“Epicureans,” fumed Thomas Carlyle in 1826, “Utilitarians, Epicureans, and other tribes of the avowed alien.”Footnote 1 Indeed, such explicit references to Epicureanism were far from uncommon in Carlyle's writings. For instance, in 1828, Carlyle accused Francis Jeffrey, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, of being “Epicurean in creed,” and, in 1832, he complained that his neighbor, Leigh Hunt, was “filled with Epicurean Philosophy.”Footnote 2 Three years later, Carlyle once again vented his frustration, sighing over the backslidings of his “Epicurean generation.”Footnote 3
But to what precisely was Carlyle referring? Certainly he was familiar with some of the most important ancient accounts of Epicurean philosophy, such as the dialogues of Cicero and the poetry of Lucretius.Footnote 4 Moreover, Carlyle also knew some early modern literary expositions of Epicureanism. These included Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), which emphasized the importance of “pleasure” and a “quiet mind”; Sir William Temple's Upon the Gardens of Epicurus (1690); and Jonathan Swift's fierce attack upon the latter in A Tale of a Tub (1707).Footnote 5
However, a more promising interpretation has been advanced by Frederick Rosen, who suggests that Carlyle was in fact protesting against the moral and political Epicureanism of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832).Footnote 6 While Rosen's argument is persuasive, it is made in passing, and thus stands in need of further elaboration. For instance, of Carlyle's writings, Rosen cites only Sartor Resartus (1833–1834) and On Heroes (1841), disregarding the rest of Carlyle's voluminous oeuvre. Moreover, Rosen refers exclusively to Bentham and his disciples, neglecting the fact that they stood as heirs to an established eighteenth-century tradition of Epicurean moral and political philosophy, with which Carlyle was well acquainted.
The key figure in this tradition was the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776). As one of Carlyle's earliest biographers remarked, from the moment that Carlyle first read Hume, the latter remained an important presence in his works, “sometimes latent, and at other times obtruding to the surface like primeval granite, but always there.”Footnote 7 For Carlyle, Hume was the prime culprit in the development of modern Epicureanism, Bentham and his followers being little more than epigones. In this sense, Carlyle persistently conflated Hume and Bentham, tending to minimize or ignore their differences. An understanding of Carlyle's hostility to Epicureanism during the 1820s sheds new light on his later political writings and particularly on his notorious polemics against utilitarianism, laissez-faire, and representative democracy. In attacking these particular doctrines, Carlyle in fact sought to challenge a far more general Epicurean account of sociability, whereby political life was held to consist in a careful balancing of individual self-interests. And Carlyle's contemporaries were well aware of the anti-Epicurean thrust of his thought.
The interest of such an inquiry is threefold. First, it will deepen our understanding of the role of ancient Greek and Roman thought in Carlyle's work, a subject that has hitherto been overlooked.Footnote 8 Second, while there is by now a huge body of literature regarding Epicureanism in eighteenth-century British moral and political philosophy, relatively little attempt has been made to pursue the story into the nineteenth.Footnote 9 As one recent commentator has pointed out, Carlyle's works constituted “a generational revolt in print,” whereby the British nineteenth century consciously demarcated itself from the eighteenth.Footnote 10 Rejection of Epicureanism played a crucial role in this transition, and particularly in the advent of that “obsessive antipathy to selfishness” that so characterized Victorian public moralism.Footnote 11 Third, a study of Carlyle's polemic against political Epicureanism elucidates the persistence of the natural law tradition, and its associated ideas of duty, obligation, and authority, well into the late nineteenth century. This was key to the transition from eighteenth-century discourses of commercial society to the interventionist, reforming mood of late nineteenth-century British Idealism. Given Carlyle's towering presence in Victorian moral and political thought, such an inquiry can enrich our understanding of some of the commonplaces of the era. Indeed, as one contemporary put it, there was no other thinker “whose works have gone more deeply into the springs of character and action, especially throughout the middle classes.”Footnote 12
Epicureanism in Carlyle's Early Writings
According to Epicurus, all of our ideas and opinions ultimately derived from external sensations. The most important springs of human action were the desires to experience pleasure and to avoid pain. However, contrary to the accusations of his enemies, Epicurus did not advocate a life of brutish sensuality but rather a prudent calculation of which actions would bring the most pleasure and the least pain in the long term. Epicurus this thus concluded that a pleasurable life consisted in ease and tranquility, “the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul.”Footnote 13
This philosophy had important political implications. According to Epicurus, virtue and justice were instrumental and artificial, being valuable solely insofar as they served as a means to one's own pleasure. In particular, he argued, virtue and justice were necessary to the security and stability that a life of pleasure required. Such theories distinguished Epicurus from other ancient Greek thinkers, such as Aristotle and the Stoics, for whom virtue and justice stemmed from a natural inclination toward sociability, consisted in obedience to the eternal laws of nature, and merited pursuit as ends in themselves. In ancient Rome, the followers of Epicurus soon came into conflict with Cicero, who accused them of undermining traditional Roman ideals of duty and of discouraging service to the state.Footnote 14
During the early modern period, there was a widespread resurgence of interest in Epicureanism in Britain.Footnote 15 One thinker particularly worthy of mention is John Locke, whose An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) Carlyle certainly read.Footnote 16 Locke's commitment to Christian theology ruled out any kind of thoroughgoing Epicureanism. However, Locke nonetheless made considerable use of the Epicurean definition of good and evil in terms of pleasure and pain. As he explained, “good” was that “which is apt to cause or increase pleasure or diminish pain,” while, on the contrary, “evil” was that “which is apt to produce or increase any pain, or diminish any pleasure in us.” It followed that “virtue” was simply that which produced pleasure—that was thus “thought praiseworthy” or deserving of “public esteem.” In his response to the Essay, Thomas Burnet thus attacked Locke for having embraced not only the “Method” of “the Epicurean Philosophers,” “without any other Principles than what are collected from Sense and Experience,” but also “Epicurus's Ethicks.”Footnote 17
These aspects of Locke's work soon came under sustained assault in Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury's Characteristics (1711), which Carlyle is also known to have read.Footnote 18 Here, Shaftesbury inveighed against “our modern Epicures,” who had “made virtue so mercenary a thing” and who had “talked so much of its reward, that one can hardly tell what there is in it.” Such thinkers, Shaftesbury complained “wou'd new-frame the Human Heart,” and “reduce all its Motions, Balances and Weights, to that one Principle and Foundation of a cool and deliberate Selfishness.”Footnote 19 In opposition, Shaftesbury defended the existence of a natural affective sociability, whereby man was naturally capable of disinterested virtue and could further develop this potential through use of his reason.
Another important Epicurean forerunner of Hume was Bernard Mandeville, whose Fable of the Bees (1714) emphasized the egotistic sources of human behavior while explicitly avowing a debt to Epicurus.Footnote 20 Mandeville's work was roundly condemned by Francis Hutcheson in his Essay on the Nature and the Conduct of the Passions (1728), which Carlyle appears to have read.Footnote 21 Here, Hutcheson rejected the doctrine of “the old Epicureans” and their modern disciples, to the effect that “all the Desires of the human Mind” were “reducible to Self-Love, or the Desire of private Happiness.”Footnote 22 Instead, Hutcheson posited the existence of an innate or natural “moral sense,” from which stemmed an array of disinterested, benevolent affections.
Despite the best efforts of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, however, the Epicurean validation of the self-regarding passions persisted throughout the Scottish Enlightenment. According to such writers, in a modern commercial society, the role of government was to accommodate, harness, and manage the passions, directing them insofar as possible toward the common good.Footnote 23 As several commentators have pointed out, particularly important in this regard was the philosopher David Hume, many of whose ideas were unambiguously Epicurean.Footnote 24
Hume's works, which seem to have been favorites of the young Carlyle, included A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740), the Essays (1741–1742), An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), The Natural History of Religion (1757), and the posthumous Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779).Footnote 25 In these works, Hume reiterated a number of key Epicurean doctrines. For instance, the Treatise adopted an Epicurean epistemology, arguing that all our “ideas” were ultimately derived from sensual “impressions,” which were then processed and categorized through “association” in the mind.Footnote 26 Similarly, in the Dialogues, Hume propounded a thoroughgoing philosophical materialism, explicitly invoking Epicurus as a source.Footnote 27
In line with the Epicurean tradition, Hume also argued that the “chief spring or actuating principle of the human mind is pleasure or pain.” As he famously put it, “Reason” was thus “the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”Footnote 28 Insofar as Hume recognized the efficacy of reason at all, it was in a purely instrumental sense, reason serving as means to distinguish between our “calm” and “violent” passions.Footnote 29 Reason was thus reduced to prudence, counseling the pursuit of those “calm” passions that would bring us maximal, long-term happiness.Footnote 30
Also like Epicurus, Hume denied that justice stemmed from a natural aptitude for sociability or benevolence or that it consisted in obedience to the eternal laws of nature. Rather, justice was an artificial virtue, serving to better gratify the self-regarding passions. As Hume explained in the Treatise, “I observe, that it will be for my interest to leave another in the possession of his goods, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me.” Thus, “justice” established “itself by a kind of convention or agreement.” “Whatever restraint” the laws of justice might “impose upon the passions of men,” Hume concluded, “they are the real offspring of those passions, and are only a more artful and more refin'd way of satisfying them.”Footnote 31
However, while “self-interest” provided the original motive to justice, it was “sympathy” that maintained it. Once men had come to understand “that ’tis impossible to live in society without restraining themselves by certain rules,” they began to “receive a pleasure from the view of such actions as tend to the peace of society, and an uneasiness from such as are contrary to it.” As Hume elaborated, “everything which gives uneasiness in human actions, upon the general survey is call'd vice, and whatever produces satisfaction, in the same manner, is denominated virtue, [and] this is the reason why the sense of moral good and evil follows upon justice and injustice.”Footnote 32 In this sense, Hume, like Epicurus, defined justice and virtue in terms of utility and expediency. As he made clear in the Enquiry, “Utility” was “the sole origin of Justice,” while “the beneficial consequences” of “Virtue” were the “sole Foundation of its Merit.”Footnote 33
Furthermore, according to Hume, the “sole” motive for “allegiance” was a perception of “the advantage which it procures to society.”Footnote 34 As he famously argued in the Essays, “opinion” and “interest” were thus the foundation of government.Footnote 35 In other words, the security of a regime depended upon its ability to satisfy the self-regarding passions of its subjects. Rather than attempting to resist or extirpate these passions, Hume argued, governors ought to harness and manage them. As he put it in another famous passage of the Essays (which would later be particularly important to Carlyle):
Political writers have established it as a maxim, that, in contriving any system of government and fixing the several checks and balances of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest. By this interest we must govern him, and, by means of it, make him, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition, cooperate to public good.Footnote 36
In short, governors had little choice but to take men as they found them, to govern them “by their passions,” and to “animate them with a spirit of avarice and industry, art and luxury.”Footnote 37 Thus, while justice was for Hume an artificial virtue, it was also a largely negative one. In a modern commercial society, the role of justice was to provide a framework in which individuals could pursue their own interests, insofar as these did not infringe upon the interests of others.
However, according to Hume, the governors were little better than the governed. As he put it in the Treatise, “those whom we chuse for rulers” did “not immediately become of a superior nature to the rest of mankind,” and were frequently driven by “their passions into all excesses of cruelty.”Footnote 38 For this reason, their selfish passions stood in need of the same checks and balances as those of their subjects.Footnote 39 Indeed, as several commentators have remarked, Hume's skepticism regarding the possibility of disinterested virtue in either governors or governed—and his reliance upon an impersonal, institutional machinery to harness and redirect self-interest—represented an important break with the classical republican tradition.Footnote 40 Moreover, it was also typically Epicurean.Footnote 41 As James Balfour put it in 1753, Hume's system was, “in effect, no other than the antient [sic] scheme” that “Epicurus first reduced to some form, and clothed with tolerable decent dress.”Footnote 42
Over subsequent years, Hume's Epicureanism was frequently castigated by a number of other Scottish writers whom Carlyle is known to have read. For instance, the historian Adam Ferguson claimed that Epicureanism had contributed to the decline of the Roman republic, implying that the writings of Mandeville and Hume would have the same effect in Britain.Footnote 43 Similarly, in his Essays on the Active Powers of Man (1788), the philosopher Thomas Reid claimed that “Mr Hume” agreed with “the Epicureans,” particularly in his contention that “virtue is an empty name, and that it is entitled to no regard, but in as far as it ministers to pleasure or profit.”Footnote 44 For his part, Dugald Stewart inveighed against the philosophy of “Epicurus,” according to which “prudence, temperance, and the other virtues, derive all their value from their tendency to increase the sum of bodily enjoyment,” while also challenging the argument of “Mr Hume” that “justice” was an “artificial” virtue, deriving its “obligations” from “considerations of utility.”Footnote 45 Thus, there was widespread recognition that Hume was “chiefly responsible for the Epicurean and ignoble strain of sentiment” within Scottish moral philosophy.Footnote 46
To summarize, Carlyle was familiar with the Epicureanism debate prior to Hume (Locke, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson). Moreover, he was also acquainted with the works of Hume and with those of the critics who had explicitly accused Hume of Epicureanism (Ferguson, Reid, Stewart). Thus, it is unsurprising that Carlyle frequently associated Hume with a number of key Epicurean doctrines in his early writings. For instance, in his unpublished novel “Wotton Reinfred” (1826–1827), Carlyle railed against “Utilitarians, Epicureans, and other tribes of the avowed alien,” referring specifically to “David Hume.” “What,” exclaims the eponymous Wotton, “was virtue? Another name for happiness, for pleasure?” “The philosophy of Epicurus,” Carlyle remarked, “was not made for him.”Footnote 47
In this passage of “Wotton Reinfred,” Carlyle had also claimed that “in the senate, the press, the pulpit, the parlour, and the market, David Hume is ruler of the world.”Footnote 48 Similarly, in “Characteristics” (1831), he wrote of “Hume and the innumerable disciples of Hume,” while in “Death of Goethe” (1832), he declared that “David Hume is at this hour pontiff of the world.”Footnote 49 But to whom was Carlyle referring? One likely explanation is provided by the Edinburgh circles in which he was moving at the time. For instance, as a student, Carlyle had studied under Thomas Brown, then professor of moral philosophy (1810–1820).Footnote 50 In his lectures, Brown had sought to defend Hume against the attacks of Reid and Stewart. For instance, he endorsed Hume's Epicurean doctrines regarding the “association of ideas” and argued that “virtue” meant “nothing more” than “a certain feeling of moral approbation,” excited “by the contemplation of a certain intentional production … of a certain amount of benefit.”Footnote 51
Alongside his teaching, Brown was also a frequent contributor to the Edinburgh Review, the premier organ of enlightened Whiggism. Serving as a selective receptacle for the heritage of the Scottish Enlightenment, the Review understood the mechanisms of modern commercial society in terms substantially the same as those employed by Hume.Footnote 52 For instance, like Hume, contributors to the Review argued that the foundation of government was “public opinion,” namely that of a large, prosperous middle class.Footnote 53 In particular, it was claimed, the purpose of government was to represent and serve the “interests” of the governed.Footnote 54 Thus, following Hume, they understood justice as an essentially artificial and negative virtue, tending to explain allegiance in terms of expedience. Indeed, this perhaps explains Carlyle's statement that “Utility” was a concept entertained by “Editors of Whig newspapers,” as well as his claim that “Hume” was “the father of all succeeding Whigs.”Footnote 55 In this regard, it is surely significant that Carlyle accused the editor of the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey, of being “Epicurean in creed.”Footnote 56
As one recent commentator has pointed out, this emphasis on utility meant that there was a considerable overlap between the ideas of the Edinburgh Review and those of Jeremy Bentham.Footnote 57 Indeed, Bentham would certainly have been one of those whom Carlyle had in mind when he declared that “David Hume is ruler of the world.”Footnote 58 In his Fragment on Government (1776), Bentham recalled having read Hume's Treatise, remarking: “I felt as if scales had fallen from my eyes … . I learnt to see that utility was the test and measure of all virtue.”Footnote 59 However, notwithstanding his debts to Hume, Bentham acknowledged that the “Principle of Utility” was of far older origin, stemming ultimately “from Epicurus.”Footnote 60 In this sense, both Hume and Bentham stood in the same Epicurean tradition.Footnote 61 However, while such similarities did have some basis in reality, Carlyle tended to push them to extremes, persistently conflating the thought of the two men and often referring to “Hume's philosophy and Jeremy Bentham” in the same breath.Footnote 62
In particular, like Epicurus and Hume, Bentham believed that all ideas were ultimately derived from external sense impressions.Footnote 63 Moreover, he also shared their beliefs regarding the motives of human action, writing: “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.”Footnote 64 According to Bentham, “Good” meant nothing more than “pleasure or exemption from pain,” while “Evil” meant “pain or loss of pleasure.”Footnote 65 As such, any action could “be said to be conformable to the principle of utility … when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it.” When men applauded the “virtue” of an action, they were really expressing “a sentiment of appropriation; a sentiment which, when applied to an action, approves of its utility.”Footnote 66
Setting out from the same premises as Epicurus and Hume, Bentham drew a series of political conclusions far more radical than anything his two predecessors had envisaged. Given that the end of government was “happiness” and given that each individual was the “proper judge” of his own “pleasure,” some form of democratic representation would be necessary.Footnote 67 This would not only allow governments to know what made the governed happy but would also ensure that governments did in fact serve “the greatest happiness” rather than their own “sinister interests.”Footnote 68 Bentham also made great use of the concept of “public opinion,” pushing it far further than Hume and the Edinburgh Review had done. For instance, he proposed the creation of a “Public Opinion Tribunal” to act as a “check” upon “the pernicious exercise of the power of government.”Footnote 69 Overall, then, Bentham understood justice as an artificial and negative virtue, believing that the role of government was to provide a framework in which individuals could maximize their own choices of pleasures and live lives that would bring them happiness. To this end, he imagined the contrivance of institutional mechanisms of representation, which would ensure the accountability of rulers to the ruled.Footnote 70
As had been the case with Hume, contemporaries were swift to recognize the Epicurean foundations of Bentham's creed. Indeed, this was particularly true of Carlyle's sources and interlocutors. For instance, in 1827, a contributor to the Westminster Review pointed out that it had been “Epicurus” who “first taught that general utility, or as Bentham expresses it, ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is the legitimate end of philosophy.”Footnote 71 Similarly, Sir James Mackintosh compared the followers of Bentham to “the old Epicureans,” particularly in their “habit of contemplating all things in relation to happiness.”Footnote 72 For their part, the Saint-Simonians, a group of early French socialists whom Carlyle famously encountered in 1830, also accused Bentham of Epicureanism.Footnote 73 For instance, in a text that Carlyle is known to have read, the Saint-Simonian leader P.-M. Laurent opined that, in their reliance upon the concept of utility, the writings of Bentham served to reproduce “the gross sensualism” of Epicurus.Footnote 74
Thus, it is unsurprising to find that Bentham and his utilitarian followers were frequently set down as Epicureans in Carlyle's early writings. For instance, in the passage of “Wotton Reinfred” already cited above, Carlyle referred to “Utilitarians” and “Epicureans” within the same sentence.Footnote 75 Similarly, in “Schiller” (1831), he lamented the preponderance of “our honest Benthamites,” comparing their doctrines regarding “Pleasure” and “Utility” to those of “Epicurus.”Footnote 76
In summary, the young Carlyle believed that both Hume and Bentham stood in the same tradition of Epicurean moral and political philosophy. As such, he tended to emphasize the similarities between the two thinkers and to ignore their many differences. In particular, these similarities included a materialist epistemology, whereby all ideas were ultimately derived from physical sensations, as well as the psychological assumption that human action was motivated by “pleasure” and “pain.” With regard to politics, both Hume and Bentham held that justice was an artificial virtue, valuable chiefly as a means to pleasure and happiness. Similarly, the sole foundation of government was utility, that is, the “opinion” of the governed that the government in question served their “interests.” In this sense, justice was also a negative virtue, relying upon a careful balancing of individual self-interests, through the use of an impersonal, institutional machinery. Thus, while Rosen was no doubt right to emphasize Carlyle's opposition to the Epicureanism of Bentham, it is important to add that the young Carlyle understood Bentham as part of a much longer Epicurean tradition, one ultimately stemming from Hume.Footnote 77
Epicureanism in Carlyle's Later Writings (ca. 1830–1850)
In his subsequent works, Carlyle set out to challenge the moral and political assumptions of his “Epicurean generation.”Footnote 78 In the first place, he argued that pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain were not appropriate ends for the life of an individual. As noted above, Carlyle was familiar with the works of Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, in which Hume had been accused of Epicureanism. According to Reid and Stewart, Hume's claim that all ideas were derived from sense, and that human action was motivated exclusively by pleasure and pain, tended to deny the autonomy of the will. In opposition, Reid and Stewart sought to reassert the “active powers” of the mind, arguing that reason could indeed gain mastery over the passions and that human beings were endowed with a natural disposition to virtue, which could be further improved through education, discipline, and training. In short, for Reid and Stewart, virtue was not merely a means to utility, nor duty a means to interest. Rather, they were to be performed as ends in themselves, and for their own sake, in line with man's nature as a rational and moral being.Footnote 79
In this regard, Carlyle's later writings were broadly continuous with those of Reid and Stewart.Footnote 80 In the first place, Carlyle inveighed against sensationalist epistemology, claiming that “from Locke's time downwards,” “our whole Metaphysics” had been not “spiritual,” but rather “material.” Further developed by “Hume,” this doctrine had dragged “the world into bottomless abysses.”Footnote 81 The “materialism and sensualism” of “Hume,” Carlyle argued, were thus inimical to “spiritual freedom.”Footnote 82 Similarly, “Benthamee Utility” would reduce “the infinite celestial Soul of Man to a kind of Hay-balance for weighing … pleasures and pains on.”Footnote 83 As such, it was the culmination of the “Spiritual Paralysis” that had characterized the “Eighteenth Century.”Footnote 84
According to “the Epicurean school of philosophy,” Carlyle claimed, human beings were to make themselves “comfortable” and “enjoy” the “world.” Such men as envisaged by “Benthamism,” he claimed, would be capable of little more than “love of Pleasure, fear of Pain.”Footnote 85 As he put it in Past and Present (1843), they would wallow in “vulturous hunger for fine wines,” “valet reputation,” “gilt carriages,” and other “Epicurisms.” The “whole wretchedness” of “these generations,” Carlyle wrote, stemmed from the “pretension” to be “happy,” as “happy” as “the fattest pig of Epicurus.”Footnote 86 Besides the fact that it did not befit a human being, Carlyle contended, such an ideal of life was ultimately self-defeating. Notwithstanding all the “upholsteries and cookeries” in the world, it would always end in “ennui.”Footnote 87
Instead, Carlyle declared, “it is possible for us to be free—to attain to the possession of a spiritual freedom … not living on any longer in a blind sensualism and egotism, but succeeding to get out and be free.”Footnote 88 In order to do this, men would have to lay aside happiness and recognize the “infinite, absolute character of Virtue.”Footnote 89 According to Carlyle, virtue was not, as Hume and Bentham had claimed, merely a means to pleasure but rather, as Reid and Stewart had argued, an end in itself. As he explained in “Schiller,”
[T]his truth, that man has in him something higher than a Love of Pleasure … has been the text of all true Teachers and Preachers, since the beginning of the world … Once, Epicurus had his Zeno; and if the herd of mankind have at all times been the slaves of Desire … earnest natures were not wanting who … asserted for their kind a higher vocation than this; declaring … that man's soul was no dead Balance for “motives” to sway hither and thither, but a living divine Soul, indefeasibly free, whose birthright it was to be the servant of Virtue, Goodness, God, and in such service to be blessed without fee or reward.Footnote 90
In order to attain this ideal, one would have to lay aside “one's own poor egoism, hungry love of happiness &c,” and acknowledge that “Self-renunciation” was “the beginning of virtue for a man.”Footnote 91 In other words, one would have to recognize “the Infinite Nature of Duty.”Footnote 92 Rather than “profit-and-loss calculations,” this consisted in “joining” oneself to “the great deep Law of the World.”Footnote 93 The latter, Carlyle argued, could be discerned through use of “the Inner Light or Moral Conscience” of one's “own soul.” Carlyle's generation, then, was called upon to rise above the sordid selfishness and sensuality of the eighteenth century and to thus emerge as “noble European Nineteenth-Century Men.”Footnote 94
In addition to rejecting the pursuit of pleasure as an appropriate end for the life of the individual, Carlyle also took umbrage with Epicurean, utility-based theories of sociability. In particular, he set out to refute Hume's claim that justice was an artificial and negative virtue, which, in a modern commercial society, could be maintained through an artful management of self-interest and “public opinion.”Footnote 95 Against Hume and his followers, Carlyle argued that genuinely disinterested “virtue,” as understood in ancient political philosophy, remained as necessary as ever. As he wrote in “Voltaire” (April 1829),
It is contended by many that our mere love of personal Pleasure, or Happiness as it is called, acting on every individual … will of itself lead him to respect the rights of others, and wisely employ his own; to fulfil, on a mere principle of economy, all the duties of a good patriot; so that, in what respects the State … Virtue, beyond the very common Virtue of loving what is pleasant and hating what is painful, are to be considered as supererogatory qualifications, as ornamental, not essential. Many there are, on the other hand, who pause over this doctrine; cannot discover, in such a universe of conflicting atoms, any principle by which the whole shall cohere; for if every man's selfishness, infinitely expansive, is to be hemmed-in only by the infinitely-expansive selfishness of every other man, it seems as if we should have a world of mutually repulsive bodies with no centripetal force to bind them together.Footnote 96
Concluding, Carlyle argued that the “Force of Public Opinion” was “ineffectual” as “a basis of public or private Morals.” This, he claimed, could be provided only by “some belief in the necessary, eternal … nature of Virtue.”Footnote 97
Several months later, Carlyle returned to the same theme in “Signs of the Times,” published in the Edinburgh Review in June 1829. Ostensibly, this was a review of W. A. Mackinnon's The Rise, Progress, and Present State of Public Opinion (1828), in which Mackinnon had suggested that the examples of “the ancient republics of Greece and Rome” were irrelevant to modern commercial societies, which were animated not by virtue but rather by “public opinion.”Footnote 98 Commenting, Carlyle wrote,
Love of country, in any high or generous sense … has little importance attached to it in such reforms … . Men are to be guided only by their self-interests. Good government is a good balancing of these; and, except a keen eye and appetite for self-interest, requires no virtue in any quarter … the ‘superior morality’, of which we hear so much … is properly rather an ‘inferior criminality’, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.Footnote 99
Such erroneous notions, Carlyle argued, stemmed not from “Socrates” and “Plato,” but rather “Bentham” and “Hume.”Footnote 100
That Carlyle considered Hume the taproot of these ideas regarding sociability is confirmed by an entry to his journal in October 1831. Here, Carlyle wrote that “you cannot drill a regiment of knaves into a regiment of honest men, enregiment and organize them as cunningly as you will.”Footnote 101 This was almost certainly a reference to Hume's claim that in politics, “every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest. By this interest we must govern him, and, by means of it, make him … cooperate to public good.”Footnote 102 One year prior to Carlyle's journal entry, Hume's dictum had been quoted approvingly by James Mill, one of Bentham's leading disciples, in his Fragment on Mackintosh (1830).Footnote 103 Thus, it is probable that Carlyle was referring to Hume, as recently cited by Mill.Footnote 104 Indeed, in his subsequent writings, Carlyle frequently returned to this point. For instance, in “Characteristics” (1831), he argued that “Utilitarianism” foundered upon “this quite insoluble and impossible problem, Given a world of Knaves, to produce an Honesty from their united action.”Footnote 105 Similarly, in On Heroes (1841), Carlyle alluded to “Hume, and a multitude following him,” again referring to “this hopeless problem, ‘Given a world of Knaves, to educe an Honesty from their united action.’”Footnote 106 And, to cite one final example, in Past and Present (1843), Carlyle argued that “by no Reform Bill, Ballot-box, Five-point Charter,” “can you perform this alchemy: ‘Given a world of Knaves to produce an Honesty from their united action!’ It is a distillation, once for all, not possible.”Footnote 107
Even more explicit confirmation of Carlyle's opposition to Hume's Epicurean theory of sociability is provided by the Lectures on the History of Literature (1838). Here, Carlyle informed his audience that
Hume considered virtue to be the same as expediency, profit; that all useful things were virtues; that people in old times found the utility of the thing [and] agreed that for the sake of keeping society together, they would patronize such things as were useful to one another, and consecrate them by some strong sanction, and that was the origin of virtue.Footnote 108
This, Carlyle pronounced, was the “most melancholy theory ever propounded.”Footnote 109
Carlyle's hostility to Hume's Epicurean theory of sociability seems to have also underpinned his subsequent polemics against laissez-faire. Indeed, as numerous scholars have suggested, the laissez-faire version of political economy had much in common with Epicureanism, particularly in its emphasis on self-interest, both as the driving motivation of individuals and as the source of sociability and justice.Footnote 110 Particularly relevant in this regard were the writings of J. R. McCulloch, one of the political economists with whom Carlyle was personally acquainted.Footnote 111 As several commentators have pointed out, McCulloch was the proponent of a “thoroughgoing Humean approach to luxury,” and his concept of “economic man” had “much in common with Bentham's pleasure-maximizer.”Footnote 112 According to McCulloch, Adam Smith's great achievement was to have “shown that it is in every case sound policy, to leave individuals to pursue their own interest in their own way; that, in prosecuting branches of industry advantageous to themselves, they necessarily prosecute such as are, at the same time, advantageous to the public.”Footnote 113 Similarly, in an article that Carlyle is known to have read, Bentham's disciple Thomas Perronet Thompson defended the doctrine of “laissez-faire,” arguing that “the desire of all men to enjoy is the precise instrument, the very principle of universal gravitation towards the same point, by virtue of which … the circuit of the world is carried on.”Footnote 114 Finally, another political economist with whom Carlyle associated, William Neilson Hancock, explained that in “laissez-faire,” “the soundest principles of science coincide with the dictates of common prudence, in teaching each person to mind his own business, and to follow the dictates of enlightened self-interest as the best means of promoting the welfare of himself, of his country, and of the whole family of man.”Footnote 115
In this regard, it is significant that, in Past and Present, Carlyle referred to the “Hume” theory of “things well let alone.”Footnote 116 “Laissez-faire,” he implied, was not merely an economic doctrine but meant more generally leaving “all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause.”Footnote 117 In this sense, like utilitarianism, the doctrines of political economists such as “M'Croudy” were “clearly fitter for a reflective pig than for a man.”Footnote 118 To such “Pig Philosophers,” Carlyle wrote, “Justice” was little more than a means to better secure “the universal Swine's-trough.”Footnote 119 In short, Carlyle argued, “enlightened Egoism” and “Laissez-faire” would never provide “a practicable Law of Union for a Society of Men.”Footnote 120
In opposition to Hume's theory of justice as an artificial virtue, Carlyle attempted to revive a broadly Platonic tradition of natural law.Footnote 121 For instance, in Past and Present, he argued that “eternal Justice” was distinct from “momentary Expediency” and that it was irreducible to “interests.”Footnote 122 Similarly, “Nature and her Laws” operated independently of “Ballot-box, Reform Bill,” and “Force of Public Opinion.”Footnote 123 In the Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Carlyle's adherence to the natural-law tradition issued in a fierce polemic against representative democracy, in which he argued that “popular suffrage is not the way of ascertaining what the Laws of the Universe are.”Footnote 124 Given that “fools, cowards, knaves, and gluttonous traitors true only to their own appetite” were the “immense majority, in every rank of life,” it would be disastrous to govern on the basis of public “opinion.”Footnote 125
Having rejected Hume's theory of justice as an artificial virtue, Carlyle also rejected his theory of justice as a negative virtue. Rather than simply balancing and managing the self-interest of individuals, Carlyle argued, the legislator was called upon to play a positive, interventionist role in public life, actively promoting virtue and moral excellence among its citizens. The “right of the ignorant man to be guided by the wiser,” and to “be held in the true course by him,” Carlyle claimed, had been ordained by “Nature herself.”Footnote 126 In this regard, even medieval notions of the “Divine right of Kings” were preferable to the eighteenth-century doctrine that “all goes by self-interest and the checking and balancing of greedy knaveries.”Footnote 127 The “end of Government,” Carlyle asserted, was to “guide men in the way wherein they should go, towards their true good in this life,” regardless of what “Hume” might claim.Footnote 128 Thus, what was required was “not a Reformed Parliament,” designed to represent public opinion, but rather “a Reformed Executive or Sovereign Body of Rulers and Administrators,” designed to guide and enlighten it.Footnote 129
Carlyle frequently articulated this theory through his famous maxim of “Hero-worship.” Indeed, the phrase itself was borrowed from Hume.Footnote 130 By invoking it, Carlyle was responding to Hume's argument regarding the need to restrain the self-interest of governors through institutional mechanisms. In opposition, Carlyle sought to reassert the possibility of genuinely disinterested authority. In “Voltaire,” Carlyle had complained of the “Utilitarian” doctrine regarding the “love of power.”Footnote 131 Shortly thereafter, in “Signs of the Times,” he referred explicitly to Hume's “Natural History of Religion,” the essay in which the phrase “Hero-worship” had appeared.Footnote 132 From this point onward, the term became a mainstay of Carlyle's idiom. For instance, in “Boswell's Life of Johnson” (May 1832), an essay that referred repeatedly to “Hume,” Carlyle declared: “Loyalty, Discipleship, all that was ever meant by Hero-worship, lives perennially in the human bosom.” Ordinary men, he argued, were “by nature quite thoroughly gregarious” and were endowed with a natural instinct that allowed them to recognize “Great Men.”Footnote 133 Similarly, in “Sir Walter Scott” (1838), Carlyle referred dismissively to “Hume,” claiming that “hero-worship” was the “indestructible” creed of “mankind,” “whereon politics, religions, loyalties, and all highest human interests have been and can be built.”Footnote 134 And, finally, in his eponymous lectures (1840), Carlyle was even more emphatic, arguing that “Society is founded on Hero-worship.”Footnote 135 In conclusion, against Hume's Epicurean theory of justice as an artificial and negative virtue, grounded in self-interest, utility, and “opinion,” Carlyle attempted to reassert the canons of natural law, in which justice was both natural and positive, to be observed by rulers and ruled alike.
The Reception of Carlyle's Writings on Epicureanism (ca. 1850–1870)
That Carlyle's moral and political writings represented an assault upon Epicureanism was readily apparent to his contemporaries. For instance, in 1842, Carlyle's friend John Forster contributed a series of articles on the ancient philosophers of Greece to the Foreign Quarterly Review.Footnote 136 Here, Forster explained how “Democritus,” a precursor of Epicurus, had “made virtue and vice depend mainly on human institutions.”Footnote 137 Following Democritus, the “Sophists” argued that “the only foundation of knowledge” was “sensation,” and that “the only foundation of virtue” was “the desire of pleasure.” Continuing, Forster then explained how Plato had set out to refute such notions, asserting that man ought “to conform his will to objective laws of action, which shall be to him the measure of virtue.” A similar mission, Forster noted, had recently been performed by “a great original thinker of modern days,” particularly in his “Sartor Resartus.”Footnote 138
Over subsequent years, a spate of similar analyses issued from the press. For instance, in 1852, a reviewer claimed that Carlyle's “whole theory of life and morals” differed widely from that of “the modern liberal school.” In a word, the reviewer explained, “he is a Stoic, and they are Epicureans.” According to the reviewer, “democratic opinions,” “as held in modern times,” had “historically proceeded from Epicurean views of human nature.” Elaborating, he wrote:
If physical good be the chief end of man, it seems that to attain it he has only to follow his bodily instincts. Now these are nearly the same in all men; and therefore the administration of affairs, or, in other words, the pursuit of their own physical gratification, may be safely entrusted to all mankind … . Nor is it merely quite safe to entrust every man with an equal share in the government: it is positively unjust to exclude him; for if he is excluded, those who govern will no doubt take to themselves a very unfair share of the good things of the world.Footnote 139
The “new Stoicism” of Carlyle, the reviewer concluded, “seems on the whole to be far better and nobler than the prevalent Epicureanism, against which it protests. Its tendency is to fortify the mental and moral energies. It inculcates the sense of duty, the contempt of pleasure and pain.”Footnote 140
The same year, a comparable analysis was put forward by another reviewer, who wrote that “thanks” to Carlyle, “we have pretty well got rid [of the] Epicureanism of last century.”Footnote 141 And, several years later, in 1856, James Martineau explained how “Carlyle” had refuted “Hume,” along with “the devices of utilitarian cuisine for putting pleasure into the pot and drawing virtue out.”Footnote 142 Thus, it was quite clear to contemporaries that Carlyle's works were anti-Epicurean in thrust.
Subsequently, John Stuart Mill, a former friend of Carlyle, took it upon himself to mount a defense of the Epicurean tradition.Footnote 143 For instance, in a series of diary entries dated 1854, Mill noted his disagreement with “Carlyle,” claiming that “useful and even permanently valuable things are continually done from vanity, or a selfish desire of riches or power.” Instead of attempting to set up “a new form” of “Stoicism,” “persuading men to sink altogether earthly happiness as a pursuit,” Mill argued, what was needed was “the creed of Epicurus warmed by the additional element of an enthusiastic love of the general good.”Footnote 144
In Utilitarianism (1863), Mill undertook to bring about such a reconciliation.Footnote 145 According to “Mr. Carlyle” and his followers, Mill wrote, “men can do without happiness … all noble human beings have felt this, and could not have become noble but by learning the lesson of Entsagen, or renunciation.” In opposition, Mill then proceeded to clarify the ideas of Epicurus, implying that Carlyle had failed to understand them. As Mill pointed out, Epicurus had not advocated a brutish sensuality but rather a more modest kind of “happiness,” consisting in “an existence made up of few and transitory pains, many and various pleasures, with a decided predominance of the active over the passive.” Thus, an Epicurean would always choose the “higher” pleasures over the “lower.” Moreover, according to Mill, such an existence was “even now the lot of many, during some considerable proportion of their lives” and, through improvements in “education” and “social arrangements,” might one day be “attainable by almost all.”Footnote 146 However, this would depend on continuing social progress, which itself depended upon exactly the kind of renunciation that Carlyle advocated. As Mill admitted,
Though it is only in a very imperfect state of the world's arrangements that anyone can best serve the happiness of others by the absolute sacrifice of his own, yet so long as the world is in that imperfect state, I fully acknowledge that the readiness to make such a sacrifice is the highest virtue which can be found in man.Footnote 147
Thus, according to Mill, the “utilitarian morality” did indeed “recognize in human beings the power of sacrificing their own greatest good for the good of others.” However, it refused “to admit that the sacrifice is itself a good,” and held that any “sacrifice” that did not “increase” the “sum total of happiness” was “wasted.” Concluding the discussion, Mill claimed that “the morality of self-devotion” could thus be claimed by “utilitarians” no less than by “the Stoic.”Footnote 148
For his part, Carlyle seems to have made little attempt to respond to Mill. However, worthy of mention is a manuscript dated October 1865. Here, Carlyle made clear that he did not see the point in Mill's attempt to stretch the language of happiness to accommodate virtue and nobleness. In his opinion, it would be better to simply speak of the latter in their own right. As he put it,
The greatest happiness of the greatest number, or any happiness of any number or of any individual, myself included; that is not the question, nor ever was. Give up that, I pray you: you don't know to what bad issues it will lead you. Say the greatest nobleness of the greatest number, if you must say something.Footnote 149
Thus, while both Mill and Carlyle stressed the importance of virtue, self-sacrifice, and dedication to the public good, Mill maintained that these were ultimately the means to happiness, while Carlyle argued that they were ends in themselves. At this point, the debate between the two men appears to have broken down.
Despite the paucity of Carlyle's own response, however, several of his disciples offered more extended replies. Some simply reiterated Carlyle's earlier objections to Epicureanism, treating Mill as a straightforward representative of the latter. For instance, in Idealism (1872), William Graham denounced “the refined Epicureanism of Mill,” arguing that “Virtue” was absolute, and must be ready to renounce “all earthly pleasure of outer and inner sense at the supreme order of Reason.”Footnote 150 Similarly, in his History of European Morals (1869), W. E. H. Lecky divided the history of moral philosophy into two great schools, the first being “the stoical,” and the second “the epicurean.”Footnote 151 While the “Epicurean” school had existed since ancient times, Lecky argued, it had only come to full fruition “in modern times,” due to the influence of writers such as “Bentham.” According to such thinkers, the sole “motive to virtue” was “enlightened self-interest.” In particular, since “cooperation and organization” were “essential to our happiness,” it was prudent to place “some restraint” upon “our appetites” and to obey the law. In opposition, Lecky endorsed the views of the “stoic” school, to the effect that “our will is not governed exclusively by the law of pleasure and pain, but also by the law of duty, which we feel to be distinct from the former, and to carry with it the sense of obligation.”Footnote 152 To clinch the point, Lecky quoted from “Carlyle's Hero-worship,” to the effect that “it is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things … that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs.”Footnote 153
However, other disciples and sympathizers of Carlyle put forward more nuanced responses, arguing that Mill had effectively stretched Epicureanism beyond breaking point, arriving at a species of Stoicism similar to that of Carlyle.Footnote 154 For instance, in 1870, Carlyle reported having been sent a book “by a Professor Grote,” this being a “remonstrance against J. S. Mill and the Utilitarian Theory of Morals.”Footnote 155 Carlyle was referring to John Grote's Examination of the Utilitarian Philosophy (1870), in which it was argued that Mill's “neo-utilitarianism” was in fact “something very different” to the older utilitarianism he had set out to defend. Although Mill appeared to “identify his cause with that of the Epicureans,” Grote claimed, it was clear that he also sympathized “with the Stoics.” In particular, by emphasizing disinterested virtue and dedication to the public good, Mill had embraced the cardinal Stoic “doctrine of man's sociality.” Furthermore, by making a distinction regarding the “quality” of pleasures, Mill had arrived at “a philosophy of happiness as [eudaimonia], or a lofty ideal of what man may rise to, entirely different from a philosophy of happiness as [pleasure].” Thus, Mill differed markedly from the older “Epicurean utilitarianism,” according to which “pleasures” differed only “according to their quantity.”Footnote 156
Scottish classicist John Stuart Blackie, an old friend and self-described disciple of Carlyle, advanced a similar analysis.Footnote 157 In his Four Phases of Morals (1871), Blackie attacked “Hume” and “Bentham” for having refurbished “the old doctrine of Epicurus, that for man, as for beast, pleasure is the only good.” What such thinkers had failed to understand, Blackie argued, was that “Pleasure and Good, so far from being of a kindred nature, are generally directly opposite.” In particular, while “Pleasure” was “often passive,” generally involved “shunning difficulty,” and was common to both “man” and “pig,” the “Good” was “always active,” sought to confront “difficulty,” and was reserved to “man” as a “rational” being. Blackie then argued that Mill's Utilitarianism represented a fundamental break with the older Epicurean tradition. By “departing from the original idea of his school,” “that pleasures differ from one another only in intensity,” and by introducing a distinction between “high and low pleasures,” Mill had effectively been “thrown back” on “those innate ideas which it is the characteristic boast of his school to have discarded.” In particular, Blackie argued, “the essential difference in the quality of high and low pleasures” could not “be proved by any external induction, but springs directly out of the intellectual and emotional nature of man.” In this sense, Mill had succeeded in defending “Utilitarianism” only “by throwing overboard all that is most distinctive in the doctrine, and adopting secretly all that is most peculiar to the teaching of his opponents.” Concluding, Blackie wrote,
In ancient times, between Epicureanism and Stoicism there was a distinct and well-marked line of demarcation … now, under Mr. Mill's manipulation, this distinction vanishes; the love of pleasure with which he started is sublimated into the love of virtue … and a Joseph Mazzini consecrating his whole life with the most intense enthusiasm and the most severe self-denial to the ideal of a possible Italian republic, is as much an Epicurean as David Hume sneering at all enthusiasm, and pleasing his soul with the delicate flatteries of fair dames in a Parisian saloon.Footnote 158
“This,” Blackie wrote, “is to confound all things, and to reduce the whole affair to a fence of words rather than to a battle of principle.”Footnote 159 According to Grote and Blackie, Mill had failed to defend the Epicurean tradition against Carlyle, and had, despite his protestations, ultimately capitulated to the latter's Stoicism.
Conclusion
Carlyle has long been known as one of the earliest and most vociferous critics of Benthamite utilitarianism. However, Carlyle understood Benthamism as the culmination of a much longer eighteenth-century tradition of Epicurean moral and political thought. Having been an enthusiastic reader of David Hume during his youth, Carlyle later turned against him, waging an increasingly violent polemic against all forms of Epicureanism. Carlyle not only rejected the pursuit of “pleasure” as an appropriate end for the life of the individual but also took umbrage with Epicurean, utility-based accounts of sociability in which justice was presented as an artificial, negative virtue. According to Carlyle, this theory provided the philosophical underpinnings of laissez-faire, representative democracy, and “public opinion.”
However, according to Carlyle, sensations of pleasure would never fulfill the life of the individual, while self-interest—no matter how “enlightened,” balanced, or channeled by institutions—would never provide a stable foundation for a political community. Instead, Carlyle sought to vindicate the tenets of Platonic natural law, according to which duty, sociability, and justice were natural and positive virtues, springing from man's nature as a rational and moral being, and incumbent upon both governors and governed alike. Accordingly, the state was called upon to play a positive, interventionist role in public life, actively fostering virtue and moral excellence amongst its citizens. Thus, Carlyle's rejection of Epicureanism made a crucial contribution to the waning of eighteenth-century discourses of commercial society, and to the rise of an interventionist, regulatory, and ethical philosophy, later known as British Idealism. Indeed, as the leading British Idealist philosopher Edward Caird put it shortly after Carlyle's death, his aim had been to “banish the eighteenth-century theory of the limitations of the government to the functions of a grand policeman, and to revive the old Platonic idea that the State had a social and ethical work to perform.”Footnote 160
The magnitude of Carlyle's contribution in this regard parallels an anecdote recounted by his friend, the Chartist lecturer Thomas Cooper. In 1853, Cooper recalled, Carlyle had unexpectedly received a package from the poet Walter Savage Landor. Cooper wrote,
A loaded truck stopped at the street-door—there was a loud knock—and the maid-servant ran upstairs, breathless, to say that a huge parcel had been brought … . It was a portrait of David Hume, in full dress … . “Only think of that old Landor sending me this!” broke out Carlyle again and again, as we all stood gazing on the portrait.Footnote 161
“Here,” Landor had written, “I present a great philosopher to a greater.”Footnote 162
