Epicurus in the Enlightenment: an introduction

NEVEN LEDDY and AVI S. LIFSCHITZ

Reappraising militant Epicureanism:aims and methodology

The general appeal of Epicureanism in the Enlightenment has beentaken for granted at least since the post-Revolutionary crystallisation ofan influential though reductive image of eighteenth-century philosophyas materialist, hedonistic and godless. In this construction Enlighten-ment thinkers were seen as eagerly incorporating Epicurean elementsincluding atomism, the plurality of worlds, mortality of the soul, thepursuit of pleasure without reference to future rewards and punish-ments, a denial of design or purpose in the universe, and the portrayal ofthe gods as distant entities with no active interest in human affairs.Twentieth-century interpreters keen on reversing the negative image ofthe Enlightenment took eighteenth-century Epicureanism to be moreserious than the facile or ‘lazy’ Epicurean libertinism of the precedingcentury (as practised by Saint-Evremond, Ninon de Lenclos and theircircle).1 Enlightenment Epicureanism was characterised as a sophisti-cated doctrine skilfully employed by committed philosophical warriorssuch as Voltaire, Diderot and Hume. As Peter Gay proclaimed, ‘In theirearnest rancour against religion the philosophes resembled no one quite somuch as Lucretius, and it was fitting that Lucretius should provide themwith their favorite tag: tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.’2 Gay suggestedthat from the Renaissance to the early eighteenth century – what hecalled ‘the era of pagan Christianity’ – classical and Christian values werenot considered mutually exclusive, allowing for new concepts and cir-cumstances to be reconciled with older traditions. The eighteenth-cen-tury philosophes, however, were ‘mystified by the coexistence of criticism

1

1. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), translated by Fritz Koelln andJames Pettegrove (Princeton, NJ, 1951), p.354-56; Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: an interpre-tation, vol.1: The Rise of modern paganism (New York, 1966), p.304-308.

2. Gay, Enlightenment, p.371. (‘So potent was Superstition in persuading to evil deeds’ – W. H.D. Rouse’s translation in Lucretius, De rerum natura, ed. Martin Ferguson Smith,Cambridge, MA, 1975, I.101, p.11). On this famous line, see Jean Salem, ‘Les crimes dela religion (Lucrece, I.101): histoire d’une formule’, in Presences du materialisme, ed. Jacquesd’Hondt and Georges Festa (Paris, 1999), p.9-22.

andmyth and eager to pit one against the other’; the Enlightenment thuswitnessed the disentanglement of Christian and neo-classical thought,marking ‘the rise of modern paganism’ (the subtitle of Gay’s book).3

This compelling portrait of Enlightenment Epicureanism is due for acomprehensive reappraisal in the light of historical, philosophical andliterary studies conducted since the mid-1960s. The image ofEpicureanism as a powerful weapon in the arsenal of anti-religiouscrusaders may perhaps be consistent with Epicurus’ desire to liberatemankind from the shackles of superstition by overthrowing the anthro-pomorphic projection of agency and purpose onto the heavens. Thiscombative stance would, however, be far from conducive to ataraxia, thedetached and balanced state of mind which Epicurus recommended. Theview of Epicureanism as an extremely belligerent philosophy also seemsto imply that it was a cohesive set of ideas with a single overarching goal,whereas this collection of essays seeks to demonstrate that Epicureanismin the Enlightenment was anything but a unified doctrine. As argued inthis volume, it was built out of a variety of components, often appliedindependently of one another, in different contexts and with multiplestrategies. The radical view of Epicureanism obscures its complex inter-play with non-Epicurean elements in most contemporary domains,from fiction to natural philosophy to political theory. This is not todeny the distinctive or even subversive features of eighteenth-centuryEpicureanism; contributors to this volume retrace and delineate themutual interaction between Epicurean and other elements in Enlight-enment thought. As pointed out by Catherine Wilson in reference to theseventeenth century, cautious enquiry into the history of early modernphilosophy should no longer treat Epicureanism and theism as twoopposite poles. Instead of a contest between contrasting ideologicalcamps, Wilson suggested that the conflict between Epicureanism and theChristian–Aristotelian worldview occurred within the minds of individ-ual thinkers as they attempted to reconcile new discoveries and exper-imental data with ‘cherished remnants of the older theological synthesis’(her example was Leibniz).4 The articles in this volume apply thisnuanced approach to a variety of authors and topics. The ensuingpicture of Enlightenment Epicureanism is indeed one of many shadesand colours, replacing Gay’s black-and-white portrait of Lucretius

2 Neven Leddy and Avi S. Lifschitz

3. Gay, Enlightenment, p.256-57.4. Catherine Wilson, ‘Epicureanism in early modern philosophy: Leibniz and his contem-

poraries’, in Hellenistic and early modern philosophy, ed. Jon Miller and Brad Inwood(Cambridge, 2003), p.90-115 (91). Wilson’s article is, partly, a response to ThomasLennon’s portrayal of a serious struggle between Gassendist materialism and Cartesianidealism, eventually won by the latter – for which see Thomas M. Lennon, The Battle of thegods and giants: the legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655-1715 (Princeton, NJ, 1993).

heralding a campaign against Christianity and medieval Aristotelianism;even the Epicureanism of Diderot, La Mettrie and Helvetius emergeshere as more refined and problematic than is conventionally allowed.Regardless of whether we speak of ‘the Enlightenment’ or a plurality of

Enlightenments, eighteenth-century research over the last few decadeshas extended the discussion – both geographically and intellectually – toinclude figures of a disposition distinct from that of Gay’s ‘little flock’ ofphilosophes.5 This inclusiveness reinforces the need to examine diversestrategies in the application of Epicureanism which were hardly exhaus-ted by renowned Parisian radicals or their clandestine peers. GottfriedWilhelm Leibniz, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton had been grapplingwith the theological implications of a new concept of matter in theseventeenth century; their acceptance of some elements of ancientatomism was accompanied by a marginalisation of its more troublingaspects, such as the corporeality and mortality of the soul or the view ofthe universe as eternal and uncreated.6 This creative selectivity can bediscerned throughout the eighteenth century and across Europe con-cerning Hume, Smith, Bolingbroke, Priestly, Schmauss and Anichkov, asdiscussed in this volume. Verbatim borrowing from Gassendi or fulltranslations and adaptations of Lucretius are no longer seen as exclusivecriteria for ‘Epicurean influence’ in the eighteenth century, as Epicureanelements were more quietly employed by a diverse gallery of authors. Inorder to perceive these elements, integrated as they were within worksthat were not necessarily thoroughly Epicurean, we might substitute thenotion of selective appropriation for the traditional concepts of ‘recep-tion’ and ‘influence’. For example, Joseph Priestley’s natural philosophymight have contained some elements of Epicurean physics but it servedto promote a Unitarian ‘materialist theism’, as Matthew Niblett pointsout in this volume; Vico and Warburton used an Epicurean account ofthe emergence of language and civilisation while confidently viewing theuniverse as created and maintained by a providential God, as discussedby Avi S. Lifschitz.The focal point of this volume is not, therefore, the availability of

ancient sources (mainly Lucretius’ De rerum natura and accounts ofEpicurean philosophy by Diogenes Laertius and Cicero) or their early

3Epicurus in the Enlightenment: an introduction

5. See, most recently, Peripheries of the Enlightenment, ed. R. Butterwick, S. Davies and G.Sanchez Espinosa, SVEC 2008:01; David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews,and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, NJ, 2008).

6. J. J. MacIntosh, ‘Robert Boyle on Epicurean atheism and atomism’, in Atoms, pneuma, andtranquility: Epicurean and Stoic themes in European thought, ed. Margaret J. Osler (Cambridge,1991), p.197-219; Monte Johnson and Catherine Wilson, ‘Lucretius and the history ofscience’, in The Cambridge companion to Lucretius, ed. Stuart Gillespie and Philip Hardie(Cambridge, 2007), p.131-48.

modern translations.7 The investigation of the selective appropriation ofEpicurean themes, in the different contexts discussed in this volume,reveals a variety of approaches. The first is the self-identification of anauthor with Epicurus or Lucretius, explicitly or implicitly, as in severalworks by Voltaire and Diderot.8 While such self-identification had beenperformed on a large scale by Gassendi in the preceding century (albeitnot without significant qualifications), in the Enlightenment this was nota common strategy as it involved the adoption of a specific traditionrather than the discrete elements of a system.9

A more common form of association with Epicureanism was throughthird-party attributions, either disparagingly or in a more neutral man-ner. Ever since its negative assessment by Cicero and the early ChurchFathers, Epicureanism had been used as a smear word – a rather generallabel indicating atheism, selfishness and debauchery. As Thomas Ahnertpoints out in his discussion of the early German Enlightenment, the term‘Epicureanism’ was regularly employed to discredit opponents by em-phasising an alleged resemblance between their ideas and a ‘well-estab-lished caricature of Epicureanism as licentiousness’. The need tomaintain orthodoxy and disavow such an association often led to orig-inal reformulations of philosophical systems and literary works. Thesethird-party attributions were not, however, always smears. Diderot, forexample, assigned several seventeenth-century and contemporary fig-ures to the Epicurean tradition in his Encyclopedie entry on ‘Epicureisme’as an exercise in appropriation. While Diderot attributed Epicureanismto these thinkers explicitly, Adam Smith did so in a more oblique

4 Neven Leddy and Avi S. Lifschitz

7. For the textual transmission of ancient and modern Epicurean themes, see A. A. Long,Hellenistic philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, 1974), p.232-48; Ira O. Wade, The Clandestine organization and diffusion of philosophic ideas in France from1700 to 1750 (Princeton, NJ, 1938); J. S. Spink, French free-thought from Gassendi to Voltaire(London, 1960), p.103-68; and contributions by YasminHaskell, Michael Reeve, ValentinaProsperi, Philip Ford, Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins in The Cambridge companion toLucretius, ed. S. Gillespie and P. Hardie (Cambridge, 2007).

8. Voltaire, ‘Epıtre a Uranie’ (1722), ed. Haydn T. Mason, in The Complete works of Voltaire,vol.1B (Oxford, 2002), p.485-502; ‘Lettres de Memmius a Ciceron’ (1771), in Œuvrescompletes de Voltaire, ed. Louis Moland, 52 vols (Paris, 1877-1885), vol.28, p.437-63; DenisDiderot, Lettre sur les aveugles a l’usage de ceux qui voient (1749), ed. Marian Hobson andSimonHarvey (Paris, 2000). See also Pierre Force’s discussion of Helvetius in this volume.

9. On Gassendi’s Epicurean project see Olivier Bloch, La Philosophie de Gassendi: nominalisme,materialisme, et metaphysique (The Hague, 1971); Saul Fisher, Pierre Gassendi’s philosophy andscience (Leiden, 2005); Lynn S. Joy, Gassendi the atomist: advocate of history in an age of science(Cambridge, 1987); Antonia LoLordo, Pierre Gassendi and the birth of early modern philosophy(Cambridge, 2007); Gassendi et les gassendistes, ed. Antony McKenna and Pierre-FrancoisMoreau, Libertinage et philosophie 4, special issue (2000); Margaret J. Osler, Divine will and themechanical philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on contingency and necessity in the created world(Cambridge, 1994); Lisa T. Sarasohn, Gassendi’s ethics (Ithaca, NY, 1996); Sylvie Taussig,Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655): introduction a la vie savante (Turnhout, 2003).

manner – making David Hume a Stoic, as explained by James A. Harrisand interpreted by Neven Leddy in this volume.The third and perhaps most common strategy examined here is the

selective appropriationmentioned above. It includes an instrumental useof Epicurean themes and elements, usually within a hierarchy of values orsystems derived from different ancient and early modern sources. Apartfrom the discussions of Smith and Hume, this is also the case in NataniaMeeker’s account of Diderot; Elodie Argaud shows that, although PierreBayle used the Epicurean tradition, his ultimate aim in so doingwas nevermade explicit. The distinction between Epicureanism and tenets of otherphilosophical systems was a complex affair, as demonstrated by A. A.Long in 2003, using early modern Stoicism as an example. According toLong, an early modern reincarnation of Stoicism is hardly identifiable asan independent tradition comparable to medieval Aristotelianism,Renaissance Scepticism orCambridge Platonism, due both to the scarcityof the ancient sources and to their partial but profound incorporationintoChristian theology.10 The seventeenth-century baptism of Epicureanatoms and their presentation as created and moved by God entailed asimilar confusion of philosophical tenets, and the situation was onlyexacerbated by third-party accusations juxtaposing Epicureanism withSpinozism. Just as Spinozism could sometimes be a construct of theradical Enlightenment or its critics rather than a serious engagementwith Baruch Spinoza’s system, eighteenth-century Epicureanism was anamalgam in constant evolution through its interaction with Christiantheology on the one hand and Spinozism on the other, alongside othertraditions (see, for example, the interaction between Epicureanism andSpinozism in Bayle’s case, as examined by Elodie Argaud).11

Stoicism, Epicureanism and Augustinianism:an ill-defined relationship

Two of the most significant systems in continuous interplay withEpicureanism were the Stoic and the Augustinian traditions, and severalcontributors to this volume attempt to locate EnlightenmentEpicureanism in relation to one or the other, or to both. The emergenceof a distinctive commercial psychology in the seventeenth and eight-

5Epicurus in the Enlightenment: an introduction

10. A. A. Long, ‘Stoicism in the philosophical tradition: Spinoza, Lipsius, Butler’, in Hellenisticand early modern philosophy, ed. J. Miller and B. Inwood (Cambridge, 2003), p.7-29.

11. For Spinozism see Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: philosophy and the making ofmodernity 1650-1750 (Oxford, 2001); on the complex relationship between Epicureanismand Spinozism in early Enlightenment radical circles, see A. McKenna, ‘Epicurisme etmaterialisme au XVIIe siecle: quelques perspectives de recherche’, in Qu’est-ce que lesLumieres radicales? Libertinage, atheisme et spinozisme dans le tournant philosophique de l’ageclassique, ed. Catherine Secretan, Tristan Dagron and Laurent Bove (Paris, 2007), p.75-85.

eenth centuries has been at the centre of much recent scholarshipsuggesting that it was one of the defining aspects of the Enlightenment.This new scholarship builds on the assumption that classical influence onseventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought is best understood as adialogue between Augustinianism and Stoicism. On this approach, theAugustinian tradition interpreted the nature of fallen man pessimistic-ally: the effect of original sin was to poison all human motivations andforever exclude the possibility of improvement, other than throughdivine grace. The Stoic challenge to this Augustinianism was describedas one where human destiny could be taken in hand by right-thinkingpeople to achieve actual improvement in this world and human lifewithin it. The role of Epicureanism in this binary framework has beenconsistently marginalised in two distinct ways: Epicureanism has beensubsumed under either the Augustinian or the Stoic traditions. We shallnow briefly review the historiography of this marginalisation.An influential interpretation of the Enlightenment as a response to

Augustinian theology and its concomitant social theory was presentedby Ernst Cassirer in 1932.12 For Cassirer the Enlightenment wascharacterised by recurring attempts to answer Pascal’s Augustinianism,an unsuccessful endeavour until Rousseau reformulated the mechanicsof the Fall by declaring that ‘God is condoned and guilt for all evil isattributed to man.’13 Cassirer gave the same emphasis to internationalAugustinianism in his separate treatment of Rousseau, published in thesame year, and Peter Gay took up this theme as Cassirer’s translator in1963.14 Where Cassirer had focused on Maupertuis’ characterisation ofvariant attempts to answer the Augustinian view of fallen man on thepart of both Stoics and Epicureans, Gay pointed to Condorcet’s descrip-tion of an anti-Augustinian truce between the Porch and the Garden.15

In line with his portrayal of Epicureanism as radically anti-religious,Gay characterised this Enlightenment compromise as a sort of criticaleclecticism, with specific reference to Diderot’s Encyclopedie article oneclecticism, as well as to Montesquieu, Voltaire and Adam Smith.16

Epicureanism became in this framework subsidiary to Stoicism, sincefor Gay, ‘In the great campaign against Christianity, all – Stoicism, andEpicureanism as much as Skepticism, especially Stoicism – had theirplace.’17 The assimilation of Epicureanism to Stoicism was made more

6 Neven Leddy and Avi S. Lifschitz

12. Cassirer, Enlightenment, particularly ch.4: ‘Religion’.13. Cassirer, Enlightenment, p.157.14. E. Cassirer, The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1932), translated by Peter Gay

(Bloomington, IN, 1963).15. Cassirer, Enlightenment, p.150; Gay, Enlightenment, p.166.16. Gay, Enlightenment, p.172.17. Gay, Enlightenment, p.296.

explicit by William J. Bouwsma in his 1975 article on the Stoic–Augustinian dialogue in Renaissance thought.18 More recently,Christopher Brooke has elaborated this binary interpretation in anarticle in The Cambridge companion to Rousseau (2001), demonstrating theflexibility of revamped Stoicism in the ideological polemic of the seven-teenth century and the secularisation of Augustinianism in that process,with a passing reference to Adam Smith.19

The assimilation of Epicureanism to Stoicism has been formulatedand expressed mainly by Anglo-American political theorists and his-torians of philosophy, but a parallel interpretative tradition has engagedwith the same texts, questions and themes as an examination of theliterature of ideas (mostly based in French departments of lettres). His-torians are not generally noted for their rapid assimilation of frame-works borrowed from literature departments, but in this instance thecross-pollination has proved particularly fruitful – to which this volumeaims to contribute. In this parallel genealogy Epicureanism wassubsumed under the Augustinian tradition and opposed to Stoicism.This line of investigation dates back to the 1950s, when French scholarsbegan to associate seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jansenism withthe subsequent development of political economy. Characteristic of thisinterpretative framework is the sustained use of the Augustinian lensthrough which to examine the development of commercial psychologyfrom Pierre Nicole to Adam Smith. The initial formulation of the view ofparadoxical Augustinianism, incorporating Epicurean themes, seems tobe Marcel Raymond’s 1957 article on Jansenism and what we now callcommercial psychology. Raymond set out from an inherent tension inJansenism, as expressed by Pascal and Pierre Nicole: postlapsarian hu-man beings, dominated by self-love and mutual aversion, ultimatelymanage to live together in a functioning society. According to Raymond,this Jansenist tension between fallen human nature and fruitful socialinteraction remained the animating paradox for Smith and subsequentpolitical economists.20 Jean Lafond entrenched and expanded this in-terpretation, first in his work on La Rochefoucauld and Gassendi andlater with direct reference to Adam Smith.21 Lafond made Gassendi the

7Epicurus in the Enlightenment: an introduction

18. William J. Bouwsma, ‘The two faces of humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism inRenaissance thought’ (1975), in A Usable past: essays in European cultural history (Berkeley,CA, and Los Angeles, 1990), p.19-73.

19. Christopher Brooke, ‘Rousseau’s political philosophy: Stoic and Augustinian origins’, inThe Cambridge companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge, 2001), p.94-123. Thepresent volume is partly the result of a continuing dialogue with Brooke on this topic.

20. Marcel Raymond, ‘Du jansenisme a la morale de l’interet’, Mercure de France 330 (1957),p.238-55.

21. Jean Lafond, LaRochefoucauld: augustinisme et litterature, 3rd edn (Paris, 1986); ‘Augustinisme

locus for the reconciliation of the Augustinian and Epicurean traditions,and characterised the new commercial psychology as paradoxicallyAugustinian.22

As this paradigm was stretched to cover Adam Smith’s very un-Augustinian celebration of concupiscence, its inherent tensions becamemore apparent. It came to rest on the assertion that human nature wastransformed by a kind of Augustinian alchemy over the course of theEnlightenment. Philippe Sellier, for example, suggested that AdamSmith’s commercial psychology was the end result of an alchemicaltransformation of Augustinianism.23 This procedure consisted in assimi-lating Epicureanism to Augustinianism, for if Epicureanism was madeinterchangeable with Augustinianism, it would be unnecessary to docu-ment the movement from one to the other. The gravitation of theAugustinian paradigm was such that it not only assimilatedEpicureanism, but, in the case of La Rochefoucauld, Stoicism as well.24

As Pierre Force points out in his contribution to this volume, prior toLafond’s treatment of La Rochefoucauld, the seventeenth-centuryauthor had been widely read as an Epicurean, based on his commentthat ‘In matters of morals Seneca was a hypocrite and Epicurus was asaint.’25 As to Adam Smith, Pierre Force played down the role ofEpicureanism in his system in Self-interest before Adam Smith (2003). Ac-cording to Force, Smith’s Epicureanism was assimilated to anAugustinianism which was countered by a Stoic perspective.26 Thispresentation of Adam Smith between Augustinianism and Stoicism,

8 Neven Leddy and Avi S. Lifschitz

et epicurisme au XVIIe siecle’, Dix-septieme siecle 34 (1982), p.149-58; ‘De la morale al’economie politique, ou de La Rochefoucauld et desmoralistes jansenistes a AdamSmith,par Malebranche et Mandeville,’ in De la morale a l’economie politique: actes du colloque deColumbia University (New York), ed. Pierre Force and David Morgan (Pau, 1996), p.187-96.

22. Following Raymond, Lafond argued that in the new economic morality ‘il y a place pourdes vertus tout humaines qui entrent, non pas bien evidemment dans l’economie du salut,mais dans celle de la morale sociale’ (Lafond, ‘De la morale a l’economie politique’, p.188).

23. ‘Mais il s’agit d’une action particuliere, avec une visee precise. Ce genre d’alchimie nereussit que ponctuellement, au sein de petits groupes choisis, ou les calculs de l’honneteteaboutissent a un faux-semblant de la charite’ (Philippe Sellier, Port-Royal et la litterature,vol.2: Le Siecle de saint Augustin, La Rochefoucauld, Mme de Lafayette, Sacy, Racine, Paris, 2000,p.178).

24. ‘Ainsi, dans l’œuvre de La Rochefoucauld, autour de notions qui sont d’inspirationsaugustinienne, des survivances stoıciennes peuvent avoisiner des elements de psychologied’origine epicurienne’ (Lafond, La Rochefoucauld, p.198).

25. As reported by the chevalier de Mere in ‘Entretien de La Rochefoucauld avec le chevalierde Mere sur la recherche du bonheur’, in La Rochefoucauld: œuvres completes (Paris, 1964),p.728. For the Epicurean reading of La Rochefoucauld see Louis Hippeau, Essai sur lamorale de La Rochefoucauld (Paris, 1967), p.85.

26. Pierre Force, Self-interest before Adam Smith: a genealogy of economic science (Cambridge, 2003),p.89.

based on the fusion of Epicurean and Augustinian traditions reviewedabove, raises several questions. Smith was certainly an anti-Augustinianin developing a progressive social theory without reference to divinegrace, but does this imply that he was equally an anti-Epicurean? Forcereturns to this issue in his contribution to this volume.27

Lafond’s presentation of the Epicurean–Augustinian paradigm hasalso been taken up by John Robertson, who presented the paradox ofJansenism as prompting the convergence of Epicureanism andAugustinianism in opposition to the Stoicism that had dominated sev-enteenth-century French thought.28 In Robertson’s presentation, how-ever, it is Epicureanism and not Augustinianism that was the drivingforce in the tandem. Responding to Jonathan Israel’s claim that ‘the realbusiness [of Enlightenment] was already over’ by the 1740s, Robertsoninstead suggested that this watershed represented the moment whenEpicureanism was redeployed away from anti-clerical polemics towardspolitical economy.29 In light of this proposal, several essays in thisvolume examine the complex eighteenth-century interplay betweenEpicureanism and other philosophical currents, while questioning themarginalisation of Epicureanism in relation to both Stoicism andAugustinianism.Elodie Argaud shows how Epicureanism and Augustinianism might

have come together in Pierre Bayle’s presentation of Malebranche, whileHans W. Blom describes how Epicureanism was subsumed into a morepolitically relevant Stoic anti-Augustinianism in the seventeenth-centuryNetherlands. More space is dedicated, however, to demonstrating howEpicureanism came to the fore either within the Epicurean–Augustinianparadigm or independently of it altogether. In all of these discussions therole of Stoicism is never far removed. Contributors do not offer solutionsto the paradox of an Enlightened Augustinian framework encompassingEpicureanism, or stable criteria for distinguishing between tenets sharedamongst different systems. But taken together, these essays do suggest

9Epicurus in the Enlightenment: an introduction

27. On this question, see Gloria Vivenza, ‘Review of Pierre Force Self-interest before Adam Smith:a genealogy of economic science’, Economic history services, 20 September 2004, accessed fromhttp://www.eh.net/bookreviews/library/0846.shtml on 23 April 2009. On Smith in relationto Jansenism and Augustinianism, see also Istvan Hont, Jealousy of trade: internationalcompetition and the nation-state in historical perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005), p.46-51.

28. John Robertson,The Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples 1680-1760 (Oxford, 2005),p.128.

29. With reference to Hume, Robertson explained how ‘By the 1750s he had recognised thathe could not expect to make the case for Enlightenment as if he were addressing a societyof atheists; but he could make it to a society of improvers. [...] The promotion of politicaleconomy, as the means to achieve human betterment in this world, was far more likely tocommand the attention of the Scottish public’ (Case for the Enlightenment, p.374; for Israel’sthesis see Radical Enlightenment, p.6-7).

that there is a point at which Epicurean elements came to play a majorrole in the European Enlightenment. ThomasAhnert and JamesA.Harrissuggest that from the 1740s onwards Epicureanism emerged from anancillary position to play a fundamental role in social theory and politicaleconomy. Matthew Niblett traces the evolution of theistic Epicureanphysics in the second half of the eighteenth century. Neven Leddy followsup on Harris’ presentation of the instrumental use of Epicureanism byHume to suggest that Adam Smith had something very similar in mindwhen he revised his Theory of moral sentiments for the last time in 1790; inboth cases Epicureanism emerged from the realm of implication andallusion, only to be left behind as the Scots turned their attention fromethics to politics. Finally Pierre Force revisits the Augustinian–Epicureanthesis through Helvetius, proposing that by the third quarter of theeighteenth century the paradoxical Augustinian element of that tandemhad been superseded. The turning point in this chronology may well be1758-1759, with the publication of Helvetius’ De l’esprit and the firstedition of Smith’s Theory of moral sentiments.

New contributions to the study ofEnlightenment Epicureanism

Beyond the discussion of the Epicurean–Stoic and Epicurean–Augustinian paradigms, this volume reflects the growing interest inother aspects of Enlightenment Epicureanism. Charles T. Wolfe exam-ines the relationship between Epicureanism and vitalist theories inmedicine and natural philosophy over the background of La Mettrie’swritings; Avi S. Lifschitz traces the integration of the Epicurean historyof language into Enlightenment accounts of the emergence of mankind;and in reminding us that Epicurus’ Garden – unlike other Athenianschools – readily accepted women, Natania Meeker observes the inter-action between Epicureanism and gender-construction in Diderot’sworks. The multi-faceted character of eighteenth-century materialismis discussed by Meeker, Niblett and Wolfe, while the prioritisation ofethics or physics in the reception of Epicureanism (and its theologicalconsequences) is surveyed by Harris, Kahn, Niblett and Blom.These contributions concentrate on the Enlightenment and its

European manifestations mostly in the eighteenth century. This focusdistinguishes the current volume from several collections on the generaluses of Hellenistic philosophy in the early modern period. A few pub-lications have been dedicated to the reception and transformation ofEpicureanism, Stoicism and Scepticism, but their focus remained firmlyon the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; this was also the case with an

10 Neven Leddy and Avi S. Lifschitz

excellent recent volume on early modern Epicureanism.30 The impor-tance of Epicurean themes in Gassendi and Hobbes, or of Stoicism inLipsius and perhaps Spinoza, has been thoroughly examined in theseand other studies. Contributors to the current volume take note ofearlier applications of Epicurean philosophy, but they are collectivelyinterested in the appropriation of Epicurean topoi primarily in theeighteenth century. Our approach is shared by an issue of the periodicalDix-huitieme siecle edited in 2003 by Anne Deneys-Tunney and Pierre-Francois Moreau which was, however, focused on science, politics andlibertinism in France.31 The scope of the present volume is pan-European, as attested by Andrew Kahn’s attempt to integrate Russiainto the debate over Enlightenment Epicureanism, as well as by contri-butions on Germany and the Netherlands. Considerable space isdedicated to religion, ethics and language beyond politics and science.The collaboration of historians, philosophers, political scientists andliterary scholars serves to bring together over these pages differentaspects of research on the topic. Historians and political theorists ofthe early modern period have offered insights into the challenge of‘Epicurean’ social utility and commercial conduct to a ‘Stoic’ civictradition, while literary scholars have broadened this discussion byexposing the invaluable role of plays, maxims, epistolary novels andfictional dialogues in the history of ideas. Here we attempt to bridgesome of the remaining cross-disciplinary gaps in the study of Enlight-enment Epicureanism in its diverse manifestations, applications andselective appropriations.

11Epicurus in the Enlightenment: an introduction

30. Hellenistic and early modern philosophy, ed. B. Inwood and J. Miller (Cambridge, 2003); DerEinfluß des Hellenismus auf die Philosophie der Fruhen Neuzeit, ed. Gabor Boros (Wiesbaden,2005). These collections had been preceded by Atoms, pneuma, and tranquility, ed. M. J. Osler,which includes a single contribution on the Enlightenment after Locke and Berkeley. InGianni Paganini and Edoardo Tortarolo’s Epicureanism-focused volume, Der Garten unddie Moderne: Epikureische Moral und Politik vom Humanismus zur Aufklarung (Stuttgart, 2004),only the fifth and last section covers the Enlightenment.

31. L’Epicurisme des Lumieres, ed. Anne Deneys-Tunney and Pierre-Francois Moreau, Dix-huitieme siecle 35 (Paris, 2003).