The Poison and the Spider's Web: Diderot and Eighteenth-Century French Epicureanism

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The Poison and the Spider's Web:Diderot and Eighteenth-Century FrenchEpicureanismJared Holleya

a Society of Fellows, University of Chicago, Illinois, USAPublished online: 10 Aug 2015.

To cite this article: Jared Holley (2015): The Poison and the Spider's Web: Diderot and Eighteenth-Century French Epicureanism, History of European Ideas

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2015.1067980

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The Poison and the Spider’s Web: Diderot and Eighteenth-CenturyFrench EpicureanismJared Holley

Society of Fellows, University of Chicago, Illinois, USA

SUMMARYThis article argues that the term ‘Epicurean’ had multiple meanings in themoral and political thought of the eighteenth century. Concentrating onthe reception of Epicureanism in France, it shows that some criticsfocused on Epicurus’ hedonistic moral psychology and labelled Epicureanthose thinkers who denied natural sociability; for others, who insteadfocused on Epicurus’ materialist natural philosophy, to label a thinker anEpicurean was to label them an atheist. This polyvalence is presented as asalutary caution against essentialising claims about the content ofeighteenth-century Epicureanism per se. Despite this sceptical stance,however, the article goes on to argue that it is nevertheless fruitful toinvestigate the engagement with Epicureanism by particular thinkers orin particular texts. Indeed, a comparative reading of Denis Diderot’sEncyclopédie entry on ‘Epicuréisme’ and his source material in JohanJakob Bruker and Pierre Bayle demonstrates that Diderot used hisdiscussion of Epicureanism to intervene directly in contemporarytheological controversies over the immortal soul and a providential god.

KEYWORDSEpicureanism; Diderot;materialism; atheism;sociability; reception;Enlightenment

Contents

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12. Eighteenthentury French epicureanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23. Diderot on ‘Epicuréisme’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94. Concluding remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

1. Introduction

One of the recurrent features of centuries of commentary is the identification of themoral and politicalthought of what came to be called ‘the Enlightenment’ as being in some sense Epicurean.1 Leo Straussargued that Epicureanism provided ‘the foundation, or rather the foreground, of the Enlightenment’,identifying the concern with external, social peace that is characteristic of eighteenth-century politicalphilosophy as a generalisation of the Epicurean concern with internal, psychological tranquillity.2

More recently, John Robertson has argued that the convergence of Augustinian pessimism and Epi-curean animalism provided the theory of human nature on which arose the discursive frameworkof political economy, itself constituting the unitary Enlightenment above and beyond local and

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

CONTACT Jared Holley [email protected] the post-facto construction of ‘the Enlightenment’ as a historiographical concept, see Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of theFrench Revolution, translated by Lydia G. Cochrane (New York, NY, 1991). Cf. Daniel Brewer, The Enlightenment Past: ReconstructingEighteenth-Century French Thought (Cambridge, 2008).2Leo Strauss, Philosophy and Law: Essays Toward the Understanding of Maimonides and His Predecessors, translated by Fred Bauman(New York, NY, 1987), 16–17.

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national contexts.3 These analyses at least partially reflect eighteenth-century thinkers’ understand-ings of their own age. Immanuel Kant noted that, likeMontaigne andHobbes before them,MandevilleandHelvétius had followed Epicurus in founding amorality of ‘self-interest’ or ‘self-love’ on ‘internal’,‘physical’ ‘sensuality’.4 Against these modern Epicureans, Kant positioned the followers of the ThirdEarl of Shaftesbury, who himself had noted that his moral sense theory was part of the ‘secret anti-Epi-curean view’ he had developed in his engagement with Hobbes and Locke.5

As such antagonism suggests, eighteenth-century thinkers received the ideas of Epicurus and theEpicurean tradition with ambivalence. For some, Epicurean hedonism offered a sanguine assessmentof psychological motivation and moral evaluation, one particularly well suited to the emerging pol-itical and economic reality. Precisely this reductive vision of human nature, however, led others toview Epicureanism as the fundamental problem confronting modern moral and political theory—aproto-anarchistic threat to community, social cohesion and civic virtue. This article focuses primar-ily on just such contemporary critics of Epicureanism in eighteenth-century France. It presents aselective reception history to argue that the term ‘Epicurean’ had multiple meanings in the moraland political thought of the eighteenth century. Some critics, typically those who focused on Epi-curus’ hedonistic moral psychology, labelled Epicurean those thinkers who denied natural sociabil-ity: the existence of any strong natural tendency in man to form social groups, and hence thepossibility of durable moral consensus prior to or outside the coercive structure of the state.6 Forothers, who instead focused on Epicurus’ materialist natural philosophy, to label a thinker an Epi-curean was to label him an atheist, one who denied the existence of an immortal soul and God’s pro-vidential governance of temporal affairs.7 This polyvalence is presented as a salutary caution againstessentialising claims about the content of eighteenth-century Epicureanism per se.8 Despite thissceptical stance, however, the article goes on to show that it is nevertheless productive to investigatethe engagement with Epicureanism by particular thinkers or in particular texts. Indeed, a compara-tive reading of Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie entry on ‘Epicuréisme’ and his source material in JohanJakob Bruker and Pierre Bayle demonstrates that Diderot used his discussion of Epicureanism tointervene directly in contemporary theological controversies over the immortal soul and a providen-tial god. The article concludes with some suggestive remarks on the implications of this analysis forcontemporary historiography of eighteenth-century political thought.

2. Eighteenth-century French epicureanism

Epicureanism has never had more radiance than in France, and above all during the last century.9

The nature of eighteenth-century Epicureanism has emerged as a problem in contemporary histor-iography at least in part because of the instability that has plagued the philosophy first articulated byEpicurus of Samos in fifth-century (BC) Athens throughout its tumultuous history. The classical

3John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005).4Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, translated by Peter Heath, edited by Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind (Cambridge, 1997), 3, 48,228, 240. Cf. Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments, translated by Curtis Bowman, Paul Guyer, and Frederick Rauscher, edited byPaul Guyer (Cambridge, 2005), 421–25.5Quoted in Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Cen-tury England (Cambridge, 1994), 61.6On sociability, see Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Princeton,NJ, 2005), 39–45. Cf. Eva Piirimäe and Alexander Schmidt, ‘Introduction: Between Morality and Anthropology—Sociability inEnlightenment Thought’, History of European Ideas, 41 (2015), 571–88.7See, for example, Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL, 1953), 107–12, 168–69, 188–89, 266, 279 (esp. 266). CompareLeo Strauss, Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, translated by E. M. Sinclair (Chicago, IL, 1965), esp. 42–45.8On ‘polyvalent utterances’, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Introduction: The State of the Art’, in Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Pol-itical Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985), 9.9Denis Diderot, ‘Epicuréisme ou Epicurisme’, in Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, edited byDenis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert, 17 vols (Paris, 1751–1765), V, 779–85 (785). In making my own translations, Ihave consulted Denis Diderot, Denis Diderot’s The Encyclopedia: Selections, edited and translated by Stephen J. Gendzier (New York,NY, 1967), 96–102.

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texts divide Epicureanism into three ‘divisions’: physics, epistemology, and ethics. Epicurean physicsis founded on the principle that nothing exists other than matter in motion and the void, and thatphysical objects are produced by the chance concourse of indivisible and eternal atomic particles.10

Epicurean epistemology understands perception to derive from particulate film or ‘effluvia’ emanat-ing from physical objects and making contact with the sensory apparatus.11 These perceptions gen-erate sensations of pleasure or pain, and Epicurean ethics deems those actions that procure pleasureto be good, whilst those that produce pain are bad.12 Rigidly materialistic, radically sensationalist,and resolutely hedonistic, Epicureanism is a systematic doctrine following from intuitive first prin-ciples.13 Despite its holistic nature, however, the intellectual history of Epicureanism is riddled withpartial transmissions and receptions. Very few of Epicurus’ writings are extant,14 and many of themost frequently cited secondary sources are critical interventions from authors hostile to his philo-sophy’s political and religious implications. Even sympathetic summaries and commentaries, whilstgenerally faithful in their presentation of Epicurus’ doctrines, often contain eclectic borrowings thattend to emphasise some of Epicureanism’s many closely integrated aspects at the expense of others.15

As we will see, this combination of critical engagement and eclectic emphasis is simply characteristicof the reception of Epicureanism in eighteenth-century moral and political thought.

Take for example the Baron de Montesquieu’s celebrated defence of luxury in his Considerationson the Greatness of the Romans, and of their Decline. Published in 1734, the Considerations put apolemical twist on a familiar story. Ancient historians had conventionally ascribed the collapse ofthe Republic to the moral vices of ambitio, avaritia, luxuria, and libido, and their analyses wereoften used to support both Christian and republican critiques of luxury.16 Against his contemporaryfollowers of these ‘ancients’, however, Montesquieu joined the ‘modern’ defenders of luxury. Andcrucially for our purposes, his justification of luxurious consumption was a partial defence of thepursuit of pleasure he and his contemporaries associated with Epicureanism:

I believe that the Epicurean sect, which was introduced to Rome towards the end of the Republic, contributedmuch to the corruption of the heart and mind of the Romans. The Greeks had been infatuated with this sectbefore them; accordingly, they were sooner corrupt. Polybius tells us that in his time no Greek could be trustedon the security of his oath; whereas a Roman was, so to speak, inevitably bound by it.17

10Epicurus, ‘Letter to Herodotus’, 39–41, and Lucretius, De rerum natura, 1.419–44, 1.503–98, in The Hellenistic Philosophers, Volume1: Translations of the Principal Sources, with Philosophical Commentary, edited and translated by A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley(Cambridge, 1987), 27–28, 37–38. Volume 2: Greek and Latin texts with notes and Bibliography, edited by Long and SedleyCUP: 1987.

11Epicurus, ‘Letter to Herodotus’, 46–53, and Lucretius, De rerum natura, 4.230–38, 4.256–68, 4.722–822, in Hellenistic Philosophers,edited by Long and Sedley, I, 72–76.

12Epicurus, ‘Letter to Menoeceus’, 127–32, in Hellenistic Philosophers, edited by Long and Sedley, I, 113–14.13For an overview, see A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (Berkeley, CA, 1986), 14–74. Cf. Victor Gold-schmitt, La doctrine d’Epicure et le droit (Paris, 1977).

14Only fragments survive of Epicurus’ 27-volume magnum opus, On Nature: see David Sedley, Lucretius and the Transformation ofGreek Wisdom (Cambridge, 1998), 94–132. The main sources remain the ‘Letters’ and ‘Principal Doctrines’ transmitted in Book X ofDiogenes Laertius’ third-century (BC) Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers; see Jørgen Mejer, Diogenes Laertius and hisHellenistic Background (Wiesbaden, 1978). The only Roman text that can unproblematically be ascribed to a fully fledged Epicur-ean, Lucretius’ epic poem De rerum natura, was lost until its rediscovery in 1417 Florence; see Alison Brown, The Return of Lucre-tius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA, 2010); Ada Palmer, Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance (Cambridge MA, 2014).

15Epicurus’ teachings survived as an oral tradition through the decline of Athens and the rise of Rome, and for centuries the mostcited sources of Epicureanism have been Roman ones like Horace, Virgil, Plutarch, Cicero and Ovid. For recent accounts of Epi-cureanism in Horace and Vergil, see Philip R. Hardie, Lucretian Receptions: History, the Sublime, Knowledge (Cambridge, 2009). ForPlutarch, see Eleni Kechagia, Plutarch against Colotes: A Lesson in History of Philosophy (Oxford, 2011). For Cicero, see Holger Essler,‘Cicero’s Use and Abuse of Epicurean Theology’, in Epicurus and the Epicurean Tradition, edited by Jeffrey Fish and Kirk R. Sanders(Cambridge, 2011), 129–151. For Ovid, see John Ferguson (revised and supplemented by Jackson Hershbell), ‘Epicureanism underthe Roman Empire’, in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, edited by Hildegard Temporini and Wolfgang Haase, 2 vols(Berlin, 1990), II, part 36.6 esp. 2272.

16Barbara Levick, ‘Morals, Politics, and the Fall of the Roman Republic’, Greece & Rome, 29 (1982), 53–62. Cf. Eve Adler, Vergil’sEmpire: Political Thought in the Aeneid (Lanham, MD, 2003), 43–51.

17Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains, et leur décadence (Paris,1802), 84. Quoted in John Brown, Thoughts on Civil Liberty, on Licentiousness, and Faction (Dublin, 1765), 78–79, translationslightly altered.

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But whilst Epicureanism may have undermined Roman morals, this had not been a sufficient causeof the Republic’s demise: like Gibbon, Montesquieu saw at the heart of Rome’s collapse not a moralcause but, rather, the political cause of militaristic overextension. For him, ‘the martial virtuesremained after all the others were lost’ because Rome’s republican institutional structure had enabledit to preserve its ‘application to war in the midst of riches, indolence, and sensual pleasures’.18

Whereas Montesquieu’s text emphasises the political implications of Epicurean hedonism, theoriginal passage from Polybius to which he referred serves rather to bring into focus the doctrine’stheological implications. Montesquieu, for his part, certainly noted that ‘religion is always the bestguarantee one can have of the morals of men’; but his source, which itself makes no mention of Epi-cureanism, had been far more effusive in this respect.19 After referring to their ‘laws and customs inrelation to the acquisition of wealth’,20 Polybius isolated the cause of the Romans’ superior moralrectitude in their belief in an afterlife:

The quality in which the Roman commonwealth is most distinctly superior is in my opinion the nature of theirreligious convictions. I believe that it is the very thing which among other peoples is an object of reproach, Imean superstition, which maintains the cohesion of the Roman State.21

As it was impossible that a state be composed entirely of philosophers, the ‘lawless desires, unrea-soned passion, and violent anger’ of the people had to be regulated not by wisdom but by ‘invisibleterrors’ and ‘pageantry’.22 For Polybius, the moral corruption of his contemporaries stemmed fromtheir having not followed the Romans in similarly institutionalising belief in immortality. Theiractions, like those of the Epicureans, were not regulated by thoughts of the gods and ‘the terrorsof hell’.23

This subtle shift of emphasis from Polybius to Montesquieu is indicative of the variety of ways inwhich Epicureanism was deployed in eighteenth-century moral and political debate. For some, Epi-cureanism provided a crucial conceptual armoury with which to advance a solution to the closelyrelated problems of moral obligation and political cohesion under the conditions created by earlycommercial society. Here, Jean Lafond’s thesis of the ‘convergence’ of Epicurean and Augustiniantheories of human nature can be combined with Albert Hirschman’s classic essay on the movementfrom ‘the passions’ to ‘the interests’24 to elucidate the importance of Hellenistic thought to the rise ofeighteenth-century utilitarianism, political economy, doux commerce,25 and French contributions tothe ‘luxury debate’ such as Jean-François Melon’s Political Essay on Commerce and Voltaire’s LeMondain.26 For others, Epicureanism itself was frequently understood as the problem with whichmodern moral and political theory was forced to grapple. Indeed, such was the message the Frenchphilosophes received from two of their most important seventeenth-century predecessors. We havealready noted the explicit anti-Epicureanism of Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit.27

18Montesquieu, Considérations, 86–87.19Montesquieu, Considérations, 85.20Polybius, The Complete Histories of Polybius, translated by W. R. Paton (London, 1922), 6.56.6.21Polybius, Complete Histories, 6.56.6.22Polybius, Complete Histories, 6.56.6.23Polybius, Complete Histories, 6.56.6.24Jean Lafond, ‘Augustinisme et épicurisme au XVIIe siècle’, in L’homme et son image: morales et littératures de Montaigne à Mande-ville (Paris, 1996), 345–68; Jean Lafond, La Rochefoucauld, augustinisme et littérature (Paris, 1977); Albert O. Hirschman, The Pas-sions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton, NJ, 1977).

25Anoush Fraser Terjanian, Commerce and Its Discontents in Eighteenth-Century French Political Thought (Cambridge, 2013); HelenaRosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva (Cambridge, 1997), 76–84; Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Com-merce (Chicago, IL, 2006); John Shovlin, ‘Emulation in Eighteenth-Century French Economic Thought’, Eighteenth Century Studies,36 (2003), 224–30.

26For Voltaire, see André Morize, L’apologie du luxe au XVIIIe siècle et ‘Le mondain’ de Voltaire; etude critique sur Le mondain et sessources (Paris, 1909). For Melon, see Jean Bouzinac, Les doctrines économiques au XVIIIe siècle. Jean-François Melon, économiste(Toulouse, 1906). For an overview, see Istvan Hont, ‘The Early Enlightenment Debate on Commerce and Luxury’, in The CambridgeHistory of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, edited by Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge, 2006), 407–09.

27For the French reception of Shaftesbury, see Emmanuel Casati, ‘Hérauts et commentateurs de Shaftesbury en France’, RLC, 14(1934), 615–45; Dorothy B. Schlegel, Shaftesbury and the French Deists (Chapel Hill, NC, 1956). Cf. René Legros, ‘Diderot et Shaftes-bury’, The Modern Language Review, 19 (1924), 188–94.

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Similarly, Samuel Pufendorf’s defence of natural sociability in the Law of Nature and Nations waspart of his opposition to the conventionalist account of justice that Thomas Hobbes had ‘borrowedfrom Epicurus’, as discussed later.

In addition to these foreign imports, the French philosophes also understood their relationship toEpicureanism to have been mediated by an indigenous philosophical and literary tradition. Michelde Montaigne and Pierre Charon are most often identified with the nouveau pyrrhonisme of the six-teenth century;28 but Montaigne’s Essais exposed eighteenth-century readers to many Epicureanideas and quotations from the Epicurean tradition as well.29 The seventeenth-century libertins éru-dites30 often added Epicurean arguments to the scepticism of their predecessors;31 Uriel da Costadrew on aspects of Epicurean theology, and Pierre Gassendi presented an updated Epicurean phy-sics.32 Historians of science now consider Gassendi’s ‘baptised Epicureanism’ to have been one of themost significant philosophical developments of the scientific revolution,33 and his harmonising Epi-curean materialism with Christian creation may have gone some way to facilitating the ‘enlightenedEpicureanism’ of later religious thinkers who placed the height of pleasure in the love of God.34 It wasagainst this rather Stoic version of the doctrine in Gassendi and his disciple François Bernier35 thatCharles de Saint-Évremond presented the ‘sceptical Epicureanism’36 he shared with Ninon de Len-clos37 and their many later admirers. It was conventionally understood that this particularly Epicur-ean inflection of French philosophy had only intensified in the eighteenth century.

In this respect, it is especially instructive to consider the reports of foreign commentators oneighteenth-century French philosophical developments. The Irish-Catholic bishop LaurenceNihell, for example, constructed a rudimentary genealogy of modern Epicureanism by identifyingseveral mid-century French philosophes as ‘malignant wits’ who had perverted the ingenious max-ims of their master, the Duke de la Rochefoucauld.38 As Nihell argued in the preface to hisRational Self-Love, modern moral philosophy was characterised by a fundamental misunderstand-ing of the nature of self-love in human motivation. While it was undeniable that, as he put it, ‘ourown good [… ] is always the first object of our pursuit’, self-love was but ‘the grand spring which

28Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford, 2003), 44–64.29Michael Andrew Screech, Montaigne’s Annotated Copy of Lucretius: A Transcription and Study of the Manuscript, Notes and Pen-Marks (Geneva, 1998), esp. 24–25, 134–37; Arthur Armaingaud, Montaigne a toujours été epicurienne Réplique à M. FortunatStrowski (Paris, 1908).

30Jean Wirth, ‘“Libertins” et “Epicuriens”: aspects de l’irréligion au XVIe siècle’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 39 (1997),601–27; René Pintard, Le libertinage érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIème siècle (Geneva, 2000); Olivier Bloch, Matières à his-toires (Paris, 1997), esp. 225–87. Compare Françoise Charles-Daubert, ‘Le libertinage érudit: problèmes de définition’, in Libertinageet philosophie en XVIIe siècle 1 (Saint-Etienne, 1996), 11–26.

31J. S. Spink, French Free-Thought from Gassendi to Voltaire (New York, NY, 1960), esp. 133–68.32Richard H. Popkin, ‘Epicureanism and Skepticism in the Early 17th Century’, Philomathes, (1971), 346–57. Cf. Strauss, Spinoza’sCritique, 53–63.

33Margaret J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the CreatedWorld (Cambridge, 1994); Thomas M. Lennon, The Battle of the Gods and Giants: Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655–1715(Princeton, NJ, 1993); Antonia Lolordo, Pierre Gassendi and the Birth of Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge, 2007); CatherineWilson, Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity (Oxford, 2008).

34Isaac Nakhimovsky, ‘The Enlightened Epicureanism of Jacques Abbadie: L’Art de se connoître soi-même and the Morality of Self-Interest’, History of European Ideas, 29 (2003), 1–14; Lisa T. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe (Ithaca,NY, 1996).

35On Bernier, see Sylvia Murr, ‘Bernier et Gassendi: une filiation déviationniste?’, in Gassendi et l’Europe, edited by Sylvia Murr (Paris,1957), 71–114.

36For Saint-Évremond, see Charles Giraud, ‘Histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de Saint-Évremond’, in Charles de Saint-Évremond,Œuvres melees; revues, annotées et précédés d’une histoire de la vie et des ouvrages de l’auteur, par Charles de Saint-Évremond,edited by Charles Giraud, 3 vols (Paris, 1865), I, i–cccxcvi. Cf. David Bensoussan, ‘L’honnêteté chez Saint Evremond: éléganceet commodité’, in L’honnête homme et le dandy, edited by Alain Montandon (Tübingen, 1993). For the Gassendi connection,see Jean-Charles Darmon, ‘Le Gassendism “frivole” de Saint-Évremond’, in Gassendi et l’Europe, edited by Murr, 57–70.

37See Émile Magne, Ninon de lanclos, 3 vols (Paris, 1913–1948), II, 3–91; Edgar H. Cohen, Mademoiselle Libertine: A Portrait of Ninonde Lanclos (Boston, MA, 1970), 62–70.

38See Wit Sivasriyananda, L’épicurisme de la Rochefoucauld (Paris, 1939); Antony McKenna, ‘Quelques aspects de la réception desMaximes en Angleterre’, in Images de la Rochefoucauld, edited by Jean Lafond and Jean Mesnard (Paris, 1984), 77–94. CompareVivien Thweatt, La Rochefoucauld and the Seventeenth-Century Concept of the Self (Geneva, 1980), esp. 10–14, 150–51.

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Providence sets in motion to engage the attention of individuals to the great object of the generalgood’.39 To Nihell, modern philosophers like Bernard Mandeville had erected systems which werebased on self-love but neglected providential design, leading to the erroneous conclusion that ‘ournotions of right and wrong are essentially variable, and to be determined only by opinion’, therebyrendering ‘nothing permanent in the sentiment of virtue’.40 Quoting from John Brown’s Thoughtson Civil Liberty, Nihell branded Mandeville, and the many modern thinkers that followed him, ashaving written with ‘a pen truly Epicurean’: ‘these seducing opinions’, Nihell cautioned his read-ers, ‘softly [… ] glide into the soul, and assume, in a little time, the appearance of reason’.41

Emphasising the irreligious implications of modern Epicureanism, this representation of the doc-trine as a seductive intoxicant cleared the ground for Nihell’s subtle reworking of a famous imagefrom the Epicurean poet Lucretius. At the opening of Book IV of De rerum natura, Lucretius likenedthe effect of his beautiful verse to that of the honey placed around the rim of the physician’s medicinecup: both were palliatives for the bitter but necessary medicine within. For Lucretius, Epicureanismwas the medicine that would cure the psychological intoxication brought on by religious supersti-tion.42 It was a typical rhetorical strategy of eighteenth-century critics instead to present Epicurean-ism itself as the poison. Playing further on the image, Nihell described De rerum natura as ‘a workreplete with impiety and beauty’ through which Lucretius ‘presented the intoxicating cup’ of Epicur-eanism to his Roman audience, who then ‘tasted, and drank deep of the delicious poison’.43 Nihellidentified Diderot, La Mettrie, and Helvétius as recent French thinkers to have presented the Epicur-ean poison in a modern cup. Changing the metaphor, he singled out their respective Pensées philo-sophiques (1746), L’homme machine (1747) and De l’esprit (1758) as works which ‘like the spider’sweb, seem calculated only for the poor and unmanly purpose of ensnaring flies, and taking advantageof the natural curiosity of men to betray them into the pernicious schemes of irreligion, or modernEpicureism’.44 Nihell signalled his further intellectual debt to John Brown by adding Mandeville andHobbes to this genealogy of modern thinkers whose works were all said to rest on the same Epicur-ean foundations and exhibit the ‘same general tendency to overthrow morality’.45 Brown’s Essays onthe Characteristics of the Earl of Shaftesbury had similarly ranked ‘Mr. Hobbes, Dr. Mandeville, andseveral French writers’ among the ‘modern Patronisers’ of ‘the Epicurean sect’.46

Identifications of Hobbes as an Epicurean in eighteenth-century France were just as oftenintended to highlight not his atheism but, rather, his denial of sociability. This emphasis was inlarge measure due to Jean Barbeyrac’s remarkably influential translation of Pufendorf’s Law ofNature. Pufendorf had criticised Hobbes for having refused the traditional distinction between com-mutative and distributive justice, advancing instead ‘one single notion of justice to comprehendevery kind; making it nothing but a keeping of faith and fulfilling of covenants’. As noted above,

39Laurence Nihell, Rational Self-Love; or, A Philosophical and Moral Essay on the Natural Principles of Happiness and Virtue. WithReflections on the Various Systems of Philosophers, Ancient and Modern, on This Subject (London, 1770), xxi (malignant wits),x–xii.

40Nihell, Rational Self-Love, xiii.41Nihell, Rational Self-Love, xiii. Cf. Brown, Thoughts on Civil Liberty, 110.42Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, 4.11–25, translated by Frank O. Copley (New York, NY, 1977), 83.43Nihell, Rational Self-Love, xiv. Admiration and even imitation of the formal properties of Lucretius’ poem did not, of course, entailany necessary adoption of its content: see Wolfgang Bernard Fleischmann, ‘The Debt of the Enlightenment to Lucretius’, Studieson Voltaire and the Eighteenth-Century, 25 (1963), 631–43.

44Nihell, Rational Self-Love, xxii. For Epicureanism in Diderot, see below. For La Mettrie, see James Steintrager, ‘Oscillate and Reflect:La Mettrie, Materialist Physiology, and the Revival of the Epicurean Canonic’, in Dynamic Reading: Studies in the Reception of Epi-cureanism, edited by Brooke Holmes and W. H. Shearin (Oxford, 2012), 162–98; Charles T. Wolfe, ‘A Happiness Fit for OrganicBodies: La Mettrie’s Medical Epicureanism’, in Epicurus in the Enlightenment, edited by Neven Leddy and Avi S. Lifschitz (Oxford,2009), 69–84. For Helvétius, see Pierre Force, ‘Helvétius as an Epicurean Political Theorist’, in Epicurus in the Enlightenment, editedby Leddy and Lifschitz, 105–18.

45Nihell, Rational Self-Love, xxiii. Nihell elsewhere identifies Hobbes as having taken up the ‘general principles of the Epicureanphilosophy [… ] with all their horrid train of errors, and impiety’; see Nihell, Rational Self-Love, 94.

46John Brown, Essays on the Characteristics of the Earl of Shaftesbury (London, 1750), 170. For Epicureanism in Mandeville, seeE. J. Hundert, The Enlightenment’s Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society (Cambridge, 1994), 43–50.

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he further claimed that this was a notion that Hobbes had ‘borrowed from Epicurus’.47 Moreover, inthe lengthy history of moral philosophy with which he introduced the text, Barbeyrac himself ident-ified Hobbes as an Epicurean for his having denied natural sociability. For him, Hobbes’ De cive con-tained many ‘dangerous errors’, all of which derived from his endeavouring to establish the ‘principleof Epicurus; which makes self-preservation and self-interest, to be the original causes of civil society’.Hobbes’ subsequent characterisation of the state of nature as a state of war and his solution of absol-ute sovereignty were erected on this Epicurean foundation.48

Barbeyrac’s account of Hobbes’ Epicureanism was repeated almost verbatim in the Encyclopédiearticle ‘Droit de la nature, ou droit naturel’. In the fifth volume, the jurist Antoine-Gaspard Boucherd’Argis followed Barbeyrac and wrote that Hobbes’s De cive was constructed on the foundation of‘the moral philosophy of Epicurus’—that ‘dangerous opinion [… ] that the primary purpose ofsocieties is self-preservation and private utility’. Just as Brown and Nihell would later do to Mande-ville, Boucher d’Argis identified Hobbes’ asserting the essential variability, subjective determinationand impermanence of moral values—that, again following Barbeyrac, ‘the will of the sovereigndefines not only justice or injustice, but also religion’—as cause for branding him Epicurean.49 Con-cluding his discussion with a mere dismissal of Hobbes’ account of the state of nature, Boucher d’Ar-gis refused even to deign to refute a ‘pernicious system’ founded on ‘easily recognised’ Epicureanerrors.50

The degree to which Pufendorf was able to overcome Hobbes’ denial of sociability with hisown principle of ‘socialitas’—and, indeed, whether his claims to have intended to do so wereany more than defensive coverings—is the subject of disagreement.51 Perhaps in part due to Bar-beyrac’s active translation methods,52 however, Diderot and his contemporaries saw Pufendorfand Hobbes as representing rival positions in modern natural law theory.53 Jean-Jacques Rous-seau, the thinker perhaps most interested in this tradition, described the bifurcation in his secondDiscourse:

Hobbes contends that man is naturally intrepid, and seeks only to attack, and to fight. An illustrious philoso-pher thinks, on the contrary, and Cumberland and Pufendorf also maintain, that nothing is as timid as man inthe state of nature, and that he is forever trembling, and ready to flee at the least noise that strikes him, at theleast movement he notices.54

Rousseau famously rejected both positions, insisting that the radical isolation and self-sufficiency ofthe state of nature meant that the combined effect of the physical sentiments of self-preservation and

47Samuel Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations, translated by Mr Carew, 8 vols (London, 1729), I, VII.13, 81; Samuel Pufendorf,Le droit de la nature et des gens, translated by Jean Barbeyrac (Paris, 1706), 113. Compare Epicurus, ‘Principal Doctrines’, 31, 33, inHellenistic Philosophy: Introductory Readings, translated by Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson (Indianapolis, IN, 1988), 28.

48Jean Barbeyrac, ‘Introduction’, in Pufendorf, Law of Nature and Nations, 67; Jean Barbeyrac, ‘Introduction’, in Pufendorf, Droit de lanature et des gens, lxxix.

49Antoine-Gaspard Boucher d’Argis, ‘Droit de la Nature, ou Droit naturel’, in Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, V, 131–34 (132–33). On Epicureanism in Hobbes, see Simon Friedle, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Reception of Early-Modern Epicureanism’,(Cambridge University, Ph.D. thesis, 2012).

50d’Argis, ‘Droit de la nature, ou droit naturel’, in Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, V, 132–33.51Compare Fiammetta Palladini, Samuel Pufendorf Discepolo di Hobbes (Bologna, 1990); Istvan Hont, ‘The Language of Sociabilityand Commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the Foundations of Smith’s “Four Stages” Theory’, in Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, edited by Anthony Pagden (Cambridge, 1986), 271–316; Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: PoliticalThought and the Intellectual Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford, 1999), 152; T. J. Hochstrasser, Natural Law Theories in theEarly Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1994).

52On Barbeyrac’s ‘active’ translation methods, see David Saunders, ‘The Natural Jurisprudence of Jean Barbeyrac: Translation as anArt of Political Adjustment’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 36 (2003), 473–90.

53Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, 1979).54Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men or Second Discourse, in Jean-JacquesRousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge, 1997), 135. ForRousseau and Epicureanism, see Jean Morel, ‘Recherches sur les sources du Discours de l’inégalité’, Annales de la Société J.-J.Rousseau, 5 (1909), 119–98. For Rousseau and sociability, see Michael Sonenscher, ‘Sociability, Perfectibility and the IntellectualLegacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, History of European Ideas, 41 (2015), 683–98.

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pity was sufficient to unite human beings without the need to introduce any notion of sociability.55 Inthe same volume of the Encyclopédie in which Boucher d’Argis’ article appeared, Rousseau’s friendDiderot accepted the conventional bifurcation and sided decisively with Pufendorf in a critique ofHobbes. The entry ‘Droit naturel’ contains a speech from a ‘violent interlocutor’, a Hobbesian natu-ral man who assumes the natural right of each individual ‘to determine the nature of justice andinjustice’. By expanding Pufendorf’s socialitas into the twin notions of a ‘society of mankind’ anda ‘general will’ of the human race, Diderot sought to refute the denial of sociability he and his con-temporaries associated with both Hobbes and Epicurus.56

Whereas Boucher d’Argis deployed Epicureanism to discuss sociability in natural law debatesabout human nature and the foundations of justice, however, Diderot significantly mentionedneither Epicurus nor Epicureanism in his parallel discussion of natural right. Indeed, Diderot’sown engagement with the doctrine was animated by questions concerning materialism, the immortalsoul, and the nature of divinity, rather than sociability. This is unsurprising both biographically,Diderot’s interest in materialism being well known,57 and contextually. In the late seventeenth cen-tury, the writings of English theologians and philosophers such as John Toland and Anthony Collinscrossed the channel and combined with continental advances in medical science to produce a mate-rialist vision of human nature that was ‘inextricably linked to thinking about the soul’.58 Moreover,when Diderot was writing at mid-century, suspicion over sensationalism and Locke’s ‘thinking mat-ter’ hypothesis was at a fever pitch.59 After a brief interval of relative calm after the initial furore sur-rounding Voltaire’s having introduced the hypothesis to France in the thirteenth of his Lettresphilosophiques, the controversy was rekindled when the Faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne passedthe Abbé de Prades’ thesis questioning Christ’s miracles and traditional Christian morality from sen-sationalist principles.60 The ‘de Prades affair’ combined with the Abbé de Condillac’s most recentarticulation of his radical sensationalism—in the Traité des sensations—to render the sensationalismof the Encyclopédists unacceptable to political and religious orthodoxy.61 As will be seen presently,Diderot took the need to include an entry on Epicureanism as an opportunity to intervene directly inthese controversies.

Epicureanism was thus not a univocal concept in eighteenth-century France. As demonstrated bythe foregoing survey, the self-interested pursuit of pleasure and other ideas associated with Epicurusand the Epicurean tradition were with almost equal regularity taken to signify a denial of either socia-bility, or the immaterial soul and god’s providence. Whilst these were understood as different aspects

55Rousseau, Second Discourse, in Early Political Writings, 127, 149. Compare Robert Wokler, ‘Rousseau’s Pufendorf: Natural Law andthe Foundations of Commercial Society’, History of Political Thought, 15 (1994), 373–402; Gabriella Silvestrini, ‘Rousseau, Pufen-dorf and the Eighteenth-Century Natural Law Tradition’, History of European Ideas, 36 (2010), 280–301.

56Denis Diderot, ‘Droit naturel’, in Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, V, 115–16. See Jacques Proust, ‘La contributionde Diderot à l’Encyclopédie et les théories du droit naturel’, Annales historiques de la révolution française, 173 (1963), 257–86. Cf.Céline Spector, ‘De Diderot à Rousseau: La double crise du droit naturel moderne’, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contract social ouEssai sur la forme de la République: manuscrit de Genève: Textes et Commentaires, edited by Blaise Bachofen and others (Paris,2012), 141–53.

57See Annie Ibrahim, Diderot: un matérialisme éclectique (Paris, 2010).58Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford, 2008), 3. Thomson is critical ofthe focus on Epicureanism and/or the libertin tradition for often yielding a narrowly Franco-centric story of ‘secularisation’ thatoccludes the importance of the ‘echoes’ of English theological debates; see Thomson, Bodies of Thought, 138. While the sourcesshe discusses are different, they are nevertheless complementary to those ancient or early modern Epicurean ones consideredhere. Cf. Gabriel Bonno, La culture et la civilisation britanniques devant l’opinion française de la paix d’Utrecht aux Lettres philoso-phiques (Philadelphia, PA, 1948).

59John Yolton, Locke and French Materialism (Oxford, 1991). On Locke’s reception in France prior to Voltaire’s Lettres philosophique,see Gabriel Bonno, ‘The Diffusion and Influence of Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” in France Before Voltaire’s“Lettres philosophiques”’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 91 (1947), 421–25. Cf. S. J. Savonius, ‘Locke in French:The Du gouvernement civil of 1691 and Its Readers’, The Historical Journal, 47 (2004), 45–79.

60See John S. Spink, ‘L’Abbé philosophe: l’affaire de J.-M. de Prades’, Dix-huitième siècle, 3 (1971), 145–80; Jeffrey D. Burson, The Riseand Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (NotreDame, 2010).

61For Condillac and Epicureanism, see Avi Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment: The Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century(Oxford, 2012), 16–39. Though Condillac’s earlier Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (1746) was arguably more radicalfor endeavouring explicitly to go beyond Locke, it occasioned somewhat less controversy than the 1754 Traité.

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of a coherent doctrine, eighteenth-century writers typically used the very term ‘Epicurean’ itself torefer, in the first instance, to one over the other. Recognising this complexity suggests that anystraightforward identification of ‘the Enlightenment’ as ‘Epicurean’ should be approached withsome caution. However, rather than present a merely sceptical conclusion, the following sectiondemonstrates that an awareness of this complexity can provide a foundation for fruitful engagementwith particular eighteenth-century texts. Indeed, such awareness allows us more clearly to under-stand what, precisely, Epicureanism does in and for specific eighteenth-century thinkers’ interven-tions. It is therefore not despite but precisely because of the equivocal nature of Epicureanism ineighteenth-century France that this article now turns to Diderot’s Encyclopédie entry ‘Epicuréismeou Epicurisme’.62

3. Diderot on ‘Epicuréisme’

The human soul is corporeal.63

Also published in the fifth volume of the Encyclopédie in 1755, Diderot’s entry on Epicureanism wasa direct intervention in contemporary theological debates. This section compares the ‘Epicuréisme’article with Diderot’s source material to demonstrate his controversial intention and position on theimmortal soul and a providential god. As we will see, Diderot actively edited the source from whichhe transcribed the majority of his entry—Johann Jakob Brucker’s own account of ‘the philosophy ofEpicurus’. In doing so, he foregrounded Epicurean materialism aggressively to conclude that ‘thehuman soul is corporeal’. Consideration of the entry on Epicurus in Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire his-toire et critique further illustrates his polemical intentions, which were readily apparent to his earlycritical readers.

Diderot’s relationship to Epicureanism is so considerable that a comprehensive treatment isbeyond the scope of this investigation. As J. W. Schmidt has shown, the influence of Lucretius inparticular was not restricted to simply impelling Diderot’s reflections upon the grand systemic phi-losophical questions of materialism and determinism but, rather, affected every facet of his work.64

Indeed, Moishe Black’s detailed studies of Diderot’s borrowings from Lucretius have illustrated the‘deep congruity of outlook and intent’ between the two authors—‘when Diderot was with Lucretius’,Black writes, ‘he was with a kindred spirit’.65 The very aims of the Encyclopédie project itself can beseen to embody the Epicurean belief that the careful study of nature ‘leads man’, in Diderot’s words,‘to knowledge which will ensure peace in his soul, frees the mind from all vain terrors, raises him tothe level of the gods and returns him to the only real reasons that he has to fulfil his duties’.66 Ofcourse, we have already seen Diderot branded an Epicurean for his earlier Pensées philosophiques,an accusation launched by Laurence Nihell in his defence of providence. Moreover, in the criticalreaction to the Encyclopédie and the ‘Epicuréisme’ article in particular, we will see another religiouscritic, Abraham Joseph Chaumeix, brand the Pensées an Epicurean pamphlet.

Diderot was given a Jesuit education and was received into the clerical order in 1726 but, by thetime he wrote his Pensées philosophiques in 1746, he had come to self-conceive as a deist. He pub-lished the work anonymously to protect himself from the storm of criticism he quite rightly

62For recent treatments of Diderot’s entry, see Natania Meeker, ‘Sexing Epicurean materialism in Diderot’, in Epicurus in the Enlight-enment, edited by Leddy and Lifschitz, 83–100 (91–94); Thomas M. Kavanagh, Enlightened Pleasures: Eighteenth-Century Franceand the New Epicureanism (New Haven, CT, 2010), 4–6.

63Diderot, ‘Epicuréisme ou Epicurisme’, in Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, V, 782.64Johan Werner Schmidt, ‘Diderot and Lucretius: The De rerum natura and Lucretius’ Legacy in Diderot’s Scientific, Aesthetic, andEthical Thought’, SVEC, 208 (1982), 183–294. Cf. Jeffrey Mehlman, Cataract, a Study in Diderot (Middletown, CT, 1979).

65Moishe Black, ‘Lucretius tells Diderot: Here’s the Plan’, Diderot Studies, 28 (2000), 39–58 (40). Cf. Moishe Black, ‘Lucretius’s VenusMeets Diderot’, Diderot Studies, 27 (1997), 29–40. Compare the more general but particularly vehement studies by Catholic his-torian Casimir-Alexandre Fusil, ‘Lucrèce et les philosophes du XVIIIe siècle’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 35 (1928), 194–210; Casimir-Alexandre Fusil, ‘Lucrèce et les littérateurs, poètes et artistes du XVIIIe siècle’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France,37 (1930), 161–76.

66Diderot, ‘Epicuréisme ou Epicurisme’, in Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, V, 783.

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anticipated to attend its many heterodox sections. Of these, the theological dialogue in ‘Pensée XV’ isof particular relevance for our purposes. For not only does Diderot there address the key points ofcontemporary religious controversy but, crucially, the monologue from a hypothetical atheist withwhich it begins articulates a distinctly Epicurean critique of orthodox belief. Diderot’s atheist deniesoutright both the existence of God and creation, and he is sceptical about the immortality of the soul.Even if some form of intelligent design were to be granted in the physical universe, ‘the confusions inthe moral order’, he argues, negate providence. Finally, these disputes over the immortal soul and theintelligent production of a providentially conserved world result from ignorance of the nature ofmotion: simply ‘because I do not see how motion could have caused this universe’, the atheist argues,‘it is ridiculous to solve the difficulty by supposing the existence of a being of whom I can have no realconception’.67

Writing as the atheist’s interlocutor, Diderot offered no immediate defence of theism, orthodox orotherwise. Instead, he argued for the necessity of moving beyond mere philosophical argument inrefuting the atheists’ case. It was not ‘the vain speculations of metaphysics’ but the discoveries ofNewton and others that had left materialism, ‘that dangerous hypothesis [… ] tottering at the pre-sent day’. Diderot therefore claimed that ‘the subtleties of ontology have at best made sceptics, and itwas reserved for the knowledge of nature to make true deists’.68 Natural mechanism afforded evenmore conclusive proof of intelligent design than did traditional arguments on the basis of man’srationality, which were susceptible to scepticism insofar as external actions could convey only anapparent operation of reason; they certainly could not show that it had been providentiallyendowed.69

While Diderot drew distinctions between the deist who ‘maintains the existence of a God, theimmortality of the soul and its consequences’, the sceptic who ‘has not decided on these points’,and ‘the atheist [who] denies them’, he knew that his orthodox readers would see little more thanvariations on the same irreligious theme.70 In ‘Pensée LVIII’, he wrote:

I know the zealots well, and they are quick to take alarm. If they once make up their minds that this work con-tains something repugnant to their ideas, I shall expect all the calumnies they have spread about a hundredbetter men than myself. If they only call me a deist and a wretch, I shall get off lightly.71

Thus, after linking the Pensées with the great modern names in a tradition of religiously suspect phi-losophers, Diderot offered an explicit profession of faith as a precautionary measure:

[The zealots] have long since damned Descartes, Montaigne, Locke and Bayle; and I hope that they will damnmany others. I tell them that I do not pretend to be a better man nor a better Christian than most of these phi-losophers. I was born in the Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, and I whole-heartedly submit to itsdecisions. I wish to die in the faith of my fathers, and I respect it as far as is possible for a man who hasnever held immediate intercourse with the Deity, and has never witnessed a miracle. That is my confessionof faith, and I am persuaded that they will find fault with it, though perhaps not a man among them canmake a better.72

The profession’s dubious sincerity was evident—the Pensées was burnt, along with La Mettrie’sHistoire naturelle de l’âme, by the Paris censors for having been found ‘contrary to religion and togood morals’.73 Only the book’s anonymous publication allowed Diderot to avoid imprisonment.

By 1749, a mere three years later, Diderot was emboldened, and no longer concerned to exercisesuch caution. Indeed, his Lettre sur les aveugles [Letter on the Blind] contains an eloquent refutation

67Denis Diderot, Diderot’s Early Philosophical Writings, translated by Margaret Jourdain (London, 1916), 33.68Diderot, Early Philosophical Writings, 34–35.69Diderot, Early Philosophical Writings, 34–35, 38.70Diderot, Early Philosophical Writings, 40, 63.71Diderot, Early Philosophical Writings, 33.72Diderot, Early Philosophical Writings, 63.73Parlement de Paris, ‘Arrest de la cour du parlement, qui condamne deux livres intitulez: l’un, Histoire naturelle de l’ame; l’autre,Pensées philosophiques, à être lacerez ûlez par l’exécuteur de la haute-justice, comme scandaleux, contraires à la religion, & auxbonnes mœurs’, 7 July 1746.

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of this very same deist position, without an equivalent profession and with Diderot’s name attached;he was famously imprisoned at Vincennes for three months as a result.74 Late in the Letter, the cler-gyman Gervase Holmes visits the blind mathematician Saunderson on his deathbed, and the twocharacters debate the existence of God. Holmes begins by ‘haranguing on the wonders of nature’.Of course, the blind Saunderson has never witnessed the ‘magnificent spectacle’ of nature invokedby Holmes and, even with his tactile perception, the mechanical functioning of his organs ‘doesnot appear so admirable’ as it does to the sighted Holmes.75 Diderot then had Saunderson articulatethe crucial sceptical objection: ‘even if the animal mechanism were as perfect as you maintain [… ]what relation is there between such mechanism and a supremely intelligent Being?’ The ‘astonish-ment’ with which Holmes experiences nature’s mechanism, Diderot had Saunderson argue, resultsfrom the tendency ‘to treat as miraculous everything which strikes you as beyond your own powers’.Following Lucretius and Epicurus, such customary recourse to a divine intelligence is derided as thework of ignorance, vanity and pride, not philosophy.76

Having failed to erode Saunderson’s Epicurean-tinged scepticism with this appeal to nature’sdivine mechanism, Holmes then reverts to arguments from authority. Thus, in his second attemptto persuade Saunderson, Holmes ‘availed himself of his good opinion of his probity and of the abil-ities of Newton, Leibniz [and] Clarke’, who had discerned an intelligent creator through the empiri-cal observation of natural phenomena. But Saunderson refuses to accept such an argument fromauthority, no matter how great its source. He could, he says, go so far as to take the word of Holmesand his illustrious authorities on ‘the present state of the universe’ and all its ‘admirable design andorder’; however, he insists on keeping ‘the liberty of thinking’ as he pleases ‘on its ancient and primi-tive state’, to which no authority could possibly bear witness.77 In the first place, it could not be guar-anteed that this order had always persisted. Crucially for our purposes, in positing Saunderson’salternative hypothesis, Diderot drew directly on the proto-evolutionary arguments of Lucretius:

I might affirm that such an one had no stomach, another no intestines, that some which seemed to deserve along duration from their possession of a stomach, palate and teeth came to an end owing to some defect in theirheart or lungs; that monsters mutually destroyed one another; that all the defective combinations of matter dis-appeared, and that those only survived whose mechanism was not defective in any important particular andwho were able to support and perpetuate themselves.78

In the second place, even if one were to allow that men had always existed in their present state andthat the mechanistic laws discovered by Newton had governed the world since its origin, what ofother possible worlds? In a passage with further distinctly Lucretian echoes, Diderot had Saundersonask:

How many faulty and incomplete worlds have been dispersed and perhaps form again, and are dispersed atevery instant in remote regions of space which I cannot touch nor you behold, but where motion continuesand will continue to combine masses of matter, until they have found some arrangement in which they mayfinally persevere.79

Finally, Diderot had Saunderson suggest that the human perspective was too limited to concludefrom the appearance of stability and regularity that the world was eternal—this would be to ‘measureduration by your own existence’. Indeed, rather than a unity in stasis, the world is ‘a complex, subjectto cycles of change, all of which show a continual tendency to destruction; a rapid succession ofbeings that appear one by one, flourish, and disappear’. The world was, according to Epicurus,

74For an extensive and eloquent treatment of Diderot’s Letter, see Kate E. Tunstall, Blindness and Enlightenment: An Essay. With aNew Translation of Diderot’s Letter on the Blind and La Mothe Le Vayer’s ‘Of a Man Born Blind’ (London, 2011), esp. 115–18 forDiderot’s and Saunderson’s Epicureanism.

75Diderot, Early Philosophical Writings, 109.76Diderot, Early Philosophical Writings, 109–10.77Diderot, Early Philosophical Writings, 111.78Diderot, Early Philosophical Writings, 111–112.79Diderot, Early Philosophical Writings, 113.

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Lucretius, and Diderot’s Saunderson, ‘a merely transitory symmetry and momentary appearance oforder’.80

At least two notable conclusions follow from this very brief interlude on two examples of Dider-ot’s early writings. First, though this list is far from exhaustive, we have isolated at least six distinctissues of active theological controversy in mid-century Paris: the existence of God; the act of creation;the spirituality of the soul; the nature of motion; providence; and multiple worlds. Second, we haveseen how these components were linked together systematically and, crucially, that intervening inthis debate and over these particular issues was an abiding concern of Diderot’s in his pre-Encyclo-pédie phase. It is also clear that Diderot deployed arguments he derived from Lucretius to do so. Hav-ing established these details, we are now in a position to examine the content of his 1755‘Epicuréisme’ article in detail. In doing so, we will see how Epicureanism was a threat to their con-tinued acceptance as philosophical principles.

As with his relationship to Epicureanism, so is the complex nature of Diderot’s role as editor ofthe Encyclopédie beyond the scope of this discussion.81 What concerns us here, though, is Diderot’swidely-acknowledged borrowing from Johann Jakob Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae in com-posing his various articles on the history of philosophy, himself acting as translator into French fromthe original Latin and excerpting long passages verbatim. Diderot made modifications both to thestructural presentation of Brucker’s article and to more technical points of interpretation.82 Mostimportantly, he deliberately and explicitly foregrounded the Epicurean account of the contemporarytheological controversies over the material composition of the gods and the soul, placing them underthe new heading ‘On Theology’. A detailed comparison of Diderot’s entry with his source material inBrucker elucidates the unique contributions of Diderot’s entry and, thereby, the reception of Epicur-eanism in his immediate context.

Both Brucker and Diderot introduced the Epicurean sect as the least understood and most slan-dered in the history of philosophy. This distorting history of reception required that Brucker pre-sent the doctrines of Epicurus ‘with all the accuracy and diligence’ possible so that ‘the reader maybe enabled to form a judgment for himself’.83 Diderot echoed this rationale but went further, pla-cing Epicurus’ doctrines in the mouth of the philosopher himself, writing ‘it is he who is going tospeak in the rest of our article’.84 Moreover, whereas Brucker had clarified that many of Epicurus’followers had disgraced their sect through licentiousness, Diderot’s distancing strategy permittedhim to claim that all the ‘Epicureans were exceptionally honourable people who had the worstkind of reputation’.85 With this rhetorical strategy, Diderot attempted to protect himself fromaccusations of personal adherence to or sympathies with such statements and the doctrines hewent on to adumbrate. The strong claims that Diderot presumed himself able to make take onnew resonance when viewed in the light of the valuable history of modern Epicureanism that con-cludes his entry. Once again, Diderot began by following Brucker; but he borrowed relatively spar-ingly from the detailed biography of Epicurus, and instead devoted more space to recentdevelopments in the Epicurean revival. He characterised these developments as undeniably French,presenting Gassendi in proto-nationalistic terms as ‘a man who did the most honour to Philosophyand the nation’ by his efforts. Indeed, Diderot’s praise that ‘there was never a philosopher who wasa better humanist, nor a humanist a better philosopher’ seems wildly exaggerated in relation to

80Diderot, Early Philosophical Writings, 113–14. Compare Lucretius, Nature of Things, 5.783–925, 131–34. For interpretation, see Gor-don Campbell, Lucretius on Creation and Evolution: A Commentary on De rerum natura, 5.772–1104 (Oxford, 2003).

81See Jacques Proust, Diderot et l’Encyclopédie (Paris, 1967); John Lough, Essays on the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert(Oxford, 1968).

82Compare Diderot, ‘Epicuréisme ou Epicurisme’, in Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, V; Johann Jakob Brucker, His-toria critica philosophiae (Leipzig, 1742–1744). In what follows, I have had recourse to the first English translation: Johann JakobBrucker, The History of Philosophy, from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Present Century; Drawn Up from Brucker’s Historiacritica philosophiae, translated by William Enfield (London, 1791).

83Brucker, History, 446 (cf. 451).84Diderot, ‘Epicuréisme ou Epicurisme’, in Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, V, 779.85Brucker, History, 456; Diderot, ‘Epicuréisme ou Epicurisme’, in Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, V, 779.

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Brucker’s more modest mention of Gassendi’s ‘uncommon abilities’.86 After referring briefly toBernier, Saint-Évremond, and Rochefoucauld, among others, the article finishes with the resound-ing conclusion that ‘Epicureanism has never had more radiance than in France, and above allduring the last century’.87

As mentioned above, in 1755 Paris the denial of providence and the belief in a material soul werethe two most hotly contested of all the aspects of Epicureanism. The article first engages the Epicur-ean treatment of the soul and providence directly in its account of plants and animals. In concludingthis section of the article, Diderot followed Brucker to treat Epicurus’ famous explanation of bodyparts and organs, though his formulation was more succinct and likely more offensive to orthodoxsensibility: ‘the eyes have not been made in order to see, nor feet in order to walk: but the animal hadfeet, and it walked; eyes, and it saw’.88 This non-teleological explanation went directly against theorthodox understanding of the functions, capacities and faculties of the human being as providen-tially endowed gifts of a creating God. These aspects were inextricably linked to the Epicurean treat-ment of both the nature and the condition of the gods, precisely the point at which the concern withsociability and theology most frequently converged.

In the entry on Epicurus in his Dictionnaire histoire et critique—which both Brucker andDiderot consulted when composing their articles—Pierre Bayle wrote that Epicurus taught rever-ence of the gods because it was right for human beings to ‘respect and honour all that is great andperfect’.89 The critical idea here is ‘perfection’. Because the gods are perfect beings, it follows forEpicurus that they must be perfectly happy—that is, that their condition must be one of perfectfelicity. And for this felicity to be truly perfect, it must be constant and unalterable. As providentialgovernance through miraculous intervention in the affairs of the world would require an alterationof the gods’ condition of perfect felicity, ‘Epicurus confined the divine nature to a state of inactivity[and] took from it the government of the world’. For this reason, Bayle concluded, Epicurus‘neither expected any good, nor feared any ill’ from the gods, and taught his followers to adoptthe same position.90

God’s providential direction of temporal affairs is obviously a central principle of Christian doc-trine. Providence, though, has never been simply a theological problem. Or, put differently, provi-dence has always been a theological problem with significant ethical and political implications. AsVoltaire noted, the ‘moral question’ of the possibility of a society of atheists was ‘set in action byBayle’ in the latter’s 1682 Various Thoughts on the Occasion of a Comet. There, Bayle assertedthat ‘as to manners and civil life’, a ‘commonwealth of atheists’ would be no different than a ‘com-monwealth of pagans’. A society of atheists would ‘require very severe laws, and very well executed’,but this was true of every society. Indeed, Bayle continued, it was not religious belief but human lawsthat were ‘for the most part the base of human virtue’.91 Bayle reiterated this claim in the Diction-naire by holding up Epicurus’ philosophical school in Greece as the perfect example of just such awell-ordered community of those who denied providence. Bayle referenced both Epicurus’ rejectionof the community of goods and the Epicurean account of friendship to directly challenge the notionthat believers were more sociable than atheists: ‘whereas the most devout sects were full of quarrels,and divided into parties, that of Epicurus enjoyed a profound peace. There they followed withoutdissensions and contradictions the doctrine of the founder’.92

86Diderot, ‘Epicuréisme ou Epicurisme’, in Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, V, 782; Brucker, History, 466.87Diderot, ‘Epicuréisme ou Epicurisme’, in Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, V, 785.88Diderot, ‘Epicuréisme ou Epicurisme’, in Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, V, 782. Compare Brucker, History, 469.89For Diderot and Bayle, see Pierre Rétat, Le Dictionnaire de Bayle et la lutte philosophique au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1971), 385–403.90Pierre Bayle, ‘Epicurus’, in The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr. Bayle, translated by Pierre Des Maizeaux (London, 1734), 780.91Pierre Bayle, Miscellaneous Reflections, Occasion’d by the Comet which Appeared in December 1680, 2 vols (London, 1708), II, 329,334. See Walter Rex, Essays on Pierre Bayle and Religious Controversy (The Hague, 1965), esp. 3–74; Eric Jorink, ‘Comets in Context:Some Thoughts on Bayle’s Pensées diverses’, in Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), le philosophe de Rotterdam: Philosophy, Religion andReception, edited by Wiep van Bunge and Hans Bots (Leiden, 2008), 51–67.

92Bayle, ‘Epicurus’, in Dictionary Historical, 776, citing Cicero, De finibus, I.20. On Bayle and Epicureanism, see Robertson, Case for theEnlightenment, 216ff. On atheism and sociability in Bayle, see Elisabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, 2 vols (La Haye, 1964), II, 101–25.

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In one of his final notes, Bayle clearly explained how the doctrine of providence was inextricablylinked to the doctrine of creation. If it were once admitted that God did not create matter, it wasabsurd to maintain that he had formed the world, preserving and directing it through providence.As such, any talk of Epicurean orthodoxy was a ‘bastard and monstrous production’. Because beliefin providence required belief in creation in this way, it was only scripture—revelation—that couldsecure belief in ‘the providence and perfection of God’. And from revelation followed ‘the most sub-lime and most fundamental doctrines’ of the Christian faith.93 For Bayle, then, the refutation of Epi-cureanism rested solely on scriptural authority. Thus, in addition to advancing his heterodoxposition on the possibility of a society of atheists, Bayle’s entry provided further ammunition forsceptics with what superficially appears as a critical commentary: once revelation was questioned,he made clear, Epicureanism was philosophically defensible.94

Brucker’s articulation of this connection between Epicurus’ denial of providence and his account ofthe gods’ perfect felicity was more fulsome than was Bayle’s, and he concluded it with a scathing com-mentary.95 In addition to the religious ambivalence of his discussion of the philosophical status of rev-elation, Bayle took the observance of local religious customs and submission to sovereigns good and badas ‘a great commendation of Epicurus’ piety’.96 Brucker, on the other hand, claimed that the charge ofimpiety launched by Epicurus’ legions of detractors ‘certainly admits of no refutation’. Indeed, itmay notgo far enough—for there was ‘some reason’ to suspect that Epicurus’ teaching on the gods was simply amercenary ploy to deflect the criticism that would attend an outright avowal of his evident atheism.97

Indeed, Brucker’s commentary is consistent in its explicit criticisms of Epicureanism, with the greatestdefect being identified as its conception of the gods’ condition of detached tranquillity, which ‘falls infi-nitely short of the true conception of Deity, as the Intelligent Creator and Governor of the world’.98

Unsurprisingly, Diderot can oncemore be seen to have followed Brucker’smodel in his articulation ofthe connection between the necessarily perfect felicity of the gods and the Epicurean denial of providence.If Diderot had been inclined to comment on these aspects, thiswas the appropriate point at which to havedone so. But the article is striking for the complete absence of original material here. He did not offer any‘profession’ analogous to that the Pensées; nor did he ape Bayle and offer any recourse to revelation.Instead, he in fact removed all of Brucker’s critical commentary, and left alone the passages on the con-dition of the gods and the denial of their providential production and conservation of the world.99 Dider-ot’s entry is audacious in this respect and, aswewill see, it was subject to violent attacks as a result. Inmanycases, then, Diderot’s innovation came more by way of subtraction than addition. But if Diderot wasclearly doing something unique in composing his entry, his real novelty was not simply of this negativevariety. This is best seen in his account of the material composition of the gods and the individual soul.

Bayle had commented that Epicurus’ teaching on the nature of the gods was ‘most impious’ andisolated that impiety in the denial of God’s providence. He continued to the crucial point:

authors disagree about the question, whether he taught that the Gods were composed of atoms? If he had taughtsuch a thing, he had robbed the divine nature of its eternity and indestructibility; a monstrous and most blas-phemous doctrine! But which I think cannot be charged upon him.100

Bayle’s stated rationale for this conclusion, supported by reference to Cicero, is that Epicurusinstructed his pupils to meditate on the ‘immortality and felicity of God’. On Bayle’s account,given that Epicurus taught both that all bodies decompose on death and that the gods were immortal,he did not believe that the gods were composed of atoms.101

93Bayle, ‘Epicurus’, in Dictionary Historical, 786–87.94Bayle, ‘Epicurus’, in Dictionary Historical, 789.95Brucker, History, 473.96Bayle, ‘Epicurus’, in Dictionary Historical, 784, cf. 785.97Brucker, History, 451–5298Brucker, History, 473–74.99Diderot, ‘Epicuréisme ou Epicurisme’, in Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, V, 782.100Bayle, ‘Epicurus’, in Dictionary Historical, 779–80, citing Cicero, On the Nature of The Gods, I.30101Bayle, ‘Epicurus’, in Dictionary Historical, 780.

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For his part, Brucker noted Epicurus’ contention that the gods were not to be understood as ‘grossbodies’ of flesh and blood, but rather as ‘thin ethereal substances’, with a ‘peculiar nature, incapableof decay’.102 Moreover, once more in contrast to Bayle’s sympathetic reasoning, Brucker offered alengthy excoriating commentary:

Finding it wholly inconsistent with his fundamental principles to suppose the existence of immaterial beings,yet wishing to ascribe to the gods an incorporeal nature, he seems to have had recourse to an abstract notion of apeculiar substance, in the form of man, of such tenuity as to be intangible, indivisible, and indissoluble; andwhich he supposed to be endued with perception and reason. What this peculiar nature of Epicurus’ divinitieswas, which was not a body, yet was like a body, we own ourselves unable to explain. The truth seems to havebeen, that Epicurus, reduced to inextricable difficulties by the absurdity of his system, that he might not whollydiscard the idea of divinity, had recourse to the common asylum of ignorance, words without meaning.103

Crucially, Diderot chose to isolate precisely this discussion of the composition of the gods and toemphasise its importance by placing it under its own heading of ‘On Theology’. There, Diderot sum-marised the dispute with a rhetorical question posed, recall, by Epicurus himself:

After having established the principle that there is nothing in nature but matter and the void, what shall wethink of the gods? Shall we abandon our philosophy and submit to popular opinions, or shall we say thatthe gods are corporeal beings?104

To state otherwise would, as Brucker had noted, have been a glaring inconsistency. Thus, Diderotconcluded that, while the bodies of the gods are not like those of men, they are nonetheless composedof atoms, though in ‘a similar but superior combination’ that gave them ‘a special nature’ knowingneither change nor action.105 With this subtlety, Diderot effectively disagreed with Bayle. Once more,the point of his rhetorical strategy is illustrated, for by having Epicurus speak directly to his audience,Diderot presumed to have absolved himself of the responsibility of issuing a commentary of Bruck-er’s sort. He can therefore be seen as attempting to present one of the most heterodox components ofthe Epicurean philosophy in such a way as to make it appear reasonably benign.

Discussions of the gods’ materiality functioned as a powerful analogy for the materiality of theindividual soul—both were particular instances of the general materialist denial of spiritual sub-stance. When Diderot turned to discuss the soul, he once again diverged from Bayle, whose com-mentary had here too been highly critical.106 But once more, Diderot offered no qualifyingcommentary: ‘the human soul is corporeal’, he forthrightly asserted, and those who argue the con-trary, ‘do not hear themselves’ and ‘speak without having ideas’. He followed Brucker in noting thephilosophical difficulty of the debate as essentially the problem of individual human action: if thesoul was incorporeal, ‘it could neither touch nor be touched, and consequently could neither actnor suffer’.107 And if the soul was not the cause of human action, it was unclear if man could inany sense be said to determine his own actions.

But Diderot went further, polemically asserting that ‘recourse to some immaterial principle, toexplain this action, does not resolve the difficulty, it is only to transport it to another object’.108 Onesubtle substance, widely dispersed throughout the body, the soul exercises its sensible capacity throughthe bodily organs, so that sensation is a result of the union of body and soul. For Diderot, l’ésprit is butthe ‘most subtle’ part of the soul.Diffused in the substance of the soul andunitedwith it just as the soul isdiffused throughout the body and unitedwith it, themind is that portion of the soul in which resides, inBrucker’s terms, ‘the power of thinking, judging, and determining’. It is through the soul that the indi-vidual experiences the sensations of pleasure and pain, which subsequently produce, respectively, the

102Brucker, History, 473.103Brucker, History, 474–75.104Diderot, ‘Epicuréisme ou Epicurisme’, in Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, V, 783.105Diderot, ‘Epicuréisme ou Epicurisme’, in Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, V, 783.106Bayle, ‘Epicurus’, in Dictionary Historical, 779. Compare Brucker, History, 475.107Diderot, ‘Epicuréisme ou Epicurisme’, in Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, V, 782.108Diderot, ‘Epicuréisme ou Epicurisme’, in Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, V, 782.

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desires and aversions that precipitate action: ‘to live’, says Diderot’s Epicurus, ‘is to feel these alternativemovements’.109 The Epicurean account of themateriality of the soul was thus understood to have directbearing on individual free will, with the subsequent implications on moral and political notions ofresponsibility and consent. So, too, were the epistemological aspects of Epicureanism understood tohave had implications for the philosophical understanding of individual sensation and action.

Diderot’s critics quickly homed in on the article, and the staunch Jansenist priest Abraham-Joseph Chaumeix easily saw past his rhetorical ploys.110 The first and one of the most vociferouscritics of the Encyclopédie, Chaumeix released eight volumes of his Préjugés légitimes contre l’Ency-clopédie between November 1758 and January 1760. Launched as it was in the context of the con-troversy surrounding the publication of De l’esprit, it is unsurprising that Chaumeix singled outthis particular article for attack.111 Indeed, in his introductory remarks Chaumeix emphasisedthat the scandalous remarks in Helvétius’ book were merely developments of the metaphysicaland moral doctrines that had been promulgated for years in the Encyclopédie.112 Addressing Dider-ot’s attempted subterfuge, Chaumeix saw clearly that Epicurus had been introduced to represent theEncyclopédists themselves, sarcastically saying that the ‘Epicurus’ that speaks in the article had beenso well instructed by Diderot that ‘we only hear him recite the sentiments and almost the same wordsof the author of l’interpretation de la nature, a collection of nonsense’.113 Diderot’s neglecting clearlyto distinguish his own views from Epicurus meant that ‘Epicurus is here only a straw-man’, and theexpressions placed in his mouth ‘feel much more like Diderotisme than Epicureanism’. To Chau-meix, it was obvious that the Encyclopédists were ‘more Epicurean than Epicurus himself’.114

Another critic to see past Diderot’s ploy was Jean-Nicolas Hayer, an Augustinian friar and editorof La religion vengée, a multi-volume orthodox defence against impiety devoting three volumes toEncyclopédie criticism in 1760. In contrast to Chaumeix’s passionate and often distracted critique,La religion vengée illustrates clearly what its more astute readers found objectionable in the Encyclo-pédie. Crucially for our purposes, they isolated precisely that section we saw that Diderot fore-grounded from Brucker. The discussion of the formation and composition of the gods in the ‘OnTheology’ section, they wrote, reveals Epicurus and his apologist Diderot to be united by an

impious and extravagant mockery: Gods formed by chance! Gods composed only of atoms! [… ] What weadmire is that such fools, such rogues can have apologists in this century of light, and in men who believe them-selves to bring it to all minds.115

Further objection was raised over Diderot’s praise of Gassendi as the father of modern Epicureanism.While both Gassendi and Diderot made Epicurus speak for himself, there was the crucial differencethat Diderot ‘only has him speak to applaud his impieties’, whereas Gassendi did so ‘to combat it andinspire with its horror’. Because Diderot was thus seen as adopting ‘with neither limitation nor reserve’all of Epicurus’ teachings, he was seen as a ‘shameless impostor’ for having claimed, in the Pensées, tohave been a Christian because it was reasonable to be so.116 Diderot’s ‘Epicuréisme’ article, then, wasboth intended and received as a direct intervention in themost important theological debates in 1755Paris.

109Diderot, ‘Epicuréisme ou Epicurisme’, in Encyclopédie, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert, V, 782. Compare Brucker,History, 469–71.110On Jansenists and Jesuits as critics of the Encyclopèdie, compare: Monique Cottret, Jansénismes et lumières: pour une autre XVIIIe

siècle (Paris, 1998), 51–86; Didier Masseau, Les enemis des philosophes: l’antiphilosophie au temps des Lumières (Paris, 2000), 19–198; Dale van Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757–1765 (New Haven, CT, 1975).

111See D. W. Smith, Helvétius: A Study in Persecution (Oxford, 1965), 78–79. Cf. Masseau, Les enemis des philosophes, 131–41.112Abraham-Joseph Chaumeix, Préjugés légitimes contre l’Encyclopédie; et Essai de Refutation de ce Dictionnaire, 8 vols, 1758–1760,

(Brussels, 1758), I, ii–xii. For Chaumeix’s concern with Epicureanism, see Neven Leddy, ‘Adam Smith’s Critique of EnlightenmentEpicureanism’, in Epicurus in the Enlightenment, edited by Leddy and Lifschitz, 185–203 (188–90).

113Chaumeix, Préjugés légitimes contre l’Encyclopédie, II, 208. The Epigraph to Diderot’s 1751 Interpretation of Nature was taken fromLucretius’ account of vision; see Russell Goulbourne, ‘Diderot and the Ancients’, in New Essays on Diderot, edited by James Fowler(Cambridge, 2011), 13–30 (18–20).

114Chaumeix, Préjugés légitimes contre l’Encyclopédie, II, 213, 217, 223.115La religion vengée ou, Réfutation des auteurs impies, edited by Jean-Nicolas Hayer (Paris, 1760), X, 280–83.116La religion vengée, edited by Hayer, X, 285, 295, 301.

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When both Chaumeix and Hayer presented the Encyclopédie as the plant that bore fruit in Hel-vétius’ De l’esprit, they extended their genealogy back to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Under-standing as the progenitor of the philosophes’ Epicureanism. This genealogy must be understoodin the context of the aforementioned renewal of suspicion of Lockean sensationalism after 1751.Chaumeix launched the typical critique that, while Locke’s fundamental teaching that our thoughtswere generated from sensations was certainly important, his infamous ambiguity on the materialityof the soul could no longer be explained away. The philosophes had exploited this ambiguity and werenow promulgating an explicit, atheistic materialism:

why do we find in [Locke’s] book so much attention given to the spirituality of the soul? Would he not alsodemonstrate that it is only matter? No, he would have liked to, but even his creative power did not go there.It was reserved for his disciples, the Encyclopédists, to work for this new creation.117

Thus, at mid-decade, a sensationalist epistemology and materialist conception of judgement wasseen as necessarily culminating in an atheism that Chaumeix and others characterised as essentiallyEpicurean because it denied the immateriality of the soul.

4. Concluding remarks

History is the tool of sceptics.118

In exploring the complex and contested reception of Epicureanism in eighteenth-century France, thisarticle has advanced two interrelated claims. In the first place, it has shown that accusations of Epicur-eanismcould refer in thefirst instance to a denial either of sociability, or of the immaterial soul andgod’sprovidence. As such, it should serve as a salutary caution to approach with scepticism any straightfor-ward identification of eighteenth-century moral and political thought as somehow essentially Epicur-ean. But in the second place, it has argued that the very recognition of this polyvalence itself allowsreaders more clearly to see to what use particular authors put Epicureanism in particular eighteenth-century texts. For as the case of his Encyclopédie entry demonstrates, Diderot both intended and wasunderstood to have used Epicureanism to intervene directly in the contemporary theological contro-versy surrounding the existence of an immaterial soul. Byway of conclusion, then, I want simply to ges-ture towards one possible avenue of investigation this article might be taken to have opened up.

Discussion of eighteenth-century Epicureanism today occurs in a historiographical field domi-nated by two rival traditions of the history of political thought. On the one hand, contextualist his-torians interpret Epicureanism as a denial of sociability in their studies of the rise of politicaleconomy, seeking to gain insights into the tenuous balance between economic inequality and politi-cal equality. On the other hand, historians and political theorists indebted to the work of Straussinterpret Epicureanism as an atheistic denial of transcendent moral values, tracing the decline ofthe tradition of political philosophy in terms of what they call the ‘political-theological problem’.119

As we have seen, both interpretations of eighteenth-century Epicureanism are entirely legitimate onthe basis of the contemporary sources. These sources, moreover, also show that the decision of eight-eenth-century authors to interpret Epicureanism in terms of either atheism or sociability was apolemical one, designed explicitly to intervene in a political discourse. We might therefore ask:when contextualists and Straussians diverge in their presentations of eighteenth-century Epicurean-ism, do they also do so on the basis of a political decision? It is undoubtedly the case that the accountsof modern politics that emerge from these rival traditions are dramatically different. However, theintimate connection between sociability and theology that we have seen throughout this articlesuggests that the two traditions are more closely related than they are typically taken to be.

117Chaumeix, Préjugés légitimes contre l’Encyclopédie, I, 178.118Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 156.119See Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem (Cambridge, 2006); Stephen Benjamin Smith, ‘Leo Strauss’s

Discovery of the Theologico-Political Problem’, European Journal of Political Theory, 12 (2013), 388–408.

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Acknowledgements

I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Duncan Kelly, Sankar Muthu, and Birte Löschenkohl for many helpful com-ments and suggestions on earlier drafts. I also benefited from discussions with Mike Sonenscher, Chris Brooke, the lateIstvan Hont, and the Society of Fellows Workshop at the University of Chicago. The article has been greatly improvedby the perceptive and sympathetic criticisms offered by two anonymous reviewers, and by Richard Whatmore’s edi-torial support at History of European Ideas.

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