This theme runs through the story of Le Neveu de Rameau (written in 1762 but not published until 1823), a dialectical satire on contemporary society and conventional morality. Rameau’s nephew is a musician and an amoral individualist who claims that happiness is living according to one’s nature. He principally enjoys sensual pleasures and is insensitive to the ‘charms of virtue’. He declares ‘long live the wisdom of Solomon – drink good wine, blow yourself out with luscious food, have a tumble with lovely women, lie on soft beds. Apart from that the rest is vanity.’27
While drawn to such hedonism, Diderot still feels virtue brings its own reward. Like Morelly, he also hoped that man-made laws would mirror the laws of nature. The best legislation, he argued, conformed most closely to nature, and this is to be achieved not by ‘opposing the passions of men, but on the contrary by encouraging and applying them to both public and private interest’.28
This was Diderot’s public stance; in private, he entertained much more radical ideas. It was his belief that ‘Nature gave no man the right to rule over others.’ When he was offered, albeit as a party-joke, the opportunity to become a monarch and legislator, he refused. It so happened that for three years he found the bean in the traditional cake on Twelfth Night which according to French custom obliged him to present a code of laws. His initial response was to assert in a poem his wish to unite people, not divide them. He further expressed his love of liberty and called on others to feel the same:
Divide and rule, the maxim is ancient,
It’s not mine; it was made by a tyrant.
I love freedom, to unite you is my will
And if I have one wish
It’s that everyone make their own.29
On winning the bean for the third successive year, Diderot decided to abdicate the kingly role once and for all. He renounced even the right to decree like Rabelais’ wayward monk ‘each should do what he wills’. With impeccable anarchist sentiments, he declared mat he did not want to obey any law or make them for others:
Never for the public’s sake
Has man been willing to surrender his rights!
Nature has made neither servant nor master;
I neither want to give nor receive laws!30
In a short story called ‘Conversation of a Father with His Children’, Diderot makes the patriarch declare that ‘no one is permitted to break the laws’. His son, the narrator, insists however that ‘nature has made good laws for all eternity’ and argues that one should follow the law of nature rather than man-made laws. He appeals to ‘natural equity’ as his guide in difficult moral problems. In the discussion that follows, the children rebel against paternal authority, and when the father breaks up the gathering his son asserts that ‘there are no laws at all for the wise’.31 Diderot, while seeing both sides of the argument, clearly sympathizes with the son. Moreover, he is prepared to extend moral and social freedom beyond the intellectual elite of his own circle.
In a more considered statement, Diderot, like Foigny and Swift, criticized existing European civilization by contrasting it with an imaginary society in the tropics. After Louis-Antoine de Bougainville had published in 1771 a description of his travels around the world, Diderot wrote a fictitious account of Bougainville’s visit to Tahiti which he called Supplement au voyage de Bougainville. His bold reasoning led him to entertain anarchist ideas but his prudence held him back from publishing them. Just as Voltaire did not want to discuss the existence of God in front of the servants, so Diderot did not want his daughter to live out his daring moral speculations. His Supplement did not see the light of day until after the French Revolution in 1796.
Diderot not only used the ‘primitive’ paradise in the Pacific to attack Western civilization with its repressive religion and warring States but presented an anarchist society without government and law. His Tahitians, though noble, are not savages; they effectively condemn by contrast the hypocrisy and meanness of Christian civilization. They follow the ‘pure instincts of nature’, have no distinction between ‘mine’ and ‘thine’, and have no private property in land or women. They enjoy free love and have no words for fornication, incest and adultery. They have no idea of crime or sin or jealousy. Having few wants and living in a fertile land, they have reduced the sum of their labours to the minimum, because nothing seems more preferable to them than repose. The entire island seems like one large family with each hut like an apartment in a great house.
Although the Tahitians’ wants are simple, it is not a simplicity imposed by necessity but a rational code of conduct. The Tahitian Orou in a talk with the visiting chaplain appeals to nature and reason and argues that the only moral rule is the ‘general good’ and ‘particular utility’.32 A love of liberty is their deepest feeling. But it does not extend to sexual licence; there is a strict taboo on intercourse before maturity to avoid unwanted babies.
In a dialogue between Bougainville and a Tahitian elder, the Old Man laments how the newly arrived Europeans have spoiled their happiness, created dissension and shame amongst the women, introduced disease, guilt, ‘artificial needs’ and ‘imaginary virtues’.33 His indignation is fired by Western greed and bellicosity, but above all by their repressive sexual code. In a discussion of the island society that follows, Diderot suggests that ‘by basing morality on the eternal relations which subsist between men, religious law perhaps becomes superfluous, and civil law must only be the enunciation of the law of nature’, adding that ‘the Tahitian who scrupulously holds to the law of nature, [is] closer to good legislation than any civilized people’.34 The whole dialogue is a celebration of the natural law and natural order as preferable to man-made law and civilized disorder. To the question whether it is necessary to civilize man or abandon him to his instinct, Diderot’s spokesman replies:
I appeal to all political, civil and religious institutions: examine them thoroughly, and if I am not mistaken you will find the human species bent from century to century under the yoke which a handful of knaves have sworn to impose on it. Beware of the person who comes to put things in order. To order things is always to make oneself master of others by disturbing them: and the people of Calabria are almost the only ones who have not yet had the flattery of legislators imposed on them.35
And asked whether the ‘anarchy of Calabria’ is agreeable, he is ready to wager that ‘their barbarism is less vicious than our urbanity’.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
If Diderot was cautious about publicizing his most radical views, Rousseau had no such qualms. He was, to boot, one of the most paradoxical writers of the eighteenth century. A product of the Enlightenment and a member of its party of philosophes, he remained an isolated figure and attacked some of its most fundamental premisses. While he used his own reason to magnificent effect, he declared ‘the man who meditates is a depraved animal’ and encouraged the cult of sensibility associated with Romanticism. He celebrated individuality and asserted his personal independence