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CONCLUSION Although the Revolutionaries of 1789 Found CONCLUSION Although the revolutionaries of 1789 found inspiration in the writings of all the major intellectual figures of the French Enlightenment, only Diderot can be truly counted as their spiritual contemporary. It has been rightly contended that Montesquieu, Voltaire, the philosophes, and even Rousseau, while they were opposed to the glaring injustices and abuses of the Ancien Regime, sought to alter its inequitable practices through the processes of reform alone. It is therefore remarkable that Diderot, who in so many ways epitomised the philosophical and moral preoccupations of his generation and shared many of its social and political objectives, should have late in life rejected reform for revolution. His apparently anomalous position within the general context of the political thought of the French Enlightenment cannot be adequately explained by referring to his tem­ perament or social position. Although his early release from family res­ traint and a natural impetuousness combined to form an attitude of ebullient independence towards convention, at a deeper level he was cautious, at times to the point of timidity. And it is caution which pre­ vailed in his relations with authority. Doubtless the deep sense of social responsibility inherited from his father contributed to his hostility to a regime which he looked upon as being socially irresponsible, and to his frustration over his own political impotence within a system which denied the right of the citizen to have a say in the running of society; but this alone cannot account for his adoption of a revolutionary stance when others in a similar position to himself continued to opt for reform. So­ cially the middle-aged Diderot was a wealthy, respected, and influential member of the upper bourgeoisie, who had assured his daughter's future and social respectability by marrying her to a member of the minor aris­ tocracy: hardly what one might expect of a potential revolutionary. The key to Diderot's emergence as the only significant theorist of revolution before 1789 lies elsewhere: in his ability to develop from his materialism a 230 CONCLUSION new understanding of the relationship of the individual to society, and to adapt the latest techniques of empirical investigation to the study of the structure and mechanisms of society. From the beginning the focal point of Diderot's preoccupation was morality, but it was clear to him that as a means of determining the right­ ness and desirability of human action it required a firm philosophical foundation, without which it must necessarily degenerate into a list of arbitrary preferences and desiderata. The initial effect of Diderot's trans­ ference of philosophical allegiance from deism to materialism was how­ ever to deprive his moral philosophy of its prescriptive dimension and reduce it to a purely descriptive science of manners. The ambiguities in­ herent in such a situation which opened the door to nihilism and moral anarchy could not be ignored. Only by the prolongation of morality into the realm of political philosophy could these dangerous ambiguities be countered; the solution proposed was enlightened absolutism, the only doctrine consonant with the rigid and oversimplified view of human na­ ture which Diderot held at the time. While the weaknesses of such a utopian doctrine are evident, it nonetheless marks an important develop­ ment: for the first time a logical continuity between philosophy, morality, and politics existed. With the subsequent shift in emphasis from the spe­ cies to the individual, rendered possible by a literary investigation into the complexities of human behaviour, Diderot's materialism in alliance with the latest discoveries in medicine and physiology led him to dis­ cover through an analysis of the workings of the human consciousness that human happiness if, achieved through a dynamic and positive rela­ tionship between the individual and society, in which self-fulfilment and social duty are identified. This identification by its very nature is only feasible in an atmosphere of freedom which allows the individual to satis­ fy the needs of his personality through the fulfilment of his social duties without direction or hindrance from outside. The elaboration of the doc­ trine of popular sovereignty, the political theory to which this principle corresponded, was made possible by the rejection of a rationalist approach to politics for one which made an objective study of the facts of political life. Furthermore, an empirical analysis of the nature of absolutism and the psychology of the absolute ruler convinced Diderot that reform as a way of transferring sov~'"eignty, usurped by the ruler, back to the people was destined to fail. Revolution alone could achieve the desired aim of restoring to men control over their own lives, individually and collec­ tively, without which their happiness must remain an unattainable goal. In assessing the originality of Diderot's political thought it is tempting CONCLUSION 231 to conclude that at the end of his life he had reached a similar position to that held by Rousseau twenty years earlier. There is a certain amount of truth in this view, but it ignores the areas where Diderot's audacity carried his thinking into realms in which Jean-Jacques did not care to venture. It also fails to appreciate that Diderot's political doctrine enjoys the support of a more sturdy philosophical foundation than the one that Rousseau was able to provide for his in many ways more impressive struc­ ture. It is these two areas of Diderot's political thought which require final consideration if we are to establish his originality in comparison with the man who has constantly overshadowed all other theorists of his genera­ tion. As we have seen in the course of this study the two men had a very different approach to politics and the elaboration of political theory, which reflected their opposing temperaments. For Rousseau objective political realities fonned a catalyst which set off a subjective process of a highly intimate and personal nature, which in due course produced a complex and original response in the form of a new order which was a rejection of the old. In the last resort the Rousseauesque society of the contract makes its appeal not so much by a description of what society could be, based upon an objective analysis of its potentialities, but more by an emotive portrait of what it ought to be, which appeals strongly to a non-rational millenarian sentiment. The channel of communication which Rousseau establishes between himself and his reader is a subjective one. He uses facts and rational analysis, it is true, but they are not determi­ native in his political thinking, which is in the profoundest sense creative. With Diderot, on the other hand, the political gaze is always outward. This is true of him even before his thought managed to break out of the dead-end utopianism of enlightened absolutism which ensnared him un­ til Galiani came to his rescue by showing him the rich possibilities that an empirical approach to politics could open up. For during this time his attention was directed in the first place towards the leaders of the great political debate which had been going on in Europe for the past hundred years, not in order to subject them to searching and often damaging cri­ ticism as does Rousseau, but to learn from them; in the second place towards the enlightened monarchs of the age and of history, such as Catherine II and Henri IV, around whom he believed, mistakenly as it happened, he could construct a doctrine of practical application. Once the bubble of utopian illusions had been burst Diderot's attraction to the facts and realities of political life is indisputable; from his first excursion into the difficult field of economics where his sober realism contrasts 232 CONCLUSION favourably with the doctrinaire babble of the physiocrats, to the revolu­ tionary call of the Histoire des deux Indes which arises out of a convinc­ ing analysis of the politics of oppression, the dominant formative influence on his thought is the real world, where men's fortunes and aspirations, indeed their lives, are dependent on the shifting patterns of power within society. The difference in the modes of political thought of Diderot and Rous­ seau accounts for some of the weaknesses of the former, but it also points to his strengths. Since the evolution of Diderot's ideas was inextricably linked to the progress of external events he could not accomplish the sud­ den and vast conceptual leaps which enabled Rousseau to produce works of such dense and sweeping intuition. While Rousseau's society of the contract may be seen as an answer to many of his private obsessions, frus­ trations, and longings, Diderot's revolutionary bourgeois democracy was the outcome of a long process of observation, analysis, and testing of the facts of political life. For a man whose respect for the complex and mul­ tifaceted nature of objective truth in the field of science and technology led him to devote twenty years of his life to the Encyclopedie, it is not surprising that he should devote another twenty years to the search for political truth. Unfortunately such a concern for objective truth, coupled with a refusal to indulge in the sophistries of which he frequently accused Rousseau, resulted in such a fragmentation of his ideas that he has failed to gain anything approaching a reputation as a political theorist, while lesser men of his generation such as Morelly and Mably have managed to earn themselves a place in the history of French political thought. It is this fragmentation of Diderot's political views and their dispersion over so many different writings which place him at a disadvantage when set against not only Rousseau but all the minor thinkers who succeeded in expressing their ideas in a more sustained, cogent and economic manner.
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