During the havoc and upheaval of the French
Revolution, the communist creed, as well as millennial prophecies, again popped
up as a glorious goal for mankind, but this time the major emphasis was a
secular context. But the new secular communist prophets were
faced with a grave problem: What will be the agency for this social change? In
short, religious chiliasts never had problems about agency, i.e., how this
mighty change would come about. The agent would be the hand of Providence,
specifically either the Second Advent of Jesus Christ (for premillennialists),
or designated prophets or vanguard groups who would establish the millennium in
anticipation of Jesus's eventual return (for postmillennialists). King
Bockelson and Thomas Müntzer were examples of the latter. But if the Christian
millennialists possessed the assurance of the hand of Divine Providence
inevitably achieving their goal, how could secularists command the same
certainty and self-confidence? It looked as if they would have to fall back on
mere education and exhortation.
The secularist task was made more difficult by the
fact that religious millennialists looked to the end of history and the
achievement of their goal by means of a bloody apocalypse. The final reign of
millennial peace and harmony could only be achieved in the course of a period
known as "the tribulation," the final war of good against evil, the
final triumph over the Antichrist.[1] All of
which meant that if the secular communists wished to emulate their Christian
forbears, they would have to achieve their goal by bloody revolution — always
difficult at best. It is no accident, therefore, that the heady days of the
French Revolution would give rise to such revolutionary hopes and aspirations.
The first secularized communists appeared in the shape of two isolated individuals in mid-18th century France. The works of these two men would later burgeon into an activist revolutionary movement amidst the hothouse atmosphere and the sudden upheavals of the French Revolution. One was the aristocrat Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709–85), the elder brother of the laissez-faire liberal philosopher Etienne Bonnot de Condillac. In contrast to his brother the distinguished philosopher, Mably devoted himself to being a lifelong writer on a large variety of subjects.[2] A man whose works, as Alexander Gray wittily writes, "are deplorably numerous and extensive." Mably's prolix and confused writings were astoundingly popular in his day, his entire collected works, ranging from 12 to 26 volumes, being published in four different editions within a few years of his death.
Mably's main focus was to insist that all men are
"perfectly" equal and uniform, that all men are one and the same
everywhere. He professed to discern this alleged truth in the laws of nature.
Thus, in his chief work Doutes proposes (1786), an attack on the
libertarian natural rights theory of Mercier de la Rivière, Mably presumes to
interpret the voice of Nature:
"Nature says to us … I love you equally."[3]
As in the case of most communists after him, Mably found himself confronted with one of the great problems of communism: if all property is owned in common and each person is equal, then the incentive to work is negative, since only the common store will benefit and not the individual worker in question. Mably in particular had to confront this problem, since he also maintained that man's natural and original state was communism, and that private property arose to spoil matters precisely because of the indolence of some who wished to live at the expense of others.[4]
Mably's proposed solutions to this grave problem were
scarcely adequate. One was to urge everyone to tighten their belts, to want
less, to be content with Spartan austerity. His other answer was to come up
with what Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung would later call "moral
incentives": to substitute for crass monetary rewards the recognition of
one's merits by one's brothers — in the form of ribbons, medals, etc. Alexander
Gray notes that Mably makes use of such "distinctions" or "Birthday
Honours Lists," to stimulate everyone to work. He goes on to point out
that the more "distinctions" are handed out as incentives, the less
they will truly distinguish, and the less influence they will therefore exert.
Furthermore, Mably "does not say how or by whom his distinctions are to be
conferred."
Gray adds that in a communist society in reality, many
people who don't receive honors may and
probably will be disgruntled and resentful at the supposed injustice involved,
yet their "zeal doesn't flag."[5]
Thus, in his two proffered solutions, Gabriel de Mably
was resting his hope on a miraculous transformation of human nature, what the
Marxists would later see as the advent of the New Socialist Man, willing to
bend his desires and his incentives to the requirements of, and baubles
conferred by, the collective. But for all his devotion to communism, Mably was
at bottom a realist, and so he held out no hope for its triumph. On the
contrary, man is so steeped in the sin of selfishness and private property that
only the palliatives of coerced redistribution and prohibitions of trade are
even possible. It is no wonder that Mably was not equipped to inspire and
stimulate the birth and growth of a revolutionary communist movement.
If Gabriel de Mably was a pessimist, the same cannot
be said of the highly influential work of the unknown Morelly, author of Le Code de la Nature (The Code of Nature),
published in 1755, and going into five further editions by 1773. Morelly had no
doubts of the workability of communism: for him there was no problem of
laziness or negative incentives. There was no need, in short, for any change in
human nature or the creation of a New Socialist Man. In a vulgarization of
Rousseau, man is everywhere good, altruistic, and dedicated to work: it is only
institutions that are degrading and corrupt, specifically the institution of
private property. Abolish that, and man's natural goodness would easily
triumph. (Query: where did these corrupt institutions come from, if not from
man?) Banish property, and crime would disappear.
For Morelly, the administration of the communist
utopia would also be easy. Assigning every person his task in life, and also
deciding what material goods and services would fulfill his needs, would
apparently be a trivial problem for the ministry of labor or of consumption.
For Morelly, all this was merely a matter of trivial enumeration, of listing
things and persons. Here is the ancestor of Marx and Lenin's dismissal of the
gigantic problems of socialist administration and allocation as merely a
question of book-keeping.
But things, after all, are not going to be that easy.
Mably, the pessimist on human nature, was apparently willing to leave matters
to voluntary actions of individuals. But Morelly, the alleged optimist, was
cheerfully prepared to employ brutally coercive methods to keep all the
"good" citizens in line. Once again, as in Mably, the edicts of the
proposed state would be written clearly by Nature, as revealed to the founder
Morelly. Morelly worked out an intricate design for his proposed government and
society, all allegedly based on the clear dictates of natural law, and most of
which were to be changeless and eternal — to Morelly, a vital part of the
scheme.
In particular, there is to be no private property,
except for daily needs: every person is to be maintained and employed by the
collective, every man is to be forced to work, to contribute to the communal
storehouse according to his talents, and will then be assigned goods from these
stores according to his needs, to be brought up communally, and absolutely
identically in food, clothing and training. Philosophic and religious doctrines
are to be absolutely prescribed; no differences are to be tolerated; and
children are not to be corrupted by any "fable, story, or ridiculous
fictions." All buildings must be the same, and grouped in equal blocks;
all clothing is to be made out of the same fabric. Occupations are to be
limited and strictly assigned by the state.
Finally, these laws are to be sacred and inviolable,
and anyone attempting to change them is to be isolated and incarcerated for
life.
As in all the communist utopias, Mably's and Morelly's,
as Alexander Gray makes clear, are ones under which "no sane man would on
any conditions consent to live, if he could possibly escape." The reason,
apart from the grave lack of incentives in utopias to produce or innovate, is
that "life has reached a static state.… Nothing happens, nothing can
happen in any of them."[6]
It should be added that these utopias were debased,
secularized versions of the visions of the Christian millennialists. In the
Christian millennium, Jesus Christ (or, alternatively, his surrogates and
predecessors) comes back to earth to put an end to history; and presumably,
there will be enough enchantment in glorifying God without worrying about the absence
of earthly change. And, as we have seen, this is particularly true in Joachim
of Fiore's envisioned millennium of people without earthly bodies. But in the
secularized utopias there reigns, at best, gray gloom and stasis totally
contrary to man's nature on earth.
Meanwhile, however, Christian millennialism was also
revived in these stormy times. Thus, the Swabian German pietist Johann
Christoph Otinger, during the mid-18th century, prophesied a coming theocratic
world kingdom of saints, living communally, without rank or property, as
members of a millennial Christian commonwealth. Particularly influential among
later German pietists was the French mystic and theosophist Louis Claude de
Saint-Martin (1743–1803), who in his influential Des Erreurs et la Verite (Errors and Truth) (1773),
portrayed an "inner church of the elect" allegedly existing since the
dawn of history, which would take power in the coming age. This
"Martinist" theme was developed by the Rosicrucian movement,
concentrated in Bavaria. Originally alchemist mystics during the 17th and 18th
centuries, the Bavarian Rosicrucians began to stress the coming takeover of
world power by the inner church of the elect during the dawning millennial age.
The most influential Bavarian Rosicrucian author, Carl
von Eckartshausen, expounded on this theme in two widely read works, Information on Magic (1788–92) and On Perfectibility (1797). In the latter work, he
developed the idea that the inner church of the elect had existed backwards in
time to Abraham and then forwards to a world government to be ruled by these
keepers of the divine light. This third and final age of history, the age of
the Holy Spirit, was now at hand. The illuminated elect destined to rule the
new communal world were, fairly obviously, the Rosicrucian Order itself, since
their major evidence for the dawn of the third age was the rapid spread of
Martinism and Rosicrucianism itself.
And these movements were indeed spreading during the
1780s and 1790s. The Prussian King Frederick William II and a large portion of
his court were converted to Rosicrucianism in the late 1780s, as was the
Russian Czar Paul I a decade later, based on his reading of Saint-Martin and
Eckartshausen, both of whom he considered to be transmitters of divine
revelation. Saint-Martin was also influential through his leadership of
Scottish Rite Masonry in Lyons, and was the main figure in what might be called
the apocalyptic-Christian wing of the Masonic movement.[7]
Notes
[1] We are
simplifying here from the often daunting complexities of millennial thought.
For example, in the highly developed premillennial doctrines of 20th-century
"fundamentalism," the period of the tribulation will be a very hectic
7 years, the "70th week" of the Book of Daniel, in
which not only the Anti-Christ ("the Beast"), but also "The
Dragon" (the Anti-God), the "False Prophet" (the Anti-Spirit),
"The Scarlet Woman," and many other evil beings will be overcome.
Thus, see George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American
Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism: 1870–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980),
pp. 58–9.
[2] In his day
and later, Mably was often referred to as an "abbé," but he had left
the clergy early in life.
[3] Quoted and
translated in Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition (London:
Longmans Green, 1946), p. 87.
[7] On
Saint-Martin, Eckartshausen and their influence, see the revealing article by
Paul Gottfried, "Utopianism of the Right: Maistre and Schlegel," Modern Age, 24 (Spring 1980), pp. 150–60.
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