Power, Pleasure, and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison

397 Pages·2018·3.63 MB·English

by  David Wootton

Power, Pleasure, and Profit

POWER,

PLEASURE,

and
PROFIT

Insatiable Appetites from
Machiavelli to Madison

xxxx

DAVID WOOTTON

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

cambridge, massachusetts

london, england

2018

Copyright © 2018 Railshead Ltd.

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of Amer i ca

First printing

Book design by Dean Bornstein

978-0-674-98988-7 (PDF)

978-0-674-98990-0 (EPUB)

978-0-674-98989-4 (MOBI)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Names: Wootton, David, 1952– author.

Title: Power, pleasure, and profit : insatiable appetites from Machiavelli

to Madison / David Wootton.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018023374 | ISBN 9780674976672 (alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Conduct of life—History. | Power (Social sciences)—History. |

Values—History. | Enlightenment. | Ambition—History. | Pleasure. | Profit.

Classification: LCC BJ1595 .W793 2018 | DDC 170.9/03—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018023374

Jacket art: Allegory of Happiness, painting by Agnolo Bronzino (1564). Courtesy of the

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy, and Bridgeman Images

Jacket design: Tim Jones

For Alison, with whom I have found happiness
x

“Ragione di Stato,” from Cesare Ripa, Iconologia (4o) (1603).

Contents
xxxx

To the Reader
1

1
Insatiable Appetites
11

2
Power: (Mis)Reading Machiavelli
37

3
Happiness: Words and Concepts
67

4
Selfish Systems: Hobbes and Locke
89

5
Utility: In Place of Virtue
115

6
The State: Checks and Balances
135

7
Profit: The Invisible Hand
155

8
The Market: Poverty and Famines
187

9
Self-Evidence
219

x

Appendix A: On Emulation, and on the Canon
251

Appendix B: Double-Entry Bookkeeping
256

Appendix C: “Equality” in Machiavelli
259

Appendix D: The Good Samaritan
265

Appendix E: Prudence and the Young Man
270

Appendix F: “The Market”
280

x

Notes
281

Illustration Credits
364

Acknowledgments
366

Index
371

It is an opinion of the ancient writers, that men are wont to vex
themselves in their crosses, and glut and cloy themselves in their
prosperity, and that from the one and the other of these two pas-
sions proceede the same effects: for at what time soever men are
freed from fighting for necessity, they are presently together by the
eares through ambition; which is so powerfull in mens hearts, that
to what degree soever they arise, it never abandons them. The
reason is, because nature hath created men, in such a sort, that they
can desire every thing, but not attaine to it. So that the desire of get-
ting being greater then the power to get, thence growes the dislike
of what a man injoyes, and the small satisfaction a man hath thereof.
Hereupon arises the change of their states, for some men desiring to
have more, and others fearing to lose what they have already, they
proceede to enmities and warre.

—Niccolò Machiavelli,
Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio
(trans. Edward Dacres, 1636)

Besides this, the desire of man being insatiable [sendo … gli appe-
titi umani insaziabili] (because of nature hee hath it, that hee can
and will desire every thing, though of fortune hee be so limited, that
he can attain but a few) there arises thence a dislike in mens minds,
and a loathing of the things they injoy, which causes them to blame
the times present and commend those pass’d, as also those that are
to come, although they have no motives grounded upon reason to
incite them thereto.

—Niccolò Machiavelli,
Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio
(trans. Edward Dacres, 1636)

O human mind, insatiable and vain,
Fraudulent, fickle, and, above all things,
Impious, malignant, full of quick disdain!

—Niccolò Machiavelli,
“Tercets on Ambition”

From whence, then, arises that emulation which runs through all
the diff erent ranks of men, and what are the advantages which we
propose by that great purpose of human life which we call bettering
our condition? To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice
of with sympathy, complacency and approbation, are all the advan-
tages which we can propose to derive from it. It is the vanity, not the
ease or the pleasure, which interests us.

—Adam Smith,
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)

The principle which prompts to save, is the desire of bettering our
condition, a desire which, though generally calm and dispassionate,
comes with us from the womb, and never leaves us until we go into
the grave. In the whole interval which separates those two mo-
ments, there is scarce perhaps a single instant in which any man is
so perfectly and compleatly satisfied with his situation, as to be
without any wish of alteration or improvement of any kind. An aug-
mentation of fortune is the means by which the greater part of men
propose and wish to better their condition.

—Adam Smith,

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes
of the Wealth of Nations (1776)

Title page and frontispiece from William Percey, The Compleat Swimmer (8°) (1658).

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To the Reader

William Percey’s The Compleat Swimmer (1658) begins, as I do, by ad-
dressing “the ingenious, prudent, and self-preserving reader.” For Percey,
“There are two onely chief ends, which are the only inducements to all Ac-
tions in the whole world; and these are pleasure and profit; yea these are the
mayn and only objects whereon all Creatures animal or rational fix their
eyes; the wheeles upon with [sic: which] all our Actions turn, as the Uni-
verse doth upon the Axletree, these are the Magnets or Loadstones that
attract all our thoughts and actions to themselves as their Centre.”1 The Com-
pleat Swimmer is only the second book in English which aims to teach the
reader how to swim; the only people who would normally read it now are
scholars interested in the early history of swimming as a sport, which is to
say hardly anyone at all. We know nothing about its author, but it is safe to
assume that he was not intending to make a particularly contentious claim
when he insisted that all human activities are motivated by either pleasure
or profit. Pleasure and profit were often coupled together (scholars, for ex-
ample, read for pleasure and profit), but never before Percey, as far as I can
tell, were they claimed to be the only motivations, to the exclusion of all
others, such as honor, virtue, and piety.2 Whether he intended to or not,
Percey was presenting a new account of what it is to be a human being. He
even went so far as to suggest that human beings are little diff erent from the
animals:

Doth not the indefatigable Emmet [Ant] keep still exercising his restless
motion all the summer, that he may enjoy the pleasure and profit thereof
in his low-roof, but to himself, and his un-aspiring thoughts, a delightful
Palace. What incessant pains takes the Laborious Bee, that she may enjoy
the sweetness of the Hony in the Artificial Chambers of her well-wrought
Castle? Herein consists pleasure and profit both. Sed quid moror istis?
[But why do I linger over such examples?] The prudent and industrious
Merchant Roames far and neer, spares neither costs nor pains, danger,

power, pleasure, and profit

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care nor trouble; and all for the sacred hunger of Gold: Therein consists
both his pleasure and profit too. Nay, the Toyl-embracing husband-man
[farmer] merrily whistles along the tediousness of his painful furrows,
in hopes to rejoyce in a fruitful Harvest.

He may well have had classical philosophers such as Epicurus and Lucre-
tius in mind, but no classical philosopher (and indeed no medieval theolo-
gian) had praised hard labor in this way, or taken economic activity as the
paradigmatic example of rational activity. Something new is happening here,
yet Percey seems quite unaware of it, and assumes that his readers will think
as he does.

Percey is an early example of the conviction that human beings (and ani-

mals too) are always engaged in the pursuit either of immediate pleasure or
of the means to future pleasure.3 His view of human nature is reminiscent
of Thomas Hobbes, who had published Leviathan in 1651, though Hobbes
called the means to future pleasure not “profit” but “power,” or of David
Hume, who would publish An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
a century later, in 1751, though Hume would call the means to future plea-
sure not “profit” but “utility.” Pleasure and profit, according to Percey, plea-
sure and power, according to Hobbes, pleasure and utility, according to
Hume: these are, these authors believed, the only motives to action, “the
wheeles upon which all our Actions turn.” In other words, all our behavior
is self-interested. And if this is the case, morality has to be seen as a strategy
for achieving our interests: thus Paul Henri Thiry d’Holbach wrote (in a
shockingly atheistical work, published under a false identity in 1770), “In
order that man may become virtuous, it is absolutely necessary that he
should have an interest, or that he should find advantages in practising
virtue.”4

Hume thought it was “excusable” to conclude that, since all human be-

havior is self-gratifying, it follows that it is always motivated by selfishness.
Nevertheless he rejected this view, and sought to draw a distinction between
self-gratifying behavior and selfish behavior, and to argue that although
moral behavior is the best strategy for attaining our personal happiness and
welfare, benevolence, friendship, and justice are not motivated solely or even
primarily by self-interest or self-love.5 Others were not so subtle, and bluntly
asserted what we may call the selfishness principle: that nobody can rea-

To the Reader

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sonably be required to act contrary to their own interests. As Thomas Nett-
leton expressed it in 1729, “We have frequent Opportunities every Day of
our Lives, to do Good to others, without any Detriment to ourselves; or if
in the Exercise of Kindness, we should suffer some Loss or Inconvenience,
yet that will be abundantly recompensed by the Pleasure and Satisfaction
which it affords: But to do Good to others, by bringing a greater Evil upon
ourselves, is what no rational Benevolence will require; neither is it consis-
tent with the general Good, to which a just degree of Self-love in every Par-
ticular, and a due regard to Self-interest is absolutely necessary.”6 And here
is a statement of it by the Genevan professor of law Jean-Jacques Burlam-
aqui in a textbook (first published in French in 1747) which went through
more than sixty editions in seven languages because it was a learned sum-
mary of received views: “Now let man reflect but ever so little on himself,
he will soon perceive that every thing he does is with a view of happiness,
and that this is the ultimate end he proposes in all his actions, or the last term
to which he reduces them. This is a first truth of which we have a continual
conviction from our own internal sense. Such, in effect, is the nature of man,
that he necessarily loves himself, that he seeks in every thing and every
where his own advantage, and can never be diverted from this pursuit.”7
The word “advantage” here is used to refer to both pleasure and the means
to future pleasure. As we shall see, Burlamaqui and his contemporaries
devoted a great deal of intellectual effort to showing that this overriding
principle of self-interest could explain apparently altruistic behavior.8

Burlamaqui was, notionally, a Calvinist, but he deliberately abstained

from describing human self-love as a consequence of the Fall, as a manifes-
tation of original sin. On the contrary, he insisted that this is how God in-
tended us to be, and to suggest there is some defect in his workmanship
would be to question divine benevolence. Burlamaqui thus argued from
natural reason, not from revelation—from deism, not theism. Some early
writers in the tradition we will be exploring here (such as Pierre Bayle and
Bernard Mandeville) deliberately masqueraded as Calvinists, and others
(such as Hobbes) wanted to exploit the overlap between the selfishness
principle and Augustinian theology, whether Catholic or Protestant.9 But
Augustinian theologians never hesitated to denounce such arguments as he-
retical, as indeed they were, whether they were presented by authors (such
as d’Holbach and Hume) who were directly critical not just of Christianity

power, pleasure, and profit

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but of belief in a divine providence, or by authors (such as Burlamaqui,
Adam Smith, and, much of the time, Voltaire) who insisted on some form
of providential design.

Underlying the selfishness principle was the conviction that it must be

possible to give a scientific account of human nature—modeled on the new
sciences of William Gilbert (who had published De magnete in 1600), Gal-
ileo Galilei (whose new physics appeared in 1638), and, by the time we get
to Hume and Burlamaqui, Isaac Newton (whose theory of gravity was pub-
lished in 1687). Human beings pursuing pleasure and profit will act, it was
believed, in rational, predictable ways, and their behavior will thus be cal-
culating and calculable: this is still the assumption on which the discipline
of economics is founded.

This book is about the origins and implications of this new psychology

and of the moral and political philosophies and economic theories that came
to be associated with it.10 There is a key feature which power, pleasure, profit,
and utility have in common and which marks the difference between this
new world and all that had gone before: they can be pursued without limit.11
They can, to use a word invented in 1817 by Jeremy Bentham, the founder
of utilitarian moral philosophy, be “maximized.” Traditional conceptions of
honor and virtue all require restraint, moderation, self-abnegation, self-
sacrifice; but the new philosophy of pleasure and profit set no limit to self-
interested or selfish conduct other than the need to avoid the self-defeating
behavior of the drinker who wakes with a painful hangover or the gambler
who fails to allow for the possibility of losing. What power, pleasure, profit,
and utility have in common is that the pursuit of them is endless. As these
insatiable appetites became respectable, curiosity and ambition—equally un-
limited, and so once viewed as vices—were reinterpreted as virtues.

My title is Power, Pleasure, and Profit, in that order, because power was

conceptualized first, in the sixteenth century, by Niccolò Machiavelli and
his followers; in the seventeenth century Hobbes radically revised the con-
cepts of pleasure and happiness; and the way in which profit works in the
economy was first adequately theorized in the eighteenth century by Adam
Smith. “Utility,” my fourth key term, received its classic formulation with
Bentham, also in the eighteenth century. Machiavelli, Hobbes, Smith, and
Bentham did not bring about singlehanded the large intellectual and cul-
tural shifts that we and their contemporaries see as being epitomized in their