Fénelon and the political summum malum of self-love

Need-love in politics

Hanley frames Fénelon’s advice to the statesman as a lesson in self-mastery. The king ought not try to avoid pleasure entirely, but learn to discern good from bad or true from false pleasure. It is the same with love. Vanity, egoism, and flattery stem from unrestrained love of self. The good king, Hanley writes, “is expected to reorient rather than renounce his desires for love, and specifically to direct them to a desire to love and be loved by his people” (PPF, p. 133). This pursuit of true need-love places a limit on the king’s absolutist inclinations, for his duty to love his people prevents them from exploiting them or forgetting them altogether. Most importantly, they must desire to be loved, or to be their servant rather than their master—an image that Hanley underscores in his reconstruction of Fénelon’s arguments. The king should avoid flattering his self-love by appointing “yes men” as ministers and courtiers. But since the need to be loved cannot be eliminated, the king should be fulfilled by the love of his people, who can then become his allies. Hanley summarizes that Fénelon thus transformed neediness into a “political blessing” (PPF, p. 138). The satisfaction of something akin to human pride—Hanley chooses “spiritual shortcoming” instead (PPF, p. 138)—gives order to the earthly city. It fulfills the ruler’s needs and constrains his actions.

But is the love of the people such a solid foundation for the orderly city? Does it curb the dangerous self-love of the ruler, as Fénelon suggested? Or can the love of the people become a political liability, a possibility that Fénelon seems to ignore? Here we can compare Fénelon with more familiar figures in the history of political thought. Marcus Tullius Cicero, who chose the side of love over fear in De Officiis (44 BCE), still stopped well short of referring to the indulgence of the ruler’s desires as a blessing, framing the affection of the people as only a less bad foundation than fear (Cicero, 2008). On the other side of the spectrum sits Machiavelli, who shared Fénelon’s anti-perfectionism and was no stranger to the ubiquity of self-love in politics. Machiavelli famously warned the prince against trying to gain the love of the “ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, and covetous” many. The so-called “love” of the people depends too much on circumstance, too much on Fortune. “They will offer you their blood, property, life, and children, when the need is far distant,” they counseled, “but when it approaches they turn against you” (Machiavelli, 1985: 66). Far from ordering the commonwealth, such a desire to be loved undermined the possibility of a stable prince and a stable political order, as the prince who desires to make himself loved must too quickly give in to popular opinion to see his desires fulfilled. Machiavelli would have been horrified by Fénelon’s intent to narrow the distance between ruler and subject for the sake of the city (PPF, p. 137). The message of The Prince leads to a very different conclusion. It makes us question whether genuine love between prince and people is possible, given that subjects are capricious and, just like their ruler, motivated by vanity. If politics is truly a world of self-love, as Fénelon recognized, then Machiavelli would have us see self-love and self-interest everywhere—from the prince down to the people.

Fénelon at times admits as much about self-love. He surely agreed with Machiavelli that vanity is everywhere, since they wrote that the vice of self-love was not unique to political rulers and had become universal in the modern age, plagued as it was by luxury and excess. Across his corpus, we can find words of warning about how indulging self-love might distort the ruler’s judgement. His character Mentor in The Adventures of Telemachus (1699) alerts his pupil to the dangers of flattery on the part of ministers who can “artfully make it seem as if [they] love the king,” with the intent to manipulate them instead (PPF, p. 129). And while Mentor’s teachings to Telemachus were consciously anti-Machiavellian, directed against kings “who dream only of making themselves feared,” Mentor mirrors the message of The Prince when they cautions against seeking too much need-love from the people. Excessive sympathy on the part of the king leads them into “weak friendships” (Fénelon: Moral and Political Writings, p. 72). The indulgence of self-love can undermine the other qualities that Fénelon hoped to cultivate in a future king.

Even as they acknowledged these dangers, Fénelon seemed to assume that the king’s need-love of the people was enough to gain their lasting loyalty and to prevent them from making bad political decisions. Fénelon equated true pleasure with “doing the people’s will” (PPF, p. 146). These assumptions become even more puzzling given Fénelon’s interest to avoid domination, a theme that recurs throughout Hanley’s reading. Though a king is susceptible to domination by flatterers in his court (a point that the character Mentor emphasized), they is only improved—on Fénelon’s account—by making himself loved by his subjects.

Fénelon’s context helps to explain these claims. Fearful of the absolutism of Louis XIV and of the excesses of the French monarchy, his philosophy was driven by the goal to prevent future tyranny of the one, that is, to circumvent indifference toward the people that might transform king into tyrant. As tutor to the Duke of Burgundy, Fénelon understood that the education of a potential heir to the throne also shaped the future of France. He also experienced the absolute power of the monarch first hand. Having read The Adventures of Telemachus when it appeared (without Fénelon’s permission) in 1699, Louis XIV banished them from the court and stripped them of his position as tutor to the Duke.

But in trying to avoid the tyranny of the monarch, Fénelon did not identify the possible problems of a ruler who relies too much on the love of the many. As Machiavelli and Mentor both recognized, the people can influence, even manipulate a ruler who desires too deeply to be loved. Their common advice to a prince raises important questions about a present-day recovery of Fénelon’s thought. How useful is a teaching about power that was designed to avoid monarchical absolutism but does not recognize how the love of the people can also become despotic or, at the very least, support the worst qualities in a ruler? What, if anything, prevents need-love from becoming a source of domination? Given recent worries about the populist tendencies of democracy, should we be comforted (as Fénelon wanted his readers to be) by the thought of a ruler who seeks to be loved by his people? ¹ To put the issue more directly: there is reason to question how far Fénelon’s solutions can be imported outside of a critique of monarchy. Can his suggestions about limiting arbitrary power, particularly those about indulging the ruler’s self-love, apply to democracy?

Church and state

Though Fénelon is already known as a religious thinker, Hanley’s insights into Fénelon’s anti-perfectionist political realism yield an original interpretation of his religious thought through the lens of self-love. Religion, too, can thwart the worst abuses of politics. Faith instills humility in the ruler, who sees himself as the servant of God. This ensures that self-love does not become self-deification. Faith also incentivizes the self-loving on earth to act justly, motivated by the promise of heaven. As a tempering influence, religious belief “could help us avoid the hell of tyranny” (PPF, p. 150).

Similarly, religious institutions limit the political reach of the state. Fénelon held that political and religious institutions belong to separate spheres, and that separation benefited each. Hanley notes the similarity between this point and a “long and familiar train of liberal arguments for separation of church and state” (PPF, p. 163). John Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) comes to mind as a direct comparison. But Hanley also draws attention to where and how Fénelon departs from what is familiarly Lockean and more broadly liberal. As we learn more about Fénelon on the relationship of religion and politics through Hanley’s text, the two spheres become “collaborative” and “mutually assisting,” not separate. Fénelon in fact describes the relationship as one of “reciprocal independence,” the two powers “united and in concert” (PPF, p. 163). The king as representative of the temporal owes duties to the Church as the exemplar of the spiritual. These duties remain a bit hazy in Hanley’s exegesis, but it is clear that the king has a duty to protect the Church against its enemies and the power to “punish innovators.” So while the Church exists to check the extent of sovereign power, it does so as part of an intricate institutional arrangement of mutuality and duty, whereby the king serves the Church to circumvent his own self-love. Again, the avoidance of monarchical absolutism animates Fénelon, who looks less and less liberal on church and state as we hear the details of his design.

Since Fénelon’s religious thought depends on such a unique collaborative relationship between the secular and the sacred, we have to ask whether his conclusions about religion as a check on self-love remain relevant outside of that relationship. Fénelon himself observed the erosion of that same institutional order under Louis XIV. As the king asserted his authority in ecclesiastical matters, they argued, the state neglected its duties to the church and made the spiritual subservient to the crown instead. For Fénelon, this was a “tragedy”; the encroachment of politics into spiritual matters had weakened the restraining functions of religion (PPF, p. 165).

Context surely is not everything. In this case, though, it does constrain just how many of Fénelon’s insights for the age of absolutism might reach us in the present day. Since it depends on a collaborative though lapsed arrangement between church and state, his argument for the political utility of religion lacks the applicability of traditionally liberal approaches to religion and politics. Can we gain insights about the balance between religion and politics from Fénelon, as we have often done from Locke? Do we need to adopt Fénelon’s institutional solutions in order to do so? Can religion, as Fénelon discussed it, continue to exercise salutary limits on the political? Hanley’s highlighting of the politically restraining purpose behind Fénelon’s religious writings suggests that we can. But there is good reason to conclude that the answers befitting Fénelon’s time are too far removed from our own.

Conclusion

These inquiries should not take away from Hanley’s rigorous study that restores the thinker’s place in the canon of political theory. Fénelon’s influence on the Enlightenment becomes much clearer after reading the book, so much so that the reader wonders where and when we forgot Fénelon at all (Hanley speculates on this in the Epilogue). Ultimately, we have less to gain from Fénelon’s conclusions than we do from remembering the animating summum malum behind his philosophy. If we take his political lessons to heart, we can appreciate a negative philosophy that warns of the worst outcomes of individual self-love joined to political power. Bearing in mind this purpose, so well highlighted by Hanley, Fénelon’s writings can alert us to the political threat posed by self-love gone awry, though they lack the theoretical reach to educate more contemporary forms of illiberal self-love under democracy.