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Nature, Desire and the Law On Libertinism and Early Modern Legal Theory

Klaas Tindemans

The subject of secularization in political and legal theory, in the context of societal

changes in the 17th century, is a theme too vast to treat in one essay. Even if one would reduce

this subject to the transformation of political theology into ‘contractual naturalism’1 – and the

residual presence of theological traces in the latter – it could not be sufficiently reflected upon

in this context. But the landscape of secularized political philosophy and jurisprudence, with

political theology seen as both its foundation and its vanishing horizon, could be clarified, as I

intend to do in these few pages. I will narrow this essay to a particular phenomenon –

Restoration libertinism – and a particular line of thought – the notion of the State of Nature.

These two cases – one more concrete, one more abstractly legal – do not have that much in

common: there is of course their historical simultaneity in the second half of the 17th century,

but there is another less obvious similarity. For Thomas Hobbes, who conceived the

boundaries of the ‘state of nature’ as a crucial issue, the notions of ‘sovereign’ and

‘sovereignty’ are reflected upon by dramaturgical tools: actor, author, persona (Hobbes 217-

222). The subversive practices of the libertines at the court of Charles II in the United

Kingdom between 1660 and 1685 – even if the effective subversion of it can be questionable

– constitute a different spectacle, but these ‘actors’ were well aware of the possibilities of

radical theatricality. So performativity2 could be conceived as an analytical and

epistemological concept to be used in order to link both phenomena. This exercise of thought

is thus an exercise in performative knowledge.

This contribution offers some reflections on a central concept in legal-political

philosophy during the Restoration era in the United Kingdom – the second half of the 17th

century. These ideas are most clearly elaborated and expressed in crucial texts by Thomas

Hobbes and John Locke, with the work (and the shadow) of Baruch de Spinoza on the

background. The concept concerned is ‘the State of Nature’ which functioned as the clean

slate on which theories about political sovereignty and about the state would be inscribed3.

The apparently naïve question raised explicitly by Hobbes and Locke could be formulated

thus: what made humankind decide – if you could call this a ‘decision’, of course – to accept

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and even to submit to a political authority? Was there some kind of crisis which invited this

submission or was it a logical step in the course of (hypothetical) history? Posing this

question presupposes of course the rejection of history – i.e. society and its institutions as they

exist at a given moment – as the realization of the plan of God. In the second half of the 16th

century, starting with Jean Bodin4, political philosophy experienced a kind of Copernican

revolution. Theorists no longer compared societal realities with a supposedly divine design,

they wondered how many and what kind of institutions a society needed – how much

‘governmentality’5 – to function and to move forward. The last idea was a real novelty, since

a society built along divine plans is, per definition, finalized and thus stable. Contrary to many

superficial interpretations, the ‘state of nature’ or the ‘natural condition of man’ – Hobbes

prefers the latter term – is not a reflection of a primitive, almost pre-human, situation, it is

rather a pre-societal hypothesis in which natural law – understood as a set of norms resulting

from reason – rules social interactions without a central authority. C.B. Macpherson

formulates it sharply, perhaps somewhat a-historically: the state of nature, that is the market

(Macpherson 38-39 & 204-211). In other words, the ‘state of nature’ is a hypothetical societal

condition constructed in order to justify (or not) sovereign institutions, sovereign authorities.

The ‘state of nature’ is not an anthropological concept, it is a liberal assumption, maybe even

in a partisan sense. And here libertinism – whether or not in the version of John Wilmot, 2nd

Earl of Rochester and his ‘cabal’ – enters the stage, as a particular ‘school’ testing the concept

of the ‘state of nature’. In what follows ‘libertinism’ appears in two guises: theory and

practice of the courtiers of the Restoration, and the extremist literature of Marquis de Sade.

The anachronistic appearance of the Marquis in this 17th century framework is of course only

relevant if his thinking is seen as a tool to test the notion of ‘libertinism’ – as a challenge to

political sovereignty to its limits, and particularly not as a historical radicalization of the

(moral) philosophy of the Restoration libertines.

In its historical Restoration form, libertinism can hardly be qualified as true political

philosophy. Even read as a text or a subtext of a particular social behavior, the ‘profane wits’

at the court of king Charles II, the theoretical impact of this phenomenon – including its

remarkable tendency of self-consciousness, or even self-critique – is limited. They used their

performative skills as devices to promote or to protect their political positions (Webster 25).

At the moment when Charles II regained his throne in 1660, the intertwinement between

political renewal, as was expected from his reign after the Civil War, and sexual energy, as

exemplified in the libertine conduct of his court, was considered as a positive sign.

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Libertinism meant, also in a political sense, thinking ‘out of the box’ – at least for a short

while, since this state of grace was only short-lived, no more than five years (Zwicker 90-93)

But it could equally be said that the libertine wits, by disturbing the self-evident re-

establishment of political society – ‘restoration’ in its true and orthodox sense – cleared the

ground for certain aspects of liberal political thinking, and more specifically the ‘possessive

individualism’ in its radical Lockean version. Libertinism,,in a more general sense - and this

could also apply to its the radical ‘anti-nomist’ form of Marquis de Sade - contributed in a

dialectal way to the establishment of constitutionalism. It did so by challenging theories of

political obligation and justification to reflect upon the ‘rule of law’ in the most profound

sense imaginable. Libertinism challenged modern liberalism and the slow development of

modern democracy as its practical political outcome. This essay will not provide decisive

proof for this assertion, it furnishes material for further reflection on it.

Hobbes, Locke and the ‘State of Nature’

In early Modernity, a structural notion of scarcity was introduced in Western society

(Achterhuis 1988, p.30-40). This society was characterized by the intensification of trade

which made, in its turn, the accumulation of capital possible. Consequently, scarcity is no

longer synonymous with the limited situation of temporary shortage. In modern society,

scarcity is an institutional phenomenon: the limited amount of value available in a given

society, as it is perceived by its members and consequently constructed as a device to

structure human relationships. Modern scarcity is a subjective notion and it derives its

meaning from a difference. Something is scarce when A possesses less than B – or the other

way round – and, most importantly, given a generalized equality between men, even if this is

an abstraction and no social reality at all. This notion of scarcity is the motor of Modern

society, since it fuels interactions between humans in search of wealth, status and – before

anything else – self-preservation.

Against this backdrop Hobbes constructed his ‘natural condition’/’state of nature’.

This natural condition is a logical hypothesis, not an observation built on historical grounds.

Hobbes imagines the existing society, from which law-enforcement and contract-enforcement

are removed, but man’s civilized social behavior has not disappeared from this philosophical

experiment (Macpherson 20-23). This condition would, in his eyes, naturally lead to the

identification of basic human desires: commodious living and the avoidance of a violent

death. It also enables the identification of the passions with which mankind lives according to

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these desires. Hobbes sketches the natural condition of man as the situation just before the

social contract in which power is handed over to a sovereign. This is a civilized condition and

the contractual transfer of power stems exactly from the will to maintain civilization and to

avoid a regression into a real, brutish ‘state of nature’. This other notion of ‘state of nature’, a

term hardly used by Hobbes, is in fact the state of war. The state of war would be the result of

a Modern society, if no social contract installing a sovereign were to exist. Hobbes has a quite

mechanical vision of man as such, he considers him as a self-moving and self-directing

appetitive machine, focused on a permanent comparison of his power, richness, knowledge

and honor with other men. Not an abstract comparison, but a capacity to get what he wants in

contrast to the same capacity of other men. This capacity, one could say, is man’s value:

Hobbes conceives man’s social power as a commodity on the market (Macpherson 4-37). The

hypothetical situation becomes very complicated, since it means that it is not the sum of face-

to-face relationships which makes up society. All social values depend upon the social values

of everyone else, everyone’s price is compared to every other man’s price. If this chaos were

left untouched, the state of war would break out almost inevitably. This ‘societal market’ has

not distributed power equally, since human desires for ‘commodious living’ are not identical

elsewhere. Thus follows, according to Hobbes, man’s need to conclude a contract to preserve

what he possesses, his life in the first place. Put in a different way, it is scarcity, as a result of

the differentiation in desires and their realization, that fosters the need for a sovereign – in

Hobbes’ logic an outsider who is himself no party to the social contract (Hobbes 230).

So scarcity, in its profound Modern sense, appears when man’s natural desire is not

defined anymore as a stable result of man’s creational status – as a theological consistency,

one could say – but as a principle of motion in a social sense(Achterhuis 22).

John Locke describes the ‘state of nature’, in contrast to Hobbes, much more as a

historical (re)construction (Locke 116-122)6. In a way, he conceives the natural situation in

which the need for ‘governmentality’ arises as a situation which would ideally continue.

Locke’s state of nature is a complete society, governed by reason, even governed by laws.

The limit situation in which the empowerment of a sovereign becomes necessary, is the

moment in which these laws are no longer self-imposed. Locke starts from a societal

minimum: the world is available to everyone – the principle of equality is self-evident – and

reason stimulates man to appropriate his share of land, only limited to his own needs and by

the avoidance of spoilage (Locke 132-133). But once the basic utility value of these

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appropriations can be abstracted and transformed into money, these limitations cease to exist.

Man can appropriate now much more than he needs for his own preservation, he can

accumulate his earnings in the form of money, of capital. Those who, by lack of active reason,

did not succeed in their desire to appropriate can sell the only property left for them: their

labor. So Locke justifies a far-reaching differentiation of humankind: those who, according to

natural law, succeeded in appropriating their share (and much more, thus contributing to a

general enhancement of welfare) and those who sold all their properties, including their

bodily labor. And precisely this differentiation forces the so-called ‘reasonable class’ in this

‘natural’ society to conclude the social contract, since exactly the lack of reason of the

laboring class threatens their possessions and their lives (Macpherson 221-238).

Hobbes describes the hypothetical situation just before the appointment of a sovereign

as a ‘market’ of human beings selling their power. Locke justifies the social differentiations

between proprietors and ‘have-nots’ as a reasonable outcome. These views have far-reaching

consequences for the political structure, as a result of the conclusion of the social contract.

According to Spinoza, this contract, this transfer of the sovereign will as it exists naturally in

the state of nature, is motivated by the profound desire to live safely and without fear. Politics

is nothing else than ‘the organization of desire’. But the crucial question is of course how to

reconcile the differentiated reason – as Locke justifies it – and this generalized desire in a

political system, a system Spinoza is ready to call ‘democracy’, even when this ‘natural

society’ is submitting itself completely to the ‘contractual’ sovereign (Spinoza 347-357, de

Gruson 73 & Tuinstra 30-32). In these early Modern theories about the ‘state of nature’ and

the social contract as its liminal solution, the tendency is clear to put off the moment of this

contract as long as possible. And when the contract is concluded, complete submission to the

sovereign is preferred. This is a remarkable paradox, at least. If the state of nature is so

desirable, at least in an abstract way, then perhaps libertinism has tried to postpone the

contract forever, when not in theory, at least in its performative practices – a ‘liminoid’

situation, as it were (Turner 1982, p.51-55)7.

Sade and radical ‘nature’

So Modern society opens a wide breach, at least in theory, between the autonomy of

the ‘state of nature’ – i.e. the market of men as commodities – and the political sphere as the

‘organization of desire’. Libertinism could take full advantage of this possibility. To describe

the limit of this possibility and the width of the breach Modern society has opened up, it is

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useful to consider, somewhat anachronistically, the most extremist and ‘anti-nomist’ exercise

of thought known: the empire of jouissance of the Marquis de Sade. The Marquis’ exercise

has been written at a moment in history that (Modern) absolute sovereignty – the French

monarchy, in his case – had used up all its political credit in a Modern society, at the edge of

the French Revolution in 1789. One could say, paraphrasing Karl Marx’ opening sentence in

his Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, ‘libertinism’ has appeared two times, first

as a black (Restoration) comedy, then as a (revolutionary) horror movie8. Sade aims, as far as

his literary severity takes the guise of a (legal) theory, to abolish law altogether, i.e. law

conceived as a general, universalized rule, emanating from a state. More specifically, he

claims the right to existence of a community of radical libertines outside the bounds of law

see (Ost 131-136 & Piret 58-59). But in this claim he exactly undermines the justification of

Modern law. In contrast to contractualists from Jean Bodin to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Sade

assumes the basic inequality in humankind, concluding that law is always unjust, exactly in its

universalist pretention (Ost 156-163). If legal generalization should be accepted, it has to be

inverted. It is not the thief who should be punished, but the owner who neglects his property.

Sade opposes the death penalty, not out of humanitarian motives, but because it impedes the

individual to take the final decision about someone else’s life. To be just, every individual

should establish his own law, the common notion of law should be replaced by privileges and

exceptions. Sade rejects the idea of the social contract, because it is based upon the possibility

to liberate oneself from the law of nature, a law to be formulated as complete licence to

jouissance, to lust. Men are not born free, the human will is not autonomous. Hence the

strange paradox of a lawless community and a very complex set of rules within the Sadean

universe, as the flipside. Sade reinterprets the device of the French revolution: the liberty to

claim lust from anybody, the equality of worthless lives, ready to be violated, the fraternity

meaning the consecration of incest. And as for property, the other cornerstone of bourgeois

enlightenment in its French revolutionary guise, Sade paraphrases Locke’s definition of

property – the liberty to dispose of his person and his goods – by simply adding ‘someone

else’s person’ and ‘someone else’s goods’(Ost 164-168). In doing so, he inverts of course the

idea of law itself, but one could argue that the legal definition of the Code Napoléon, which

includes the right to annihilate one’s property, comes, in its absoluteness, pretty close.

Logically, Sade makes his so-called legal theory impossible by denying his victims the rights

his perpetrators enjoy unconditionally, without justifying the differentiation in this closed

community, in his invented ‘society of the friends of crime’ (Ost 264-265). Sade’s libertinism

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is totalitarian, it transforms the law into its exceptions, it transforms collective protection into

arbitrary punishment, and it makes a doctrine out of these inversions. The Modern absolute

sovereign being exhausted, not able anymore to bridge the gap between the ‘market’ of

political subjects and their governmental embodiment, Sade takes advantage, theoretically, of

the abysmal nature of the breach to create, to imagine an anti-nomist micro-society, a

Fremdkörper. The breach opened wide shortly after the revolution. Sade and Robespierre

were the fiercest enemies, but the terror of the Jacobins in 1791-1794 comes often close to

Sade’s idea of the inversion of the law, especially in its overall equation of virtue and

violence, of law and death9.

The ‘nature’ of Restoration libertinism

Restoration libertinism, as I situated it, expresses the moment of hesitation between

the bourgeois imagination of a ‘state of nature’ and its incorporation in the constitutional,

sovereign state. In which way could the universe of Sade, this glorification of inequality and

inverted law enforcement, be relevant to that context? Sade explores the state of nature – a

lawless society, but still a (closed) society – in its deepest core, he radicalizes Lockes idea of

limitless appropriation and concludes that political sovereignty no longer matters. He invites

us to play with the idea that the acceptance of natural law – in its Enlightenment sense, i.e.

reason and rationality – makes any legal obligation superfluous and unjustified.

Philosophically, Sadean thought could be considered as the ‘symptom’ of a discursive

impasse. It points, says Slavoj Žižek, to the impossibility of any ethical system to think, let

alone to act, its own radical limits. Sade is not the truth of Immanuel Kant, as Jacques Lacan

seemed to suggest, but he is the symptom of Kants self-betrayal, his compromise with ‘pure

virtue’ (Žižek 209 & Lacan 765-790). Robespierre refused this compromise, and we know the

result.

However, Restoration libertinism had another point of reference – or another societal

mirror – than Sade, who met Jacobin self-righteousness in all its rigor. Žižek says, about

Robespierre, that his equation of virtue and terror showed the absence of a meta-system of

(legal) dogmatic to contextualize strong legal rules, resulting in their transformation into

merciless ethical claims (Žižek 171). It is precisely this contextual void Sade inverts, thus

exposing its ‘truth’. The ‘court wits’ of king Charles II were equally confronted with a

contextual emptiness – the anomy of an open market and its ‘possessive individualism’ as

McPherson calls it – but their inversion was different. They satirized of course the political

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climate they enjoyed, but they never went as far as to speculate about a generalized, violent

state of nature. The melancholic violence in Rochester’s “A Ramble in St. James’s Park” and

the nihilistic complaint about the failure of reason in “A Satire against Mankind” however

could be seen as remarkable exceptions to that general tendency10. In the latter poem

Rochester clearly sees the human faculty of thought as an obstacle to life according to the

laws of nature. Reason should not impede a man to take food when he is hungry, and

government should not interfere in the way an individual conceives his own happiness. These

variations on the theme are not very political in their argument, but the melancholy about the

existential position of the libertine in the nation’s highest circles is quite outspoken and

expresses a kind of discomfort about the theatricality of the society he depends upon. At the

same time, it is this theatricality that answers, from the libertines’ point of view, the

succeeding political crises the United Kingdom lived through in the 17th century. In a very

serious way, Hobbes himself insisted on the theatrical aspect of the creation of the sovereign:

the parties of the social contract behave according to a role, they are author and actor and they

should stick to their persona (Hobbes 217-222). The analogy is not gratuitous, since

Renaissance theatre practices – from the late 16th century until the theatre shutdown in 1642 –

function as the cultural battleground for the new politico-economic regime, based upon the

(abstract) ubiquity of the market: the rogues, the villains and other ‘vices’ of Elizabethan and

Jacobean drama embody the dangers of this transformation (Agnew 101-148)11. The regime

of Charles II, after his restoration in 1660, thrives by the theatre, in a literal sense with the

explosion of a repressed dramatic and performance culture, in a metaphorical sense in its

display of power (Webster 19-24). But these performances were misleading, the fantasy that

sexual abundance would automatically result in progeny, both for the royal court and for the

nation, and the idea that personal and national fertility are intertwined, proved quickly

wrong(Zwicker 92-93) 12. The intrigues of the court contributed to its outlook as the

mediaeval castle where Sade located his orgies – but in this English case, one could hardly

talk about a doctrine. At the same time, the confrontational character of the political culture –

in its largest sense: the polemicist literature included – prepares the ground for answers to a

radically changing world, to the challenges of the bourgeois-dominated society that takes

shape (Staves 4 & passim). Political theory, from Hobbes until Locke, passing over the

Levellers, begins, almost indistinctly, with the clean slate of the ‘state of nature’. This logic

remarkably resembles the relationships of power in the real society of the late 17th century,

when a clearly secular idea of sovereignty takes shape. In his satirical poem Absalom and

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Achitophel (1681), John Dryden tries to re-establish a form of patriarchal justification of

power, but he comes no further than a catalogue of possible forms of government, finally

justifying a vague form of absolutism out of fear of rebellion – the crisis about the possible

exclusion of the Catholic Duke of York reaches its zenith (Zwicker 151-153). At the same

time, Locke writes his Two Treatises of Government, and he chooses the opposite literary

strategy, thus implicitly polemizing with Dryden’s satire. He takes the road of philosophical

abstraction, but not without using extremely polemical words such as ‘appetite’ and ‘arbitrary

government’ in the most explicit statements on objectionable forms of government. Viewed

historically, Dryden won the polemical contest, his old-fashioned notion of political

patriarchy was victorious at the conclusion of the Exclusion crisis. But Locke wrote a new

introduction to his Treatises in 1689, exactly one year after the Glorious Revolution which

paved the road for constitutional government, just as he defended it (Zwicker 155-161).

Perhaps Dryden was not the best placed to defend or to apologize for ‘appetite’ and ‘arbitrary

government’, perhaps Locke should have polemized with the libertine wits. To a certain

extent, the libertines were fully aware of their changed societal position in the ‘state of nature’

of market economy, some of them – even Rochester himself – behaved as good governors of

their estates (Johnson passim). At the same time their behavior, including its performative

aspect, created the illusion of a lawless society – clearly underscored by the liminality of both

their language and their performance – which could only be answered by a constitutional

discourse. That is the breach, the rupture they represent in the slow creation of Modern

theories of governmentality. Compared to the Sadean version of libertinism - Sade had

polemized with Robespierre, l’incorruptible – the Restoration libertines had only a poet

laureate – John Dryden – as their adversary. The situation was, at least at first sight, a lot

more ambiguous than during the French revolution. The libertine wits operated, even in their

most iconoclastic postures, within an aristocratic framework – never mind the Levellers.

Historical ruptures were relative, even when, in both cases, kings were beheaded. In this

political and cultural swamp, libertinism was a type of behavior and a discourse that, perhaps

unconsciously, paved the way for the constitutionalism of Locke and his successors.

In 1710 Thomas Betterton, the most famous actor of the Restoration era, is buried in

Westminster Abbey – the first actor to enjoy that honor. At that moment, the political

situation had been stabilized, the United Kingdom began to affirm itself as an empire (Roach

73-85), the facelessness of new market-economic relationships only needed a good writer to

assert its ideological victory – Adam Smith, his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the

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Wealth of Nations would be published in 1776. Maybe Betterton’s funeral signifies the final

irrelevance of provocative libertinism for the theatricalities of authority: a sentimentalist ethic – and

Adam Smith himself is an heir of that philosophy – will prove to be better prepared for the political

translation of the ‘state of nature’ – read: market capitalism.

Bibliography

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Ambo, 1988

Agnew, Jean-Christophe. Worlds Apart. The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American

Thought, 1550-1750, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986

Bodin, Jean. Les Six Livres de la République, Paris : Fayard, 1576/1986

Foucault, Michel. « La ‘gouvernementalité’ » in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, III 1976-1979,

Paris : Gallimard, 1994, p.635-657

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Cahiers Confrontation n°11: L’État freudien, Paris : Aubier-Montaigne, 1984

Furet, François. La Révolution française, Paris : Gallimard, 2007

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Johnson, James William. A Profane Wit. The Life of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester,

Rochester (NY): University of Rochester Press, 2004

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits, Paris: Seuil, 1966

Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government, London: J.M. Dent, 1689/1993

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Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1970

Macpherson, C.B. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism. Hobbes to Locke,

Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962

Marx, Karl. Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, Frankfurt am Main : Suhrkamp,

1852/2007

Ost, François. Sade et la Loi, Paris : Odile Jacob, 2005

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Piret,Jean-Marc. De geschiedenis als slachtbank. Reflexieve modernisering en de wet bij

Joseph de Maistre, Marquis de Sade en G.W.F. Hegel, Brussel: VUBPress, 2009

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University Press, 1996

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overeenkomst. Nijmegen: Ars Aequi Libri,1990

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Amsterdam: Wereldbibliotheek, 1670/1997

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University of Nebraska Press, 1979

Tuinstra,Marin. Democratie als cultus. Over politiek en religie, Amsterdam: Boom, 2011

Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre. The Human Seriousness of Play, New York: PAJ

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New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005

Wilmot, John, 2nd Earl of Rochester. Complete Poems and Plays, London: J.M. Dent, 1993

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Notes

1 The expression comes from G.C.G.J. van Roermund. He defines this ‘naturalism’ as “a set

of requirements conceived as to be put forward by ’nature’ and presented as necessary

properties and relations without which nobody could act and which precede any formation of

culture” (van Roermund, p.13). A primal contract is one of these requirements.

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2 ‘Performativity’ is understood here in a broad sense: this aspect of behavior within a social

reality (seen as necessarily constructed) in which a trace of the ‘as if’-character of

performance proper (i.e. theatre) is detectable and structurally important (Schechner 141-142)

3 Hobbes uses the term ‘natural condition of mankind’ (183-188), Locke calls this primal

status ‘state of nature’ (116-122)

4 Bodin says clearly that sovereignty is meaningless if the Prince has any authority above him:

then the Prince is a subject and no sovereign (I: 306-326)

5 Michel Foucault’s term: « Comment se gouverner, comment être gouverné, comment

gouverner les autres, par qui doit-on accepter d’être gouverné, comment faire pour être le

meilleur gouverneur possible. » (636) In this context, one should also refer to the notion of

‘functional differentiation’ as coined by Niklas Luhmann (193-203), which tries to explain the

historical-sociological shift from a class system to a system of functional (in)equalities

without previous hierarchization.

6 The chapters that follow (‘on the state of war’, ‘on slavery’ and ‘on property’) are written as

(historical) consequences of this ‘state of nature’

7 Turner calls these rituals ‘liminoid’, which can be structurally seen as rites de passage, but

without a religious context and restricted to a self-defined social group.

8 „Hegel bemerkt irgendwo, daß alle großen weltgeschichtlichen Thatsachen und Personen

sich so zu sagen zweimal ereignen. Er hat vergessen hinzuzufügen: das eine Mal als Große

tragödie, das andre Mal als lumpige Farce.“ (Marx 9)

9 François Furet (375-376) explains Robespierre’s government: « La Révolution va être enfin

au pouvoir à travers lui, mais elle n’a plus d’autre fin qu’elle-même : c’est ce vide qu’il essaie

pathétiquement de combler par le discours sur l’indispensable régénération des individus par

la vertu, condition d’une République de vrais citoyens. Mais cette pédagogie nationale, en

1794, est exercée par la Terreur, régime sans lois fixes, défini par une mission morale :

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séparer les ‘bons’ des ‘méchants. (…) Ce qui est sanglant, chez lui, est abstrait, comme le

système politique : la guillotine s’alimente à sa prédication morale. »

10 Two examples: “I’ll make her feel my scorn and hate / Pelt her wit scandals, truth or lies, /

And her poor cur with jealousies / Till I have torn him from her breech, / While she whines

like a dog-drawn bitch, / Loathed and despised, kicked out of town, / Into some dirty hole

alone, / To chew the cud of misery, / And know she owes it all to me.” (from “A Ramble in

St. James’s Park”, Rochester 49-50) and “I’d be a dog, a monkey, or a bear, / Or anything but

that vain animal, / Who is so proud of being rational. / His senses are too gross; and he’ll

contrive / A sixth, to contradict the other five; / And before certain instinct will prefer /

Reason, which fifty times for one does err.” (from “A Satire against Mankind”, Rochester 25)

11 Remarkably enough, Agnew skips the Restoration era in his cultural and intellectual history

of market capitalism between 1550 and 1750.

12 “The king and nation were no longer united in a bacchic embrace”