scholarly interest in this stream of thought has been growing steadily in
recent decades, even though sociability has rarely been at the centre of investigation in
these studies.29 From the perspective of this volume, however, it is important to highlight
the continuous efforts of various thinkers in trying to reinforce natural and intuitionist
sociability. Already earlier responses to Pufendorf’s writings by Leibniz and the
Cambridge Platonists attempted to reinstate Platonic, neo-Platonic and Stoic idioms,
viewing sociability as an application of a theory of justice common to God and
mankind.30 In this idiom, sociability was continuous with benevolence, which in its full-
blown, moral form, was seen as an extension of the divine. This line of thought was
26
See, e.g., Lester G. Crocker, An Age of Crisis: Man and World in Eighteenth-Century French Thought
(Baltimore, MD, 1959), chapter 11; M. M. Goldsmith, Private Vices, Public Benefits: Bernard Mandeville’s
Social and Political Thought (Cambridge, 1985); E. J. Hundert, The Enlightenment Fable: Bernard Mandeville
and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge, 1994); Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 47–51.
27
Hutcheson, ‘Of the Social Nature of Man’, in Hutcheson, On Human Nature, 134.
28
See Wolfgang Leidhold, Ethik und Politik bei Francis Hutcheson (Munich, 1985); James Moore, ‘The Two
Systems of Francis Hutcheson: On the Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment’, in Studies of the Scottish
Enlightenment, edited by M. A. Stewart (New York, NY, 1990), 37–59; James Moore, ‘Utility and Humanity: the
Quest for the Honestum in Cicero, Hutcheson, and Hume’, Utilitas, 14 (2002), 365–85.
29
See Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal Ought 1640–1740 (Cambridge, 1995); Isabel
Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment (Cambridge, 2000); Christian Maurer, ‘Self-Interest and Sociability’, in
The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, edited by James A. Harris (Oxford,
2013), 291–314.
30
See Patrick Riley, Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence: Justice as the Charity of the Wise (Cambridge, MA,
1996), 141–98; Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories, 76–78; Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy,
50–51; Darwall, British Moralists, chapters 4–5; Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, chapters 6, 9, 10, 12.
summarised neatly in the entry on ‘sociabilité’ in the Encyclopédie, subtitled ‘bienveil-

lance envers les autres hommes’. ‘La sociabilité’, writes the Chevalier de Jaucourt, its
author, ‘est cette disposition qui nous porte à faire aux hommes tout le bien qui peut
dépendre de nous, à concilier notre bonheur avec celui des autres, & à subordonner
toujours notre avantage particulier, à l’avantage commun & général’.31
The role of the Third Earl of Shaftesbury in inspiring moral and psychological
inquiries not only in Britain but also in France and Germany has long been appreciated.
But there is still much to be done to chart the linkages between these different national
contexts, particularly in the light of recent contextual interpretations of Shaftesbury’s
moral thought.32 In the wake of Shaftesbury, we can find numerous Enlightenment
thinkers debating the precise role of—and relationships among—other-regarding affec-
tions, love of order and aesthetic appreciation in human motivation.33 In addition, the
various German thinkers who were schooled in Leibniz’s and Christian Wolff’s
philosophies sought to incorporate these motivations into their theories of morality by
exploring the epistemological and ontological grounds of pleasure and the relationship
between the beautiful and the good in perfectionist terms.34 This line of inquiry formed an
essential backdrop to the development of aesthetics as an independent philosophical
discipline in the second half of the eighteenth century.35
4. ‘States of Nature’ and ‘Conjectural History’ in the Middle of the Eighteenth

Century
It is no exaggeration to claim that the entire sociability debate was profoundly restructured
by the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was Rousseau’s ‘conjectural history’ in the
Second Discourse which provoked a new wave of debate on human nature and
31
[Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt], ‘Sociabilité, (Droit nat. & Moral.) bienveillance envers les autres hommes’, in
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le
Rond d’Alembert, XV, 251, taken from University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Spring 2013 Edition),
edited by Robert Morrissey, http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/ [accessed 10 November 2014]. Compare the similar
connection drawn between benevolence, sociability, and justice in the entry on société: [Unknown] ‘Société’, in
Encyclopédie, 253, taken from ARTFL Encyclopédie Project: ‘Les moralistes ont donné à ce germe de bienveillance
qui se développe dans les hommes, le nom de sociabilité. Du principe de la sociabilité, découlent, comme de leur
source, toutes les lois de la société, & tous nos devoirs envers les autres hommes, tant généraux que particuliers. Tel
est le fondement de toute la sagesse humaine, la source de toutes les vertus purement naturelles, & le principe général
de toute la morale & de toute la société civile’.
32
See Mark-Georg Dehrmann, Das ‘Orakel der Deisten’. Shaftesbury und die deutsche Aufklärung (Göttingen,
2008). For subtle reconstructions of Shaftesbury’s and Hutcheson’s rather different counter-theories to self-
interest as the basis of society and morality, see Darwall, British Moralists, 176–206; Paul Guyer, Kant and the
Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (Cambridge, 1993), 48–61; Daniel Carey, Locke,
Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge, 2006).
33
On theories of aesthetic morality in various national contexts, see Jean Ehrard, L’idée de nature en France
dans la première moitié du XVIII siècle (Bibliothèque de L’évolution de l’humanité; 3) (Paris, 1994), esp.
chapters 6–7, 9; Robert E. Norton, The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY,
1995); Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment; Doris Bachmann-Medick, Die Ästhetische Ordnung des Handelns.
Moralphilosophie und Ästhetik in der Popularphilosophie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1989).
34
See esp. Moses Mendelssohn, On Sentiments, in Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, edited and translated
by Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge, 1997), 7–95; Moses Mendelssohn, Rhapsody, or Additions to the Letters on
Sentiments, in Philosophical Writings, 192–232. The ‘aesthetic’ dimension in Leibniz’s and Wolff’s moral
philosophy as well as in the Baumgartenian developments of it is discussed by Norton, Beautiful Soul, 72–83;
Panajotis Kondylis, Die Aufklärung im Zeitalter des neuzeitlichen Rationalismus (Munich, 1986), 545–63; Riley,
Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence.
35
Rudolf A. Makkreel, ‘Aesthetics’, in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, edited by
Knud Haakonssen, 2 vols (Cambridge, 2006), I, 516–56; Frederick C. Beiser, Diotima’s Children: German
Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing (Oxford, 2009).
Introduction 9
the foundations of modern politics by denying natural human sociability and predicting
the collapse of modern monarchies in class warfare and despotism.36 Indeed, some of
Rousseau’s eighteenth-century readers directly associated his thought with the figure of
Carneades, thus denouncing him of restating the sceptical denial of natural justice.37
Rousseau called into question each and every one of the various psychological features
and powers usually invoked to refute Thomas Hobbes’s pessimistic views of human
nature, denying both indirect (needs-based) and direct (affectionate) sociability, as well as
any primary human ability to perform complex mental operations.38 Sociability, Rousseau
argued, developed at a much later stage of human history under the impetus of the
spiralling expansion of human needs and perfectibilité.39 This implied a profound
transformation from the unsocial to the unsociable, i.e., a positive yet competitive
engagement with others. The result entirely reversed man’s original condition. Modern
man evolved as a self-conscious, i.e., moral individual. But he became, at the same time,
caught in a net of psychological and self-created material dependencies from which only
radical political and educational reform could rescue him. Dependency gave rise to moral
evil, i.e., the intentional harming of others and oneself, generated by emulation and envy.
Particularly when attending to the problem of sociability, it becomes clear that Rousseau’s
dramatic statement from the Social Contract, ‘man is born free, and everywhere he is in
chains’,40 was not just a republican attack on the political and social injustices of his age;
more profoundly, it was also a statement about the almost inescapable chains that
sociability has created for us.41
In recent commentaries on Rousseau’s thought, two strands of interpretation can be
discerned.42 A number of studies have highlighted the fundamentally sceptical, Hobbesian
premises of Rousseau’s argument, thereby also explaining its role as the catalyst of a new
wave of debate on human nature and the foundations of modern politics, both domestic
and international.43 In a way, Rousseau was trying to reinstate the original Hobbesian
version of unsocial sociability in De cive, but proposed a different way out from it.
Hobbes’s solution to the antagonism of the unsociable social state was the representative
sovereign state. Rousseau sought to eliminate its heteronomous character, which he
viewed as bound to generate future social conflicts, by proposing a sovereign state that
was a common self with a general will (hence replacing an external constraint with an
36
For a recent commentary, see Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality: Reconstructing the
Second Discourse (Cambridge, 2014).
37
Béla Kapossy, Iselin contra Rousseau: Sociable Patriotism and the History of Mankind (Basel, 2006), 181–
83, 222–44.
38
Kapossy, Iselin contra Rousseau, 207–21. Cf. Robert Wokler, ‘Rousseau’s Pufendorf: Natural Law and the
Foundations of Society’, History of Political Thought, 15 (1994), 373–402, reprinted in Robert Wokler,
Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and Their Legacies, edited by Bryan Garsten (Princeton, NJ, 2012),
88–112.
39
See Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton,
NJ, 2008), 195–201; Alexander Schmidt, ‘Sources of Evil or Seeds of the Good? Rousseau and Kant on Needs,
the Arts and the Sciences’, in Responses to Rousseau, edited by Avi Lifschitz (forthcoming).
40
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, edited and translated by
Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, 1997), 41.
41
N. J. H. Dent and Timothy O’Hagan, ‘Rousseau on Amour-Propre’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
suppl. vols, 72 (1998), 57–73; new series, 99 (1999), 91–107; Frederick Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-
Love: Evil, Rationality, and the Drive for Recognition (Oxford, 2008).
42
Cf. Béla Kapossy and Michael Sonenscher, ‘Introduction’, in Hont, Politics and Commercial Society.
43
On Rousseau’s Hobbism, see Arthur M. Melzer, The Natural Goodness of Man: On the System of Rousseau’s
Thought (Chicago, IL, 1990); Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, 197–207; Kapossy, Iselin contra Rousseau, 182–
83, 207–21.
internally generated one).44 This line of interpretation explains why a large number of
Rousseau’s contemporaries reacted by trying to reinstate the previous idioms of natural
sociability, whether of an ‘Epicurean’ or ‘Stoic’ pedigree. But, as Béla Kapossy and
István Hont have shown, authors as different as Isaak Iselin and Adam Smith also adopted
the naturalism of Rousseau in order to explicate the social character of morality.45
Rousseau’s later works, however, also supplied guidelines for radical educational and
political reforms, and have been read influentially as solutions to the problems generated
by sociability, meaning that they put forward ways in which sociability understood as
dependence and relationships of exploitation could be turned into a certain kind of moral
and political sociability based on mutual recognition and non-dependency.46 It is against
this background that we can now better understand the challenges to which Immanuel
Kant responded when developing his concept of the moral law.47 As Allen Wood has
underlined forcefully, ‘no interpretation of Kant’s views on any aspect of human
psychology, sociology or history will get matters right as long as it ignores the theme
of unsociable sociability’.48 According to Jerome Schneewind, unsocial sociability can be
understood in two ways: first, as simply a natural mechanism explaining the development
of culture and the need for political government, and, eventually, for permanent peace in
the international sphere; second, as a means to awaken us from our natural indolence,
developing our capacity to become the kind of moral and free beings that oblige ourselves
to norms in order to overcome the baneful consequences of unsocial sociability.49 Here
we begin to detect a fundamental transformation in the notion of sociability and, in some
ways, a return to the idea of self-obligation that lay at the roots of the Grotian ideal of
sociability. To a large extent, Kant’s aim was to rescue morality and freedom by basing it
on the autonomy of reason instead of the quicksand of human sociable propensities,
manipulated by our striving for honour, wealth, and power.
While Rousseau’s Second Discourse provided inspiration for numerous Enlighten-
ment conjectural histories, the status of ‘conjectural history’ as the method for studying
the origins of human sociability and justice was by no means uncontested in the middle of
the eighteenth century. As John Robertson has recently shown, Catholic thinkers had for a
long time preferred to contribute to debates on sociability by turning to the sacred history
of the Bible.50 In his contribution to this volume, Avi Lifschitz discusses the ways in
which the methodological and substantial issues relating to conjectural history were
addressed by an eminent figure of the German Protestant Enlightenment—Thomas Abbt.
As Lifschitz demonstrates, Abbt criticised conjectural histories—whether of Rousseau’s
or his opponents’ kind—precisely because of their arbitrary and predetermined character,
44
We would like to thank Michael Sonenscher for suggesting that this connection be highlighted.
45
Kapossy, Iselin contra Rousseau, 233–45; Hont, Politics and Commercial Society.
46
Nicholas J. H. Dent and Timothy O’Hagan, ‘Rousseau on Amour-Propre’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society (Supplementary Volume), 72: 1 (1998), 57–74; Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Theodicy of Self-Love.
47
See Schneewind, Invention of Autonomy, 483–529 and passim; Frederick Neuhouser, ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and the Origins of Autonomy’, Inquiry, 54 (2011), 478–93; Schmidt, ‘Sources of Evil or Seeds of the Good?’, in
Responses to Rousseau, edited by Lifschitz.
48
Allen Wood, ‘Kant’s Fourth Proposition: The Unsociable Sociability of Human Nature’, in Kant’s Idea for a
Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim: A Critical Guide, edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and James
Schmidt (Cambridge, 2009), 115.
49
J. B. Schneewind, ‘Good Out of Evil: Kant and the Idea of Unsocial Sociability’, in Kant’s Idea for a
Universal History, edited by Rorty and Schmidt, 94–112. Cf. Michael Sonenscher’s contribution to this volume.
50
Robertson, ‘Sacred History and Political Thought’. Cf. Silvia Sebastiani, ‘Conjectural History vs. The Bible:
Eighteenth-Century Scottish Historians and the Idea of History in the Encyclopedia Britannica’, Storia della
Storiographica, 39 (2001), 39–50.
Introduction 11
and opted for a synthetic approach consisting of both sacred and secular history. The
anthropology of Genesis could then be accepted as the starting point for a conjectural
history, leaving ample room for further speculations. Abbt’s own divergent interpretation
of the Babel story from theological and naturalistic perspectives helps to illustrate this
point. In different texts, he saw it as either the starting point of particular human creativity
and diversity or as the origin of inter-societal conflict and dispersion across the globe. In
his famous debate with Moses Mendelssohn on the vocation of man, these methodolo-
gical hesitations did not prevent Abbt from rejecting certain anthropological views as
implausible. While Mendelssohn defended the continuity between savage and civilised
humans by highlighting the common character of the same fundamental capacities
(beginning with the instinct for self-perfection and the capacity of all humans to fulfil
their vocation for self-perfection to some extent), Abbt limited the amount of common
ground to people’s aversion to harming others and their pleasure at the sight of another
human as instincts common to all, including savages. Humans were, therefore, naturally
sociable, but not naturally benevolent—morality as benevolence towards the entire human
race called for abstract reasoning and moral education. Thus while Abbt also developed a
naturalistic interpretation of the origins of morality, he argued that the real debate about
human nature was not one between defenders of the selfish and the benevolent view, but
between supporters of the selfish and the sympathetic view. In his terms, sympathy was
the basic natural unselfish capacity that allowed for the development of benevolence at
higher levels of civilisation.
While Abbt fundamentally sided with the neo-Stoic accounts of human nature,
distinctly ‘Epicurean’ ideas informed the naturalistic inquiries into human nature that
thrived in the newly-founded Hanoverian university of Göttingen. These inquiries drew
on various historical accounts as well as travellers’ reports in substantiating their
minimalistic accounts of natural law and the origins and workings of society. They also
directly disputed the nature of sympathy as an other-regarding capacity. In his
contribution to this volume, Alexander Schmidt focuses on an original materialist thinker
who is representative of this line of thought—Michael Hissmann (1752–1784). In a
review of the Second Discourse, Adam Smith astutely observed that Rousseau and
Mandeville in the second volume of the Fable of the Bees were making the same
argument.51 Hissmann’s Enquiries into the State of Nature can be read as confirming this
observation. Without mentioning Mandeville, Hissmann combined a Rousseauian with an
essentially Mandevillian account of unsocial human nature and the slow development of
society and justice, granting humans only one fundamental drive to which all others could
be reduced—the drive for (self-regarding) pleasure. Society and justice, accordingly, were
the artificial results of human convention and political legislation. Thus, Hissmann also
disputed the universality of justice and (like his near contemporary Claude-Adrien
Helvétius) developed a version of legal positivism instead. Furthermore, he also rejected
both the Hobbesian and Rousseauian varieties of contractarianism, accepting (rather like
David Hume) that justice was the product of long-term historical evolution and the
development of human faculties, including reason. Drawing on contemporary philosoph-
ical accounts of European history, Hissmann sought to show how both rulers and their
subjects gradually learnt to identify their true utility, and to use the criterion of public
interest for evaluating and reforming legislation.
51
Adam Smith, ‘Letter to the Edinburgh Review’ (1756), in Smith, Essays on Philosophical Subjects, edited by
W. P. D. Wightman and J. C. Bryce (Indianapolis, IN, 1982), 250.
In reconstructing Hissmann’s account of sociability, Schmidt makes a broader point

about the nature of the so-called ‘crisis of natural law’ in the second half of the eighteenth
century. In particular, he takes issue with the view that this crisis resulted from the rise of
Benthamite utilitarianism and the nineteenth-century German Historical School, arguing
that rather it originated in the neo-Epicurean critique of natural sociability and concomitant
reciprocal obligations. In this type of critique, assertions of man’s unsociable nature tended
to support versions of legal positivism and utilitarianism. The neo-Epicurean point about
the importance of natural human self-regard at the origins of human society and justice was
accepted by Kantians like Karl Leonhard Reinhold and Johann Gottlieb Fichte, even though
the Epicurean solution was rejected as straying far too close to Hobbism in the sense of
identifying justice with the right of the stronger or the command of government. With an
emphasis on teleology in human history, Reinhold and the Kantians sought to rescue some
important elements of the project of natural law earlier formulated by Grotius and
Pufendorf. In doing so, they intervened in the debate about the reality, scope, and
desirability of universal human rights occasioned by the French Déclaration des droits de
l’homme et du citoyen of 1789. Here, Kant and his followers presented humans as having
the ‘moral’ task of achieving sociability by transcending their selfish drives through reason
and cultivation. Mankind’s unsociable qualities would turn conflict into the means to
develop authentically human faculties while the human striving for betterment would,
ultimately, allow humanity to embrace ‘rational justice’ autonomously and come to see
external freedom, or the security of individual life, opinion, and property, as the proper
objects of legislation—a theme that was ingeniously reworked in Hegel’s lord-bondsman
dialectics in the Phenomology of Spirit.52
5. Political Relevance and Patriotism

Hissmann’s, Reinhold’s and, one may add, Bentham’s account of the principles of
legislation demonstrate that debates about human moral psychology and the origins of
justice were important not only in their own right, but had direct political relevance. The
political implications of their theories in an age of heated debates about the reform of
society require further research and can only be adumbrated here. As Michael Sonenscher
neatly puts it in his contribution, until roughly the mid-eighteenth century a weak claim of
sociability characteristically implied a strong claim of sovereignty, and vice versa.
Although Pufendorf showed the possibility of human survival in the state of nature
defined as a state without political authority, his construal of the principles of human
interaction demonstrated the need for a strong government, an absolute ruler at best, to
contain men. Conversely, a ‘benevolent’ account of human motivation allowed for
developing more communitarian or republican ideas of civil government. If the emphasis
fell less on human deliberation and ‘common sense’ than on the ‘satisfaction of needs’, it
could also be used to justify forms of benevolent (enlightened) absolutism. In both these
versions of ‘benevolent’ politics there was an easy continuity between ethics and politics,
with political justice being seen as a direct outgrowth of personal benevolence.
Patriotism—or, as Hutcheson put it, ‘all that benevolence toward the general public,
which is concerned with the protection and welfare of whole nations’—was an obvious
case of sociable behaviour directly supporting benevolent politics and common well-
52
See Robert B. Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit
(Princeton, NJ, 2011), 62–64.
Introduction 13
being.53 In the anti-Epicurean idiom represented by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, it was

often marshalled as both a common human passion as well as a moral virtue that in some
cases demanded an exceptionally high degree of courage and self-government. Yet its
moral psychological basis was also vehemently debated, and as Shaftesbury’s major critic
Bernard Mandeville argued, patriotism could also be construed as shrewd egoism only
masquerading as such. Furthermore, the relationship between patriotism and republican-
ism in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was a complex one. At one extreme,
we can discern a tradition of Dutch commercial republicanism in which political
institutions, guaranteeing freedom from domination and ‘a political order geared to
further[ing] the conscious pursuit of self-interest’ (together with an adequate macro-
economic structure), are seen to secure public well-being and citizens’ interest-based
patriotic commitment.54 At another extreme, we can see the spread of the ideal of sociable
patriotism also serving the attempted republican revival in Europe, one in which both
Shaftesbury and Hutcheson can be seen as participating in Britain, but which can also be
traced in other parts of Europe. Indeed, remarkably, both these varieties of republicanism
led to questions and debates about the possible implementation of these crucial aspects of
republican politics in the context of modern monarchies, from Britain to Prussia.55 We can
also identify attempts to show the compatibility of these varieties of republicanism with
irenic aspirations, rejecting reason-of-state politics as a specific characteristic of absolute
monarchies.56 Particularly in the case of theories of sociable patriotism, patriotism could
be seen as a particularised instance of general love of mankind, and there was accordingly
no opposition between cultivated patriotic virtue and love of mankind.57
These visions came to be seriously contested in the middle of the eighteenth century
with the publication of Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois in 1748, leading to an explosion of
interest in the moral and psychological foundations of modern politics all over Europe. In
Montesquieu’s analysis of the principles of government, moderate forms of government—
modern monarchy or the English ‘republic disguised as a monarchy’—were grounded in
different forms of selfish sociability, especially honour-seeking. The greatest provocation
for thinkers all over Europe was Montesquieu’s claim that modern monarchies could
function well without patriotism. Rousseau’s First and Second Discourses adopted
Montesquieu’s analysis of modern society, but developed a picture of what a purely
commercial society would really look like and how it would end (in foreign invasion or
53
Hutcheson, ‘On the Social Nature of Man’, in Hutcheson, On Human Nature, 134–35.
54
Hans W. Blom, ‘The Republican Mirror: The Dutch Idea of Europe’, in The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity
to the European Union, edited by Anthony Pagden (Cambridge, 2002), 91–115 (92).
55
For these debates, see the various chapters in Monarchisms in the Age of Enlightenment: Liberty, Patriotism,
and the Common Good, edited by Hans W. Blom, John Christian Laursen, and Luisa Simonutti (Toronto, 2007).
56
For the irenic implications of some Dutch theories of republicanism, see Blom, ‘The Republican Mirror’, in The
Idea of Europe, edited by Pagden. For an example of a theory of sociable patriotism with cosmopolitan overtones,
see Isaak Iselin, Philosophische und Patriotische Träume eines Menschenfreundes (Freiburg, 1755; Zurich, 1758);
Isaak Iselin, ‘Über die Liebe des Vaterlandes. Anrede an die im Jahr 1764 zu Schinznach versammelt gewesene
Helvetische Gesellschaft’, in Iselin, Vermischte Schriften 2 vols (Zurich, 1770), II, 161–184.
57
Compare also archbishop Fénelon’s evocative description and prophesy of the good-intended brotherhood of
nations: ‘All of a sudden Mentor said to the assembled kings and commanders: “Your several nations for the
future will be but one, under different names and governors. Thus it is, that the just gods, who formed and love
the human race, would have them united in an everlasting bond of perfect amity and concord. All mankind are
but one family dispersed over the face of the whole earth. All nations are brethren, and ought to love one another
as such”’; see François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Telemachus, son of Ulysses, edited and translated by
Patrick Riley (Cambridge, 1994), 147. Cf. Fénelon, Telemachus, 229. For Fénelon’s particular type of
‘republican’ monarchism, see Patrick Riley, ‘Fénelon’s “Republican” Monarchism in Telemachus’, in
Monarchisms in the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Blom, Laursen, and Simonutti, 78–100.
despotism, rather than liberty) if unsociable amour-propre was allowed to reign freely.58
These provocative theories helped to launch a pan-European debate on the character of
modern society, and particularly about the desirability and possibility of reviving
patriotism in modern commercial states.59
Johann Gottfried Herder was one of the most committed critics of Rousseau’s denial
of natural sociability.60 Yet in his early years he is known to have been a follower of
Rousseau (via his academic mentor Kant).61 In her contribution to this volume, Eva
Piirimäe shows that there was indeed a substantial overlap between Herder’s and
Rousseau’s ideas in Herder’s early writings. Herder joined the Genevan in his rejection of
abstract philosophy, and shared some of Rousseau’s understanding of the basic drives of
human nature and of the sentimental foundations of morality, as well as his commitment
to the ideals of human moral independence and political freedom. Yet Herder’s admiration
for Rousseau’s moral philosophy did not lead him to adopt Rousseau’s critique of
sociability, even in this early period. Rather, Herder attempted to combine a Rousseauian
cultural critique, ‘human’ moral philosophy and philosophy of education with ideas
inspired by Thomas Abbt’s theory of monarchical (sociable) patriotism. In contrast to
Rousseau, Herder posited the existence of natural patriotic feelings, and relied on a
traditional natural law account of the gradual emergence of political society thanks to
what he called (probably following Johann Georg Hamann) humans’ ‘family spirit’. Thus,
Herder could have a relatively optimistic view of the role of ‘human philosophy’ in
regenerating patriotism in a modern setting, and distanced himself from some Swiss
republicans whom he regarded as developing the line of austere democratic republicanism
in Rousseau. Herder embraced Abbt’s (and Hamann’s and David Hume’s) emphasis on
the positive aspects of modern monarchies and ‘modern liberty’ when compared to
ancient republics, highlighting the positive role of trade and commerce in generating
religious tolerance and the general possibility of developing one’s ‘natural’ inclinations in
modern monarchies. After only a few years however, Herder came to realise that this ideal
was radically at odds with the realities of the domestic and international politics of large
commercial monarchies and embarked on a lifelong study of the foundations of sociability
and the historical development of human societies.
58
In his later works, most prominently in the Considerations on the Government of Poland of 1771, however,
Rousseau explored the possibility of educating humans to be patriotic citizens by extending their socially
generated self-love through a system of public honours to include their community. The Genevan understood
very well that the conclusion of the social contract was only the beginning of securing individual freedom in a
free community of equals. Good laws were meaningless in a society of selfish individuals ensnared in
competition for wealth, power, and honour. Laws had thus to be permanently complemented by education,
republican festivals, patriotic honours, and a civic religion to prevent the state from disintegration or succumbing
to foreign powers. It was unclear, however, as to whether this vision was compatible with his rejection of natural
sociability in Second Discourse.
59
See Eva Piirimäe, ‘Dying for the Fatherland: Thomas Abbt’s Theory of Aesthetic Patriotism’, History of
European Ideas, 35 (2009), 194–208; Alexander Schmidt, ‘Ein Vaterland ohne Patrioten? Die Debatten über
deutsche Vaterlandsliebe in der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Die deutsche Nation im frühneuzeitlichen Europa. Politische
Ordnung und kulturelle Identität?, edited by Georg Schmidt (Munich, 2010), 35–63.
60
Nigel DeSouza, ‘Language, Reason and Sociability: Herder’s Critique of Rousseau’, Intellectual History
Review, 22 (2012), 221–40; Eva Piirimäe, ‘Sociability, Nationalism, and Cosmopolitanism in Herder’s Early
Philosophy of History’, History of Political Thought (forthcoming).
61
John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago, IL, 2002), 91–177, 214.
Introduction 15
6. International Implications
In an age of sustained warfare, global expansion and increased competitive trade,
questions about regulating international conflict and the possible ways of overcoming it
were asked frequently. Sociability was a crucial issue in this context since it posited the
existence of (or the demand for) human society as such rather than any particular civil
society. In the jurisprudential mode of inquiry, sociability continued to serve as a
foundation for determining not only natural law but also the law of nations, even if a
number of qualifications were added on the basis of the putative differences between
individuals and states.62 But it was also possible to restate Hobbes’s denial of the
existence of ‘human society’—as Rousseau consistently did in his manuscript entitled
State of War, raising profound questions both about the nature of patriotism and the
universality of morality. One did not have to be a Hobbesian, however, to argue that there
was a tension between the existence of political societies and the idea of human society.
Especially in the light of the phenomenon of ‘jealousy of trade’, or the entanglement of
commercial competition and power politics, ‘reason-of-state’ arguments from the
necessity of self-preservation could be shown to trump those of general utility or justice,
hence reinforcing the view of patriotism as incompatible with any form of
cosmopolitanism.63
Iain McDaniel’s contribution delineates a distinctive type of modern patriotism
advocated by Adam Ferguson and Lord Kames. McDaniel demonstrates that a crucial
inspiration for these thinkers was Montesquieu’s anti-Hobbesian argument about the
origins of war in the ‘social state’. Like Montesquieu, Ferguson and Kames regarded
humans as naturally sociable but highlighted what McDaniel calls ‘the agonistic’
character of human sociability and patriotism. Kames was explicitly critical of
Hutcheson’s and Shaftesbury’s notion of universal benevolence as grounded in human
nature, emphasising the proportionally limited scope of both our ‘appetite for society’ and
our moral duties. For Ferguson, too, humans were prone both to friendship and animosity,
concord and discord. Human natural sociability was limited in scope, being both
motivated and reinforced by animosity toward other groups. Ferguson and Kames shared
the Scottish perspective on the various stages of human history and traced the different
expressions of this fundamentally limited disposition towards sociability in different types
of society. Yet in contrast to many of their contemporaries they did not envisage
transcending this disposition in the course of human history,64 instead warning against the
waning of agonistic patriotism in modern commercial monarchies. Both these authors
viewed human rivalry as a source of positive energy in society as well as a guarantee for
liberty in modern states. At the international level, they were critical of the view that
Europe’s commercial and cultural development would ultimately favour stability and the
cosmopolitan value of peace, insisting instead on the balance of power and emulation
between economically and militarily equal independent states as the best guarantees of
Europe’s vitality and the ‘liberties of mankind’.
62
Kapossy, ‘Introduction: Rival Histories of Law of Nations’, 14.
63
Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 6–17, 22–37; Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and
the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ, 2009), 173–252.
64
Béla Kapossy, ‘Iselins Geschichte der Menschheit als Friedenschrift’, in Isaak Iselin und die Geschicht-
sphilosophie der Europäischen Aufklärung, edited by Lucas Marco Gisi and Wolfgang Rother (Basel, 2011),
101–23; Eva Piirimäe, ‘Sociability, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Herder’.
7. From Conjectural History to Philosophy of History

Much of the enlightened inquiry into the prospects of freedom and peace in Europe was
conducted in the mode of philosophical history of civilisation: this mode of inquiry not
only put the question of sociability into historical perspective but also made it possible to
view it in terms of the theories of the development of the human mind and human ideas,
including morality. As a number of recent studies have shown, enlightened philosophy of
history owed a great deal to the inspiration, and challenges, of Rousseau and
Montesquieu.65 Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitan philosophy of history, too, is in many
ways part of this philosophical endeavour and would certainly merit further contextual
study.
In his contribution to this volume, Michael Sonenscher traces the origins of post-
Kantian ‘historicism’ in these debates, highlighting the seminal role of Rousseau’s

concept of perfectibility for the bifurcation of enlightened philosophical histories into two
types of visions of historical development. Thinkers accepting both Rousseau’s denial of
human natural sociability and his vision of a republican politics of the general will used
philosophical history as a resource for reconstructing the possible ways in which human
societies (and in the case of Kant, humanity itself) could be seen as evolving towards
embracing sociability as their underlying principle. If there was no natural sociability,
human freedom or perfectibility began to denote humans’ fundamentally mutable
character. At the same time, these late-eighteenth-century thinkers differed profoundly
on how the development of human cognitive capacities was to be construed—as either
overcoming local error and converging on uniform principles of understanding or as
diverging due to the development of individuality both within as well as across cultures.66
Historically achieved sociability itself could thus also be construed in contrasting ways, as
uniform or heterogeneous. Both these ways were foreshadowed in Rousseau’s two
different accounts of perfectibility in his different works. In the Social Contract Rousseau
pointed to the cold inhospitable environments as favouring the development of individual
labour through which finally a taxable surplus would be created; this in turn led to greater
accountability of the government (compared to environments in which natural endow-
ments were the source of government revenue), and finally the maintenance of equality
among the population through fiscal policy. The second was developed in Rousseau’s
Letter to Christoph Beaumont and Julie, and centred on the human pre-social love of
beauty and order, which for Rousseau could be educated to identify and pursue the
general will (under conditions of egalitarian politics).
Sonenscher explores the ways in which these two notions of perfectibility, in
combination with the metaphysical starting points of monism and dualism, played out
in Condorcet’s and Friedrich Schlegel’s controversy over the progress of the human mind
in history, and more broadly, in the differences between the moral and political thought of
the French ideologues and their German romantic counterparts. For Condorcet, the
contingent emergence of surplus goods, and, as a next step, the division of labour in
society led to economic progress and the growth of industry and trade. At the same time,
he insisted on the progress of human understanding and its long-term capacity to generate
65
Kapossy, Iselin contra Rousseau; Annette Meyer, Von der Wahrheit zur Wahrscheinlichkeit: die Wissenschaft
vom Menschen in der schottischen und deutschen Aufklärung (Tübingen, 2008); Iain McDaniel, Adam Ferguson
and the Scottish Enlightenment: The Roman Past and Europe’s Future (Cambridge, MA, 2013).
66
These understandings were also combined with the metaphysical presuppositions, monism or dualism, hence
yielding a greater variety of corresponding accounts of human reason. For example, Kant shared a converging
view of the development of human reason with Condorcet, while Condorcet was a monist and Kant a dualist.
Introduction 17
a stable alignment between individual and collective interests by applying a range of

egalitarian fiscal and financial policies to modern political societies. Condorcet’s monist
materialism gave rise to a vision of historical progress in which human capacities finally
converged in mastering both nature and humanity’s own asocial nature. Schlegel, by
contrast, rejected Condorcet’s monism and criticised him for neglecting what distin-
guished humanity from animals—notably the human capacity for moral perfection and
culture as grounded in disinterested aesthetic experience. This capacity gave rise to
variable types of moral culture in human history, something that Condorcet had decidedly
ignored. It was, he argued, a capacity that explained not only human perfectibility, but
also its other side—corruptibility and the unequal nature of progress in various sections of
human culture. For Schlegel, it was this erratically unpredictable tendency in particular
that constituted ‘the specific problem of history’.

In some ways, we have now come full circle: the challenge of scepticism is looming
large again. Sociability, which was initially a ‘natural’ foundation of justice, is for Schlegel
merely a cultural and political artefact of the varying historical development of humanity.
Yet this is only one possible end point for the story of sociability. Indeed the transformation
of the concept in the time around 1800 and, specifically, in the wake of Kant’s epistemology
and practical philosophy promises to be a field of further inquiry into the deep connections
between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century moral and political thought.67 To what extent, to
take one key example, can Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s and Hegel’s theories of recognition be
understood as reworkings of the eighteenth-century sociability debate?68 Certainly, the post-
Kantian thinkers subscribed neither to the theological framework nor to the naturalism of
most of their predecessors. Yet in Hegel’s continued concern with the question of how to
lead a free life in a society of equals one can still discern some recognisable puzzles about the
relation between personhood and society that stood at the origins of the sociability debate.
Indeed, it is still not yet clear when and how the concept of sociability actually became
redundant. In his entry on ‘Anthropologie’ in the first volume of the influential Staats-
Lexikon published as late as 1834, Carl Welcker, a central figure in South German liberalism,
strongly insisted on the relevance of the relation between the natural drives of the human
individual, on the one hand, and society and the state, on the other, as a field of scientific
enquiry. Welcker identified these human drives as basic forces and principles of law and
human history, asking:
How does the life of the individual and his law of life relate to those of the entire
species, to society, and namely to the all-encompassing society of the state? What are
the general, irrefutable natural drives; and thus the natural needs of this human life, of
the individuals and the nations, which are hence the basic forces and principles of the
laws? Are these those on which Hugo Grotius, Hobbes, Montesquieu, Filangieri,
67
See Isaac Nakhimovsky, The Closed Commercial State: Perpetual Peace and Commercial Society from
Rousseau to Fichte (Princeton, NJ, 2011); Alexander Schmidt, ‘Self-Cultivation (Bildung) and Sociability
between Mankind and the Nation: Fichte and Schleiermacher on Higher Education’, in Ideas of Education:
Philosophy and Politics from Plato to Dewey, edited by Elizabeth Frazer and Christopher Brooke (London,
2013), 160–77.
68
See Neuhouser, Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality; Robert B. Pippin, ‘What is the Question for which Hegel’s
Theory of Recognition is the Answer?’, The European Journal of Philosophy, 8 (2000), 155–72; Axel Honneth,
‘The Depths of Recognition: The Legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, in Engaging with Rousseau, edited by Avi
Lifschitz (forthcoming).
Thomas Paine, and Bentham based their respective systems: the sociable drive, the
egoist drive, the drive to perfection, domination, or others?69
Acknowledgements
This volume would be unthinkable without the, often provoking, inspiration and generous
guidance of the late István Hont. The papers of this volume were originally written for
two international workshops: ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism in a Divided World:
Historical and Contemporary Perspectives’, 3–4 September 2010, University of Tartu,
Estonia, and ‘Social versus Unsocial Sociability in Enlightenment Thought’, 12–13
November 2010, University of Jena, Germany. The workshop in Jena was held in
connection with István Hont’s Schiller-Professorship at the University of Jena in 2010.
We would like to thank Hans Blom, Avi Lifschitz, Isaac Nakhimovsky and Michael
Sonenscher for their very helpful comments on this introduction. Eva Piirimäe also
gratefully acknowledges the support of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research
[individual grant No. 8887 and institutional grant Nos. SF0180128s08 and IUT20-39
(Political Community in Flux: Identity, Sovereignty, and Democracy in a Transforming
World)] for research undertaken for this article. Alexander Schmidt wishes to express his
gratitude to the Research Centre ‘Laboratory Enlightenment’ at the Friedrich Schiller
University Jena, and its directors Hartmut Rosa and Stefan Matuschek for providing a
congenial academic environment in which to undertake research for this special issue.
69
Carl Welcker, ‘Anthropologie’, in Staats-Lexikon oder Encyclopedie der Staatswissenschaften, edited by Carl
von Rotteck and Carl Welcker, 15 vols (Altona, 1834–1843), I, 618: ‘Wie verhält sich das Leben des Einzelnen
und sein Lebensgesetz zu dem der Gattung, zu der Gesellschaft und namentlich der allumfassenden Gesellschaft,
dem Staat? Was sind die allgemeinen unabweisbaren Naturtriebe und mithin natürlichen Bedürfnisse dieses
Menschenlebens, der Einzelnen und der Völker, und somit auch Grundkräfte und Grundprincipen (sic!) der
Gesetze? Sind es etwa die von Hugo Grotius, von Hobbes, von Montesquieu, von Filangierie, von Thomas Paine
und von Bentham ihren Systemen zu Grund gelegten, der Geselligkeitstrieb, der Trieb der Selbstsucht, der
Vervollkomnung, der Trieb nach Herrschaft usw. oder andere?’. Our translation.

Between Morality and Anthropology-Sociability

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Originaltitel

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

Between Morality and Anthropology-Sociability

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

This article was downloaded by: [Archives & Bibliothèques de l'ULB]

On: 01 February 2015, At: 13:49

History of European Ideas

Introduction: Between Morality

Click for updates

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2014.987538

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Introduction: Between Morality and Anthropology—Sociability

E VA P IIRIMÄE 1 * AND A LEXANDER S CHMIDT 2

Keywords: Natural law; epicureanism; stoicism; moral scepticism; patriotism;

*Corresponding author. Email: eva.piirimae@ut.ee

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

just as it also connects the jurisprudential mode of enquiry to subsequent Enlightenment

2. Origins of the Problem

international justice, loomed large in this context, and indeed continued to do so

By now a vast body of scholarship has highlighted the convergence of various

summarised neatly in the entry on ‘sociabilité’ in the Encyclopédie, subtitled ‘bienveil-

4. ‘States of Nature’ and ‘Conjectural History’ in the Middle of the Eighteenth

In reconstructing Hissmann’s account of sociability, Schmidt makes a broader point

5. Political Relevance and Patriotism

being.53 In the anti-Epicurean idiom represented by Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, it was

7. From Conjectural History to Philosophy of History

Kantian ‘historicism’ in these debates, highlighting the seminal role of Rousseau’s

a stable alignment between individual and collective interests by applying a range of

that constituted ‘the specific problem of history’.

Das könnte Ihnen auch gefallen