Archives for February 2024

François Jean de Beauvoir, Marquis de Chastellux: Agriculture and Population the Truest Proofs of the Welfare of the People: Or, an Essay on Public Happiness: Investigation on the State of Human Nature Through the Several Periods of History, from the Earliest Date to the Present Times. Originally published in 1774. Anonymous translation. London: J. Caddel, 1792. Reprinted by Ulan Press, Orlando, 2023. Volume I.

Unlike most of the Enlightenment philosophes, and much more like the American Founders, many of whom he met during his years in the United States during the Revolution [1], the Marquis de Chastellux brought substantial practical experience to bear on his writings, avoiding much, if not all, of the scientistic utopianism seen in his colleagues. A friend of Thomas Jefferson, with whom he professed more or less complete agreement in ideas, his book may throw light on that elusive phrase Jefferson put into the Declaration of Independence, “the pursuit of happiness.” At very least, Chastellux’s project advances the thought that the happiness being pursued is not only individual happiness but the happiness of civil societies and of human beings generally; regimes and the wars they fight do not escape his attention. “I must presume to fix the attention of mankind upon new objects,” he writes, as these have “become the most essential to our happiness” (Introduction, i); the purpose of his book is to advance “the welfare of humanity” (I. Sec. 1. iii. 64). “The object of a good government should be to give permanence to public happiness” (I. Sec.1. vi.192).

“Shall men always be the enemies of men?” (Introduction, ii). Despite having “the best organization” of their natural faculties, men have yet to enjoy “the advantages which the vilest of the brutes possess,” namely “the advantages of living peaceably with each other” (Introduction, ii). He sets out to investigate “human nature” and how to adapt it to “political institutions” (which might be “susceptible of amendment, if not of perfection” (Introduction, ii). He will investigate human nature “not by theory,” in the manner of state-of-nature philosophers, but by “experience, applying it to the knowledge of our errors, ascending to their sources, and laboring to divert their course” (Introduction, ii). This approach is necessary since the physical nature of man—the human “sense of feeling, and the perfection of speech”—has caused his social and political organization to become “too complex to be invariable, and too subtle to be regular” (Introduction, viii). Man is omnivorous; because his diet varies from place to place and his ways of procuring food differ accordingly, his “manners and customs” also differ “in conformity to his means of subsistence” (Introduction, ix). Further, humans have no particular mating season, a fact that at once strengthens the bond of women to men and renders them sexually promiscuous. For all these reasons, it is “difficult to define what human nature has fixed, relative to the state of society” (Introduction, xi). To ask if man in the state of nature is warlike or peaceful is therefore a “frivolous and useless” question, no firm ground for “establish[ing] a moral system” (Introduction, xii). Chastellux follows Montaigne, not the “sublime ravings” of Hobbes or Locke, in thinking that “the state of society has effaced even the slightest traces of what is called the state of nature,” that civilized men, whether “corrupted or amended” by civilization, “are entirely new beings” (Introduction, xii). 

Under civilized conditions, the modes of human subsistence interfere with love. Men who work must spend time away from the home; “they take a wife, without taking a companion” (Introduction, xiv). For her part, the wife, absorbed in household management, no longer nurses her infants, instead sending them, when they are older, to confinement “in those prisons, called colleges, schools, and convents” (Introduction, xv). It would, Chastellux maintains, be absurd to expect that children raised this way would “treat their parents with an obedience and veneration equal to any they might have felt arising from the remembrance” of parental protection and care (Introduction, xv). Whatever the state of nature may have been, it no longer prevails. With Montaigne, then, Chastellux eschews all claims to hold up one moral or political standard for all persons; with Montesquieu, he denies that all nations can rightly adopt the same form of government. Moreover, “even in the same nation, similar laws, policies, and customs cannot be adapted to the genius of every town and every class of citizens, yet all have a general pretension to the greatest advantages, which can be secured to them” (Introduction, xviii-xix). This combination of variety and self-interest must result in factionalism and war—war, which “creates a ferocity of manners” and “perverts our useful passions by ennobling our vices,” “substituting force in the place of justice” (Introduction, xix). Therefore, an indispensable element of public happiness must be peace, “the first blessing which a people should implore” (Introduction, xix). “The first step, therefore, towards accomplishing the happiness of mankind, should be to lengthen the duration of peace, and lessen the frequency of war” (Introduction, xix).

War has five causes: the desire to move to a better climate and a more fruitful land—a “more commodious habitation” being another element of public happiness; competition for the possession of resources that can be hunted, fished, or mined; “the ignorance and barbarity of some yet untutored people, who, destitute of every idea of moderation and equity, are apt to be easily exasperated, and make, for slight offenses, the cruelest reprisals”; “a stupid credulity” coupled with “the domain of a delusive hierarchy,” amounting to “a government at once tyrannical and intolerant”; and (“the most powerful motive”) “defects in particular systems of government,” which “give birth to civil wars” (Introduction, xx-xxi). That is, the causes of war can be economic, moral, religious, or political. While the Chinese empire has been in existence for some three thousand years, and its regime seems to be “the most perfect and happy of all those of which we have any knowledge,” animated by “wisdom and stability,” Chastellux modestly declines to consider it, pleading ignorance and, quite possibly, doubting the more buoyant reports of its excellence (Introduction, xxiii). In this, he silently rejects the enthusiasm of the Physiocrats, whom he otherwise admires, in their praise of China, and particularly of Confucianism. He will confine himself to the ancient nations he does know about, beginning with the earliest regimes, those established in Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Medea, and Lydia. That is, he turns not to theoretical considerations of a state of nature but to historical investigation and moral-political criticism.

“A melancholy idea must arise from the reflection that the first epoch with which history presents us, owes its existence to war” (I. Sec.1. i.27). The earliest conquerors didn’t even want to keep the lands they conquered, being satisfied with building monuments to themselves and moving on. But this doesn’t mean that human beings wage war by nature. The example of Egypt proves that “whatsoever the nature of man may be, good laws, and excellent administrations can suppress the propensities to war” (I, Sec.1. i.29). More, Egypt gives reason for optimism: “Had all the earth been peopled with nations governed like the inhabitants of Egypt, the problem of the possibility of a perpetual peace might have been demonstrated by facts, or perhaps, never proposed: no contradiction, however, can be brought against the supposition that the world may one day prove sufficiently enlightened, universally to bear a mode of government, to which a smaller portion of mankind had formerly submitted” (I. Sec. 1. i.29-30). But even so, it is not clear how Egyptian laws supported peace, as “we know but little of the real constitution and government of this nation” (I. Sec.1. i.30). We do know that its monarch was strictly ruled by laws—his meals and his mating ordained by them, their enforcement overseen by a person about whom we have “little information” (I. Sec.1. i.30). And although Egyptian priests wielded substantial powers, we don’t know what these were. Like China, then, better-known Egypt still is insufficiently known. Chastellux can only say that the Egyptian monarchs were ruled by law and peaceful, while the Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Lydians were ruled by despots, “cruelly heroic” rulers in “military” regimes (I. Sec.1. i.33, 37). 

Although the regime is the most important element in determining whether a society is peaceful or warlike, it is not the only element; nor should the aggrandizement of the government be confused with “the good of individuals” living under it, “as if the public prosperity, and the general felicity, were two inseparable matters” (I. Sec. 1. ii.42). Pyramids and palaces do not make for public happiness, and often indicate the presence of misery, of slave labor and heavy taxes. To measure public happiness, one does better to ask, first, how much time in a day or a year can a man work, “without either incommoding himself, or becoming unhappy” (I. Sec.1. ii.44). The answer will depend upon such variables as climate, the constitution, physical strength of the citizens, their education, and other circumstances. Then one must ask, conversely, how much time it takes a man to work in order to preserve himself and procure his “ease” or “welfare” (I. Sec. 1. ii.45). Finally, does the “duty which the sovereign exacts from him” stay within or beyond the time “which each man can spare from his absolutely necessary avocations” (I. Sec.1. ii.45)? How many days in a year does the subject work for himself, how many for his sovereign? If too many, he “must either desert or perish” (I. Sec.1, ii.46). Chastellux is no anarcho-capitalist; he recognizes that the state has legitimate purposes and therefore legitimate expenses that must be borne by its citizens or subjects. “The first object of all governments should be to render the people happy,” which cannot be sustained if they victims of invasion and crime (I. Sec.1. ii.50). A bloated government will lend itself to excesses and abuses, but “a soft and enervated people” that refuses to “furnish the state with such a portion of labor as may be necessary to maintain the public security…will expose themselves, by so negligent a provision, an easy prey to the first power that may think proper to attack them” (I Sec.1. ii.50). Again, different geographic, including climatic, conditions will require different policies. As to Egypt, its peaceableness suggests that it maintained a militia sufficient to deter its enemies, although Chastellux regards its priesthood with suspicion. “It was the luxury of ignorance, of all other luxuries the most detrimental, because equally incapable of exciting industry and [of] producing one agreeable enjoyment” (I. Sec.1. ii.55). They would have better off investing in activities that procured “the commodities of life,” as “war and superstition have always been the greatest obstacles to the happiness of nation” (I. Sec.1. ii.55).

A prosperous people will increase in population and eventually send out colonies. Colonies should be governed humanely. Ruling less civilized nations, they provide those they rule with incentives for commerce, exchanging their natural resources for the “conveniences of life” manufactured by their rulers (I. Sec.1. ii.58). Since “the enjoyment of one convenience would lead to the acquisition of another” and “new desires would follow close upon the last,” they too will become civilized (I. Sec.1. ii.58). “Such would have been the progress of our [French] commerce with America, if, instead of destroying the unfortunate inhabitants of that extensive country, we had been satisfied with civilizing their manners” (I. Sec.1. ii.58). Republics will more likely found their colonies on this policy because while monarchs and despots readily exact labor from those they rule for the glory of themselves, “republics neither erect pyramids, nor plume themselves on having planted trees on eminencies that touch the clouds,” inclining rather to undertaking “those useful, but expensive works, the accomplishment of which, must be the joint result of power, and unanimity” (I. Sec.1. ii.59). But republican regimes have not prevailed. “Through every period, ignorance, despotism, war, and superstition, have, by turns, plundered mankind of the advantages with which nature had presented them” (I. Sec. 1, ii. 61).

Following this “digression” (I. Sec.1. ii.60), Chastellux turns to the consideration of ancient Greece and Rome, for which we do have sufficient information to make firm judgments. Athens and Sparta have been lauded as the glorious defenders of liberty against the invading Persians, but Chastellux demurs. In fact, the Athenian democracy was “vain, frivolous, ambitious, jealous, interested, incapable of marking out a proper conduct for themselves,” a people “grudging their chiefs that fortune which they shared with them” (I. Sec.1. iii.66). They misruled themselves with “idle eloquence,” “giv[ing] the sound of words a preference to reason” (I. Sec.1. iii.66). They were unjust to their allies and cruel to their enemies. The Spartans were not better, although their vices were different. They failed to cultivate their land, preferring severity of discipline to prosperity; “the ties of families, of marriage, of parentage, of love, and of friendship are entirely unknown to them,” since everyone belonged to “the country” (I. Sec.1. iii.66). Sparta was a barracks, or perhaps “one vast monastery”—modeling its regime on one or both of Chastellux’s bêtes noires, militaries and priesthoods (I. Sec. 1, iii.67). The ethos of the Spartans conduced to humility and submissiveness at home, arrogance, ambition, and tyranny abroad—rather like “bold, intriguing monks, who, after having overthrown provinces, and even whole states, perceived themselves compelled to retire again within their cloisters” (I. Sec.1. iii.73).  Such a people can scarcely thought happy. Rather, “it seems a kind of high treason against humanity, to mention such atrocious facts, without invoking posterity to turn from them in horror” (I. Sec.1. iii.75).

But were the Greeks not a highly cultivated people, outside of Sparta? Yes, but “humanity was a virtue to which these people, in general, were strangers”—so much so that this alone “prove[s] the superiority of our modern philosophy, over that which accommodates itself to such abominations” as the torture and slaughter of enemies, including putting prisoners of war to death.  (I. Sec.1. iii.76). Worse, this raises a problem with Enlightenment itself, for “if, as the human understanding became enlightened, the depravity of the heart increased, what hope have we from the present and the future ages? What relation then does the progress of the mind bear to the augmentation of public happiness?” (I. Sec.1. iii.77-78). 

Chastellux finds succor in the stages of “human understanding,” which does not occur all at once. The visual arts come first, then poetry and music; “a taste for discussion follows at some distance,” but is initially “attended by a subtlety of reason, a spirit of controversy that he calls “Logomachia” (I. Sec.1. iii.78). Logomachia fosters doubt, but doubt then bends intelligent minds to experiment, experience, which “thus forms, by little, and little, the true, and (if one may so all it) the last philosophy”—the philosophy that undertakes modern, experimental science (I. Sec.1, iii.78). In Greece, pre-Socratic philosophers “absolutely neglected morality,” indulging in “the empty systems of cosmogony and theogony” that did nothing to prevent cruelty to enemies and failed to discover “the benefits of nature” and its uses. Greeks instead “placed their whole happiness in glory, and their whole glory in war” (I. Sec.1. iii.81). Subsequently, the political philosophers, Socrates and his followers, did no better. In bringing philosophy down from the heavens, in undertaking political philosophy, Socrates “set out upon an idle journey” (I. Sec.1. iii.79n.) Had he kept philosophy in the heavens but turned cosmological knowledge to practical purposes, he would have “acquired a knowledge of some physical truths, more useful to men, than all the morality of Plato” (I. Sec.1. III.79n.). Political philosophy’s errors “derived their source from an ignorance of physics”; had philosophy continued on as natural philosophy it would have overcome its pre-Socratic inutility, as “in the long run, a good physical system must introduce a good philosophical system” (I. Sec.1. iii.79n.) In this, Chastellux concurs with Bacon and Hobbes, who intend to use physical laws to relieve man’s natural state. Human reason, he writes, has two “instruments” at its disposal: contemplation and experiment—that is, systematized experience (I. Sec.1. v.140). Yet mankind has failed to use these instruments properly, contemplating the physical world (founding “the laws of nature” “on ingenious, but extravagant conjectures,” as seen in the pre-Socratics), while founding “the laws of society” on “particular facts” discovered by experience (I. Sec.1. v.140). On the contrary, modern science subjects the physical world, rightly, to experimentation. But except for Montaigne, Montesquieu, and (now) Chastellux, it has not understood that the small ‘sample’ we have of political societies in the relatively short history of mankind, along with their many “varieties” and “anomalies,” continue to “elude the light of experience” (I. Sec.1, v.142).

What is needed, then, is “a new system of science,” founded upon “the examination of nature, and of her fixed, immutable, and necessary laws” (I. Sec.1. v.143). The study of political societies would begin there, with geography, climate, and their economic consequences. “Andrologia, or the knowledge of man in general, would serve as the basis to medicine, natural history, and morality; and these would give birth to politics, which would prove the result of all the others. It is then that an absolute Physiocratia would arise, a government founded on the powers of nature and the energy of her action” (I. Sec.1. v.143). By so integrating the solid results of physical science with the more limited knowledge of which “andrologia” consists, men could overcome that limitation to an extent hitherto unattainable, using that knowledge to rule themselves as physiocrats—giving themselves regimes of monarchy or republicanism as determined by their research into the particular circumstances of each nation.

The deficiency of the Greek “science of politics”—actually, its un-science—may best be seen in the Greeks’ failure to sustain a confederacy of the Greek states, in the “spirit of tyranny and usurpation” in both the Athenian democracy and the Spartan oligarch, all bespeaking “a greater share of spirit than reason” (I. Sec.1. iii.83). “The severity of the discipline at Sparta” contrasted with “the ease enjoyed [by the soldiers] in camp; the kings’ “insignificance” in peacetime contrasted with their “unlimited consequence” in wartime: both invitations to initiate war. Admittedly, the Spartans lived for centuries under the laws of Lycurgus, but the Iroquois and several other Amerindian nations have maintained their laws for long periods. Duration doesn’t bespeak good laws. As for the Athenians, their regime could scarcely be said to have had laws at all. “In the last resource, everything was referred to a populace,” whom demagogues “could assemble, and harangue without for and without precaution” (I. Sec.1, iii.87).

The modern republics—Switzerland, Holland—are unquestionably superior to their ancient counterparts. “How must we applaud their permanence, and, particularly, the heroism which founded them!” (I. Sec.1. iii.88)—as seen in the story of Wilhelm Tell. (2) Modern republicanism “nourishes and protects the most natural sentiments,” namely “the love of our properties, the desire of living with our wives, of educating our children, of cultivating our fields, and of worshipping our God with such a mode of homage, as may be the most pleasing, and the most suitable” (I. Sec.1. iii.88). The small size of the Greek city-states guaranteed their instability. Although Rousseau claims that “no true liberty” can exist in a large modern republic, a republic based on representative government instead of direct popular rule, he is mistaken (I. Sec.1. iv.97). “There will be no substantial, and lasting liberty, and, in particular, no happiness, but amongst individuals, were everything is transacted by a representative body” (I. Sec.1. iv.97). This is because in a “small republic” or democracy, there is no division of political labor; each man becomes “a shallow politician, an incapable judge, and an undisciplined soldier” within a puny country which leaves him “either a prey to faction or exposed to the rage of war” (I. Sec.1. iv.97). A modern republic, big enough to defend itself, less vulnerable to the bad effects of faction (as argued, famously, by Publius in Federalist 10), citizens can farm their own land while “the judge watches over the political welfare of the state and the warrior repels its invasion” (I. Sec.1. iv.98). “In such a society, peace wears a hundred additional charms and war throws off a hundred of its horrors” (I. Sec.1. iv.98). Far from a threat to liberty, standing armies protect it, freeing most men from the severities of military service. “The people may be happy without being enervated,” since they work in peaceful pursuits, “and softened, because a proper discipline is kept up in armies, where the principles of honor and courage may maintain themselves” (I. Sec.1. iv.100). 

Not only are modern republics generally superior to ancient Greek republics, generally, but modern commercial republics are superior to ancient commercial republics. The most powerful ancient commercial republic was Carthage, inhabited by “an active people, equally engaged in the practice and promotion of industry,” who “conducted themselves on principles superior to the principles of the Greeks” (I. Sec.1. iv.101). This notwithstanding, and “whatever commendations Aristotle may have lashed upon the laws of the Carthaginians,” their “avarice was so insatiable, [their] whole system of politics was so jealous, and so cruel,” their “religion was so superstitious and atrocious”—commanding, as it did human sacrifices wherein mothers threw their children into bonfires—that “the imagination starts back with horror” at their way of life (I. Sec.1. iv.101). In modern Switzerland and Holland, by contrast, the people are industrious and their modes of worship simple. They own no slaves and do not enslave themselves to religion and its priests. [3]

So much for the Greeks. But in the eyes of the Europeans of Chastellux’s time, the grandeur of the Romans seemed far more impressive than the glory of the Greeks. “Surely, no study has a stronger claim to the attention of the philosopher, than that study which endeavors to investigate the principles, which could raise a simple city to such a height; or, to speak more properly, to that excess of glory and prosperity” (I. Sec.1. v.110). [4] Chastellux reminds his readers, however, that he wants them not to gape at greatness but to assess the level of public happiness in political societies. “If the Romans, far from triumphing by the ascendancy of their virtue, were indebted for their prevalence solely to crimes, and entirely established themselves upon the ruins of the world, who shall hinder us from loading them censures”? (I. Sec.1. v. 112). In this, Chastellux acknowledges, he follows Plutarch, “the first writer who maintained that the founders of this queen of the world were only robbers and outlaws,” and, among the moderns, Giambattista Vico. [5] 

Chastellux claims that all ancient governments originated in cities because there was “no need of laws and conventions, except when great numbers were assembled in a small space”; we owe the origin of government not to war but to agriculture, which made such concentrations of human beings possible (I. Sec.1. v.123). This is why legislators should take care to attend to the needs of agriculture before anything else, along with property, “the leading principle of agriculture” (I. Sec.1. 126) (as Rousseau had also declared, but balefully). Nature “ought to have established the first right of property,” which would in turn yield plentiful produce in great variety, commerce, and riches; commerce requires public markets, preferably situated along riverbanks or seashores for ease of transportation (I. Sec.1. v.126-127). Thus would cities arise, their citizens “attached, by interest and habit, to the soil,” making “their own preservation the basis of their politics (I. Sec.1. v.127). Under these circumstances, “perhaps the word glory would not have been known in any language; but the contrary to this has been the case” (I. Sec.1. v.127).

This was unquestionably the case with Rome. But even it founded its greatness not on war, simply, but on its then unique practice of bringing conquered peoples into the city as citizens, instead of enslaving them. Whatever Machiavelli may have thought, the early Romans were far from adept at the art of war; indeed, “during almost five ages, Rome did not much outstrip her neighbors in the acquisition of advantages,” as “her infantry were never distinguished by their superiority,” they had no great knowledge of strategy or of tactics, and their only real military merit was a well-ordered and courageous cavalry (I. Sec.1. v.149n). What enabled them to conquer their neighbors in Italy was their neighbors’ barbarism; what enabled to conquer their neighbors along the shoreline was their neighbors’ over-refinement, their effeminate and enervated affluence as commercial societies. Once Rome had conquered Italy “what was wanting to make her the mistress of the whole world, but to conceive it possible that she might be mistress?” (I. Sec.1. v.154). Sicily was divided into several small city states, governed by “petty tyrants”; Illyria was populated by mere pirates; Macedonia was “engaged in all the Grecian quarrels” (I. Sec.1. 154). That left Carthage, which “seemed more jealously employed in extending than in fortifying her possessions” (I. Sec.1. v.155). The Romans were better situated geographically, in the middle of Italy with easy command of two seas, its armies within reach of the whole peninsula. Even so, Hannibal nearly won the Second Punic War, and only his Carthaginian imprudence, seen in his foolish traversal of the Alps, which weakened his own troops, and Carthage’s foolish factionalism, which undermined him at home. In Chastellux’s judgment, Rome should scarcely be much credited for its victory, which enabled it to continue its imperial expansion into Greece, also factionalized and ruled by imprudent kings. It was not, then, the virtue of Rome’s regime that caused its greatness but the weakness of its enemies, including the folly of many of their rulers.

That regime did not conduce to the happiness of the Romans. Rome was a military and aristocratic, not a commercial, republic. Since (following Montesquieu) not so much the laws or institutions but the “spirit and character” of a people are most to be considered (I. Sec.1. vi.183), the spirit and character of citizens in a military republic are unlikely to issue in happiness. For “is not the ferocity of individuals a constant symptom of habitual sufferings?” (I. Sec.1. vi.178).

The Romans’ happiness and misery varied from epoch to epoch, of which there were four: from the founding by the legendary Romulus to the expulsion of the kings (aristocracy followed by tyranny); from the expulsion of the kings to the conquest of Italy (aristocracy); from the First Punic War to the destruction of Carthage (aristocracy); from the destruction of Carthage to the subversion of the republic (aristocracy followed by monarchy). In none of these epochs were the Romans happy; Rome always exhibited “more grandeur than happiness,” their “strongest passion” being “the love of glory” (I. Sec.1. vi.193). This amounted in fact to “the barbarous joy” of the ruling aristocrats in the Senate and “the fear and misery of everyone else” (I. Sec.1. vi.198). Once the people did taste riches, thanks to the largesse made possible by Rome’s conquest, they couldn’t deal with them sensibly but only with a covetous “fury” to which they “sacrificed all their principles and manners” (I. Sec.1. vi.203). The Romans extended their warlikeness to the acquisition of wealth, resulting in a uniquely ferocious form of decadence.

As might be imagined, the effect of the Roman republican regime on foreign states scarcely conduced to the happiness of the conquered. In this, the Roman republic resembled the despotism of Alexander the Great, “that ambitious youth, “already corrupted by good fortune,” under whom “mankind groaned under the laws” of its “senseless master” (I. Sec.1. vii.214). Rome’s republican imperialism, “the most fatal of all tyrannies,” afflicted its conquests; these conquests gave the conquered republics relief from their factionalism, but this “preserved only the vain appearance of liberty” (I. Sec.1. vii.215-216). Their manners and morals, even their language, soon becomes infected by slavishness, as “they bend, they cringe, they promise everything” (I. Sec.1. vii.218). The “implacable republic” of Rome, dominating and plundering their neighbors, “treated all nations, not as conquered enemies, but as revolted subjects” to be reduced to slavery under heavy tribute—a “shocking principle” more or less identical to that animating the rulers of China, ancient and modern (I. Sec.1. vii.227). The machine of Roman grandeur was lubricated by the blood of “millions of men, who were slaughtered in Spain, in Africa, and in Asia,” an accurate indication of “the influence of the Roman people over the happiness of mankind” (I. Sec.1. vii.232-233). 

An economy of plunder corrupted the Roman people themselves. Instead of making their own statues and paintings, they seized them from the Greeks. But “it is the enjoyment of our own workmanship, and not the enjoyment of the workmanship which we may have taken from another, that proves so pleasing” (I. Sec.1. vii.225). Industrious and prudent cultivation of one’s own land and one’s own mind under just laws and policies alone conduce to happiness. “The welfare of a small part of mankind cannot long remain in opposition to the welfare of the whole” (I. Sec.1. vii.225).

In its last years, the Roman republic was “torn by civil discords” (I. Sec.1. viii.234). Although imperialism had dampened republican factionalism for a long time, the very extent of the republican empire enabled its generals to attach their soldiers to themselves more than to the distant regime, with its center in the capital. The cure for factionalism became a new source of it. Civil wars became the new wars of conquest, conquest now aimed at the city of Rome itself. Generalship conduces not to republicanism but to monarchy or to despotism. And although in modernity we know how large the world is, and therefore how implausible the instantiation of a universal monarchy is, in Roman times this seemed feasible, given the smaller dimensions of the known world. Augustus, the eventual beneficiary of the generals’ wars against each other, proved a reasonably peaceful ruler, but his distributions of bread to the people, who thereby became “the first slaves of Augustus,” ensured that no republican regime would return to Rome (I. Sec.1. viii.244). He thus preserved only a “resemblance of a republic” (I. sec.1. viii.253). “Add to these, some Greek rhetoricians, foreign adventurers, a multitude of slaves, and a great number of gladiators, wrestlers, comedians, and prostitutes, and then some idea may be formed of the situation of Rome under her emperors” (I. Sec.1. viii.245). With Rome’s “debased, indolent, and frivolous people,” with its conquered kingdoms “converted into oppressed and languishing provinces and, at a greater distance barbarous nations, equally ignorant of commerce and of agriculture, and existing only in a state of war,” “where is the philosopher who can, at any time, be led to envy those whom fate had destined to live during this era?” (I. Sec.1. viii.250). 

While it is true that patriotism and generosity were “virtues common to the ancients,” “true philanthropy, a regard for public welfare and general order are sentiments to which the past ages were absolutely strangers” (I. Sec.1. viii.256). Chastellux draws the lesson that “politic princes are as much superior to martial princes as the art of governing is more difficult than the art of commanding” (I. Sec.1. viii.259). A lost war ruins a nation; military deadlock “harasses and drains a nation”; victory in war brings on the afflictions seen in Rome (I. Sec.1. viii.261). “Military despotism,” the result of those afflictions, “is the worst government of all, not only for princes,” prey to their guards and military officers, “but for the people,” corrupted and tyrannized (I. Sec.1. viii.262).

In the second section of his first volume, Chastellux turns from the evils of war to the evils of religion, or more specifically, to the evils of religions in practice. The years immediately before the Roman Empire separated into four sections saw the world reduced to “one vast field of battle, where the bodies of forces, not employed in flight, are engaged in continual evolutions, and, incessantly, change their ground” (I. Sec.1. i.277). But then “a revolution, a thousand more astonishing” than a revolution in “the political system of the world,” “prepared itself to overthrow the empire of opinion,” “from the power which commands to the persuasion which governs” (I. Sec.2.ii.278). “A tumultuous war arose in the mind,” a “revolution in the system of religion,” which roiled the soul of hermits as much as soldiers,” as paganism collapsed and “a new people and a new mode of worship prevailed” (I. Sec.2. ii.279-280). 

Chastellux prudently confines himself to “an examination of the influence of the Christian religion over the happiness of making in its exclusive relation to this life” (I. Sec.2. 280). He observes that the term ‘paganism’ encompasses a vast number of religions with little in common beyond polytheism. These religions were man-made, made by poets; ‘poet’ means ‘maker.’ Paganism endured because it was political, a civil theology. The pagan religions were made by aristocrats and they buttressed aristocratic rule; there was “an intimate union, which subsisted for a long time, between aristocracy and religion” (I. Sec.2. ii.298). Men who aspired to despotism—Caligula, Nero, Commodus—despised religion and forged alliances with the people to cut down the aristocrats. There was, “therefore, as much inclination, as policy, that the emperors suffered all religious opinions to fall into disgrace” (I. Sec.2.298). Even the relatively good emperors tolerated philosophers, “too virtuous to be exposed to fear and repentance, the usual food of superstition, and too enlightened to cherish a medley of absurdities” (I. Sec.2, ii.298). Meanwhile, the invading barbarians, “who had never read Homer, nor heard of Mercury, or Apollo,” “found themselves exactly in the same situation with those savages of America, whom the most ignorant of our missionaries converted, by thousands” (I. Sec.2. ii.299). “The Roman government becoming, at first, aristocratical, then democratical, and at length monarchial” finally changed its religion with its regime, with “the Barbarians [giving] the finishing stroke to the destruction of the last remains of the ancient opinions” (I. Sec.2. ii.300). 

In keeping with his avoidance of theological concerns, Chastellux restricts his inquiry only to “the human or natural means” of “the progress of Christianity” (I. Sec.2. iii.301). Invocaions of Providence are not for him. Christianity’s “spirit of charity and alms-giving…contributed not a little to facilitate its progress,” especially among the many who were poor, as did its “ideas of equality and brotherhood” (I. Sec.2. ii.309n.). Indeed a man of the Enlightenment, he describes the apostles and disciples as “not only simple and unpolished men” but in some instances criminal; their “gospels are filled with errors in language, etc.” (I. Sec.2. iii.310-311n.). Asserting that Christians did not clearly separate themselves from Jews until the destruction of the Great Temple in Jerusalem, he claims that “Christianity must then have drawn a double advantage from this event, for while it gave a mortal wound to the Jews, by destroying their political and religious empire, it prepared at the same time new arms, wherewith to encounter Polytheism, by sending out into all the provinces of the empire, a great number of men whose religion was founded on Deism and whose opinions approached much nearer to the doctrine of the Christians than to the fables of Paganism” (I. Sec.2. iii.316-317). In Jerusalem itself, Christian clergy found in the Temple’s destruction “an advantageous opportunity of increasing their own consequence”—the true seed of the Roman Catholic hierarchy (I. Sec.2. iii.316n.). 

Philosophers, too, were attracted to Christianity. “Equality amongst mankind, charity, beneficence, and the distributing of alms, were at once recommended and practiced in these pious assemblies: where could humanity, where could true philosophy have seen a more respectable object?” (I. Sec.2 iii.321). But the infiltration of philosophy into Christianity led to disputation, since Platonism, not pre-Socratic nature-philosophy, was the dominant school at the time. Chastellux rightly observes that “all the works of the first fathers of the church”—Justin Martyr, Augustine, Origen—breathe “the spirit of Platonism” (I. Sec.2. iii.325n.). Origen especially “perverted the Platonic philosophy” with Christianity (and, it might be added, vice-versa) with his immanentism, seen (for example) in his belief that angels “enjoyed within themselves a portion of the Divinity” (I. Sec.2. iii.326n.). Christian Platonists “abandoned the simplicities of the Gospel for the subtleties of the schools” (I. Sec.2. iii.328). As a result, “the sincerity of plain dealing was soon sunk amidst the implacable violence which infected the theological disputes,” leading some theologians to fabricate books to support their opinions, such as “the oracles of the Sibyls” and the works of Hermes Trismegistus (I. Sec.2. 327). The disputes were aggravated because the Church had, “as yet, no visible chief whose authority was acknowledged or confirmed” (I. Sec.2. iii.330n.). The authority of the Roman pontiff awaited the conversion of the emperors to support it, beginning with Constantine. Meanwhile, many of the rulers persecuted Christians, which only added “luster over the reputation of the Christians,” inasmuch as “under a despotic government every act of severity is, at once, deemed unjust” (I. Sec.2. iii.334). Christian writings at this time “recommended that toleration which Jesus Christ had taught them, and which, from the peculiarity of their lot, it was their interest to preach of,” for now (I. Sec.2. iii.334). [6]

The “dreadful chaos” that prevailed with the breakup of the Roman Empire found the people less desirous of liberty than of peace—prepared to accept even a regime of despotism. This moral atmosphere brought on the rise of Constantine, one of the four Tetrarchs. The emperor of Rome, Maxentius, a “cruel and superstitious” man who consulted pagan oracles and whose “hands were imbrued with human blood,” had established an “empire of magic,” in which “every place was filled with the accounts of evocations, of sacrifices, and of predictions” (I. Sec.2 iv.339). Chastellux leaves it open whether Constantine chose Christianity as a means of fighting Maxentian sorcery with “other arms,” or whether “his acquaintance with the disposition of a people, irritated by persecutions, and inclined towards christianity, inspired him with the idea of pacing his support upon a new religion,” that is what he did (I. Sec.2. iv.339). Before his victory over Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, Constantine is said to have seen a vision of the Cross, a claim of which Chastellux judges, “nothing could be more obscure,” “often called in question, and considered as a pious fraud,” which (he hastens to add) “is the worst of all falsities, because by poisoning even the very source of truth it exposes the most sacred authorities to all those doubts which profane writers are so ready to cast upon them” (I. Sec.2. iv.339, 341). 

This would have begun “the fine age of the church, if the disputes, the cabals, the schisms, and the cruel and extravagant errors, with which [Constantine] was agitated, had not tarnished the luster of these prosperous days” (I. Sec.2. iv.341). But even “these disorders did not prevent Christianity from acquiring fresh vigor,” as every sect united in working for “the extinction of Paganism,” now willingly referring their internecine disputes to Constantine, “soon considered as an oracle in all matters relating to doctrine” (I. Sec.2. iv.344). Whereas “Christianity oppressed” had “preached in favor of toleration,” Christianity “when rendered the ruling religion, became intolerant in her turn,” as Christians and the Emperor, himself “scarcely a Catechumen,” allied in persecuting the pagans. (I. Sec.2. iv.345). To those of his readers who might yet esteem Constantine as a good Christian, Chastellux writes that “to draw aside the mask, beneath which feeble humanity has frequently remained hidden is constantly a painful employment, but howsoever odious it may be in society, in all historical researches it is at once noble and useful” (I. Sec.2. iv.347). “The task of daring to penetrate into his soul was reserved for this enlightened age” (I. Sec.2. iv.348). For indeed Constantine was a “ferocious and irregular prince,” for whom “the ties of friendship were, in his estimation, no surer safeguards than the ties of blood” (I. Sec.2. iv.353). Chastellux cites the example of the Neo-Platonist philosopher Zopater, whom he befriended and admitted to court. When jealous courtiers spread rumors of sorcery and magic about him, and a ship bringing grain from Egypt was “detained by contrary winds,” raising fears of famine, Constantine did not hesitate to sacrifice “this innocent philosopher” to assuage the growing rage against Constantine himself (I. Sec.2. iv.354). Zopater’s enlightened and philosophic successors should rather reflect that a warlord like Constantine rests his rule, finally, on force, and that his triumphs (like those of early Rome) bespeak neither providential favor nor exceptional virtue. “A player at chess may take another less strong than himself, and yet be very weak” (I. Sec.2. iv.355). “The citizen, who by dint of firmness and intrepidity, attains to the power of adding some advantage to public liberty, is more respectable than the prince, who, at the head of fifty satellites, makes a people of slaves exchange one master for another master” (I. Sec.2. iv.356).

Nor did Constantine found a just regime. As legislator, he amalgamated “that vicious mixture of civil power and the ecclesiastical power which has scattered so much disorder, for fifteen centuries, throughout the Christian world” (I. Sec.2. iv.357). Such a regime “must have had a terrible influence over morality, since on one side the Christians have commended, even to the skies, an emperor, who was guilty of the most atrocious crimes, whilst on the other side, the Romans, who applauded Nero, when he made his entry into their capital, after having put his mother to death, could not bear the sight of Constantine, by whose order his own wife and son were executed” (I. Sec.2.362). This illustrates how “an attachment to empty rites and ceremonies perpetually prevails over that law which nature has engraved on every human heart, but unfortunately, in characters too superficial, and too easy to be obliterated” (I. Sec.2. iv.362).

Was Constantine’s piety genuine? Chastellux has his doubts. Citing “an old remark, that gamesters begin by being dupes and end by being knaves,” he observes that “in matters of opinion the case is reversed,” that “we begin by being knaves and end by being dupes” (I. Sec.2. iv.366). This, he suspects, was the case with Constantine, who was “quickly duped by [his] own artifice” (I. Sec.2. iv.366). “We mention this to the honor of christianity,” of course, “the moral system of which could never have united itself to those atrocious crimes which Constantine committed” (I. Sec.2. iv.367). (In line with the more moderate Enlighteners, Chastellux praises Christianity as a moral system, leaving its strictly religious claims aside.) At any rate, “Constantine, having lived in the perpetration of guilt, and died a heretic, is unworthy of our encomiums, either as a Man, a Prince, or a Christian” (I. Sec.2. iv.371). 

Returning to his main theme, Chastellux devotes the final chapter of his first volume to the question of what influence Christianity exerted over the happiness of the people between Constantine’s rule and the ruin of the Western Roman Empire. He rejects the contention of Machiavelli, Montesquieu, and Gibbon that Christianity caused Rome’s downfall, as the early Church had never concerned itself with “the glory and prosperity of states,” instead inculcating “humility, poverty, penitence, and prayer” with no thought of turning Christianity into a civil religion (I. Sec.2, v.373). This of course is exactly why those political philosophers had blamed Christianity for hastening Rome’s fall, but Chastellux, who wants to discourage war and encourage peaceful commercial republicanism (without the cruel religiosity of the Carthaginians), studiously ignores that point, instead directing his readers to consider whether Christianity as a civil religion, as an “established” religion, has made mankind “more virtuous and more happy” or whether it has made sovereigns “less covetous, and less sanguinary”; “whether the people have been more submissive and more quiet, whether crimes have been less numerous and punishments less cruel, whether the progress of war has been conducted with more humanity, and whether treaties have been mor scrupulously observed” (I. Sec. 2. v.376). He answers with a firm ‘No.’

It isn’t Christianity itself that ruins morality—Christian morality is sound—but the use of Christianity as a civil religion that corrupts “everything” (I. Sec.2. v.380). Worse, part of the problem has been that “this very religion became a new source of evils, for, as the purest aliments are apt to grow corrupted, in bodies attacked by diseases, so the most sacred tenets of the faith are frequently converted into the instruments of the most shocking disasters” (I. Sec.2. v.381). Once politically established, Christian churches turned tiger: “Of all the enemies of human nature, the most modern and the most cruel enemy is intolerant persecution,” which “unsheathed the sword wheresoever the voice of zeal had propagated the word,” inflicting “the most horrid punishments” over turns of phrase (I. Sec.2, v.381, 384). Once again, ancient political philosophy is partly to blame, as “this barbarous and intolerant spirit, these scandalous and atrocious disputes are indebted, for no inconsiderable part of their origin, to the peculiar characteristic of the Greeks, to that unhappy passion, which this nation had introduced, for Empty dialectics and frivolous sophisms.” (I. ec.2. v.384). Theology began “to supply the place of morality,” very much at the expense of morality, and mankind “perceived themselves, on a sudden, exposed to a new species of tyranny which, penetrating within the most secret recesses of the human heart, scatters through the faculties of the soul, the same disorders and afflictions, which civil despotism spreads through all our exterior relations” (I. Sec.2. v.385-386). The mind is corrupted along with the heart, as such historians as Xenophon, Livy, Polybius, and Tacitus, “respectable citizens whose bosoms glowed with the virtues of every era and every country,” give way to “a set of party-writers, who relate facts with no view but to support particular opinions” (I. Sec.2. v.386-387). And war became “more sanguinary than every,” since “religion, far from diminishing the horrors of it had only given a keener edge to the inveterate exertions of hatred” (I. Sec.2. v.409).

During these centuries, “mankind had no idea of the very interesting science of finances and commerce,” but instead saw the refusal of one nation to accept the currency of others in payment for its goods, with barter the only means of exchange (I. Sec.2. v.413). “It was not, at that time, known that…without liberty, neither commerce nor riches can exist” (I. Sec.2. v.414). This notwithstanding, even within these feudal states, “the great cities always maintained a kind of liberty,” given their concentration of “a great number of men, strictly united,” cannot easily be dominated by outsiders (I. Sec.2. v.416). Although he does not mention it here, the cities became the hubs of finance and commerce that the feudal lords knew nothing about.

Chastellux’s critique of the ‘ancients,’ the Christians, and the modern state-of-nature philosophers stands on his turn to historical research. This turn leans in the direction of historicism, of Hegel, without quite getting there, although his invocation of “the stages of the human spirit” surely prepares some of the ground for historicism. His new science, “Andrologia,” nonetheless remains rooted in physical nature and its “laws.” With the Physiocrats, he emphasizes the centrality of agriculture to the wealth of nations and the importance of commerce, the circulation of goods and of money, to the instantiation of human happiness while extending Physiocracy to politics, very much with the assistance of Montesquieu. The Enlighteners enter into the lists with the Christians, those erstwhile masters of “the war of the mind,” in Chastellux’s case not dismissing Christianity tout court but retaining much of its moral content, contra Machiavelli and Hobbes.

Notes

1. For a discussion of Chastellux’s American travel journal, see “Chastellux in America” on this website under “American Regime.” 
2. See “The Manly, Moderate Republicanism of Wilhelm Tell” on this website under “Nations.”
3. Chastellux admits “that our age is not yet, totally, exempt from the reproaches which we have thrown upon antiquity” with regard to slavery (I. Sec.1 iv.105). This notwithstanding, among modern Christians slavery has been abolished, “except it be in the colonies”; the slaves come from “an extremely savage, and brutal nation” whose rulers sell their own people to European traders; “though reason and philosophy proclaim the necessity of treating the slave, like a European, it is notwithstanding true that the great disparity between these unhappy wretches, and ourselves, is but little calculated to excite in us, the fine feelings of humanity, and serves to nourish those cruel prejudices, which occasion them to remain in a state of oppression”; and finally “no tenderness, no benefits could erase from the minds of these individuals, their base, ungrateful, and cruel characteristics,” whereas if the slaves had been Europeans they would, by now, have won “the rights of citizens” (I. Sec.1. iv.105-106). There are fewer slaves in proportion to the total population of Christians than there were slaves in proportion to the total population of Greeks—one in a hundred rather than three to one. 
4. While this is true, in Chastellux’s estimation the philosophers who have treated Rome—Machiavelli and Montesquieu—while “infusing into their observations all the fire of their genius and all the sagacity of their understanding,” have nonetheless gotten things wrong. Machiavelli did not adequately consider the weakness of Rome’s rivals; Montesquieu, whose The Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline “resemble[s] marginal notes, written on the same work [Livy’s History] of which Machiavel was the commentator,” merely reproduces the same error (I. Sec.1. v.152n.)
5. See “Vico’s Periods of History” on this website under “Philosophers.”
6. In this, Chastellux artfully insinuates the Enlightenment principle of religious toleration into Jesus’ teaching. The Apostle Paul indeed preached “Christ crucified” to both Jews and Greeks, Jesus dined with publicans and sinners, and both loved sinners, but love is not toleration, and neither the Jewish-Christian man nor the Christian Man-God tolerated either sin or heresy.

Raymond Tallis: In Defence of Realism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.

For two generations and counting, literary studies in the universities of the West have been ruled by professors who have embraced ‘postmodernist’ doctrines intended to ‘subvert’ commonsense understanding of reality in the name of social and political egalitarianism. That there is no non-arbitrary limit to such subversion, that social and political egalitarianism can as easily be ‘deconstructed’ as social and political hierarchy, does not occur to many of these adepts of ‘Literary Theory’ although, among the more clear-eyed, it does not matter, since they have seen that Nietzsche’s will to power might best be satisfied by making a grand show of ‘social justice,’ even as its advocates enjoy the quasi-aristocratic privileges of tenure-based prosperity. And like the titled aristocrats of old, the new aristoi respond to their impudent critics either with serene shows of indifference, ignoring them altogether, or with a contemptuous back of the hand. 

A professor of geriatric medicine, thankfully independent of the bad opinions of the academics he (how do you say?) critiques, Raymond Tallis wisely selects a surveyable portion of this barren landscape: the ‘theorists’ rejection of realist fiction. Against their literary lordships, he ventures to claim that, “understood as an attempt to do justice to, to express or to preserve, a piece of reality, realism is not the dead hand of the past but the challenge of the present and the future,” despite “the inextricable mixture of half-truths and whole falsehoods” on which the case against them has been argued or, perhaps more accurately, asserted. Although he acknowledges the malign social and political intentions of the literary academics—many of them leftover New Leftists who never smartened up—he is primarily concerned that these “current trends in literary criticism represent a real threat to the development of fiction”: “The republic of letters cannot be a more healthy place for being wrapped in a fog of bad philosophy and worse linguistics and such a fog can only slow the appreciation of true worth.”

Lit-crit professors begin at turns by denying that “we” no longer have a “common sense of reality” but are restricted by “all kinds of relativistic structures of consciousness.” But they further claim that they, somehow, see these structures for what they are, namely, excrescences of “contemporary capitalist reality,” whose “essence is unreality.” Modern reality is “more horrible than any that has gone before,” “more vast and complex,” “pre-digested” by imagery put up by commercial advertisers and political propagandists, dominated not by nature but by the human artifacts designed to conquer nature. “Can any thinking artist trust his own perceptions?” Evidently, thinking critics can (and is not Das Kapital subtitled, “A Critique of Political Economy”?). Mere novelists had better get in line. 

Tallis demurs. “Revolting cruelty is not a twentieth-century invention; nor is the application of technical advances to bestial ends.” The American Civil War saw more American deaths than the wars of the twentieth century caused later Americans to suffer, and as for Tallis’s fellow Europeans, the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic Wars devastated the old continent as thoroughly as any war in the twentieth century.  “It is, therefore, no more a sign of moral or intellectual insensitivity to try to write a realistic novel in the 1980s than it was in 1922 or 1857.” The real change has been the change of expectations in the West: the more “recent horrors” “seem less excusable because we like to believe that the world is—or should be—more civilized than it was.” Should technological progress not be accompanied by moral and political progress? If, manifestly, it is not, don’t blame realism, Tallis writes; blame the unrealism of progressivism. This some ‘postmodernists’ have proceeded to do, but without abandoning their progressivist sentiments. Nature, according to postmodernist sensibilities, is a benign and generous Mother. Tallis, who treats the chronically decaying elderly, rather doubts this. And, in a supremely ‘insensitive’ moment, he suggests that persons who claim that X is unreal must believe that something else is. That being the case, the attack on realism loses its cogency, unless the ‘theorists’ can show why they are the superior realists. Which they deny anyone can do, even as they act as if they’re doing it. 

Anti-realists often deny that the real world has an order or, more modestly, that the order seen in realist fiction “is alien to reality itself.” But how alien? Obviously, a story about a real event, and even more, a story about a made-up event that really could have happened, is not identical to the reality outside the ‘text.’ That doesn’t mean “that there is an especially pernicious distortion at work in the construction of realistic narratives.” Memories of events are not the events but that doesn’t mean “that all memory is false,” that “re-lived experience is a falsification of lived experience.” “Experience cannot of itself be true or false since truth values can be assigned to experience only when it is reflected upon and articulated into propositional form and made the basis of an assertion—as when, that is, it is recalled at a later date.” To say, ‘There is a dog in this room’ is not the experience of perceiving the dog in the room but it is a true (or false) statement, nonetheless. You can select a fact (choose to point out that there’s a dog in the room) but that doesn’t mean you made it up. Anti-realists confuse “the role of the subject as one who articulates reality into facts on the one hand and the truth-conditions of factual statements on the other; between what motivates the formulation of reality into statements and the reality that determines whether or not they are true…. Failure to observe this distinction will lead to a kind of idealism that holds that reality itself is created out of values—in short, to magic thinking.”

There is still another confusion, the assumption “that discourse can be genuinely ‘about’ something only if it is structured like it.” Just because language doesn’t have the same structure as (for example) nature doesn’t mean that language is a system closed off from nature. The reverse is also true: “an identity of form guarantees nothing,” inasmuch as Object A “does not count as a description of Object B just because it looks like it.” Thus, “isomorphism is…neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition either for expression or for truthful reference.” Just the opposite: “Only when there is a distance between what is said and the reality that is spoken of can a narrative, or any description, be ‘about’ anything.” Physical reality is, which means that “is not itself true or false.” Only a statement about reality can be true, in line with but not identical to the reality it describes or makes note of. “Truth and falsehood emerge as fully explicit categories only in relation to statements that formulate reality in order to present it as facts.” Yes, “telling transforms reality,” but “if telling were not different from living, it would be redundant.” 

“When these muddles are cleared up, little of the case against realistic facts remains.” And when that case evaporates, “the radical arguments against realistic fiction that we have examined here” do, too. 

What if the anti-realist were to concede these ‘epistemological’ points, but instead claim that realistic novels have been superseded by a more accurate medium, cinema? Are images not more accurate depictions of reality than words, precisely because they are depictions, pictures, especially moving pictures that track real-world activity? Indeed, no one could deny that a camera better “replicate[s] the visible surfaces of parts of the world” than a writer can do. But does reality “consist essentially of visible surfaces”? If not, then not. “At best, the camera renders sensibilia, not experiences or perceptions.” They cannot “depict the sense of visible things, in which experience and knowledge are dovetailed.” This is why people talk and write about movies when they try to understand them. Once again, “physical reality is in itself neither true nor false; neither are its representation.” One sees this whenever one notices “the usually dismal and sometimes downright embarrassing results of attempts to film great realistic novels,” when meaning gets squeezed out and only the spectacle remains.

More radically, and returning to epistemology, anti-realists may claim that “we get reality wrong not only when we report and remember it but even as we experience it.” In the neo-Marxist thought of Louis Althusser, for example, we are told that capitalist social structures and beliefs so distort reality, that the world as we now experience it is already so thoroughly artificial, that the realistic novel merely reports these distorted socially constructed experiences. “What counts as real” to the novelist is only “what is acknowledged by the group to which the individual belongs at a given moment or the group consciousness that is operating through him”—an “ideology” that has been “intersubjectively constructed.” The ideology claims to justify the rule of the ruling class in that society. The claim resembles the image of the Cave in Plato’s Republic, with the shadows of idols on its walls, except that in Marxism the idols’ movements are ultimately driven not by the rulers, and what contrasts with the artifacts, the idols, is not nature. It is instead the ‘dialectic of history’ that determines the conduct of the rulers. Historicism replaces naturalism. For Marxists, “what counts as ‘reality,’ then, is a privileged version of what is out there and is at least in part an outcome— of a struggle [the ‘dialectic’] between rival experiences of the world, related to competing needs and conflicting interests.” The ruling class uses its ideology to “naturalize social phenomena,” to make them seem real, “to confer upon them the objectivity of [the] material world, to make that which has been constructed by human beings seem to confront them as naturally given. “This is an illusion, sometimes deliberately conjured, sometimes shared by the rulers themselves.” (There can be little doubt that American slaveholders of the nineteenth century often believed the result of ‘race science’ or, to be unkind to, albeit honest with Althusser, that Marxists who have boosted themselves into positions of rule have often believed the claims of ‘scientific socialism.) According to him, “all ideology expresses a class position” while simultaneously concealing the reality of that position from its dupes. “Ideology,” Althusser claims, “is so potent and inescapable because it is invisible; because it does not consist of a set of ideas that can be debated, tested, opposed but is implicit in practices.” Realistic novels seem realistic only “because they do not question what is customarily taken for granted,” taking the side of the ruling-class ideology that prevails in their time and place. Proponents of ‘Literary Theory’ “imagine themselves as the somehow awakened”—Tallis writes decades before the term ‘woke’ replaced clunky, academic-sounding ‘consciousness’—persons “able to speak to readers who are still lost in the collective ideological dream.” Exactly how they achieve this heightened state of mind is often somewhat obscure, and the discrediting of Marxian ‘science’ might seem to have foreclosed that pathway to epistemological privilege. But so they have done, they insist.

Althusser does so by distinguishing himself, and his fellow neo-Marxists, from everyone else. All “subjects,” including neo-Marxist subjects, are “socially and historically constructed,” as “the self is merely a set of social relations” existing in space, in time, in thought and in action. The self (and here Althusser departs from the Marxism of Marx) is constituted by language. The problem, Tallis observes, is that subjects seem to “pre-exist the system, however much they are bound up or shaped by it.” Althusser denies this, dismissing it as “a symptom of the false consciousness that is the work of ideology.” The supposedly “unitary, pre-social ‘metaphysical’ subject is in fact a social construct.” “In fact,” Althusser proclaims, “the State and its Apparatuses only have meaning from the point of view of the class struggle, as an apparatus of the class struggle ensuring class oppression and guaranteeing the conditions, of exploitation and its reproduction,” since “man is an ideological animal by nature.” But “in fact”? “By nature”? How does Althusser know what facts and nature are, if his ‘self’ is socially constructed? How does he know that his socially constructed ‘self’ sees deeper into the nature of things, perceives facts more clearly, than the benighted many? How does he know that his self is socially constructed, if it is socially constructed? To do so, he needs to exempt himself from his own strictures. 

Nor does realist fiction necessarily endorse the existence of an unchanging self, unaffected by ‘History.’ Tallis remarks that on the contrary, “realistic fiction has done more than any other literary form to undermine the quasi-religious conception of the self as pre-formed, unfolding from within, kissed awake by crucial experiences”; realist authors “have been in the forefront of those who have discredited the essentialist conception of the self.” What Stendhal did with his persons caught up in the Battle of Waterloo, what Tolstoy did “to de-center history in perhaps the greatest nineteenth-century realist novel,” bear little resemblance to the caricatures of realism held up by the anti-realists. A realist novelist “does not have to subscribe to the beliefs implicit in liberal humanism,” beliefs from which Stendhal, and especially Tolstoy, are really quite remote. Are such men really incapable of ‘thinking critically’ about the world, or are they in fact guilty of failing to think Marxically? 

If, as Marxists and many other thinkers ancient and modern contend, there is no such Person as God to provide a comprehensive perspective against which merely human perspectives must be measured, then the otherwise “inexplicable coincidence or dovetailing of literally millions of different viewpoints” in the establishment of, well, science among other things, requires one “to postulate that there are ‘social forces’ ordering the developing consciousness so that it may participate in, understand and operate within, the intelligible order that has been agreed upon by the collective.” Yet this does not mean that “the forces combing consciousness to self-intelligibility and socializing its world picture can be expressed entirely in narrow political terms or summarized so easily as Althusser seems to imagine.” His “critique” makes “ideology inescapable and his own critique impossible,” an instance of the paradox of the Cretan Liar. This is particularly “awkward” for “those who would condemn realism on political grounds,” grounds that the contemnor must somehow know, if he is to sustain his claim to rule those who do not know. And if “all discourse, inasmuch as it is intelligible, is steeped in ideology,” what then? How can Althusserians distinguish the regimes they endorse—the ‘peoples’ republics’—from the ‘bourgeois democracies” and, if they manage to do so, how can they claim one is superior to the other? 

Moreover, “even if the ideas of the radical critics of realism were actually true, they would still not justify the welcome that is given to most of the existing brands of anti-realism.” By demolishing the criteria by which a literary work may be judged good or bad, they make literary work, including literary criticism itself, pointless. One is left with whimsicality authored by “whimlings.” “There is a highly advertised abdication of authorial control”—the celebrated ‘death of the author’—the claim that “chance or the unconscious dictates the work.” If so, who knows and why care? Tallis is so bold as to suggest that a main purpose of the whimling is to call attention to himself, like “a brilliant child dancing in the spotlight of an admiring gaze.” In the face of the alleged absurdity of bourgeois existence, play is the only serious thing left to do, especially if it can be presented as subversive of bourgeois existence.

Much of this was anticipated by the French surrealists—André Breton, Louis Aragon being the most prominent—who flourished in the aftermath of the First World War. The original surrealists “combined art with ‘direct action,’ writing with scandal in an anarchistic attempt to “undermine and possibly abolish bourgeois reality.”  “There was a dream of transforming the world,” of a vast liberation of desires in the wake of destroying “logic and everything based on it” or in any way partaking of it, such as religion, morality, and the family. It wasn’t long before they were outdone by “madmen greater than themselves and a collective madness greater than anything than they could aspire to,” the fascist and Communist tyrants who “set about destroying religion, morality and family, with a degree of success greater than [the surrealists] had ever imagined.” Aragon distinguished himself by seeing this and going right along with it, embracing Stalinism. “The last prominent French literary figure to wake up out of the Stalinist dream,” he may be said to have anticipated the aging New Leftists and their students who now celebrate the genocidal intentions of mullahs. “The history of surrealism is not that of an undifferentiated, nameless Id but of certain large posturing Egos.”

What happens when you ‘destroy’—i.e., abandon—logic is that you end up saying nothing, rather as I do when I tell you I have in my possession a square circle. You don’t know what I mean, and neither do I. And so: the anti-realist text must be “free of all the usual trappings of realism” but at the same time somehow “reflect the unreal nature of contemporary reality”; it should “criticize, not collude in, the prevailing ideology” yet “reflect the dehumanized face of contemporary reality” all while resolutely opposing ‘humanism’; it should be “self-reflexive to the point of infinite regression,” since an aversion to infinite regression only worries a logical mind, and it should be “non-referential,” never ‘about’ anything, “‘writable’ but not ‘readable.'” Somehow, this farrago of incommensurables will change the world for the better, although no one can say (or everyone equally can say) what ‘better’ would be. Ultimately, “a text that ceased to be a communication emanating from a writer and received by a reader would simply cease to be a text.” Which, in many of these cases, wouldn’t be such a bad thing, were it literally the case.

Meanwhile, what one ‘literary theorist’ has called “the golden age of criticism” chugs along, thanks to the institutional inertia of the universities; “it would be only a small exaggeration to say that the syllabus, rather than the open market of the book trade, was the economic space of postmodernism.” That the New Left continues to control academic institutions has given the movement a lifespan far exceeding its intellectual deserts, as the ideologues run the show. That show addresses literature only peripherally; “critics still take sides—but the objects of their most explicit advocacy tend to be critical theories rather than works of literature,” very much at the expense of “literary or aesthetic judgment.” Nor is the show especially difficult to put on; given the prevalent egalitarianism, lit-crits need not work too hard, once they’ve mastered the jargon. One “does not prefer ‘good’ works over ‘bad,’ the canon of ‘literature’ over the rest: literature is merely ‘what gets taught’ and is therefore defined not in terms of its intrinsic properties but on the basis of the purely extrinsic accident that it serves someone’s (ideological) purpose to have it valued and therefore taught.” As usual, in practice this means that the egalitarians have ensconced themselves in a hierarchy, with ‘stars’ pulling down substantial sums of money in exchange for their none-too-burdensome labors. Non-referentiality seems not to interfere with successful careerism in the rotten bourgeois society. This leads to some amusing paradoxes, as when the plays of the avant-garde Marxist Bertolt Brecht become what even one admirer calls “classics of the bourgeois theater.” (“Their revolutionary impact,” Tallis remarks, “may be judged by the almost total absence of the proletariat from their audiences in the free world and the Arts Council funding necessary to mount them.”) And so, “behind ‘theory’ is a dream of unmasking literature and society at large and in this way contributing to the revolution that will lead to a better future. Exactly how this is going to come about is a little unclear.” It is likely to remain so. This more or less must be so, since “if language, for example, were essentially non-referential, then all fiction—not merely realistic fiction—would be impossible; and so too would all literary criticism.” 

“All of this is so obvious, the reader may wonder why critics have managed to maneuver themselves into such absurd positions.” It helps not have had any serious “experience of continuous, logical or critical thought,” to have avoided the task of “advocating ideas that are put to the test of logic or of experience.” Institutional insulation provided by the universities enables the literature professors to concentrate their attention on the politics of academia itself, where rhetorical gestures and petition-signing suffice when it comes to consideration of politics beyond the university walls. The fact that “experimental art and progressive politics” do not necessarily “go together” in the lives of artists outside academic confines may be safely ignored.

Against all this, Tallis asserts that “realistic fiction remains the great unfinished aesthetic adventure.” As the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn demonstrates, a realist need not attempt to write like Tolstoy (or Flaubert or Dickens). The Red Wheel experiments with a variety of literary techniques: “the task of letting reality into fiction will always demand a questioning attitude to the language and assumptions of one’s own life and of the world one knows and will require the author to be as experimental as any of the more obtrusively experimental anti-realists.” Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Russian and Communist revolutions invites “a response to an invitation to draw part of what we now; or to use what we know to imagine into what we don’t.” Since “man is the only form of matter that is astonished at its own existence and capable of conceptualizing its own mutability in the terrifying idea of death,” realistic fiction “is, potentially, the highest achievement of man,” and can serve as a rebuke to tyrannies political and intellectual, alike. As for anti-realism, it would be a mistake to try to get rid of it, were that possible. “The anti-realist critique, keeping realism on its toes by continually questioning the received version of the nature of reality and mocking the fictional conventions by which reality is captured for the printed page, is an essential goad, an irritant driving the realistic novelist towards a more self-critical and conscious confrontation with reality, a greater willingness continually to compare what he writes with the world he is experiencing outside of his moments of writing. It forces realism to notice itself.” But for that to happen, “realism, however, remains central.”