The Individual and Society

The controversy created by the conflicts between the philosophes and the various churches and states of Europe drew attention away from a subtle but profound transformation in worldviews. In previous centuries, questions of theological doctrine and church organization had been the main focus of intellectual and even political interest. The Enlightenment writers shifted attention away from religious questions and toward the secular (nonreligious) study of society and the individual’s role in it. Religion did not drop out of sight, but the philosophes tended to make religion a private affair of individual conscience, even while rulers and churches still considered religion very much a public concern.

The Enlightenment interest in secular society produced two major results: it advanced the secularization of European political life that had begun after the French Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it laid the foundations for the social sciences of the modern era. Not surprisingly, then, many historians and philosophers consider the Enlightenment to be the origin of modernity, which they define as the belief that human reason, rather than theological doctrine, should set the patterns of social and political life. This belief in reason as the sole foundation for secular authority has often been contested, but it has also proved to be a powerful force for change.

Although most of the philosophes believed that humans could use reason to understand and even remake society and politics, they disagreed about what reason revealed. Among the many different approaches were two that proved enduringly influential, those of the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith and the Swiss writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Smith provided a theory of modern capitalist society and devoted much of his energy to defending free markets as the best way to make the most of individual efforts. The modern discipline of economics took shape around the questions raised by Smith. Rousseau, by contrast, emphasized the needs of the community over those of the individual. His work, which led both toward democracy and toward communism, continues to inspire heated debate in political science and sociology.

Adam Smith (1723–1790) optimistically believed that individual interests naturally harmonized with those of the whole society. To explain how this natural harmonization worked, he published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. In this work, commonly known as The Wealth of Nations, Smith insisted that individual self-interest, even greed, was quite compatible with society’s best interest: the laws of supply and demand served as an “invisible hand” ensuring that individual interests would be synchronized with those of the whole society. Market forces naturally brought individual and social interests in line.

Smith rejected the prevailing mercantilist views that the general welfare would be served by accumulating national wealth through agriculture or the hoarding of gold and silver. Instead, he argued that the division of labor in manufacturing increased productivity and generated more wealth for society and well-being for the individual. Using the example of the ordinary pin, Smith showed that when the manufacturing process was broken down into separate operations—one man to draw out the wire, another to straighten it, a third to cut it, a fourth to point it, and so on—workers who could make only one pin a day on their own could make thousands by pooling their labor.

To maximize the effects of market forces and the division of labor, Smith endorsed a concept called laissez-faire (“to leave alone”), in which the government neither controls nor intervenes in the economy. He insisted that governments eliminate all restrictions on the sale of land, remove restraints on the grain trade, and abandon duties on imports. Free international trade, he argued, would stimulate production everywhere and thus ensure the growth of national wealth. Governments, he insisted, should restrict themselves to providing “security,” that is, national defense, internal order, and public works.

Much more pessimistic about the relation between individual self-interest and the good of society was Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). In Rousseau’s view, society itself threatened natural rights or freedoms: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau first gained fame by writing a prize-winning essay in 1749 in which he argued that the revival of science and the arts had corrupted social morals, not improved them. This startling conclusion seemed to oppose some of the Enlightenment’s most cherished beliefs. Rather than improving society, he claimed, science and art raised artificial barriers between people and their natural state. Rousseau’s works extolled the simplicity of rural life over urban society.

Whereas earlier Rousseau had argued that society corrupted the individual by taking him out of nature, in The Social Contract (1762) he aimed to show that the right kind of political order could make people truly moral and free. Individual moral freedom could be achieved only by learning to subject one’s individual interests to “the general will,” that is, the good of the community. Individuals did this by entering into a social contract not with their rulers, but with one another. If everyone followed the general will, then all would be equally free and equally moral because they lived under a law to which they had all consented.

Like Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704) in the seventeenth century, Rousseau derived his social contract from human nature, not from history, tradition, or the Bible. He went much further than Hobbes or Locke, however, when he implied that people would be most free and moral under a republican form of government with direct democracy. Neither Hobbes nor Locke favored republics. Moreover, Rousseau roundly condemned slavery. Authorities in both Geneva and Paris banned The Social Contract for undermining political authority. Rousseau’s works would become a kind of political bible for the French revolutionaries of 1789, and his attacks on private property inspired the communists of the nineteenth century such as Karl Marx. Rousseau’s rather mystical concept of the general will remains controversial because he insisted that the individual could be “forced to be free.” Rousseau’s version of democracy did not preserve the individual freedoms so important to Adam Smith.