Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries PDF
Preview Skepticism and Political Thought in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
SKEPTICISM AND POLITICAL THOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/6/18 1:54 AM This page intentionally left blank Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/6/18 1:54 AM SKEPTICISM AND POLITICAL THOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES Edited by John Christian Laursen and Gianni Paganini Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/6/18 1:54 AM © The Regents of the University of California 2015 www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-4921-7 Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable- based inks. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Skepticism and political thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries / edited by John Christian Laursen and Gianni Paganini. (UCLA Clark library series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4921-7 (bound) 1. Skepticism – Political aspects – History – 17th century. 2. Skepticism – Political aspects – History – 18th century. 3. Sextus, Empiricus. 4. Skeptics (Greek philosophy). I. Laursen, John Christian, editor II. Paganini, Gianni, 1950–, editor III. Series: UCLA Clark Memorial Library series B837.S563 2015 149ʹ.73 C2014-907042-X This book has been published with the help of a grant from the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund Unauthenticated for its publishing activities. Download Date | 12/6/18 1:54 AM Contents Introduction 3 john christian laursen and gianni paganini 1 Neither Philosophy nor Politics? The Ancient Pyrrhonian Approach to Everday Life 17 emidio spinelli 2 La Mothe Le Vayer and Political Skepticism 36 daniel r. brunstetter 3 Hobbes and the French Skeptics 55 gianni paganini 4 Questionnnements sceptiques et politiques de la fable: les « autres mondes » du libertinage érudit 83 jean-charles darmon 5 Obeying the Laws and Customs of the Country: Living in Disorder and Barbarity. The Powerlessness of Political Skepticism According to the Discours sceptiques (1657) of Samuel Sorbière 113 sylvia giocanti 6 Bernard Mandeville’s Skeptical Political Philosophy 130 rui bertrand romão Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/6/18 1:55 AM vi Contents 7 David Hume: Skepticism in Politics? 149 andrew sabl 8 Denis Diderot and the Politics of Materialist Skepticism 177 whitney mannies 9 Rousseau: Philosophical and Religious Skepticism and Political Dogmatism 203 maría josé villaverde 10 Skepticism and Political Economy: Smith, Hume, and Rousseau 227 pierre force 11 Can a Skeptic Be a Reformer? Skepticism in Morals and Politics during the Enlightenment: The Case of Voltaire 240 rodrigo brandão 12 From General Skepticism to Complete Dogmatism: Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville 256 sébastien charles 13 Carl Friedrich Stäudlin’s Diagnosis of the Political Effects of Skepticism in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany 274 john christian laursen Contributors 287 Index 289 Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/6/18 1:55 AM SKEPTICISM AND POLITICAL THOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/6/18 1:55 AM This page intentionally left blank Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/6/18 1:55 AM Introduction JOHN CHRISTIAN LAURSEN AND GIANNI PAGANINI This is a book about ideas about knowledge and politics. More precisely, it is about lack of knowledge, or skepticism, and what it can mean for politics. Presumably, if we have wide access to truth and knowledge, it must be pretty easy to figure out what to do in politics. But if we do not have such confidence, what should we do? This is a question that many thinkers have pondered over the centuries. And this is a book about some of the ideas they have developed in order to answer it. The idea that we should not have much confidence in our knowledge is widely referred to as skepticism. And people have attributed a wide range of political implications to it. On the one hand, it has been said that if one cannot know much, one should not try to do much, but rather remain conservative or quietistic. On the other hand, if the status quo is not supported by truth and knowledge, then perhaps we should feel free to make radical changes, to undermine and subvert everything. The very idea that such opposite implications have been attributed to a concept cries out for a wider and deeper analysis of it. What Is Skepticism? We can start with the point that the word “skepticism” means different things to different people. In very general terms, it is an attitude that foregrounds the difficulties in deciding on the truth or falsity of any proposition. Any attempts to bring out more specific features come up against the reality that there is no single accepted meaning of the word, but rather a family of meanings. It is worth observing that if writers claim to detect related concepts such as Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism, or Epicureanism in the writings of historical figures, they are obligated Brought to you by | Cambridge University Library Authenticated Download Date | 11/1/16 3:00 PM 4 John Christian Laursen and Gianni Paganini to make some remarks about the historical traditions designated by those terms. But skepticism has long been different: many writers who use the term clearly have little or no appreciation that there is a historical tradi- tion behind it. This does not mean that skepticism had no history, but rather that skeptical thinkers seldom put much effort into placing themselves into a historical context. If they did, they would have discovered that the history of two traditions of skepticism dates back at least to the age of Hellenistic Greece.1 One is called Pyrrhonism, and is named after Pyrrho of Elis (ca 365–275 BC), who is supposed to have lived the life of a skeptic. Ancient authors Diogenes Laertius and Sextus Empiricus are our main sources about this tradition. As Sextus put it, the Pyrrhonians found equipollent arguments on both sides of any argument (i sosthenia ), so they suspended judgment (e poché ), and found themselves in tranquillity (a taraxia ). 2 This did not mean they stopped enquiring: they were also called z etetics or enquirers because of their ongoing investigations. They reported that the outcome of all of their work was m etropatheia , or moderated passions. 3 Emidio Spinelli’s chapter, below, provides a much more in-depth intro- duction to the Pyrrhonists and the political implications of their ideas. The other tradition was a development from Plato’s Academy, and thus was called Academic skepticism. Arcesilaus and Carneades were skeptical successors to Plato as heads of the Academy. The Roman thinker Cicero is our main source here.4 Pyrrhonism was characterized by suspension of judgment and living with appearances, not by flat-out denial of knowledge or truth. Academic skepticism provided rules for living in the absence of truth by evaluating probabilities and looking for good reasons. However, the word spread out to cover much more than the historical traditions. Doubt, suspicion, and any number of other reasons to hesitate to accept truths or knowl- edge have accreted to the concept.5 One way to bring many of these meanings together is that what they have in common is that they oppose dogmatism, or the claim to access to truth and knowledge. It is well known that dogmatisms or claims to truth have any number of political implications. 6 Skepticism and dog- matism are two ends of the spectrum of epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. A couple of the figures in this volume are actually dogma- tists, but they provide some of the best analyses of skepticism even as they oppose it. It should be observed that skepticism is not the same as relativism, which is a dogmatic theory that everything really is relative to everything Brought to you by | Cambridge University Library Authenticated Download Date | 11/1/16 3:00 PM
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