The Politics of Self-Organization
Extracted from chapter 7 of "
Invisible Hands - Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century," by Jonathan Sheehan & Dror Wahrman, The University of Chicago Press, 2015
Richard Payne Knight has been described as the
arbiter elegantiarum of
turn-of-the-century London society, though much of his salon cred was subsequently lost when he spectacularly misjudged the Elgin marbles as unimportant Roman imitations. But in his heyday Knight was the epitome of sometimes
arrogant connoisseurship, an erudition he imparted to the British public in
two rather ponderous “didactic poems” in the mid-1790s. In
The Landscape
(1794) Knight offered a theory of picturesque landscaping that eschewed the
contrived style of the famous eighteenth-century landscape architect Capability Brown for a more fundamental embrace of irregularity. Verdant growth,
he insisted, nature’s “labyrinth’s perplexing maze,” should be left to its own
devices, “as chance or fate will have it.” The resulting “magic combination,”
bringing about a “congruity of parts combin’d,” had been found “in days of
yore” when “each free body mov’d, without control, / Spontaneous with the
dictates of its soul.” [1] If Knight’s prescribed landscape has a self-organizing
undertone reminiscent of Alexander Pope’s “mighty maze! But not without
a plan,” it is his second didactic poem of two years later,
The Progress of Civil
Society—once more reliant on Pope’s
Essay on Man, this time explicitly—
that brings Knight to our attention here. A heroic effort to capture the full
development of human society in 3,238 lines of verse,
The Progress of Civil
Society was a luxuriant paean to self-organization, proffered as the fundamental principle of complex social organization, social progress, and social
modernity.
Knight begins by dismissing as indeterminable the question of the world’s
prime mover, whether it is divine or merely “the wild war of elemental strife.”
(The poem later acknowledges the influence of Lucretius.) Instead he recommends a more down-to-earth alternative:
Let us less visionary themes pursue,
And try to show what mortal eyes may view;
Trace out the slender social links that bind,
In order’s chain, the chaos of mankind,
Make all their various turbid passions tend, [turbid = producing confusion]
Through adverse ways, to one benignant end,
And partial discord lend its aid, to tie
The complex knots of general harmony;
And as the tides of being ebb and flow,
And endless generations come and go,
Still farther spread their ever-lengthening chain,
And bid, ’midst varying parts, the mass unchanged remain. [2]
The self-organizing vision here is again a double one, and indeed, albeit a tad
inconsistently, even a triple one. At any given moment, those “slender” social
links transform multiple adverse, discordant, and chaotic pulls into overall
benign harmony. Over time, the accumulation of many generations spreads
further the ever-lengthening chain of harmony’s complex knots. And in the
long-term aggregate, while the components ebb and flow, the mass remains in
unchanging equilibrium.
True to this declaration of intent, the poem redounds with multiple self-
organizing moves. It repeatedly tries to illustrate them with metaphors, though
few really work, like the confusing chain of harmony’s knots in the previous
paragraph. Other metaphors range from the skills of the architect and builder
through the movements of vessels at sea or of the tide to the innards of intricate
machines. With the aid of these metaphors and others the poem explains how
millions of individuals all share one driving passion for fame and power, which
leads them to different actions that counteract each other’s effect.
So in those crowds which to one object tend,
All still press towards, and none reach the end:
While partial discords, to one centre bent,
Serve but the general union to cement.
The historical evolution of human society began with private property, creating local attachments that “progressively increase[d] of themselves,” so that
“by degrees, the embryo town began / As wants or habits form’d its artless
plan.” This dynamic of institutions forming of themselves, without design or
directing hand, applied equally to the equilibrium of population, the development of social ranks, the effects of the principle of honor molded by “accident
and circumstance,” and the contribution to the “social fabric” of the “adverse
claims” made by “balanced interests” through which “union still from separation springs.” Echoing lines from his recent poem on landscape, Knight
describes how in mature society the common good—production, commerce,
innovation, prosperity—is served by the passion for “wanton luxury,” “selfish
avarice,” and “mean self-interest”:
Yet still where’er it leads, its windings tend,
Through ways discordant, to one general end;
For though each object of pursuit be vain,
The means employ’d are universal gain. [3]
Knight’s account culminates in the origins of law and government; as his prose
argument explains, “complicated laws arise from complicated interests, and
produce republics better balanced, than if they had been planned by prospective wisdom.” And in verse:
Thus, from self-balanced rights, republics sprung,
As parts to parts self-constituted hung;
More nicely poised, than when, with rule and line,
Vain prescience passion’s limits would define;
Or varying interest’s boundless measures span,
In the small compass of a pedant’s plan.
In a particularly elaborate passage about the social system, too long to quote in
full, Knight reiterates that in “well-poized and complicated states” individuals
with “jarring passions” come together in “complex knots” to form diversified interests, and the more “multiplied” and “dispersed” the parts, the more
the “golden tide . . . / Enlarged in energy and substance grows.” Complexity,
importantly, must not be regulated “too strictly,” lest the “well ordered” social
system drain away the “native vigour of the roving mind,” leading to the “loss
of graces [which] art can ne’er restore.” This was precisely the same language
that Knight used two years earlier to describe the sterilization of landscape
by the likes of Capability Brown. Randomness, chance, and contention are
essential. In a well-run polity “taste and accident” must always be allowed to
mix; laws should only “secure the acquired means of life, / Nor yet suppress
each rising germ of strife.” [4] And we could go on and on. From self-interest and
contrariness through synchronic and diachronic layers of aggregation with
ever-expanding complexity to an energized, prosperous self-organized polity:
Knight’s poem was a didactic primer in the diverse range of panaceas offered
by the language of self-organization.
On the one hand, as we remarked about Joseph Townsend writing in 1786,
by this point in time authors showing off their self-organization dexterity were
often derivative and predictable, even if Knight’s insistence and intricate vision
(like Townsend’s) outdid most. In 1796, the same year as Knight’s poem, the
learned satirist Thomas James Mathias poked fun at the gist of public debate
on this very issue: “Left to themselves all find their level[:] price, / Potatoes,
verses, turnips, Greek, and rice.” [5] Figures like Prime Minister William Pitt (the
specific butt of Mathias’s jibe), be they self-professed acolytes of Smith or mere
followers of intellectual fashions, indiscriminately applied the self-organizing
logic to every issue that crossed their path.
On the other hand, Knight’s 1796 was not at all like Townsend’s 1786. Dur-
ing the decade in between the two, historical events had radically transformed
the tenor of public discussion and the weight attributed to ideas and utterances:
the French Revolution, bringing royal execution and bloody Terror in its wake,
and the threat of Jacobin revolution in Britain, real or imagined, resulting in
unprecedented heights of excitement and fear, political activity and political
repression. Although Richard Payne Knight had been a member of Parliament
since 1780, he rarely showed as much interest in politics as he did in his intel-
lectual pursuits. Yet he too, like everyone else, was drawn in by the fervor of
the 1790s. Both of Knight’s didactic poems end with long disquisitions on the
French Revolution. Like other Foxite Whigs, he combined sympathy for the
antityrannical revolution with horror at its excesses. For Horace Walpole, an old
Whig of a more conservative bent, this was enough to conclude from Knight’s
verses on landscape that their author was one “who Jacobinically would level
the purity of gardens, who would as malignantly as Tom Paine or Priestly guil-
lotine Mr [Capability] Brown.” [6] In overheated imaginations in the mid-1790s,
little separated the blade of the lawn mower from that of the executioner.
Self-organization too was swept up in the maelstrom. Given Knight’s
avowed sympathy for the revolution, at least in its earlier stages, it was easy to
read radical overtones into his insistence on the creative force and energy of
“free-born soul[s]” whose movements should not be overly regulated. Even
more so, perhaps, when he celebrated the beneficial effects of “the ferment of
contention,” of “crowds” of individuals with “jarring passions” whose “partial
discords . . . serve but the general union.” Knight published the poem within
months of the so-called Gagging Acts, the culmination of what has been described as Pitt’s Reign of Terror, that were designed explicitly to disperse
crowds, suppress political contention, and stop the flow of free public speech.
In such a freighted context, what could one make of the following lines about
what one hopes to see in a judicious government?
Where laws secure the acquired means of life,
Nor yet suppress each rising germ of strife;
But leave some social rights still undefined,
To stimulate the forces of the mind;
To rouze its torpor in the keen debate,
And wake its calm repose with gusts of hate;
For jealous hate, that emulation breeds,
The efforts of the mind still upward leads. [7]
The example Knight cites for such a good government is the Greek city-states,
contrasted with the despotism of ancient Egypt. But the echoes of contemporary events—in Knight’s defense of perfectible social rights, of keen debate,
even of the positive effects of gusts of hate, as well as in the opposition to the
suppression of every sign of strife—were unmistakable.
George Canning, for one, saw this clearly. A major contributor to the
Anti-Jacobin, an influential 1790s journal devoted to defending the government
and attacking revolutionary ideas, the Pittite wit and future prime minister took
on Knight’s poem with a parodying imitation titled “The Progress of Man. A
Didactic Poem. In Forty Cantos . . . Dedicated to R. P. Knight, Esq.” Canning immediately singled out for critique Knight’s vision of self-organization.
“Then say, how all these things together tend / To one great truth, prime object,
and good end?” asks Canning’s mock poem, identifying the verses to which it
responds by repeating Knight’s own rhymes. Contrary to Knight’s assertions,
Canning responded, order is maintained not by some inexplicable magic but
because “to each living thing, whate’er its kind, / Some lot, some part, some
station is assign’d.” Canning offers multiple examples from the natural world
for this kind of order, before concluding:
But each, contented with his humble sphere,
Moves unambitious through the circling year;
Nor e’er forgets the fortune of his race,
Nor pines to quit, or strives to change, his place. [8]
Forget the unfettered movements of free-moving souls that harbor Jacobinical
dangers, forget the beneficial energy of contention, forget the space for random
movement or self-organization. The good end is arrived at through organic,
natural, stable organization, in which all know their place.
Thomas James Mathias was of the same sentiment. “I have no romantick
ideas of virtues without motives, and of actions without regulations.” Following
his mockery quoted above of the unthinking application of the self-organizing
model to everything from rice to Greek, Mathias insisted that he, by contrast,
was no naive believer in order emerging of itself. “I feel myself a member of
a regulated society, and I would maintain an established order.” This order
“should be declared, taught, and enforced, by law, by religion, and by education.” [9] Mathias’s mind’s eye conjured up a whole slew of visible, regulating
hands. In a mirror image of the logic dominating Knight’s text, this opponent
of revolution and supporter of the current social and political order could not
bring himself—despite the well-known enchantment of the conservative prime
minister with Adam Smith—to espouse self-organization.
Almost. A few lines later Mathias also wrote:
Half a century is insufficient for any new power or constitution to find it’s level.
It is indeed matter of great patience, as well as of deepest concern, to reasonable
men, to observe what is still carrying on in this country in defiance of every evil
which has been felt, and will long continue to be felt, from the introduction of
new principles among other nations.
A long-term perspective on political change—one longer than a single generation—allows the conservative critic to eat his self-organizing cake and keep
it too. Rice and Greek might not find their level as simply as Smithian believers have it, but slow, gradual political evolution, as distinct from the sudden
quakes experienced by other nations, may still find its beneficial level after all.
What happened to Mathias here was neither a coincidence nor a slip of
the pen. The language of self-organization was supple enough and capacious
enough to be mobilized for incompatible positions even in such a polarized
political landscape. If one conservative writer could calm his audience by saying that revolutionary disruption cannot have dire long-term consequences
because “when society again settles into form, as it naturally must do, all men
will find their proper level” and station, a progressive voice from the other
side could find in the same logic equal reassurance that there are no grounds
to fear the importation of “French principles” to Britain, since “it is absurd
to imagine that any society can embrace doctrines, destructive of all society:
for human fitness will be sure to find its own level.” [10] Both of them, from their
respective perspectives, were in the right.
Charles Lloyd agreed with them both. A close associate of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb, Lloyd struggled in the late 1790s with his
(not wholly undeserved) reputation as a radical. In 1798 he attacked William
Godwin’s notions of marriage in an epistolary novel, Edmund Oliver, in which
Oliver’s mentor, Charles Maurice, is the vehicle for Lloyd’s own opinions.
More than once Maurice voices what sound like direct refutations of the self-
organizing logic. “The systems of the present day seem to suppose,” Maurice
sneers, “that general happiness is the aggregate of individual misery.” They
are as mistaken as those who “through the whole of the [economic] system . . . recommend industry with a view to personal aggrandizement” but fail
to understand that “the whole mass” is thus “tainted by corruption, and let me
add, with corruption it ever will be tainted while each man has a selfish and
individual aim in society.” [11]
On another occasion, Maurice refutes in no uncertain terms the assertion of a young impressionable heroine that “the sacred spark of truth is frequently elicited in the collision of heterogeneous and opposing principles.”
Not at all so, explains the mentor.
You will hear[,] Edmund, in the circles of London, . . . that frequent collision
is the only mean of eliciting truth. So far am I from admitting this as a fact, that I
would exactly reverse the proposition: and insist that no greatness of character,
no vastness of conception were ever nursed except in solitude, and seclusion.
Not only is the alchemical reversal of negatives to an ultimate positive mere
fantasy, but so is also “this crusading spirit, which modern philosophy encourages, that disposition of giving ‘an identity to imaginary aggregates.’ ” What
a modern (or postmodern) formulation, all the way to the mocking inverted
commas, centuries before Benedict Anderson! The pseudo-mathematics
of aggregation that assume a qualitative leap from the parts to the whole are
mere conjuring tricks. They are equivalent, Lloyd says in Maurice’s voice,
to an effort to “attain an end without using the means.” Aggregation, collision, opposition, self-interest: all creatures of the newfangled political theories, self-organizing theories that have by now become a readily recognizable
target, and none of which lead to the beneficial effects they are reputed to
produce. [12]
A few months later Lloyd addressed
A Letter to the Anti-Jacobin Reviewers, who apparently were still in need of further reassurance that the author
of
Edmund Oliver was no revolutionary. After all, Lloyd explained, he would
be the first to acknowledge that the origins of society were divine rather than
by human contract. “I believe that all things find their level,” he asserted,
somewhat unexpectedly. Society is formed because human beings “enter, not
reasoning, into it, from an inevitable impulse, with a safe yet blind instinct.
The collision of their minds”—thus the even more unexpected continuation—
“will, in process of time, lead to discoveries in the arts, in the sciences, and
lastly to philosophy.” Attentive readers of
Edmund Oliver who remembered
Maurice’s admonitions could be forgiven a gasp of surprise. “In all this process
there is nothing of contract,” Lloyd continued, and it is only “the immutable laws of the universe” that, “acting at first as instincts in the minds of the
agents, impel man to society. Society is, therefore, the offspring of him who
governs the world by general laws,” and thus “an institution . . . of divine origin.” Having thus defended the self-organizing social order that follows only
a divine, not a human, plan, it was but one further step to retract and reformulate
Edmund Oliver’s critique of commercial society. Commerce, Lloyd now
stated,
is as good as any other stimulus (and I suppose better, as far as it extends, or it
would not be permitted) . . . to blend self-interest with ingenuity, to interweave
the objects of the individual with those of the community; and to mingle the
distinct aims of millions (in whom the oppositions of hereditary frailty, and
those of acquired mental character, unite) into a homogenous, and mutually
protecting mass. [13]
After rejecting in his novel self-organization as radical, newfangled, and
misleading, Lloyd now completely reversed his position and sought in self-organization support for his conservative credentials.
Lest he be considered a mere ideological flip-flop striving to please, Lloyd
appended an unpublished dialogue, which he claimed to have written the
previous spring, i.e., contemporaneously with
Edmund Oliver, in which the
antirevolutionary character says the following:
Our mad and modern speculatists would reverse the order of nature; would
efface, with a sacrilegious impiety, the character which the Maker of this world
has so evidently imprest upon it—the character of a mysterious imperfection!
As for myself, when I consider the infinity of elements, the contrariety of ener-
gies, that are at work in this scene, not made for mortal explanation; I am only
surprized at their wonderful adaptation and order! [14]
It turns out that Lloyd had had a strictly antirevolutionary vision of order all
along, one that mysteriously emerges of itself from infinite contrary impulses.
After all, he knew something about contrarieties.
What then is the political valence of self-organization? Were Lloyd’s inconsistencies simply a sign of his own scrambling to clarify what was in truth an
ambiguous political position, or did they—like others we quoted—capture
something meaningful in the political potential of these conceptual moves?
The answer seems rather straightforward. Time and again we have seen
self-organization lead to what can be called the anti-Lycurgus position, a negative role for which the exemplary legislator of antiquity was frequently invoked
by people like Turgot or Ferguson. If laws, government, social institutions,
and political constitutions evolve slowly and imperceptibly from a multitude
of human actions, without design, forethought, and overall plan directing
them toward this outcome—if Lycurgus is by definition a mythical fiction—
then self-organization is inherently conservative. Political order that emerges
of itself requires only cautious overseers, not proactive visionaries.
It is therefore not surprising that the grandfather of modern conservatism,
Edmund Burke, was so fond of the language of self-organization. The only
way to advance social and political reform, he insisted in his epoch-shaping
Reflections on the Revolution in France, is with the aid of long swathes of time,
so “that its operation is slow, and in some cases almost imperceptible”:
The work itself requires the aid of more minds than one age can furnish. It is
from this view of things that the best legislators have been often satisfied with
the establishment of some sure, solid, and ruling principle in government; a
power like that which some of the philosophers have called plastic nature; and
having fixed the principle, they have left it afterwards to its own operation.
Burke’s self-awareness of the meaning of self-organization and the baggage
it carries with it is remarkable. He reaches back here all the way to the late
seventeenth century, to Ralph Cudworth’s concept of “plastic nature,” which
we discussed in chapter 1: that middle principle between providentialism and
mechanism that works “magically” as an “Inward Principle,” simultaneously
creating unity and diversity. Burke’s plastic nature in government, once fixed
in principle, can be left thereafter “to its own operation.” In a period of time
greater than any living generation—and thus beyond the forethought and design of any living soul—such an evolutionary process “enable[s] to unite into
a consistent whole the various anomalies and contending principles that are
found in the minds and affairs of men.” Burke’s self-organizing vision—we
have seen this too before—thus achieves order on two different levels. At any
given moment self-organization ensures “that the parts of the system do not
clash” even though it encompasses all those multiple contradictory impulses
that characterize mankind. And over time it guarantees the emergence of “not
an excellence in simplicity, but one far superior, an excellence in composition.”
That is to say, an excellent complexity: “the happy effect of following nature,
which is wisdom without reflection, and above it.” [15]
It was not merely the revolutionary aftershocks that prodded Burke, at the
end of a lifelong reforming career, into this conservative position. Already in
1782 he said pretty much the same to the assembly of British legislators in the
House of Commons. Our constitution, he thundered (one imagines), is not the
outcome of a choice or plan by any group of people.
It is a constitution made by what is ten thousand times better than choice, it
is made by the peculiar circumstances, occasions, tempers, dispositions, and
moral, civil, and social habitudes of the people, which disclose themselves only
in a long space of time. . . . The individual is foolish. The multitude, for the
moment, is foolish . . . ; but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as
a species, it almost always acts right.
The process is inexorable—the species as a whole displays deliberation and
acts right—but these are aggregate long-term effects that circumvent any purposeful choice. “Interest, habit, and the tacit convention, that arise from a
thousand nameless circumstances”—thus again the postrevolutionary Burke
in 1795—“produce a
tact that regulates without difficulty, what laws and magistrates cannot regulate at all.” [16]
So far, so predictable: Burke’s organic view of society and the self-organizing
language blended seamlessly together. Thomas Paine, Burke’s most famous interlocutor, recognized this tendency right away. “A government of our own is
our natural right,” Paine had written already in his
Common Sense of 1776; “it
is infinitely wiser and safer, to form a constitution of our own in a cool deliberate manner, while we have it in our power,
than to trust such an interesting
event to time and chance.” And again, in his blockbuster
Rights of Man of 1791,
directly responding to Burke’s reflections on the French Revolution:
Government in a well constituted republic, requires no belief from man beyond
what his reason can give. He sees the rationale of the whole system, its origin
and its operation; and as it is best supported when best understood, the human
faculties act with boldness, and acquire, under this form of Government, a gigantic manliness. [17]
The gigantic manliness aside, the contrast between Burke’s and Paine’s views
of the bedrock on which stable and beneficial governments rest could not be
clearer.
But government was not the be-all and end-all of Paine’s political vision, which educated a whole generation in the last decade of the eighteenth
century. On the contrary, in the second part of
The Rights of Man, which was
even more popular than the first, Paine maintained that “a great part of what
is called government is mere imposition,” and therefore the less government
a society has the better. But if “governments, so far from being always the
cause of means of order, are often the destruction of it,” then where does order
come from? Paine learned the answer, he told his readers, while observing the
American colonists during the revolutionary war with Britain. The American
Revolution produced at first a political vacuum, in which “there were no established forms of government” for more than two years. “Yet during this interval,
order and harmony were preserved as inviolate as in any country in Europe.”
How so? “The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act,”
Paine explained; “all that part of its organization which it had committed to
its government, devolved again upon itself, and acts through its medium.”
What makes society capable of acting as a gigantic aggregate agent—it is here
that Paine’s social vision becomes especially interesting for our purpose—is
“the diversity of [man’s] wants, and the diversity of talents in different men
for reciprocally accommodating the wants of each other.” This multiplicity
generates “the unceasing circulation of interest, which, passing through its
million channels, invigorates the whole mass of civilized man.” Ultimately “it
is to these things, infinitely more than to any thing which even the best instituted government can perform, that the safety and prosperity of the individual
and of the whole depends.” The bottom line of this Smithian vision is resoundingly self-organizing:
The more perfect civilization is, the less occasion has it for government, because the more does it regulate its own affairs, and govern itself. . . . If we consider what the principles are that first condense men into society, and what
the motives that regulate their mutual intercourse afterwards, we shall find,
by the time we arrive at what is called government, that nearly the whole of
the business is performed by the natural operation of the parts upon each
other. [18]
As is typical of Paine’s rhetoric, he states the principles of his thought—here,
the self-organizing principle—with unflinching clarity. Surprisingly, then,
Burke and Paine found themselves in agreement about how things really work
on a fundamental level. Or, to be more precise, on two different fundamental levels. For Burke, the self-organizing historical evolution of the political
order was the argument against tampering with it rashly. For Paine, the self-organizing natural resilience of the social order was what ensures its survival
through all manner of political experiments. The question of where self-organization operates, in the order of the political framework or in the social
formation that underlies it, would remain a key distinction for the future of
political thought.
We know by now, however, that the reliance of both Burke and Paine on the
language of self-organization in service of their respective positions in their famous debate is in truth not as surprising as it first appears. Signs of this supple,
multiple-sided potential of self-organization were there all along. Long before
the French Revolution, for example, the Scotsman Adam Ferguson had already
foreshadowed precisely these two seemingly incommensurable positions. As it
happened, both together. In the previous chapter we heard Ferguson proclaim
in the manner of Turgot or Hume that the evolution of human institutions is a
slow, gradual process beyond human design or comprehension. Consequently,
he too cautioned, stories such as those of Romulus or Lycurgus should be
taken with a pound of salt, since in truth “no constitution is formed by concert.”
It is only with hindsight that “we ascribe to a previous design, what came to be
known only by experience, what no human wisdom could foresee, and what,
without the concurring humour and disposition of his age, no authority could
enable an individual to execute.” [19] This is familiar territory.
And yet even as Ferguson’s self-organizing view of historical development
appeared to produce a dampening effect on political action and reform—how
active can one be if social institutions only emerge as if through natural animal instincts (Ferguson’s terms, as we have seen)—at the very same time, his
self-organizing view of
society also led him to other statements with diametrically opposite political implications. Animal instincts belong to living things.
A society, therefore, which is an aggregate of living active individuals, cannot
be expected to have the same kind of order as that of “subjects inanimate and
dead.” Ferguson explained:
The good order of stones in a wall, is their being properly fixed in the places
for which they are hewn; were they to stir the building must fall: but the good
order of men in society, is their being placed where they are properly qualified
to act.
Consequently “our notion of order in civil society is frequently false,” since
“we consider commotion and action as contrary to its nature.” Instead we must
realize that “the rivalship of separate communities, and the agitations of a free
people, are the principles of political life.” A proper polity according to Ferguson is one in which people agitate and pull in all directions. “A perfect agreement in matters of opinion is not to be obtained in the most select company;
and if it were, what would become of society?”
This, then, is the summation of Ferguson’s vision of politics in a dynamic
society of free agents. “Our very praise of unanimity, therefore, is to be considered as a danger to liberty.” “Liberty is maintained by the continued differences and oppositions of numbers.” “The public interest is often secure, not
because individuals are disposed to regard it as the end of their conduct, but
because each, in his place, is determined to preserve his own.” Let individuals
agitate, disagree, push for their own interest, engage in action and commotion:
then and only then will they come together as a society of “free men.” [20] Not
quite a recipe for political quiescence, then, even if only the invisible hand
of historical time can produce institutions serving the public good from the
long-term aggregates of such self-interested actions. In short, not only did
Ferguson’s sociopolitical analysis prefigure Burke as well as Paine, combining
different levels of temporality (the momentary, the
longue durée) and different
levels of analysis (political, social); it also demonstrated that self-organization
taken seriously, at least in Ferguson’s hands, leads to the realization that such
different and seemingly contradictory understandings of politics are actually
complementary.
Indeed, on the level of theoretical consideration as well as praxis, it is not surprising that politics too became subject to self-organizing thinking in the eighteenth century, belonging together with economy and society to the mainstays
of the Enlightenment’s analytics of human affairs. “Politics are a science as
reducible to certainty as mathematics,” insisted the essayist and minor political
figure Soame Jenyns in 1757; its study in his view was precisely as a science of
statistical aggregates. [21] But it is in the Age of Revolutions that we can observe
most readily how the language of self-organization infiltrated calls for political
action rather than only political theory. The Burke-Paine debate is a telling
double example. We follow it now with four more, from other revolutionary
settings, representing widely divergent political agendas. Taken together, their
range demonstrates the versatile political uses to which the language of self-organization could be put, and was in fact put, by the end of the eighteenth
century. Given that the reader by now is an experienced connoisseur of the
language of self-organization, the following examples are presented with relative brevity.
Consider for starters one of the foundational texts of the American republic,
Federalist 10, which James Madison contributed to the 1787 debate on the ratification of the United States constitution. Its topic was factions. The received
wisdom of Anglo-American political thought had always been that factions
are bad. “When a nation is divided against itself, how great must be the providence that must save it from sinking!” Lord Chesterfield roared half a century
earlier in an utterly typical manner. “When the people are broken into parties
and factions, worrying and reviling one another, what a fine harvest it yields
to the common enemy!” In the previous century King Charles II, in the Declaration of Breda that launched his restoration as the British monarch, had
already decreed by royal dictate “that henceforth all Notes of discord, separation and difference of Parties, be utterly abolished among all our Subjects,
whom we invite and conjure to a perfect Union among themselves under our
Protection.” [22] Such pronouncements went back to Machiavelli, Hobbes, and
a host of others: factions had long been known to be disruptive, dangerous,
malignant formations in the body politic.
In Madison’s view such platitudes were futile posturing. “The latent causes
of faction,” he wrote, are inevitable, “sown in the nature of man,” and become
all the more pronounced as society progresses.
A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a monied interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and
divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views.
Furthermore, while “the regulation of these various and interfering interests
forms the principal task of modern Legislation,” it is a task beyond the actual abilities of the interventionist legislator. “It is vain to say, that enlightened
statesmen will be able to adjust these clashing interests.” [23] Factions and interests will forever struggle with each other, and there is nothing anyone can do
about it.
And yet not all hope is lost. In a radical move, parallel with many others we
have encountered in the pages of this book and yet no less brilliant for it, Madison’s main argument in
Federalist 10 turned faction into virtue, and indeed
into the very foundation upon which the American republic could be stabilized. The key to this alchemical transformation according to Madison was
scale, in which inheres the advantage of a republic over a smaller democracy.
The greater the number of divisions and interests pulling and pushing in different directions, the less likely they are to combine and align in a single line of
action to the detriment of others. (Madison’s logic brings once again to mind
the early-eighteenth-century analysis of the stock market as beneficial only because people’s actions in it do not align, as it also does the even earlier celebration by tolerationists from Bayle through Defoe to Locke of the strife between
different religious sects that paradoxically results in harmony.) Multiplicity,
diversity, variety, complexity: these are the qualities of the political system that
ensure a balanced and beneficial aggregate outcome. Furthermore, this overall
effect is not arrived at in a linear fashion. The other advantage of a republic
over a direct democracy, according to Madison, is that this diversity of interests
is not represented directly, in a simple mechanism of public vote, but through
indirect representation that translates the cacophony of jarring interests into
a unified voice. “It may well happen that the public voice pronounced by the
representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good, than
if pronounced by the people themselves convened for the purpose.”
When Madison reformulated the argument again in
Federalist 51, the self-
organizing logic of this model was clearer to him and to us. “This policy of
supplying by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might
be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public.” People’s well-meaning intentions cannot be relied upon, so the key to the
public good must lie in the structural characteristics of the system, establishing
order from disorderly and contradictory impulses without the active design
of an overseeing legislator. Order emerges in the aggregate—an aggregate that
“itself will be broken into so many parts”—and thus “the larger the society . . .
the more duly capable it will be of self government.” [24]
Madison’s vision was one suitable for a nascent republican system. Someone
more skeptical about a decentered political structure might have objected to it
with words like the following:
A great society which is divided into a considerable number of others, and
these again subdivided into a still larger number, cannot subsist without a
central point: unless for a predominating will, there can be no order and no
harmony. [25]
These words, insisting,
pace Madison, that social divisions like those celebrated in
Federalist 10 must be orchestrated from above for harmony to
emerge, were written by the Frenchman Louis-Sébastien Mercier. Mercier
was a moderate French revolutionary, a member of the Convention who voted
against the execution of King Louis XVI in 1793, precisely the time when these
words were published.
And yet Mercier did not have to sacrifice self-organization in order to
achieve a vision of politics centralized around a “predominating will.” Mercier’s 1793
Fragments of Politics and History both insisted on the necessity of
an autocratic polity and acknowledged the underlying multiplicity of differing
individuals and groups.
The springs which combine so many contrary motions into one, almost resembling order, are not concealed under the throne of the monarch, but really emanate from many individuals. . . . Often in an obscure cottage, an unseen hand
prepares the will of the sovereign; for that of kings is usually adopted from their
subjects.—The royal edict has been composed long before the public herald
proclaims it in the streets: every one has contributed to it, his idea, his wish,
nay, his expression; and when announced, it is obeyed and respected, only as it
is sanctioned beforehand by the public opinion. [26]
Mercier’s resolution of the great number of contrary pulls is unexpected. In
this version of political order, agency is shifted from the king who issues a
royal decree to the invisible hands of myriad individuals pulling in contrary
directions, itself an interesting twist for this familiar image. Somehow all these
small, unseen contributions come together to form public opinion, a unified
opinion that is expressed in the decrees of the single ruler and becomes the
basis of order and harmony.
To be sure, the notion of one collective political will of all subjects had
already had a long history in France. The model prevalent before the eighteenth century involved gatherings of the whole nation in primary assemblies
who would send written summaries, the
cahiers de doléances, to the Estates-General, who would then condense them further into single books for the
king. The eighteenth century saw various thought experiments in more abstract processes for the formation of a general will from myriad individual ones.
Some, like Voltaire or d’Alembert, found in this process a key role for the influence of men of letters and other gifted individuals like themselves. Others, like
Malesherbes, believed in the emergence of an educated, well-informed public
whose numerous dispassionate readings of printed media would somehow
result in a coherent public opinion. Rousseau, in his Social Contract, imagined
the formation of a general will as a kind of mathematical process whereby “the
pluses and minuses” of the particular, individual wills “cancel each other out,
[and] the sum of the differences is left, and that is the general will.” [27] None of
these procedures was conceived as self-organizing. Thus Rousseau insisted
on the importance of direct democratic representation of every individual and,
contra Madison, on the negative effects of factions and mediations.
What was new in Mercier’s account was the mechanism that “convert[s]
in sentiment a whole nation into one individual.” Mercier readily admitted
that this mechanism was mysterious. “The tie which binds several thousands
of men to a single individual has always appeared to me inexplicable: as it is
drawn tighter, so it relaxes and elongates by a multitude of little unperceived
causes.” The difficulty in understanding was hardly Mercier’s alone: it is a
mechanism, he said, which “could not have been discovered by all the sagacity
of genius,” and which thus defied even the greatest legislator. “O Lycurgus!
When thy legislating brain reflected on all the modifications of the human species, didst thou ever obtain a glimpse of such a discordance in political harmony!” O Lycurgus, didst thou ever imagine that there would come an age in
which your name would become universal shorthand for the impossibility of
your project?
At the same time, Mercier identified a necessary condition for the transmutation of discord into harmony: aggregation. Every particular case of law,
of policy or of principle, although “at the first glance [it] may appear to be
founded on reflection, has, like every other operation of the human mind, its
caprices and its absurdities . . . the offspring of chance.” Nevertheless, law and
government “grow and multiply in time in an invisible manner, and in majestic silence.” Thus we arrive at the familiar comforts of mysterious, nonlinear,
invisibly self-organizing accumulation, even if Mercier reassures his readers
of the bottom line often enough to betray a certain lingering unease: “Never
will chance come at the profound combinations of a good system of laws”;
“the author of nature, after diffusing order on all sides, left not to chance the
lot of humanity”; and in a Rousseauian vein, “the individual will is often suspicious, but the general will is always good, and can never deceive.” [28] The
repeated mention of Rousseau here is not gratuitous: in the
Social Contract
Rousseau was preoccupied with many of the same questions—the relation-
ship of the parts and the whole, the creation of a single general will from a
multiplicity of private interests, the emphasis on aggregation on a large scale,
the difficulty in seeing the whole. (“How can a blind multitude, which often
does not know what it wants, because only rarely does it know what is for its
own good, undertake, of itself, an enterprise so extensive and so difficult as a
system of legislation? Left to themselves, the people always desire the good,
but, left to themselves, they do not always see it.” [29] ) Rousseau did not offer a
self-organizing solution, and might have found Mercier’s reassurances a bit
naive, but he would have immediately recognized Mercier’s project.
Recall, however, that Mercier promulgated these reassurances in 1793, in
the middle of an unprecedented political roller coaster ride. Mercier therefore reassured his readers that even revolutions are not inherently dangerous.
“Even should all the political laws undergo a visible change . . . the state would
subsist nevertheless, because human societies are a species of
polypi which
live in all their parts.” For his own choice of metaphor Mercier summoned
those threshold organisms that proved so exciting during the Enlightenment,
as we saw in chapter 4; like
polyps, like humans, or rather human social formations. “If between the part which governs, and that which is governed, the
law of equilibrium is destroyed, an intestine agitation will ensue, until the equilibrium shall be re-established.” And again: “When the [political] equilibrium
shall be too violently broken, it will re-establish itself.” [30] Despite the caprices
of individual rulers, a stable polity self-organizes through long-term evolution. Despite the upheavals of revolutions, a destabilized polity self-organizes
through a self-correcting equilibrium. Here the moderate revolutionary Mercier, with his insistent belief in the powers of self-organization—which surface
elsewhere in his book to correct other large systems like population or the
distribution of wealth or the circulation of assignats or the global system of
states—joins at the same time both the organicism of Edmund Burke and the
republicanism of Tom Paine.
Further to the right—much further—was Joseph de Maistre. Perhaps the epitome of the antirevolutionary and counter-Enlightenment writer, a man who
according to Isaiah Berlin wanted to destroy everything the eighteenth century
stood for, de Maistre responded to the French Revolution with his
Considerations on France, which is the best-known French equivalent to Burke’s
Reflections and indeed often sounds much like it.
Where does political order come from? “One would have to have very little
insight into what Bacon calls
interiora rerum to believe that men could have
achieved such institutions by an anterior process of reasoning and that such
institutions could be the product of deliberation.” Writing in 1796 in direct
response to France’s new constitution of 1795, de Maistre explained:
All free constitutions known to the world took form in one of two ways. Sometimes they germinated, as it were, in an imperceptible way by the combination
of a host of circumstances that we call fortuitous, and sometimes they have a
single author who appears like a freak of nature and enforces obedience.
Even in this latter scenario, however, de Maistre did not allow the “freak of
nature” to be an omniscient, omnipotent Lycurgus. Rather it is merely the
case of a legislator whose “constitutive acts . . . are always only declaratory
statements of anterior rights, of which nothing can be said other than that they
exist because they exist.” [31]
The example, as so often, was the English constitution. The emergence of
representative government in England in the thirteenth century
was not an invention, or the product of deliberation, or the result of the action
of the people making use of its ancient rights; but that in reality an ambitious
soldier, to satisfy his own designs, created the balance of the three powers after
the Battle of Lewes, without knowing what he was doing, as always happens. [32]
As de Maistre reiterated elsewhere, the English constitution was “a work of
circumstances, and the number of these circumstances is infinite”—he lists
them over several lines—which through “endlessly multiplying combinations,
have finally produced after many centuries the most complex unity and the
most delicate equilibrium of political forces the world has ever known.” For
de Maistre this undesigned self-organizing evolution was proof of the involvement of God:
Since these elements, so cast into space, have fallen into such meaningful order
without a single man among the multitudes who have acted on this huge stage
knowing what relation his actions had with the whole scheme of things or what
the future was to be, it follows that these elements were guided in their fall by
an unerring hand, superior to man. [33]
In contrast to this Lucretian yet godly history, the actions of the French revolutionaries were blasphemy.
Yet even for de Maistre the underlying belief in the ordering powers of self-organization had a calming effect when staring into the revolutionary abyss.
God, again, was the great guarantor. “In divine works” as contrasted with puny
human ones, de Maistre wrote in the opening passages of
Considerations on
France, “the irregularities produced by the work of free agents come to fall into
place in the general order.” It is precisely in moments of great disruption of the
“usual order,” moments like the French Revolution, when rather than “a series
of effects following the same causes . . . we see usual effects suspended, causes
paralyzed and new consequences emerging,” that self-organization steps in to
save the day. “Never is Providence more palpable” than in those circumstances
bereft of any linear causality, in which “divine replaces human action and
works alone. This is what could be seen at that moment in France.” How so?
The very villains who appear to guide the Revolution take part in it only as simple instruments; and as soon as they aspire to dominate it, they fall ingloriously.
Those who established the Republic did so without wishing it and without
realizing what they were creating; they have been led by events: no plan has
achieved its intended end.
The providential-yet-distant invisible hand, working through the dynamics of
the unintended consequences of self-organizing human actions—since “God,
not having judged it proper to employ supernatural means in this field, has
limited himself to human means of action”—was what guaranteed the failure
of the revolutionaries, the restoration of order, and the salvation of French
society. [34]
We have come full circle from earlier Christian providentialism, which attributed directly to God both ordinary order and extraordinary moments of
disorder—but with the key difference that here God’s way was achieved, in
both ordinary and extraordinary circumstances, through self-organization.
Reminiscent of Ferguson or of Mercier, a mixture of a Burkean belief in the
evolutionary, long-term spontaneous ordering of political structures, together
with a Painite belief in the short-term self-correcting equilibrium that protects
society from fundamental unraveling, and indeed harnesses moments of acute
crisis to its own providential purpose, allowed de Maistre to be as antirevolutionary as Burke without sounding as hysterical. For our purposes, of course,
the thing to note is that even de Maistre, the self-declared enemy of the Enlightenment who made it his goal (thus Isaiah Berlin) to destroy everything the
eighteenth century stood for, even he could not get rid of one of the century’s
most tenacious inventions, the logic of self-organization. [35]
Finally, from the opposite corner of the political arena, and sitting with Mercier
in the 1793 Convention, came a different sort of revolutionary, a more radical Jacobin and a more radical champion of self-organization: Louis-Antoine
Saint-Just. Saint-Just took the anti-Lycurgus line to its logical conclusion, and
presented to the Convention in April 1793 a constitutional proposal that in
effect negated the Convention’s very goal. His view, the first comprehensive
theory of what Dan Edelstein has recently described as the Jacobin strand of
natural republicanism, was that society was self-governing and thus did not
require positive laws and constitutions. Protected from external threats and
left to its own devices, society would essentially take care of itself. Saint-Just
explained:
In general, order does not result from movements of force. Nothing is ordered
but that which moves of its own accord and obeys its own harmony; force need
only keep away what is foreign to this harmony. This principle applies above
all to the natural constitution of empires. Laws repel only evil; innocence and
virtue are independent on the earth. [36]
Nothing could be clearer. Order cannot be forced or intentionally orchestrated.
If for Burke and de Maistre the English constitution was itself a marvelous feat
of complex self-organizing aggregation; if for Paine and Mercier, and de Mais-
tre again, the self-organizing and self-correcting tendencies of society limited
the possible damage of imperfect constitutional experiments; if for Madison
self-organization was a key principle to take into account in the rational shap-
ing of a constitution for the nascent American republic: then for Saint-Just,
perhaps most consistently of all, the spontaneous order that emerges through
self-organization, at least in wishful thinking, rendered a political constitution
altogether unnecessary.
ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL ?
This chapter is in danger of ending on too optimistic a note. Indeed, this is
a danger of self-organizing-speak more generally, especially in its eighteenth-century guise. Spontaneous order, as imagined by numerous figures throughout this book, is good order. The invisible hand delivers what is ultimately a
beneficial outcome, even if things look less rosy along the way. This was the
case for Hume’s accumulation of multiple instances of local injustice in court.
This was the case for Malthus with his demographic disasters essential for the
long-term equilibrium of the species. This was the case for de Maistre, whose
view of war was that it is hardly the evil it is usually taken to be, since “humanity can be considered as a tree that an invisible hand is continually pruning, often to its benefit.” [37] (Yes, here it is again, the invisible hand.) Self-organization
enacts the utilitarian calculus: the greatest good for the greatest number.
As self-organization entered the nineteenth century, however, one also encountered new kinds of doubts. Is spontaneous order always better than its
opposite? Is it justified or logical to embrace the fortuitously self-organizing
universe as the best of all possible worlds, or even simply as a good world?
Many—probably most—continued to repeat these nostrums as self-evident
natural and/or divine law. But not all.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, for one, had his doubts. In his second “Lay
Sermon”—an 1817 peroration on political economy that led John Stuart
Mill to dismiss the Romantic writer’s economic views as those of “an arrant
driveler”—Coleridge repeated the standard account of the expansion of English trade and industry since the second half of the eighteenth century, and
assured his readers that he was no enemy to commerce. “I am not ignorant that
the power and circumstantial prosperity of the Nation has been increasing during the same period, with an accelerated force unprecedented in any country,”
and that the modern system “called into activity a multitude of enterprizing
Individuals and a variety of Talent that would otherwise have lain dormant.”
Coleridge’s grudging appreciation for these achievements then began to slip,
however, revealing what was really on his mind:
We shall perhaps be told too, that the very Evils of this System, even the periodical crash itself, are to be regarded but as so much superfluous steam ejected
by the Escape Pipes and Safety Valves of a self-regulating Machine: and lastly,
that in a free and trading country all things find their level. [38]
The logic, the language, the images are all taken for granted. The system,
whose evils we are told are necessary ones, is a self-regulating Machine in
which all things find their level.
Coleridge, in fact, believed this description to be true. His goal was not to
deny the prevalent wisdom about how the system works, but rather to use it as
a preamble for his sermonizing blast, which deserves to be quoted at length:
But there is surely no inconsistency in yielding all due honor to the spirit of
Trade, and yet charging sundry evils, that weaken or reverse its blessings, on
the over-balance of that spirit, taken as the paramount principle of action in the
nation at large. . . . Thus instead of the position, that all things find, it would be
less equivocal and far more descriptive of the fact to say, that Things are always
finding, their level: which might be taken as the paraphrase or ironical definition of a storm, but would be still more appropriate to the Mosaic Chaos, where
its brute tendencies had been enlightened by the WORD. . . . But Persons are
not Things—but Man does not find his level. Neither in body nor in soul does
the Man find his level! [39]
Quite an indictment of self-organization, hook, line, and self-adjusting sinker.
Self-organizing order, celebrated as it was by the champions of the system of
trade, is analogous to the brute natural order of pre-biblical chaos, untouched
by human rationality and divine logos. It is a primitive form. There is no contesting that it works, but it is appropriate only for soulless things, not for sentient persons.
Coleridge went on to illustrate this with indignant examples about the human costs, degrading and dehumanizing, of the ways in which the system self-organizes. “Go, ask the overseer, and question the parish doctor,” he enjoined
in the context of a factory that lay inert for a whole season before things got better again. Ask them “whether the workman’s health and temperance with the
staid and respectful Manners best taught by the inward dignity of conscious
self-support, have found
their level again!”
In short, self-organization works but can be a bad thing. Coleridge repeated
this basic message as often as he could. (Though it does not have to be a bad
thing: elsewhere, for instance in celebrating the quasi-magical formation of
public opinion from multiple individual ones, Coleridge sounds much like the
celebratory Frenchmen earlier in this chapter. [40] ) Here is one more example,
notable for its rhetorical force:
I have often heard unthinking people exclaim, in observing differences of
price in different parts of the country, What has become of Adam Smith’s
level? . . . Water will come to a level without pain or pleasure, and provisions
and money will come to a level likewise; but, O God! What scenes of anguish
must take place while they are coming to a level! But still the sneer against
Adam Smith, as to the simple fact, is absurd. The tide in the rivers Trent and
Parrot flows in in a head
. Now if a spectator should exclaim to a writer on
fluids, What has become of your level now? Would he not answer, stay and
see! [41]
This passage is again suffused with Adam Smith, and like modern writers
speaking about Freud, say, it expects its audience to be sufficiently conversant
with the language and way of thinking that Smith stands for even if they had
not read a single word from
The Wealth of Nations. Yet Coleridge’s argument
turns out to be a radical one. The invisible hand is dangerous. People must be
protected from the pernicious consequences of spontaneous order.
The self-organizing system is therefore not the end point of a discussion
about the public good but a preliminary constraint upon which improving
action must be taken. According to Coleridge, two things can save people
from its harmful effects. These were two things that the champions of self-organization denied had any importance in the greater scheme of things:
individual agency and
the state. As regards the individual, Coleridge ends his “Lay
Sermon” with an exhortation to every member of society to become a better
person. “Let every man measure his efforts by his power and his sphere of action, and do all he can do! . . .
Let him act personally and in detail wherever it
is practicable.” The fetish of the aggregate needed toppling, in the name of individual action and responsibility. The political economists, Coleridge warned
on another occasion, “worship a kind of non-entity under the different words,
the state, the whole, the society, &c. and to this Idol they make bloodier sacrifices than ever the Mexicans did to Tescalipoca.” At the same time, the state
was also important in Coleridge’s vision: it must step in in order to redress the
“imbalance” of the commercial system, and “our manufacturers must consent
to [its] regulations.” [42] For Coleridge the state was no longer the “idolatrous”
imaginary outcome of spontaneous order, but rather a proactive entity invited
to protect all citizens from its harmful effects.
It is only to be expected, of course, that the nineteenth century, with its
dramatic social transformations and the increasing attention of some to their
dire social costs, witnessed more heretics of this kind, those who acknowledged the self-organizing dynamic but not its providential interpretation. As
Malthus himself had put it, in the context of regulations of the corn trade: “It
is undoubtedly true, that every thing will ultimately find its level, but this level
is sometimes effected in a very harsh manner.” At the first general meeting
of the British and Foreign Philanthropic Society for the Permanent Relief of
the Labouring Classes in June 1822, one of those present spoke as follows:
“Things will, it is true, sooner or later find their level; but the present generation, the agricultural and manufacturing interests, may first be ruined, by being
deprived of their comfort and happiness.” This statement was denounced by
another participant in the meeting as an unjustified attack on “Turgot, Smith,
Malthus, Ricardo &c.,” though the editor of the proceedings assured readers that it was nothing of the kind. Twenty years later Charles Bray, a social
reformer with Owenite and cooperativist tendencies, insisted on the same
point, no longer shying away from the critique of his forebears. “The Economists hold that supply and demand have an equal tendency to find their level
with water, it being of no importance that in the operation whole towns are
ruined and whole countries half-starved.” So even as Bray was “quite willing
to concede that the principle laid down by the Political Economists ought to
be true,—that they [sic] are true in the abstract,” this was for him only the beginning point of a discussion of how to act to prevent widespread distress in
practice, not the end point reached by conceptual modeling “in the abstract.” [43]
In France, Jean Charles Léonard Sismondi, a political economist who had
gradually become more interested in general human well-being than simply
in material wealth, echoed the same theme. “Let us beware of this dangerous
equilibrium theory that re-establishes itself of its own accord!” he wrote in his
revisionist
Nouveaux principes d’économie politique of 1819. “A certain kind
of equilibrium, it is true, re-establishes itself in the long run, but it is after a
frightful amount of suffering.” [44] We have certainly entered a different mental
world from that of the eighteenth-century invisible hands. It was a more sobering and sobered-up world that was now willing, perhaps, to contemplate
self-organization while facing head-on the terrifying prospect of the absence
of God.
Notes:
1. Richard Payne Knight, The Landscape, a Didactic Poem . . . Addressed to Uvedale Price,
Esq. (London, 1794), 2–4, [23], 25. Michael Clarke and Nicholas Penny, eds., The Arrogant
Connoisseur: Richard Payne Knight, 1751–1824 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1982), [ix].
2. Richard Payne Knight, The Progress of Civil Society: A Didactic Poem (London, 1796),
[3]–4.
3. Ibid., [2], 10–11, 20, [26], 78–81. The last verses quoted replicate closely those in Knight,
Landscape, 2.
4. Knight, Progress of Civil Society, 73, 81, 84, 88–90.
5. Thomas James Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature; or, What You Will . . . Part the Second
(London, 1796), 15.
6. Quoted together with other similar condemnations in Stephen Daniels, “The Political
Iconography of Woodland in Later Georgian England,” in The Iconography of Landscape, ed.
Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 66.
7. Knight, Progress of Civil Society, 11, 81–84, 90. The free-born soul is from Knight, Landscape, 71.
8. Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner: In Two Volumes, 4th ed. (London, 1799), 1:526–27
(no. 15, 19 February 1798).
9. Thomas James Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature . . . Part the Third, 3rd ed. (London,
1797), 7–9.
10. Charles Daubeny, A Sermon Applicable to the Present Times, and Designed as an Antidote
to Those Dangerous Doctrines Now in Circulation . . . (Bath, 1793), 16. D[enis] O’Bryen, Utrum
Horum? The Government, or the Country? 2nd ed. (London, 1796), 68–69.
11. Charles Lloyd, Edmund Oliver (Bristol, 1798), 1:128, 178–79.
12. Ibid., 36, 52, 126, 131.
13. Charles Lloyd, A Letter to the Anti-Jacobin Reviewers (Birmingham, 1799), 20–24.
14. Ibid., 33–35. Lloyd repeated the same vision in his even more strongly antirevolutionary
Lines Suggested by the Fast, Appointed on Wednesday, February 27, 1799 (Birmingham, [1799]).
15. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (London, 1790), ed. Conor C.
O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 119, 280–82 (emphasis added).
16. Edmund Burke, “Speech on a Motion Made in the House of Commons,” 7 May 1782,
in Works and Correspondence, new ed.. (London, 1852), 6:130; and Thoughts and Details on
Scarcity (1795), in ibid. 5:196. See also 339 for another strong self-organizing statement about
the evolution of European states in Burke’s Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide
Directory of France (1796).
17. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (14 February 1776) and Rights of Man (1791), in Collected
Writings, ed. Eric Foner (New York: Library of America, 1995), 34, 534 (emphasis added).
18. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man Part the Second (1792), in Collected Writings, 552–54.
19. Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh, 1767), 188.
20. Ibid., 93, 196, 410, 412–413n.
21. Soame Jenyns, A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1757), in The Works of
Soame Jenyns (London, 1790), 3:135–36 (and similarly 2:215).
22. “Essay on Parties,” in Miscellaneous Works of the Late Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl
of Chesterfield . . . (London, 1777), 1:54; originally published in Common Sense 25, 16 July 1737.358
King Charles II: His Declaration to All His Loving Subjects of the Kingdom of England, Dated
from his Court at Breda . . . (Edinburgh, 1660), 1.
23. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist: With Letters of “Brutus” (1788), ed. Terence Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 41–43.
24. Ibid., 44–45, 252–54. Compare Madison’s reflections on parties in the National Gazette,
23 January 1792,
http://www.constitution.org/jm/17920123_parties.htm
25. Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Fragments of Politics and History . . . Translated from the
French (1793; London, 1795), 1:438.
26. Ibid., 93–94.
27. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 3, in Social Contract: Locke,
Hume, Rousseau, ed. Ernest Baker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 193–94. Paul Fried-
land, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), chap. 2. Mona Ozouf, “ ‘Public Opinion’ at the
End of the Old Regime,” Journal of Modern History 60, supp. (1988): S16, singles out Mably as
a French thinker who more than others resigned himself to the multiplicity of contradictory interests in public life; see Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, Doutes proposés aux philosophes économistes
sur l’ordre naturel et essentiel des sociétés politiques (Paris, 1768).
28. Mercier, Fragments of Politics and History 1:11, 12, 98, 105–6, 108, 122–23, 390; 2:13.
29. Rousseau, Social Contract, bk. 2, chap. 6, p. 204 (with minor corrections to the
translation).
30. Mercier, Fragments of Politics and History 1:130–32, 139.
31. Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France (1796), in The Works of Joseph de Maistre,
ed. and trans. Jack Lively (New York: Schocken, 1971), 66, 77. Compare his Du Pape (1819):
Every important institution is “formed of itself by the concurrence of a thousand agents, who
are almost always ignorant of what they are doing. . . . The institution thus vegetates insensibly
over the course of age” (quoted in Owen Bradley, A Modern Maistre: The Social and Political
Thought of Joseph de Maistre [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999], 99; and more generally for de Maistre’s notions of providence, chap. 7).
32. Considerations on France, in Works of Joseph de Maistre, 66–67.
33. Essay on the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions (1809), in Works of Joseph de
Maistre, 152.
34. Considerations on France, in Works of Joseph de Maistre, 47–49, 77.
35. Isaiah Berlin, introduction (orig. 1952) to Joseph de Maistre, Considerations on France,
trans. and ed. Richard A. Lebrun (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xiv–xv.
36. Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, “Discours sur la constitution de la France, prononcé à la
Convention Nationale . . . 24 Avril 1793,” in his Œuvres complètes (Paris: Lebovici, 1984), 416.
Dan Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French
Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 2, 200. David Bates, Enlightenment
Aberrations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 162–69.
37. Considerations on France, in Works of Joseph de Maistre, 62. De Maistre continues in an
explicitly Malthusian vein and argues against the seeming randomness of war by comparing it to
meteorology: “If tables of massacre were available like meteorological tables, who knows if some
law might not be discovered after centuries of observation?”
38. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lay Sermons, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 6, ed. Reginald J. White (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 204–5,
and for J. S. Mill, editor’s introduction, xlii.
39. Ibid., 206–7. Compare Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, 12 October 1809, in The
Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 4, ed. Barbara E. Rooke (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1969), 130–31.
40. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, in The Collected
Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 10, ed. John Colmer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1976), 40. Compare also Coleridge’s celebration of self-organizing aggregation in the formation of life and of beauty as discussed in Denise Gigante, Life: Organic Form and Romanti-
cism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 23.
41. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays on His Times in “The Morning Post” and “The Cou-
rier,” in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. 3, pts. 1–3, ed. David V. Erdman
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), pt. 1, p. 255 (Morning Post, 14 October 1800).
Compare similarly pt. 2, p. 176 (Courier, 30 May 1811). And cf. Patrick Brantlinger, Fictions of
State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994 (Ithaca, NY, 1996), 127–32.
42. Coleridge, Lay Sermons, 229–30. Coleridge, The Friend, 15 February 1809 [1810], 326.
Elsewhere Coleridge added a third protection, the very much visible hand of “church and state,”
that is to say, the benevolent supervision of a national “clerisy,” comprising clergy and intellectuals: see Brantlinger, Fictions of State, 128–29.
43. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population; or, A View of Its Past and
Present Effects on Human Happiness, 3rd ed. (London, 1806), 2:238. Speech of Mr. Tooke,
Proceedings of the First General Meeting of the British and Foreign Philanthropic Society for
the Permanent Relief of the Labouring Classes . . . the 1st of June, 1822 (London, 1822), 38, 42.
Charles Bray, An Essay upon the Union of Agriculture and Manufactures and upon the Organiza-
tion of Industry (London, 1844), 30.
44. Jean Charles Léonard Sismondi (de Simonde), Nouveaux principes d’économie politique;
ou, De la richesse dans ses rapports avec la population (Paris, 1819), 2:217 (bk. 6, chap. 6).
