History 111: Candide and the Innate Goodness of Man (Part II)

(Part I)

If medieval and early modern Christianity had a pessimistic view of human nature in which man is innately sinful and can only be kept in check by Church and State, we moderns tend to have a rather optimistic view of human nature that stresses man's innate natural goodness. This too has consequences for both theology and politics. If man is good then it stands to reason that he can achieve salvation through his own means without the aid of the Church. Now it becomes possible to talk about human reason as the bar against which to judge all things. Only someone confident in the intrinsic goodness of human beings could allow them to judge the world around them and do it based on what is innate to them. As for politics, a belief in human goodness allows for human beings to craft their own laws. We can even begin to talk about government as a contract between equals instead of the dictates of a patriarch to his children, leading to liberal democracy.

The legacy of this notion of human goodness still presents itself in our debates over crime and punishment and foreign policy. Why do people commit crimes? A conservative would say it is because they are "bad" people, motivated by greed and malice. In order to protect itself, society must remove this person from its midsts, either through prison or even the death penalty. Punishment is something that the person deserves as his just deserts. In the liberal model crime results from either mental illness, being raised in a problematic society or simply bad education. One way or another it is not the person's fault and the purpose of any "punishment" is not to penalize the person, but "rehabilitate" them. (See "C. S. Lewis on the Implications of the Nazi Holocaust.") Why are there terrorists? The conservative will tell you that it is because they are "evil" and hate "freedom." Naturally, such people can only be stopped by invading other countries and killing those people who deserve it. The liberal will tell that terrorists are the products of economic inequality, the legacy of colonialism and a fundamentalist education that preaches hate. Agree to peace talks, address the massive economic inequalities across the globe and provide a proper education for all and terrorism will disappear.

Now even the liberal acknowledges that there is much that is wrong with the world. Rather then lay the blame on people, the blame is placed on society. It is society that creates inequalities and teaches prejudice. People, left to their own devices, would naturally wish to live in harmony with others, recognizing the common humanity of all, and would not be bothered by the existence of other races and creeds. People have to be taught to hate others because of the color of their skin and the deity they pray to. The good news is that people can be saved from their own prejudices. With a properly funded welfare program, civil rights legislation and tolerant education, the natural human goodness in people will reassert itself and stand against all the ills created by society in the first place.

This brings us to Candide, a novel that represents this Enlightenment shift in how one views humanity. Candide is naturally good. Contrary to a simplistic view of the character, Candide is not stupid (a mistake made by the modern day adaptation, Forrest Gump). Candide is simply naive due to the fact that he is raised with no experience with the world. This is crucial to the character because it is precisely this lack of worldliness that allows for Candide's goodness. Candide does not suffer from greed, does not hate anyone and only wishes to live in brotherhood with all. Candide is not even capable of understanding the possibility that other people are not like this. The reason for this is that Candide exists completely uncorrupted by society. (This idea would be taken even further by Rousseau.)

It is for this reason that Voltaire subverts the garden of Eden story. Instead of Adam and Eve committing Original Sin, willfully disobeying the divine commandment to not eat from the tree of knowledge, and being rightfully thrown out of paradise, Candide has no notion of sin. He only wishes to experiment with the laws of "cause and effect." The fact that he kisses Cunegonde is interpreted as sin by a corrupt society, leading to him being wrongfully exiled from his beloved home in Westphalia. Instead of degenerate humans needing to be saved by righteous laws, Candide is the pure one, it is the outside system that is degenerate.


       

History 111: Candide and the Innate Goodness of Man (Part I)

(Go to 2:55 for Candide's showdown with the villainous  Jew.)


My last discussion of the early modern debate about human salvation proved surprisingly fitting for the last book we are doing, Voltaire’s Candide. Candide has the advantage of being short enough that we can go through it in two classes. If it is part of the Enlightenment, it is a critique of the old world I have spent the quarter trying to describe. If Voltaire was prejudiced against Jews, it is still one of the funniest books ever written. Candide also serves as an example of the modern shift in the understanding of human nature from a pessimistic view, in which human beings are hopelessly depraved, to a more positive view, in which humans are assumed to be innately good.

In the debate over salvation, both our Catholics and Protestants operated from the assumption of human depravity. In the Catholic model humans are just mostly depraved. We are tainted by Original Sin; while we are capable of doing good and resisting sin in specific situations, it is inevitable, barring divine intervention through grace, that we will come to sin. For example, even if I resist temptation and do not sin with a woman, the mere fact that I lusted after the woman is itself a sin; if I truly understood who God was, I never would even contemplate breaking his commandments. The fact that I would contemplate such a thing demonstrates that I am under the taint of Original Sin and of Satan. From this perspective it may be less damaging for my soul in the long run if I had given in to temptation. Now that I have not, I am in danger of believing myself to be righteous so I will never repent and I will add the sin of pride. The Catholic solution is that one needs to enter the body of the Church and come under the forgiveness earned on the cross. Being baptized and receiving the sacraments will not necessarily make me a better person; human depravity remains and I will have to answer for my sins in purgatory. By being part of the Catholic Church, though, one has access to Jesus’ atonement and can hope to eventually get out of purgatory and enter heaven.

Protestants are even more pessimistic about human nature than Catholics. Lutherans believe that man is almost completely depraved, incapable of doing any good or avoiding any sin on his own. The only redemptive feature in human nature is the ability to have faith. Calvinists are the most extreme, believing in utter human depravity and that humans can have no role in their own salvation. While, in a sense, Protestants value good works less than Catholics do, Protestants tend to agonize over the implications of their day to day works. Catholics can feel confident that, having entered the body of the Church, they are part of the saved despite their sins. With Protestantism there is no longer a set recognizable body of believers that one can belong to and be confident of salvation. Furthermore there is an assumption that one’s salvation should be manifested in good works. Thus if I am still sinning, even after being baptized as a Protestant, it is a sign that perhaps I never genuinely believed and received graced and am therefore not really one of the saved.

This view of human nature has political as well as religious implications. If I cannot hope to get right with God on my own because I am so depraved, neither can I fashion laws and a government for myself to live with others. Just as I need God to reveal his laws through the Church as I could never learn them on my own, he also needs to establish a government for me, such as a king, with rulers to keep me in line, because I could never do so on my own. Now it might happen that this king will prove corrupt as he is also a depraved human sinner. If that happens then I should take it as a punishment from God for my sins and should pray for forgiveness and ask God to change the heart of the king. Under no circumstance should I even contemplate rebellion. What basis do I have to believe that I, a depraved sinner, can possibly fashion anything better? How dare I reject the government that God saw fit, in his infinite mercy, to grant me that I may become less of a sinner.

Admittedly, already with Protestantism this model becomes more complicated. While Protestants may believe in human depravity they also believe in grace which can rectify human nature. This allows for there to be a “community of saints,” that small group of people blessed with grace. Such people would be capable of establishing their own “godly” government. It may even be their duty to seize the reins of government from an unsaved king. In the case of the English Civil War, this led to the execution of Charles I and the establishment of an English Republic under Oliver Cromwell. It also led to the Fifth Monarchy movement, which thought that Cromwell was not godly enough and tried to remove him as a limb of Satan.

Intellectual Networks and the Internet

My friend Shana Carp has a laudatory post about me (which I, in no way deserve), discussing my recent back and forth with Dr. David Friedman. What particularly impressed Shana was the fact that the internet could afford the opportunity for me, a not very sociable lay person, to talk to a leading economist.

Apparently, on the internet, no one knows you are a _____________. BZ is the son and grandson of a pair of prominent rabbis who went to get a doctorate in history (not economics or political theory).  His biggest achievement right now is being almost done (and on time with the almost done) while being funded through the process.  His whole life is ahead of him.  And yet, apparently even he can make an impression on a really good economist.  He got the attention because he was smart and is using the internet to reach out.

It is a situation that can happen to anyone, with enough effort.  Expertise seems to be slowly shifting to those who will open themselves up as both being open to learn, open to criticism, and open to creating real resources for scholarship.  Further, it will both make scholarship communities both smaller (IE, Dr. Friedman and BZ talking about sci-fi) and larger (IE BZ is now connected, even if only peripherally, to mainstream Economics scholarship).  It means that the production of scholarly material will be produced by a mixture of experts, amateurs, and in betweeners, with a lot more community sorting taking place.  

 

I agree that one of the interesting aspects of the internet is its ability to "democratize" scholarship by offering a forum for lay people to participate. A good example of this is Wikipedia, which, for better or for worse, offers the collective knowledge of society by allowing anyone to edit and write encyclopedia articles. That being said, I see this less as something revolutionary than as a continuation of one of the major themes of Enlightenment modernity. The Enlightenment saw the empowerment of the public sphere in Western politics, exemplified by the rise of coffee houses in the eighteenth century. Coffee houses provided open forums for lay people to discuss the ideas of the day and even to meet with Enlightenment intellectuals. (Voltaire was an avid coffee drinker.) This led to a major shift in Western political thought with the notion that there existed a lay public with a political consciousness, setting the stage for the notion that governments are answerable to this "public." I find it ironic and I am not sure it is a complete coincidence that accompanying the internet revolution has been the rise of the Starbucks coffeehouse. Might I suggest that the internet is the Enlightenment 2.0, with the open discourse of the coffeehouse brought online? (See Jorgen Habermas on the transformation of the public sphere.) From this perspective it is hardly shocking that leading intellectuals will be found talking to educated lay people; what else would you expect from this new Enlightenment. (See A Confession of Personality.)

I would place my conversation with Dr. Friedman within a pyramid model of the flow of ideas. At the top are the experts, those with a comprehensive knowledge of the workings of their field. This allows them to not only understand their field but to be creative with it. Just below them are those people capable of understanding the technical literature of the given field. These are very narrow groups of people and in many fields it is quite plausible that together they consist of only a few hundred individuals. (Most academic books have print runs of only a few hundred copies.) Furthermore, while there can be exceptions to this rule, the very training and intelligence that allows the experts and their readers to be what they are ironically serves to isolate them from society at large. As such experts and their direct readers in of themselves would be useless unless there were some means of transposing their ideas to a wider audience. For this we need the next step down in the pyramid; these are the popularizers, writers of mainstream print books and articles as well as the advisors for politicians. Such people may lack the technical expertise to truly understand a topic from the inside, but they are capable of having it explained to them and, of the most crucial importance, they can impart that understanding to a wider audience. For example Voltaire lacked the mathematical training to read Newton for himself, but he had a mistress who could explain it to him and he in turn could pass on the main ideas to the wider public. This wider audience consists of educated lay people, who read non-fiction. One hopes to find at least the more sophisticated sort of politician in this category. One has to realize, though, that even with our educated lay people, we are only dealing with a percentage of the population ranging in the single digits. The vast majority of the population is incapable of reading and understanding material written for the "general public." Thus for ideas to become successful, we are going to need educated lay people, the "general public," to serve as the "Mavens" and "Connectors" to society at large by reaching out to their friends, family and acquaintances. (See my discussion of intellectual networks in Sabbatian Tipping Point.) Ironically this makes those people in the middle, the popularizers and educated laymen, the most critical people on the networks, more so maybe even than the experts who formulate ideas. The success or failure of an idea depends upon what happens when it reaches the populizers and educated laymen and how they receive it.

 

In this intellectual network pyramid, it is possible to occupy more than one position. I would see Dr. Friedman as an expert with the ability to serve as a popularizer. In terms of economics and political theory, I would see myself as a high end educated layperson, capable of engaging some of the academic literature. Thus we have a meeting along the network. Dr. Friedman, as an expert, is attempting to pass along the idea of anarcho-capitalism, that all government, even the police and the courts, should be privatized. I am familiar and interested enough in the issues to try reading Dr. Friedman and, as a libertarian, I am somewhat sympathetic to his ideas. If I could be converted then I could serve to reach out to people below me on the network, who might not be inclined to read Dr. Friedman, but do interact with me (either in person or through this blog). Such people might be open in turn to embrace anarcho-capitalism. Get several thousand small time popularizers and educated lay people on board with anarcho-capitalism and it is possible to form a serious movement capable gaining the attention of society at large. I have not been converted to anarcho-capitalism; thus what happened was a potential connection on the intellectual network that failed.

Maimon on Hasidim: Are Haredim Capable of Acts of Virtue?

In earlier posts, I discussed the importance of an ethical God as the basis for a truly monotheistic religion. I am not a big fan of Solomon Maimon. As with Voltaire, I find Maimon to have been a miserable excuse for a human being. His autobiography is useful mainly for its “how I became an apikores” and “how I gave my rebbe a heart attack” hilarity. In the following passage from his autobiography, though, he does say something of value.

But as these people [the Hasidim] have false ideas of religion itself and their virtue has as its basis merely the future rewards and punishments of an arbitrary tyrannical being who governs by mere caprice, their actions in point of fact flow from an impure source, namely the principle of interest. Moreover, in their case this interest rests merely on fancies; so that, in this respect, they are far below the grosses Epicureans, who have a low, to be sure, but nevertheless genuine interest as the end of their actions. Only when it is itself founded on the idea of virtue can religion yield a principle of virtue.

Haredi apologists, such as Rabbi Pinchos Lipschutz of the Yated, often point to the willingness of individual members of their community to perform acts of kindness even to random strangers. Such things are obviously commendable and I acknowledge that the greatest strength of this community is the personal goodness of its individuals. That being said the source of such goodness makes any claim to virtue problematic. Haredim are very open about the fact that the source of their morality is their belief that they are commanded by God to behave in such a manner and that God will reward or punish them based on their actions. I do not challenge the proposition of divine reward and punishment either in this world or in some future world, but to have it as the primary motivation for one's actions negates any virtue.

There is the classical Kantian quandary of if my friend is sick, do I visit him and why. If I am a Kantian then I must visit my friend in keeping with a universal ethical imperative, but if I act out of such a universal imperative I am not acting as a friend, out of any sense of emotional attachment. On the reverse side, if I go as a friend than I am not acting according to a universal imperative and am therefore as a Kantian. This requires one to redefine friendship as something apart from emotional attachment. I recognize that it is physically impossible to live up to the full extent of one’s ethical imperatives to the entire human race. For example, I could not possibly go visit every sick person in the world even though they would all, in theory at least, be deserving of my attention. The solution is to pick a limited number of people and devote one’s efforts in fulfilling one’s ethical imperatives with them. These people are labeled friends. As an Asperger, this understanding of friendship works perfectly for me and I have no problem understanding love I these terms.

If a Haredi person comes to visit me because I am sick, I have to assume that he is not doing it out of any actual concern for me or any desire to be virtuous. The only reason why he is visiting me is because he believes that he is earning points with his god, which can be cashed in for goodies in this world and in the next. If this Haredi person’s god, or whomever this Haredi person takes as speaking for god, tomorrow tells him to spit at me and laugh at the fact that I am incapacitated and that he will score special bonus points for doing so then I have every reason to assume that he would spit and laugh at me. In the end, the only people who can be virtuous are those who act out of the principle that what they do has innate value as a virtuous action, regardless of any divine command, offer of reward or threat of punishment.

History 112: Candide and Kant (Q&A)

1. During his lifetime how did the public react to the works of Voltaire? Was he praised or like many others was it not until many years later, possibly after his death was his works recognized for what it was?
2. Did Voltaire get in any trouble with the Church for this work? It seems to have some negativity toward religion?


Voltaire is another good example of what I have said previously: you can get away with being heterodox as long as you know how to play your politics. Voltaire flipped back and forth from being successful and unsuccessful in this political game throughout his life. At various times he was imprisoned and exiled and at other times he wined and dined with kings and nobles. This is the contradiction of Voltaire; he made a name for himself as this anti establishment figure and he cashed in on this notoriety to become an international celebrity. (This is not that different from artists who denounce big corporations and then attend events sponsored by big corporations.) Candide itself was a major bestseller in its day. Unfortunately for Voltaire he did not reap the financial awards as there was not much in the way of effective copyright laws in the eighteenth century. Before the nineteenth century almost no one was able to make a living from being a writer.


3. Do you know, or have any guesses, as to which STD Pangloss is talking about in this section?

"O my dear Candide, you must remember Pacquette, that pretty wench, who waited on our noble Baroness; in her arms I tasted the pleasures of Paradise, which produced these Hell torments with which you see me devoured. She was infected with an ailment, and perhaps has since died of it; she received this present of a learned Franciscan, who derived it from the fountainhead; he was indebted for it to an old countess, who had it of a captain of horse, who had it of a marchioness, who had it of a page, the page had it of a Jesuit, who, during his novitiate, had it in a direct line from one of the fellow adventurers of Christopher Columbus; for my part I shall give it to nobody, I am a dying man."

Dr. Pangloss has syphilis, a “popular” disease during the eighteenth century. Voltaire goes with the popular assumption, still being debated to this day, that syphilis came from the New World. Notice the clergymen involved in this "genealogy" of transmission. You have a Franciscan giving it to Pacquette. (One assumes while doing other things besides for confession.) And you also have a pedophile Jesuit. Voltaire sticks all sorts of subversive material most of it between the lines to avoid censors.

4. Kant praises Frederick II for the tolerance within his country. Was he Kant's patron, or was Kant giving him acknowledgment and using the state as an example simply because it was a good example at the time?

One assumes that Kant had Frederick II of Prussia in mind when he talked about the tolerant ruler. I do not think that Kant was directly funded by Frederick II, but Kant was a professor at the University of Konigsberg, so he was not in a position to mouth off against the government. Voltaire actually was personally very close to Frederick II.

5. In Kant's essay when he is discussing how the restrictive phrase "Do not argue" always comes up in the context of everyday relations with others, he says, "Only one ruler in the World says, "Argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!" Who is the ruler he is referring to?

I assume that he is referring to “Reason.” Reason is the authority against which everything must be judged. We have been discussing the move away from traditional authority based on ancient books and religious leaders. This essay by Kant is one of the classic statements of this transition.

6. Ok, maybe I'm not understanding the reading correctly. But does Kant believe that there should be no government because government obstructs/discourages our ability to think and reason? And that Enlightenment can only happen when people go against their government (aka "emergence from his self-impost immaturity")?

As we have already seen, particularly with Rousseau, the Enlightenment search for liberty has an ironic tendency to turn into apologies for authoritarian forms of government. If you read carefully Kant is mainly interested in religious freedom, political freedom seems to fall by the wayside. This is particularly important within the context of Frederick II, who was very tolerant in terms of religion but maintained a highly authoritarian regime in all other regards. As one Enlightenment philosopher commented: your Berlin freedom consists of saying any nonsense about religion. Let someone stand on the streets and talk about liberty and you will see that you live in the most oppressed land in Europe.
Kant’s emphasis on Duty is also going to have repercussions in terms of individual freedom as nineteenth and twentieth century German history will show.

7. Has enlightenment, as Kant describes it, ever been achieved? He warns that it is a slow process, because if it happens too quickly, the masses will cling to a new set of prejudices and never work past their "immaturity." I cannot think of a time when there was not some sort of great unthinking mass, as Kant call's the general public, clinging to some sort of prejudices or popular ideology. What are your thoughts?

As Kant states: "Do we presently live in an enlightened age?" the answer is, "No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment." I do not think that any era could ever live up to Kant’s standards. Being an enlightened individual, committed to challenging authority and finding things out for oneself is difficult; the alternative is just so tempting. This is one of the first things that one has to realize when trying to follow this path. If you think that it is some slogan you can choose to adopt you are probably not one of the enlightened. Enlightenment is something that only a few people in any generation could ever hope to achieve.

History 112: Enlightenment I (Q&A)

1. In the Davies text they spoke of Rousseau as a man that overcame a lot and as a man that was a forward thinker about equality and rights. In the excerpt online about his views on women, he sounded like a pompous jerk [for arguing that women needed to be kept in their place]. I was just curious if his views on women were acceptable back then? Was his views typical of the general public, and what about other forward thinkers, did they also agree with his view on women?
2. What were the common folk's opinion on how women should be treated? Also what was the Church's take on this? Were women of "wit" or "letters" looked down upon, as Rousseau thought they should be?
Rousseau was hardly alone in his sentiments even among Enlightenment figures. Not only did they have, by our standards, fairly negative views on women, their advocacy of freedom and reason was built around the premise that women needed to be kept in their place outside of the public sphere. (This is not all that different from Thomas Jefferson saying that “all men are created equal” and still being a slave owner.) This is not a matter of hypocrisy; they meant something very different from what we mean when we talk about freedom and liberty.
I assigned this particular sample of Rousseau’s writing precisely because it is something so offensive to the modern ear. This piece stands in stark contrast to Voltaire’s “Plea for Tolerance” which sounds very modern. Of course as we shall soon see Voltaire is also not a modern. One has to ask was Rousseau really so forward thinking and is it really meaningful to talk about people being forward thinking. You say that Rousseau sounds like a “pompous jerk.” As a product of modern liberalism, I would agree with you. People not trained in the historical method will read Rousseau and pat themselves on the back and think about how “tolerant” and “forward thinking” they are. We, as practitioners of the historical method, on the other hand see this as an opportunity to turn the question on ourselves. Why is it so obvious to us that Rousseau was a pompous jerk; might there be something that we are missing?
The Catholic Church traditionally has a rather funny relationship with women. On the one hand the Church venerates the Virgin Mary along with a slew of female saints. There is, as we have discussed, a long tradition of Catholic female visionaries such as St. Teresa de Avila. This veneration of women, though, has very little to do with real every day women and in fact may have been detrimental to women. If the Virgin Mary is the model of womanhood against which all women are judged, what woman can every hope to come out ahead.

3. Rousseau and Wollstonecraft provide starkly contrasting views on women and their role in society. How did the role of women differ between different social classes in the late 18th century Europe? If a woman wanted to become educated during this time period, what options did she have for doing so?
As we have seen previously “oppressive” societies are not such much oppressive as there being a system that one can play if one keeps from offending the wrong people. (For example Galileo was able to be a heliocentrist up until the moment he made fun of Pope Urban VIII.) If you are an upper class woman, while you would not have direct access to a university education, you would still be capable of getting an education, likely through private tutors and books, and even take an informal part in the public sphere. (In fact much of the Enlightenment takes place in salons hosted by upper class women.)
This was not an option for lower class women. That being said, lower class men also did not have these options either. In a sense lower class women were “freer” since there less restrictions upon them in terms of them being women.



4. How would Rousseau have responded to Mary Wollstonecraft's idea that it is better for everyone when a woman is self-sufficient?
As with most polemical debates, Rousseau and Wollstonecraft are talking past each other. For Rousseau the primary issue is not individual liberty. On the contrary the pursuit of individual liberty is a trap that leads to irrationality and tyranny. One has to submit oneself to the “General Will” and pursue the rule of reason by promoting the welfare of society. Wollstonecraft, like most people in the liberal tradition, thinks in terms of individual liberty.

5. Davies says, "Rousseau and Voltaire were as different as chalk and cheese", but from what I gathered from the reading, they seem quite similar. Rousseau believed that "since the evils of the world are overwhelming, all one can do is to put one's own affairs into order," meaning that you should practice self interest. Voltaire believed that all men should be free, no matter their station. So, in essence, Voltaire wanted common men to practice self-interest through government and Rousseau appealing to the "enlightened elite" encouraged self-interest. In essence, they have the same belief but are applying them to different socio-economic groups...Is this right, or am I missing something?

Rousseau and Voltaire had very different understandings as to the nature of progress and the nature of society. Rousseau believed that the advent of civilization, with the rise of private property, had corrupted human nature. He is the exact opposite of Thomas Hobbes; while Hobbes’ man in a state of nature is a bloodthirsty barbarian, Rousseau’s natural man is completely peaceful and lives at one with nature. Rousseau is critical of the very mechanisms of progress so beloved by the Enlightenment, reason, culture and the state. From Voltaire’s perspective Rousseau was as much an enemy of the Enlightenment as the Catholic Church.

6. How did the Classical Republic form of government not rise in the Renaissance if the Renaissance was a rediscovery of these texts? Were there advocates for this? Why did they not succeed or why weren't there any defenders for Republics?
The Renaissance has Republican governments such as Florence and Venice. And republican governments continued to exist in the eighteenth century in places like the Dutch Republic and the city states of Switzerland. The accepted consensus at the time was that republican governments worked well for small states, but that for larger states one needed a strong central power such as a Monarchy. This assumption has its roots in Aristotle who argued that democracy only works well when you only have a few thousand active participants. The success of the “American experiment” is important precisely because it showed that a republican government could work on a massive scale. This is the underlying theme of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Tocqueville was a French aristocrat who toured American during the early nineteenth century and commented on American life.

7. I did some more research on the Second Treatise and understood that it was best known for popularizing the right of revolution. Some sources also say that the Treatise influenced Thomas Jefferson's "Declaration of Independence". Do you think John Locke would be happy to see his work, his thoughts influenced another document that eventually used against his own country?
8. Reading the Locke text, it reminds me very strongly of the Declaration of Independence, especially in the first few lines and in the method for denying the rights of a king over men as being a good form of government. Being written nearly a hundred years earlier I certainly see it as possible that this document was in mind when the Declaration was written, do we have any evidence as to whether this is the case or no?

The line “life, liberty and property” end up in the Declaration of Independence as “life, liberty ad the pursuit of happiness.” The Constitution puts the word “property” back in. John Locke died decades before the American Revolution. He actually took an active interest in the American colonies and even helped write the constitution for the Carolinas. I must confess that I myself find the use of Locke by the Declaration of Independence to be remarkably unconvincing. (Read past the opening passage of the text and judge for yourself) I doubt if Locke would have found it convincing. This may sound very unpatriotic, but if I had been alive during the Revolution I would have been a Tory, like a third of Americans back then, and would have supported the British. I am a big Anglophile and I consider it rather unfortunate that we separated from England.


9. Norman Davies mentions briefly that "Differences between Western and Eastern Europe were growing" but did not go into details. Can you discuss more about these differences in class?

Davies is actually a specialist in Eastern European history, particularly Poland. So while most textbooks ignore Eastern Europe, he actively tries to incorporate it. Hopefully from reading Davies you will get a picture of Poland that moves beyond the Pollack jokes that we have all grown up with. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries England, France and Prussia (which will eventually come to form Germany) are going to industrialize in ways that other countries such as Spain, the Italian states and Russia do not. As such England, France and Prussia are going to take this tremendous leap forward at the expense of other European countries and eventually much of the world. Why this happens is an open question that I hope to discuss in future lectures.