Abstract
In this excellent new study which offers fresh readings of Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau, Julie E. Cooper presents an alternative genealogy of modern political theory to set against those narratives—here called “Augustinian”—that suggest that the secularizing project of learning to do without God must ultimately culminate in some kind of immodest politics of self-deification. By contrast, Cooper points to the role that humility or modesty plays in making modern secular politics possible, as the recognition of the limitations of one’s own powers and abilities becomes the foundation for, or perhaps even the spur to, the construction of powerful forms of collective agency. In brief, it is self-knowledge of self-limits which underpins self-rule. Past masters such as Leo Strauss and Michael Oakeshott had pointed long ago to the significance of the critique of pride in writers such as these, but it is only in much more recent years that we have had the studies—whether by Gabriella Slomp on Hobbes or by Frederick Neuhouser on Rousseau—that really do justice to the topic. And although it is written in a different idiom to either of these books (very much in the North American political theory tradition of recent decades, as exemplified by this journal), Cooper’s book very much belongs in their distinguished company.
The three main chapters of the book consist of case studies of each of the major authors under examination. What these have in common is their construction as secular political theorists, where “secular” here picks out the idea that politics is a realm of human construction, rather than being anything to do with their own views about God. Each is also positioned against a common background of “Augustinian” assumptions about politics—though here we might think that the term is being stretched too thinly across (at least) three very different religious contexts to do especially useful work. Hobbes is the most straightforward case of a theorist who champions modesty in pursuit of collective empowerment. The other two authors are more challenging. The challenge of appropriating Spinoza to the general subject of the book comes from his “blunt declaration” in the Ethics that “humility is not a virtue” (p. 70). In the case of Rousseau, I suppose that the challenge is to say something new about his celebrated—and one might have thought by now exhaustively discussed—distinction between two varieties of self-love: amour-propre and amour de soi-même.
It is not unusual these days for scholars to place the Hobbesian critique of pride or vainglory at the centre of their analysis—or indeed, to draw attention to the way in which this is precisely the theme that Hobbes himself picks out when he offers his own explanation for the title of his book, Leviathan (see pp. 45–46). By shifting attention from pride, glory, or vainglory to their characteristic antonyms, however, one of the valuable threads that Cooper is able to tease out concerns Hobbes’s own redefinitions of such keywords, as he writes against (for example) contemporary “Puritan divines” who “extolled the virtue of humility in an effort to encourage, and justify, seditious claims of conscience” (p. 46). “As Hobbes defines it, modesty is not a mark of distinction that elevates self-appointed saints above the political world—rather, it is a disposition that enables ordinary mortals to build and sustain a political world” (p. 56).
Cooper’s strategy, both when it comes to trying to understand Spinoza’s denial that humility is a virtue and for responding to those scholars who offer an immodest view of him either as a proto-Nietzschean philosopher or as the source of all of the gains of the “radical Enlightenment,” is to consider the contours of the contemporary polemic that surrounded his work. In particular, she concerns herself with the anti-Spinozist polemics of François Lamy, Pierre Poiret, and Christoph Wittich, her aim being to “treat them as barometers registering the subtlety of Spinoza’s negotiation with religious ethics,” to “unsettle rather than amplify, modernist self-confidence,” and to show how, in order “to envision secular agency, Spinoza must retain and rework some of humility’s traditional connotations” (p. 72).
With attention in particular to the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality and Emile, Cooper’s interpretation of Rousseau concentrates on his distinctive accounts of self-love. That has of course been an almost obsessive focus of so much of the recent Rousseau literature, often either with a nod forwards to the subsequent tradition of German idealism or a nod backwards to what we might call Rousseau’s neo-Epicurean inheritance. What she gives us here is distinctive, or so it seems to me, in setting her discussion of the famous contrast between amour-propre and amour de soi-même against its most immediate French background, with a focus on the entry in the Encyclopédie on “AMOUR-PROPRE & de nous-mêmes.” The entry itself is substantially plagiarized from Jacques Abbadie and Nicolas Malebranche (p. 109), and Cooper draws our attention the Malebranchian theology still present in the Encyclopédie’s exposition, which falls out of the picture as Rousseau reworks the material for his own purposes (p. 113). Armed with this perspective, then, she is able to show, for example, how Rousseau’s concern in the Second Discourse with “inflamed” amour-propre plausibly links up both to the theology of the Savoyard Vicar in Emile on the one hand and to the correspondence debating “the possibility of nonquietist humility” in Julie on the other (pp. 114–15).
Cooper’s own conclusion—which she calls “a modest tale about theoretical modesty”—works through the debate about the propriety of anonymous authorship to which both Spinoza and Rousseau contributed and stages a critical encounter with Stephen K. White’s argument in his 2009 book, The Ethos of a Late-Modern Citizen. But rather than follow Cooper, with her finger on the fast-forward button that takes us so rapidly across the quarter-millennium that separates Rousseau and White, I found myself wanting to slow down and employ her framework for thinking just a bit more about what else comes in the eighteenth century, and what happens just subsequently to that, as it seems to me to be a strikingly fruitful one.
Although the words “sovereign” and “sovereignty” appear quite a bit in this book, there isn’t much discussion of what Hobbes, Spinoza, and Rousseau specifically have to say on the subject, and Cooper generally runs her discussion through the more general vocabulary of “agency” and, especially, “power.” (One footnote remarks correctly that “as readers will observe, I devote scant attention to The Social Contract” in the chapter on Rousseau [p. 198].) But if her three subjects are very much philosophers of sovereignty, as well as of their respective varieties of modesty or humility, it’s also the case that some of those who sought to displace the category of sovereignty from the centre of political-theoretical attention also and relatedly wrote in defence of a politics of vigorous self-assertion. David Hume features from time to time in this book as a rehabilitator of pride (e.g., pp. 27–29), and we might also think in this context about two canonical figures who don’t make an appearance. The key to resisting the overweening centralisation of power in a large modern monarchy was what Montesquieu called “honour,” which he understood as the jealous insistence on the privileges made possible by the hierarchical social order. As part of his discussion, he had observed that “ambition” was fatal in republics, but his republics (unlike his monarchies) were by and large small-scale affairs, and it was James Madison who was later to offer what became the best-known account of how ambition might help in fact to stabilise political life, if the republic were large, federal, and representative. There’s nothing modest or humble about either honour or ambition, of course—quite the contrary—and it’s not implausible, I think, to see these strands of argument pointing forwards to what eventually crystallizes in the early nineteenth century as “liberalism,” an approach which is quite nervous in the face of the emphasis on modesty-as-empowering-collective-agency that we find described in this book, and prefers its politics to be built around some of the key elements of moral psychology which theorists such as Hobbes and Rousseau had previously sought to chasten.