The Forgotten Philosophe: Claude Helvétius on Equality, Empire, and Sexuality

• In Event: Delimiting the Popular and the Political in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

For an author whose work evoked spirited responses from Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau, Claude Helvétius’ writings have received remarkably little attention from historians of political thought. The central aim of this paper is to make the case that the various currents of Enlightenment political thought cannot be understood without a consideration of Helvétius’s thought. To this end two principle claims are articulated and defended in this paper. (i) I show that Helvétius’s positions on equality, empire, and sexuality are far more radical than that of his fellow 18th century philosophes. In De l’esprit Helvétius presents a view of human equality that attributes all differences in ability between human beings to education and upbringing; he takes an uncompromising stance on European colonies calling for a boycott of sugar as a protest against slavery; and he unapologetically calls for human sexuality to be recognized as a primary source of motivation for human action. It is this radicalism, I argue, that led both Diderot and Rousseau to take up their pens against Helvétius. Diderot and Rousseau’s opposition to Helvétius brings to the fore the limits of both Diderot’s critique of sexual mores in the Europe of his time, and Rousseau’s egalitarianism. (ii) In the second part of the paper I show how Helvétius’s insights are built on realizing the radical potential of Locke’s Essay, to the exclusion of Locke’s other writings. Helvétius, like many of his fellow philosophes, rejected the religious grounding of natural law. But, I argue, unlike other philosophes his embrace of a through-going materialism meant that he was forced to deal most explicitly with the problem of grounding natural law in interest.

Author

• Faisal Baluch, College of the Holy Cross