K B L E C T U R E 4
‘Failed Enlightenment’:
Spinoza’s Legacy and the
Netherlands (1670-1800)
NIAS
Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
Meijboomlaan 1, 2242 PR Wassenaar Telephone: (0)70-512 27 00
Telefax: (0)70-511 71 62 E-mail: [email protected] Internet: www.nias.knaw.nl
The fourth KB Lecture was held at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) - National Library of the Netherlandsin The Hague on 21 June 2007
The Dutch translation In strijd met Spinoza. Het failliet van de Nederlandse Verlichting (1670-1800)(translated by Hans van Cuijlenborg), ISBN 978-90-351-3209-2, was published by Uitgeverij Bert Bakker (c) 2007.
NIAS, Wassenaar, 2007/5
ISBN: 978-90-71093-58-6 ISSN 1871-1480; 4
It is a great pleasure for me, and also an honour, to be delivering the Fourth KB Lecture. In the last few years this has become an annual academic occasion of some significance in the Netherlands, chiefly no doubt because it symbolizes the collaboration in modern society between the staff and resources of a great national library, like the Royal Library here, in The Hague, and the researchers and academics who carry on research into, and teach, the humanities in our universities. Hence, this very special lecture is also inherently linked to the question of the relevance of the humanities to modern society.
Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), without question the Netherlands’ most important thinker, was the first great philosopher in history systematically to advocate the need for democracy and individual freedom, as well as equality, as the basis of a purely secular social and moral theory. This lends him a pivotal importance in Dutch as in all human history as well as in present-day debate about society, politics and religion. Spinoza’s philosophy was an outright challenge not just to the ancien régime, and to tradition and organized religion, but also a powerful moral, social and political set of principles that lies at the heart of all nineteenth, twentieth and no doubt also twenty-first century battles over the true nature of modernity. Little wonder that Spinoza provoked unprecedented opposition not only in his own time but throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “The willingness to view the human situation”, as one recent commentator aptly expressed it, “without recourse either to metaphysical comfort or to despair constitutes a new kind of bravery, which Spinoza calls fortitude or strength of
character – what Nietzsche later described as intellectual probity.”1We have fairly
extensive evidence to show that in the Netherlands there many disciples of Spinoza in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth. As the Harderwijk professor Bernard Nieuhoff (1747-1831) expressed it, in his book Over Spinozisme
(Harderwijk, 1799):
“Men zegt, dat voorheen seer velen gevonden wierden, vooral in Nederland, die het Spinozisme in stilte koesterden. Zeker is het, dat zeer weinigen er openlijk voor uit kwamen; en geen wonder; Spinozisme werd algemeen uit geekreten, als het allersnoodste atheisme.” [It is said that very many were to be found, formerly, who cultivated Spinozism in secret, especially in the Netherlands. What is certain is that very few came out openly for that cause; and no wonder! Spinozism was generally decried as the very vilest atheism.]2
Nieuhoff then adds that “nowadays, yet again, Spinozism seems to be coming up somewhat”.3 Some have chosen to interpret this as referring exclusively to
Germany where in the 1780s there was a great public controversy, the
Pantheismusstreit, about the significance of Spinoza in modern culture. But I shall argue that it applies to the Netherlands too and that this fact is highly significant for correctly understanding the Dutch Enlightenment and that the Dutch Enlightenment is, in turn, a crucial episode – and perhaps the most crucial, at least after the Dutch Revolt against Spain – for understanding the character of Dutch modernity.
For if Spinoza, born and bred in Amsterdam, was the first great thinker to set out the principles championed by democrats, egalitarians, systematic freethinkers and men of comprehensive toleration (ie. not Locke’s limited toleration), and, hence, can meaningfully be interpreted as the anchor-man of the Early Radical Enlightenment, or Vroege Radicale Verlichting, as one says nowadays in Dutch,4
the Netherlands undeniably also played a pivotal role in the wider history of
1 S.B. Smith, Spinoza’s Book of Life(New Haven, Conn., 2003) p. 200. 2 Bernardus Nieuhoff, Over Spinozisme(Harderwijk, 1799), p. 40. 3 Ibid., p. 41.
4 Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested. Philosophy, Modernity and the Emancipation of Man,
modern democracy and equality in another, and at first sight entirely different, sense. The Patriottenbeweging (1779-87) and the revolutionary democratic movement formed by the Patriot refugees in exile, in France (1787-95), constitutes the first and only major European democratic mass movement prior to the French Revolution, and only eighteenth-century mass movement explicitly demanding not just democracy but also full individual freedom of thought, expression and conscience (i.e. was in a significant sense anti-Rousseauist).
This imparts to the later Dutch Enlightenment era a central significance in the history of the global Enlightenment as a whole which has by no means been adequately recognized in the existing literature either by Dutch or foreign writers. Indeed, scholars have been curiously reluctant to accept either that the ideas, books and philosophical debates that lie behind the democratic projects and demands of the Patriotten were the decisive factor in turning the
Patriottenbeweging into a genuinely mass democratic movement or that it did constitute a decisively important aspect of the Western Enlightenment as a whole. In fact, contrary to what I shall be saying this evening, nearly all Dutch historians who have written about this subject, including E.H. Kossmann, have been inclined to deny that the Patriottenbeweging was a major expression of the Enlightenment’s general philosophical evolution. It is to attempting to right the balance, as I see it, that this present lecture is largely devoted.
This now traditional neglect of the intellectual aspects of the Dutch radical democratic ‘revolution’ of the 1780s seems to me to be trebly unfortunate. Firstly, it utterly distorts history and as long as this preference for avoiding the ideas and ideology of the Patriotten persists, it will be impossible to persuade readers to view the Patriottenbeweging chiefly in terms of ‘Enlightenment’ and the Enlightenment’s bearing on the emergence of modern democracy and equality. Since preserving the values of our modern democracy, equality and individual liberty against forces intent on destroying those values is today rightly considered an urgent priority, and in the Netherlands more perhaps than anywhere else, thoroughly demonstrating the wrong-headedness of the claim that the Dutch were more or less untouched by international Enlightenment philosophical debates in the 1770s and 1780s, and the, I believe, equally mistaken notion that it is primarily the social-cultural not the intellectual aspects of the Patriottenbeweging
that matter, becomes a rather urgent priority.
during the years just preceding the outbreak of the American Revolution, in 1776, will immediately see that the general public, and not least the Dutch Reformed Church preachers, were profoundly agitated and uneasy about the impact of the general European Enlightenment on Dutch culture and society.5But they will also
see that during the early and mid 1770s, contemporaries were almost entirely preoccupied with the religious and moral aspects of the Enlightenment’s impact, and the issue of where to draw the bounds of toleration, and not at all, as far as the public sphere was concerned, with the political and institutional dimension. Those orthodox Calvinists who complained that ‘philosophy’ was beginning to prevail over ‘Bible-teachings’ in many people’s minds, and that a mechanistic world view was replacing a world governed by miracles and supernatural forces, and there were very many, blamed not only the French philosophes, and the native Dutch naturalisten– a key word at the time – but also the influence of mechanistic and Deistic tendencies with a Leibnizian-Wolffian colouring emanating from Germany.6
Those Dutch intellectual leaders, such as the Wolffian jurist and future Patriot spokesman, Professor Friedrich Adolf van der Marck (1719-1800), at Groningen, who expounded social theories based on purely secular philosophy, rather than theology, or who like Professor Van Goens at Utrecht, were identified in the public sphere as championing the ideas of Voltaire, d’Alembert, Diderot, and Hume, found themselves caught up in a fraught, distinctly embattled, situation. Admittedly, the religious and moral controversies of the late 1760s and early 1770s ultimately had deep political implications;7but they were scarcely apparent
at the time. Although Van der Marck was officially dismissed from his chair at Groningen, in 1773, by the university senate, under suspicion of Socinian heterodoxy, especially for denying the Fall, and the incapacity of natural reason, as well as the necessity of Christ’s intercession for human salvation, some (at least later) viewed theology just a pretext, believing that the Stadholder, who participated in his dismissal, did so in reality because Van der Marck was inspiring
5 A point stressed in E. van der Wall, Socrates in de hemel? Een achttiende-eeuwse polemiek over
deugd, verdraagzaamheid en de vaderlandse kerk, pp. 11, 27-8, 73.
6 See, for instance, De Waarheid van zyn luister beroofd door de Philosophie van Wolff(Utrecht, 1775) (Knuttel: 19111) pp. 77-9, 81-2; Godert van Nieuwenburg, Heilzaame en welmeenende raad voor alle voorstanders van de gevoelens van den Heer Professor Van der Marck(np. 1775) (Knuttel, 19040), pp. 9-10, 27-3.
students with the ‘sentiments of liberty’, as Mirabeau later put it, while the Prince preferred ‘qu’on lui forme des esclaves’.8 But to all appearances, the public
controversies surrounding Enlightenment ideas in the Netherlands, before 1775, had little to do with politics. The principal issue in the controversy surrounding the Utrecht professor, Van Goens, down to 1775, for example was whether, as Van Goens maintained, one can admire (and teach students about) the literary, aesthetic and literary-philosophical ideas of, Voltaire d’Alembert, Diderot and Hume, without admiring or encouraging students to absorb their anti-religious attitude and basic philosophical principles. Van Goens adamantly insisted one could and should; his many critics (rather more convincingly) held that one can not, and if one wishes to preserve an essentially Reformed-minded society, should not.9Van Goens must have changed his mind about this later, for he subsequently
abandoned his earlier pro-Enlightenment stance and increasingly withdrew into an intense Christian piety.
Viewing this from a European and trans-Atlantic perspective, one might say there was nothing at all unusual here. But what was wholly unique was the way the Dutch Enlightenment was suddenly politicized and polarized in the most dramatic fashion, from 1776 onwards, by the outbreak of the American Revolution. Events in America had a profound effect everywhere in Europe, of course; but only in the United Provinces and not, I believe, anywhere else did this deep impact immediately result, in a full-scale and intensely political public controversy in which Enlightenment thought and philosophers played a key shaping role in the domestic debate; and, secondly, owing to the Netherlands’ peculiar position, internationally, at the time, caused a profound rift within the nation, a split that was to have lasting and profoundly divisive consequences.
These two key features – the deep split in Dutch society and the Enlightenment controversy were, in fact, inextricably connected because Dutch support for the
8 [Pieter Vreede?], Zakboek van Neerlands Volk, voor Patriotten, Antipatriotten, Aristokraten en Prinsgezinden(Dordrecht, 1785) (Knuttel, 21041), pp. 35-8; W. Gobbers,Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Holland. Een onderzoek naar de invloed van de mens en het werk (ca.1760-ca.1810) (Gent, 1963), p. 225.
9 Bericht van den Prof Van Goens rakende de recensie van zyne vertaling van de Verhandeling van
Mozes Mendelszoon(Utrecht, 1775)(Knuttel, 19107), pp. xxi-xxiv, xxxvii, xlii; Johannes Habbema,
American rebels, even if largely politically and commercially motivated, justified itself to the public in terms of republican, democratic and ‘Left Wolffian’ natural right theories, on the one hand, while the ties between the House of Orange and Britain led the Stadholder’s supporters vigorously to oppose the American Revolution not just through loyalty to the House of Orange but also because they were convinced that “l’union la plus intime avec l’Angleterre”, as one of them put it, was the proper basis for Dutch state policy and the best way to protect the Republic’s political independence, trade and colonies.
Both sides in this bitter and escalating quarrel crucially invoked Enlightenment ideas; however, the two sides appealed not just to different Enlightenment ideas but to very different dimensions of the Enlightenment. A key spokesman for the Orangist side, for example, was the Netherlands’ leading Jewish philosophe, the wealthy patrician, Isaac de Pinto (1717-87), a long-standing opponent within the Jewish community since his youth of both Spinozism, and the French materialism which he rightly saw as its heir.10De Pinto held that property and privilege were
the right basis for ‘Dutch liberty’ and, in consequence, fiercely denounced in the press those Dutchmen who criticized Britain and supported the American Revolution. Contending that “par l’extension de la participation du pouvoir, on tend à détruire la liberté”, he powerfully invoked Montesquieu – a philosophe
widely known to have admired British mixed monarchy, and a philosophe often appealed to in the 1780s on behalf of socially conservative causes, including the defence of serfdom in Russia, and even slavery in the Caribbean. Citing Montesquieu, De Pinto warned his countrymen: “il ne faut pas confondre le pouvoir du people, avec la liberté du peuple.”11
Many Dutchmen, argued De Pinto, were overlooking the centrality of commercial interest in the traditions and policy-making of their republic. Dutch supporters of American independence were, he believed, being absurdly short-sighted in maintaining that Britain had no right to tax the Americans without their consent. What would Holland’s good burghers say were the inhabitants of towns, like The Hague and Naarden, historically excluded from representation in the States of
10 I.J.A. Nijenhuis, Een Joodsephilosophe. Isaac de Pinto (1717-1787) en de ontwikkeling van de politieke economie in de Europese Verlichting(Amsterdam, 1992), p. 9.
Holland or the inhabitants of Surinam, Saint Eustatius and the Dutch East Indies, to demand representation in the States? Would not sensible Dutchmen firmly oppose such demands precisely as the British Parliament refused the Americans?12
It was in the Dutch interest, argued De Pinto, to help Britain, and also Spain and Portugal, to maintain their imperial systems in the New World.13 The American
insurgency, he contended, would not stop with the thirteen colonies. “Spain, Portugal, and all Europe ought therefore to join with England”, he urged, “to prevent or at least retard that independency.“ Were the Americans to win their independence, they would soon extend their domination, he predicted, over all of the New World: “Curaçao, Surinam, the islands of Jamaica, Martinique, St Domingo, Guadaloupe, in a word, all the European possessions in America and the West Indies, would pass under [their] dominion, bringing the Republic’s prosperity to an end – no more could [the Dutch] republic boast of her riches and greatness!”14
De Pinto utterly repudiated the ‘declamations’ of Raynal (and hence also Diderot) against “la prétendue tyrannie des Anglois” and detested their “abominables éloges des rebelles”.15In subsequent years De Pinto remained ardently Orangist
and pro-British and supported his equally conservative friend, Van Goens, who between 1781 and 1783 endeavoured to check the Patriot ascendancy in the Dutch press by propagating conservative Orangism through the pages of De Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot, the paper supported by the Stadholder which he edited.
In other words, the rift in Dutch public life between 1776 and 1780, already clearly marked out the lines of ideological polarization that developed, subsequently, during the Patriottenbewegingitself, inexorably pushing the two rival factions in Dutch politics towards opposite poles of the Enlightenment: conservative Orangists orientated towards Montesquieu, strong defence of empire, and adamant insistence on the superiority of the British model; Dutch supporters of the American rebellion gravitating towards the ideas of the Radical Enlightenment whether these were packaged in a French republican, German ‘Left Wolffian’, or, as with admirers of Thomas Paine (whose famous pamphlet Common Sense
appeared in French at Rotterdam as early as 1776), an Anglo-American libertarian
12 Ibid., p. 37.
13 Isaac de Pinto, Letters on the American Troubles(London, 1776), pp. 34-5, 40-1. 14 Ibid., pp. 41-2.
format. During the decades, then, that democratic thinking, egalitarianism and full freedom of expression and life-style first became major constituents of the Dutch political and social scene, namely the 1780s and 1790s, Dutch society was increasingly divided between the Patriots and their Orangist opponents, the strife between them, though certainly a political struggle being at the same time a kind of Kulturkampf, an irresolvable cultural and intellectual civil war over philosophy, science, morality and religion.
After 1781, the Netherlands was split from top to bottom not only over the question of democracy, toleration, political reform and the House of Orange, but also over the wider intellectual changes introduced by the Enlightenment and especially the issue of what kind of enlightenment should be embraced as the basis of a free, successful and prosperous society. In the end, the democrats resoundingly lost this historic struggle, being defeated by a combination of the Orangist urban mob and those in Dutch society whom the Leidse Ontwerp of 1785, one of the key Patriot public declarations, called “heerschzugtige Aristocraaten”, that is office-holders, regents and other elite groups.16 The
democrats were beaten that is by the defenders of social hierarchy, tradition, aristocracy, empire, ecclesiastical authority and the monarchical principle who won chiefly by using conservative Enlightenment concepts. But if, in the end, the democratic Radical Enlightenment was roundly defeated in the Netherlands, it was defeated only by means of massive interference in Dutch affairs by Britain and Prussia, and only after a long and very bitter struggle, and after partially winning for time; moreover, the Dutch democratic Enlightenment lost in a way which continues to have great relevance and topicality for us today.
Ideas and ideology then are the key to understanding what was going on. I do not mean to say by this that most people were interested in the ideas or the ideology. No doubt the Patriot leader, Gerrit Paape (1752-98), was quite right in saying that most ordinary Patriot supporters had only the vaguest, most incoherent notion of what Patriot doctrine was about and took no interest in such debates. But this is true of all modern ideologies; moreover, this lack of interest and understanding
on the part of the vast majority did not prevent Patriot democratic doctrine from developing coherently, very rapidly and with an impressive momentum among the movement’s political and intellectual leadership. As Nieuhoff pointed out, there were some in Holland and elsewhere at the time who identified Spinoza as the philosophical root of the systematic democratic egalitarianism and materialism culminating in the Système de la natureand other works by d’Holbach, Diderot, Helvetius and their disciples as well as in the third edition of Raynal.17 The
connection was pointed to also by another Patriot activist, the French-born republican journalist and historian, Antoine-Marie Cerisier (1749-1828), in his important Tableau de l ‘Histoire Générale des Provinces-Unies, (10 vols.;Utrecht, 1777-84). Cerisier, a strong republican, remarkably bold in his published statements about Spinoza (dating from 1783), observed that Spinoza’s system had been powerfully renewed in our time by some new “Diagoras [an allusion to Diderot and d’Holbach], qui n’avaient ni le génie, ni la profondeur et la subtilité de Spinosa”.18
Spinozistic philosophy, then, culminating in d’Holbach and Diderot was the philosophy intellectually most closely linked to full democracy, freedom of expression and life-style, and individual freedom. Very few people, it is true, either understood or were interested in this. But the emergence of the Patriots as a mass movement, able to command strong support in the streets, and tendency of the country’s many civic literary and debating clubs to split between the rival factions as the political strife intensified, turned such reading and debating societies (and the universities), into arenas where radical tendencies, nevertheless, indirectly, by extension, so to speak, gained a huge following. Radical ideas, stripped of their original philosophical baggage, sufficiently answered the needs of the moment, to enable a philosophically articulate few, often, like Van der Marck and Nieuhoff, professors, or else lawyers, doctors, or, like Cerisier and Gerrit Paape, journalists, to gain a wholly disproportionate influence over what was soon to be a nation-wide mass movement.
A good example of this remarkable filtering down of radical ideas is the splitting of the several Leiden literary and debating circles. In the late 1770s and at the
17 Nieuhoff, Over Spinozisme, p. 82, 306
beginning of the 1780s, these clubs accommodated both ardent Patriots, like Pieter Vreede (1750-1837), son of a Leiden textile manufacturer who, by 1783, completely rejected the old Dutch constitution and urged a democratic Enlightenment conception of ‘vryheid’, on the one hand, and no less fervent Orangists, defending the existing constitution, on the other.19However, by the early and mid 1780s, as
the struggle intensified, the traditionalists were forced out, since relatively few Leiden professional people, book-sellers or literary figures supported the kind of conservative Orangism championed, for example, by the publisher and writer Elie Luzac (1721-1796), or by Adriaan Kluit (1735-1807), the first professor of Dutch history at Leiden and an adamant Orangist. In effect the clubs were conquered by the Patriots. Just as Luzac became isolated among the Leiden book-sellers, so Kluit became marginalized and heavily embattled at the university, his lectures leading not just to some fierce criticism but several fist-fights.20Like Van Goens at Utrecht,
he was unceremoniously dismissed from his chair, in 1783, by the Patriots after they gained control, for the moment, of both universities.
Prior to 1785, admittedly, the public ideology of the Patriottenbeweging in the Netherlands was not altogether a product of Enlightenment ideas. Dutch historiography traditionally and still today points insistently to the numerous examples in public declarations, and the writings of some early Patriot leaders like Van der Capellen, where Patriot rhetoric and ideology, adorned with lengthy recitals of historical events, still drew predominantly on alleged ancient ‘privileges’ and the Dutch past.21Van der Capellen and other Dutch Patriots, it is
held, firmly eschewed abstract concepts, urging the “herstelling der voorregten en vrijheden van ‘s Lands” [restoration of the privileges and freedoms of the land]; and where they did choose to cite Enlightenment authors uniformly preferred the more conservative British strain of Enlightenment to the radical message of French
philosophes such as d’Holbach, Diderot, Helvetius and Raynal. Justification for reform, at any rate down to 1784, allegedly, was predominantly still couched in terms of what was or was not legitimated by the sixteenth-century Dutch Revolt against Spain and by such episodes from the Republic’s seventeenth-century history as the First Stadholderless period (1650-72).
19 R. van Vliet, Elie Luzac (1721-1796). Boekverkoper van de Verlichting(Nijmegen, 2005), pp. 366-8. 20 Ibid., p. 371.
It is true that Patriot leaders continued, for some years, to show considerable hesitation about the idea of democracy as a universal principle. De Post van den Neder-Rhijn, for example, one of the main Patriot newssheets, and a paper resolute in insisting that Dutch Catholics were co-citizens and should share equally in the state, noted, in September 1785, that it remained “as opposed to a complete democracy as it was to a complete aristocracy”.22 But what has been generally
missed is that the elements in early Patriot ideology that appeal to tradition and reflect intellectual conservatism stemmed mainly from the unavoidable fact that well-entrenched, old-fashioned notions remained vital for public consumption. Other evidence proves, indisputably, that well before 1785, arguing for restoration of the ‘true constitution’ on the basis of historical precedent, was by no means the predominant tendency among the Patriot leaders and spokesmen. On the contrary, from the first emergence of the Patriot movement, in the later 1770s, there were – if we leave aside Van der Cappellen (who really was an aristocrat, a conservative thinker and strongly aligned with English ideas) – at least five distinct and highly innovative new strands, dominating the political discourse of the Patriots all of which were fundamentally new, universal and impossible to justify under the existing constitution; equally, all were unthinkable except in terms of Enlightenment thought. These were, firstly, the elevation of the ‘people’ as the primary source of legitimacy in politics, invoking the inherent legitimacy and superiority of ‘een volmaakte volksregering’ [a perfect government of the people], and the principle of volks-souvereiniteit [people’s sovereignty], in a far more emphatic way than ever before, a shift closely linked, of course, to Patriot enthusiasm for the American Revolution. The resulting stress on “the people’s sovereignty and the power which it has delegated to the country’s high sovereigns, as their representatives”, clearly meant that the people possessed the authority to abolish the stadholderate, and the whole of the existing Aristodemocratiek
constitution, as one Patriot called it in 1785, should they see fit.23
Secondly, there was the remarkable redefinition of the idea of vryheid ‘freedom’ to mean not freedom under specific historical privileges, but the inalienable freedom of everyone on an equal basis, the idea that individual “freedom was the
22 De Post van den Neder-Rhijnviii, pp. 366, 459; P.J.H.M. Theeuwen, ‘Pieter ‘t Hoen (1744-1828)’ in
O vrijheid! Onwaareerbaar pand!. Themanummer Jaarboek Oud-Utrecht 1987, pp. 43-77, here p. 68.
aim” of the Patriot movement: “de natie te verlichten”, as Pieter Vreede put it, “haar deszelfs onvervreemdbaare regten, als een vry volk te leeren keenen, is de onderneming” [to enlighten the nation to learn to know their own inalienable rights as a free people, that is the undertaking].24You can not be said to be free,
he explained, “as long as you have no control over yourselves, over your belongings and over your own happiness”; hence, only representative democracy can render individuals free.25
A third major strand of early Patriot republicanism unthinkable in terms of the past and unimaginable except in terms of Enlightenment ideas was the, for many, disturbing new doctrine that Catholics and Protestants (including the Mennonites) were equal in their civil status, or as the Post van den Neder-Rhijn expressed the point, “dus, zoo ver het het ‘s Lands behoud en welvaart aangaat, medebroeders” [thus, as far as the country’s upkeep and prosperity is concerned, fellow brethren].26This was totally out of line with the whole history of the Republic and,
potentially, rendered Jews, Socinians and Muslims too part of society.
Fourthly, there was now a crucially important discourse of anti-Aristocratie, deliberately stirring up popular resentment against both the ‘Alleenheerscher en Aristocraat’, as a necessary part of consolidating the new concept of Vryheidand, as Gerrit Paape was especially keen to do, in his De Aristocraat en de Burger
(Rotterdam, 1785), implanting the idea that de Vryheidis always in danger from sinister Aristocraatenand clergy who know how to manipulate the “de afhanglyke, de onverschillige, de onkundige burger” [the dependent, indifferent and ignorant burgher].27 This, of course, went together with rhetoric firmly rejecting the
hereditary principle and reflected new social aspirations, urging the promotion of a fresh set of office-holders who had supposedly demonstrated by their dedication and abilities, that they were worthy of being elevated from lower to higher offices.
Finally, those Patriot leaders whom the Anti-Patriottencalled the Patriot cabaal, that is those who led the democratic movement, were rightly seen by their
24 [Pieter Vreede],Beoordeelend en ophelderend verslag van de Verhandeling over de Vryheid (Arnhem, 1783) (Knuttel, 20405), p. 6.
25 Pieter Vreede, Waermond en Vryhart. Gesprek over de waere Vryheid der Nederlandren, en den
aert der waere Vryheid(‘Holland’, 1783) (Knuttel, 20400), p. 4. 26 De Post van den Neder-Rhijn. ii, p, 728 and vi, pp. 945-6 (issue no. 263).
adversaries (and particularly resented by the more conservatively orthodox Reformed preachers), as the party advocating a universal “vryheid van dencken, van sprecken, en van de drukpers” [freedom of thought, of speech and of the press], something which had also never previously before been part of the Republic’s cultural fabric, at least not in the broad secular sense of freedom of thought and life-style now being demanded.28 This fifth new plank too stood in
starkest contrast to the style of justification based on tradition, religious doctrine and precedent usual in practically the whole of ancien régimeEurope.29 Leading
Orangist intellectual opponents, such as Kluit, Luzac, and Van Goens, were entirely justified, therefore, in claiming the Patriots were totally subverting the true Dutch constitution, past and present, by dragging in wholly extraneous abstract principles, headed by their ‘philosophical’ concept of vryheid[freedom] – something the Patriots, of course, mostly denied.30
The persistence of pre-Enlightenment ideas in the early public discourse of the
Patriottenbeweging, it is often pointed out, is confirmed by the most substantial Patriot publication of the first phase of the movement, the two-volume
Grondwettige Herstelling [Constitutional Restoration] of 1784. This work, compiled by a group of leading Patriots, including Van der Capellen, and published anonymously claimed the institutions of the Republic were in a state of chronic decay, and needed thoroughgoing reforms, to be secured by the ‘people’ with the help of the civic militias. Restoration here was certainly justified on the basis of historical precedent and existing institutions, the United Provinces, according to this text, having always been a Volksregeering that tended to minimize the hereditary principle in society and politics.31Arming the respectable
citizenry in the style of the American militias, held the Grondwettige Herstelling, was the way to compel the Stadholder and provincial assemblies to respect the rights of the ordinary burgher, irrespective of his religion, while simultaneously keeping the unruly (Orangist) mob at bay.32
28 Rijklof Michael van Goens, De Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriotiii (1782), p. 290. 29 Israel, Enlightenment Contested, p. 397-405.
30 S.R.E. Klein, Patriots republikanisme. Politieke cultuur in Nederland (1766-1787), (Amsterdam, 1995), p. 286; W.R.E. Velema, ‘Vrijheid als volkssoevereiniteit. De ontwikkeling van het politieke vrijheidsbegrip in de Republiek, 1780-1795’, in E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier and W.R.E. Velema (eds.)
Vrijheid. Een geschiedenis van de vijftiende tot de twintigste eeuw(Amsterdam, 1999), pp. 287-303, here pp. 271-2, 302.
31 Gobbers, Rousseau in Hollandp. 224; I.L. Leeb, The Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution (The Hague, 1973), pp. 205-6.
A notable difficulty with adjusting new social aspirations to old ideas, however, is that such arguments can then easily be challenged on grounds of their highly dubious historical accuracy. Outraged by what he saw as its flagrant unconstitutionality, Kluit penned an incisive reply, entitled De souvereiniteit der Staaten van Holland, verdedigt tegen de hedendaagsche leere der volks-regeering
(1785). The whole point about the constitution of the United Provinces (like that of Britain), Kluit pointed out, was that Dutch sovereignty, the highest authority, was not vested in the people. The philosophical doctrine being spread about by the likes of Rousseau, Paine, and Price according to which the people are always the true sovereign is roundly rejected by him in favour of the views of Grotius, Pufendorf, Coccejus, Huber, Thomasius and others who insisted on the purely institutional character of sovereignty.33 In his later Academische Redevoering
published at Leiden, in 1787, Kluit chiefly blamed for what he saw as the Dutch catastrophe on the (in his eyes ruinous) influence of Rousseau, Raynal, Mably, Price and ‘the Americans’.34 This writer continued deep into the 1790s,
contrasting despotisme populaire with Dutch ‘true freedom’, denouncing democracy which he deemed catastrophically pernicious with “de waare republikeinsche vrijheid, gebouwd op wettige en welhebragte privilegien” [the true republican freedom built on lawful and properly established privileges].35
Those addicted to radical intellectual influences nurtured a body of political theory which justified and legitimated wholesale revolutionary constitutional and institutional reform. Perhaps the most articulate expression of this, from the period before 1787, were the ideas of the lawyer and later diplomat and statesman, Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck (1761-1825), the son of a Mennonite family, raised at Deventer, who is usually designated a ‘moderate’ Patriot, since he never went into exile and later became skilled at placating Napoleon. But although his career culminated in his becoming the last Grand Pensionary of the Batavian Republic (1805-6), earlier, in the 1780s he appears to have been a thoroughgoing, if inconspicuous, radical republican, ‘moderate’ only in the sense that he relegated activism to others and ardently believed in non-violent methods, as well as the rule of law and decency, values which, after all, all the Patriot leaders subscribed to.
33 Adriaan Kluit, Academische Redevoering, over het misbruik van ‘t algemeen staatsrecht (Leiden, 1787) pp. 27-8.
34 Ibid., p. 90n, 93n.
In 1784, Schimmelpenninck published, first in Latin and then, the following year, in Dutch, his Verhandeling over eene wel ingerichte volksregeering holding that representative democracy, through regular elections, was the best and most orderly way to extend democratic principles to larger countries and those with a federal tradition, like the Netherlands. This doctrine undoubtedly owed much to the example of the American Revolution but is expounded by Schimmelpenninck in a systematic, highly theoretical manner not unlike that developed by d’Holbach in the early 1770s, prior to the American rebellion. The theme of representative democracy was taken up by Schimmelpenninck, as by Paulus and other Dutch radical theorists, in the context of criticism of Rousseau and with a degree of emphasis which had no real parallel in the Europe of the mid 1780s.36
Although it has been claimed that Schimmelpenninck’s intellectual inspiration was mainly British and American;37the evidence for this is not very convincing.38 He
esteemed Machiavelli, knew the ancient republican texts, and was familiar with the Dutch translations of the constitutions of the American states; but the chief influences on his democratic republican ideology, judging by the authors he quotes, were Rousseau of whom he was nevertheless rather critical, Mably, Montesquieu, Diderot and Raynal.39In his Verhandeling, he translates into Dutch
Rousseau’s claim, in the Contrat Social, that the sovereign power of the people can not be represented, for the same reason that it cannot be alienated and then vigorously attacks it, along with Price’s and Priestley’s somewhat equivocal qualifications of it, stressing the distinction between opperste magt (majestas) [sovereign power] and the opperste bewind (summum imperium) [executive power]. Agreeing with Rousseau that the people’s sovereign power can never be alienated, much less irrevocably surrendered, he denies it follows from this that executive power can not be entrusted to delegates chosen from among the people, provided this occurs through the mechanism of democratic elections.40
Hence, a republican legislature should never enact laws in the name of the assembly itself, like the British Parliament, but always in that of the people as a whole. Responsibility for enacting laws must necessarily be entrusted to an elected assembly; but the authority to do this always rests with the people. Elected
36 R.J. Schimmelpenninck, Verhandeling over eene wel ingerigte volksregeering(Leiden, 1785), pp. 4-5. 37 Klein, Patriots republikanisme, pp. 193-4.
38 Ibid., p.193; Leeb, Ideological Origins, p. 182n. 39 Kluit, Akademische Redevoering, pp. 90n, 93n.
deputies, he insists, are never justified in proceeding against the people’s wishes or staying in power against the people’s will.
Authority to proclaim laws in the name of the people, held Schimmelpenninck, derives not from any contract or agreement between society and the executive but rather from the “contract each burgher concludes with his fellow citizens when he undertakes to subordinate his own will to the common will of his fellow citizens”.41 Citing the Dutch-language versions of the constitutions of the states
of Pennsylvania, Georgia, South Carolina, Massachussetts, and New York, and Mably’s analysis of these, he also considers how best to organize democratic elections for legislative assemblies. Should the voting, as he and others thought, be in secret, to protect the individual’s freedom? Or would an open declaration of votes, as argued by Mably, better ensure that voters did not vote according to petty personal whims and biases, rather than for the common good? 42
The doctrine that democratic republicanism is the most natural, rational and fitting form of government for humans, as formulated by Schimmelpenninck, was based on arguments chiefly drawn from Rousseau and Mably but resonated unmistakably with echoes of the Brothers De la Court and Spinoza who, however, are never named.43 Crucial in this kind of democratic republic, argues
Schimmelpenninck, is that the citizenry should possess enough insight and awareness of politics to be able to judge fittingly over the gemeenebest[common good]. “Those who have fallen into poverty should be excluded from electing high office-holders, he maintains, lest they be bought or corrupted and also out of fear of their all too great ignorance”. Thus, Schimmelpenninck sought to exclude the poorest but was also at pains to ensure that all those who are householders, or who in countryside own a piece of land of modest value, should have the right to vote. The level of property ownership required for eligibility, he emphasized, should be so moderate that only the lowest stratum of the ‘common people’ – and nobody else – was excluded, with all those of middling standing being guaranteed the right to vote.44
A sure sign of the drift away from traditionalist arguments towards a radically
41 Schimmelpenninck, Verhandelingpp. 7-8. 42 Ibid., pp. 12-13.
enlightened stance, during the mid 1780s, was the other, of the two, most famous Patriot declarations, the Leidse Ontwerpof 1785. “The most striking attempt yet to win over the ran-and-file of the Free Corps to the more advanced views of its democratically inclined leadership”,45 as Schama describes this document, its
importance lies in its establishing as a general principle that “eene waare representative Democratie” [a true representative democracy], is the best form of government, that a society’s laws and institutions must have the people’s consent, and that “freedom is an inalienable right belonging to all members of Dutch society”.46 The manifesto’s publication was closely associated with Wybo Fijnje
from Delft, a radical Patriot leader named beneath it; and he was long supposed to have written it together with Vreede.47In recent years, however, it has emerged,
thanks to new research, that others also participated, notably Schimmelpenninck and, also, Cerisier who, it turns out, to have actually composed the draft, originally in French, from which it was then translated into Dutch.48
As a journalist Cerisier, a no less consistently staunch supporter of the Patriot cause than the American Revolution, might have played a publicly more conspicuous role in the democratic movement than he actually did. For both the British and German press of the time were firmly opposed to the democratic pretensions of the Patriots and supported the Stadholder and his court, while the French-language press outside of the Netherlands, in France, the southern Netherlands and elsewhere, was also predominantly anti-democratic. This offered a unique opportunity for the prestigious Gazette de Leyde, the French-language Leiden paper Cerisier edited, from 1785 onwards, as this newspaper was practically the only voice supporting the Dutch democratic republican revolution to be heard internationally. But Cerisier was reined in by the paper’s owner, Jean Luzac, a cousin and rival of the Orangist publisher, Elie Luzac who, if less openly anti-Patriot than the latter, was nevertheless increasingly troubled by the overtly egalitarian character of the Patriot cause.49
45 S. Schama, Patriots and Liberators(London, 1977), p. 95. 46 Ontwerp om de Republiek, pp. 49, 62-3.
47 Ibid., p. 68; Klein, Patriots republikanisme, p. 251; Maarten Prak, ‘Citizen Radicalism and Democracy in the Dutch Republic. The Patriot Movement of the 1780s’, Theory and Societyxx (1991), pp. 73-102, here, pp. 89-90.
48 Jeremy Popkin, ‘Dutch Patriots, French Journalists, and Declarations of Rights: The Leidse Ontwerp of 1785 and Its Diffusion in France’, in The Historical Journalxxxviii (1995), pp. 553-65, here pp. 557-60.
The significance of the new finds surrounding the Leidse Ontwerp lies less in Cerisier’s being its principal author than the fact that he was undeniably an outright democrat and Radical Enlightenment republican theorist, and also an erudite Spinozist besides being a direct bridge to Mirabeau, Brissot and other French republican ideologues of the early and mid 1780s. A Frenchman who had settled in Holland in 1774, Cerisier, an ardent admirer of the early Dutch Enlightenment of Spinoza and Bayle (as well as Balthasar Bekker who, he says, despite being suppressed in his day, by his Dutch Reformed Church opponents, won in the end, since “ses opinions ont pénétré et même prévalu”),50was the ideal
person to help graft Dutch and French Radical thought onto the emerging Dutch democratic republican tradition. If Cerisier, inspired by the American rebel capture of Montreal, in 1776 and the ensuing fighting between the British and revolutionaries in Canada, dreamt of a future French-speaking republic in North America guided by the voice of “a Rousseau, a Mably, a Lauraguais, a Raynal, a Mercier, etc.”,51 his ambition to help establish democratic republics in the
Netherlands and later France itself, were equally guided by universal democratic principles and very broad anti-Christian, radical, philosophical concerns.
What became the core Patriot doctrines then, were based on ideas drawn from the Radical Enlightenment. It has often been claimed that in the Netherlands, the ideologues of both political factions could with justification claim to be ‘verlichte’ [enlightened] men. While, in a very loose sense this is true; it is also highly misleading unless carefully qualified. For the two sides increasingly represented not just different but opposing and wholly irreconcilable wings of the Enlightenment, one Christian the other essentially non-Christian. It is true that like their adversaries, leading Orangist ideologues of the day, such as Kluit, Luzac, De Pinto, Van Goens, and Hennert, built their ideas around the quest for ‘freedom’, the ‘common good’, toleration and republican virtue; but, by each of these, they plainly meant something quite different from their opponents. In particular, Orangist conservative Enlightenment intellectuals did not agree that ‘reason’ is humanity’s sole guide, insisting rather on the centrality of tradition, social hierarchy and precedent as well as faith and ecclesiastical authority. Equally, they totally rejected the democratic doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, indeed rejected ‘philosophical’ democracy, equality, full toleration and the comprehensive
50 Cerisier, Tableauix, p. 569.
individual liberty upheld by the Patriots.52 Thirdly, Orangists tended to be ardent
admirers of the British model, as well as British ideas, and especially of the ideal of mixed monarchy which was anathema to the Patriots. Finally, they disagreed broadly about human rights. Luzac indignantly repudiated the key Spinozistic idea, so important to Paape, for instance,53 that natural right is carried over from the
state of nature into political society; he considered it an outrage that men should formulate abstract principles on the basis of natural right, and philosophy, and then, where these clash with the positive laws of society, seek to elevate the former above the law, overriding the actual constitution.54
While the growing split over philosophy, political theory and science was thus inextricably bound up from the outset with the political struggle between Patriots and Orangists, and support for and against the American Revolution,55it would,
admittedly, be a gross oversimplification to suppose there was ever anything like a neat or thoroughgoing correlation between ‘aristocratic’ Orangism with British moderate mainstream Enlightenment, on the one hand, and, on the other, democratic Patriotism with the Radical Enlightenment. The strong religious leanings of most of Dutch society rendered this impossible. If the antagonism between the two wings of the Enlightenment among the more highly literate sections of Dutch society was uninterrupted and ubiquitous, the relation of this all-pervasive intellectual rift to political loyalties and mass politics remained veiled, highly unstable, and extremely complex throughout.
As the neo-Cocceian preacher, IJsbrand van Hamelsveld (1743-1812), an eager admirer of Johan de Witt and Grotius and one of the leading pro-Patriot preachers, declared, in his book on the moral decline of the Dutch, in 1791, the European Enlightenment remained for everyone a highly volatile dichotomy, a Janus-headed phenomenon, or as he put it a force for both good and evil. He fervently supported what he saw as the ‘good’ Enlightenment which balances reason with faith and promotes education, religion and love of reading among the people, celebrating the literary and debating society Tot Nut van het Algemeen as especially
52 Leeb, Ideolgical Origins, pp. 206-9; Israel, Dutch Republic, p. 1104.
53 Gerrit Paape, De Hollandsche wijsgeer in Braband(4 vols. Antwerp-Dordrecht, 1788-90) iv, pp. 40-6, 53-4, 62-3.
54 W.R.E. Velema, Enlightenment and Conservatism in the Dutch Republic. The Political Thought of
embodying its spirit; but he was equally uncompromising in opposing the ‘bad’ Enlightenment, as he saw it, that is the radical, freethinking tendency that rejects theology, and ecclesiastical authority and invokes philosophical reason alone.56
The kind of atheism and materialism associated with Diderot, Helvetius and d’Holbach, furthermore, were generally deemed to be less prevalent in the Dutch Republic than in England, or “in France especially”, as the Utrecht Orangist professor Johan Frederik Hennert (1733-1813) affirmed, in 1782, where “both among the learned and unlearned these every day seem to increase”; nevertheless, Dutch contemporaries tended to agree, as Hennert also noted, that “yes, in the Netherlands too here and there, people are infected by this sickness via their neighbours”.57 He added, moreover, that it seemed to him that Dutch
theologians had become too complacent about this phenomenon: “in our days, and who would have thought this! more Atheistenappear in the Netherlands ‘dan sommige theologanten zich schijnen te verbeelden’ ” [than some theologians seem to suppose].58
But if open atheism was less commonly to be found in the Netherlands than in France, the intellectual divisions within Dutch culture, through their being inextricably linked to the political struggle, were, until 1789, much more obviously divisive than elsewhere, and this open antagonism between the two conflicting enlightenments seemingly drove many more to embrace outright egalitarian and democratic views than were to be found anywhere else at the time, even America where full ‘philosophical’ egalitarianism was still rather rare. Thus the Patriotten
formed their own political clubs and societies and these to an extent overlapped with the literary and debating societies of the age even if by no means wholly or exactly.
At the same time, these reading and debating societies undoubtedly added to the increasingly feverish ideological atmosphere by spreading awareness among the reading and debating public of the ideas of the chief philosophers, and details of
56 IJsbrand van Hamelsveld, De zedelijke toestand der Nederlandsche natie(Amsterdam, 1791), pp. 55, 76, 404-8, 480; Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic. Its Rise, Greatness and Fall 1477-1806(Oxford, 1995), pp.1110-11.
57 Johan Frederik Hennert, Uitgeleezene verhandelingen over de wijsbegeerte(6 vols, Utrecht, 1780-95) ‘voorreede’ to vol. iii (June 1782), pp. 7-8.
current scientific controversies. Van Hamelsveld, for example, a Patriot with moderate Enlightenment views, resembled the Orangist professor Hennert, and many others, in associating what he called the ‘bad’ enlightenment of libertinism and materialism chiefly with French ideas and influences. Van Hamelsveld admired Rousseau’s call for a more intense commitment to virtue, but denounced virtually all other forms of French cultural, intellectual and social influence.59“Contrary to
what the naturalisten maintain”, insisted this author, “it is religion which is the chief pillar of a free and democratic republic”.60
Yet, the relentless political struggle inevitably intensified and polarized the intellectual-scientific rift in Dutch society. Thus when the Orangist news-sheet, the
De Ouderwetse Nederlandsche Patriot (1781-3), a paper fiercely derided by all democrats,61accused those Dutch Reformed preachers, like Van Hamelsveld, who
chose the Patriot side not merely of forgetting all that the Reformed Church owed to the House of Orange but also of failing to grasp “dat de hoofden van die party, tot welke zy zich thans laten overhalen de grootste vyanden van hunne byzondere leer zyn” [that the heads of the party to which they presently let themselves be swayed towards are the greatest enemies of their particular teaching],62they were
making a point which was not just largely correct but which was also a self-fulfilling prophesy in the sense that it pushed more and more people into highly unorthodox, radical modes of thought. Undoubtedly, the Patriottenbeweging
always included numerous more or less orthodox Reformed; but theological Latitudinarians and neo-Socinians were particularly prominent and the movement clearly acted as a hold-all facilitating the advance also of freethinking and materialism, or what Gerrit Paape simply termed ‘philosophy’.
Admittedly, as many scholars have pointed out, the spread of reading and debate in the Dutch cities in the 1770s and 1780s also reinforced popular Newtonian-style physico-theology in the estimation of the ordinary reading public, albeit at the very moment when physico-theology and Newtonianism were actually losing their grip in the Dutch universities.63Physico-theology was indeed fundamental to
the moderate mainstream Enlightenment and its spread must have further
59 Van Hamelsveld, Zedelijke toestand, pp. 38-9. 60 Ibid., pp. 73-4.
61 Van Vliet, Elie Luzac, p. 367.
intensified the growing polarity between an official, respectable Dutch Enlightenment anchored in physico-theological ideas, on the one hand, and its antagonist, Radical Enlightenment, which was philosophiquein the special sense intended by Diderot, Helvetius, d’Holbach and Mirabeau, on the other, a sense adopted in the Netherlands by Patriot leaders like Cerisier and Paape. But it is also arguable that while the spread of the reading societies certainly further stiffened most readers’ fervent hostility to naturalism and materialism, this form of popular philosophy must almost inevitably have simultaneously tended to inhibit adherents of such ideas from embracing any kind of democratic Patriot ideology. For Newtonianism as a popular philosophy heavily emphasized the idea that the entire existing order is God-ordained and therefore essentially good.
The supreme voice of Dutch physico-theology in the late eighteenth century, for example, the massively widely read and influential Johannes Florentius Martinet (1729-95), a Reformed preacher at Zutphen, and ardent enthusiast for the new science, did his best to stand aloof from the political conflict. He repeatedly criticized Reformed traditionalists, and Orangists generally, for being insufficiently tolerant, or charitable, towards Catholics and dissenters, but simultaneously disassociated himself from the ideology of the Patriots. Physico-theology led Martinet to apply much the same principle to history and political institutions as he believed applied to the physical cosmos: the divine Creator had ordered all in a harmoniously interacting whole and this should be regarded as the basis of legitimacy in social life as it was in the physical order of things.64
Consequently, Patriot claims that everything was wrong with the existing political order and that a general ‘reformation’ was needed, struck him as a sacrilegious affront to the principle of divine providence.
Another ardently physico-theologial preacher inclined to link study of science closely to a liberal theology, in opposition to radical ideas and far-reaching institutional change, was Pieter Kaas (1742-1818), a member of the society
Verscheidenheid en Overeenstemming established in Rotterdam, in 1760. A philosophical debating club with an originally Wolffian orientation, this group sought to combine the thought of Leibniz and Wolff with Newtonian experimental philosophy, the system which in Kaas’s view reveals the entire truth about nature. Lecturing at one of the society’s weekly meetings, shortly after the Stadholder’s
restoration, in 1788, he publicly joined the struggle to demolish the naturalisme
(Spinoza) and materialism (La Mettrie) which he perceived to be posing a dire threat to Dutch and all European society. Newton’s empiricism, held Kaas, proves the fallacy of constructing hypothetical metaphysical systems vindicating Bernard Nieuwentijt’s vigorously anti-Spinozistic physcio-theology. Newton, Leibniz, and Wolff, in his opinion, successfully demonstrate how the divine Creator’s free choice and conscious ordering of the world are compatible with human free will.65
Spinoza, held Kaas, nevertheless remained a dire threat, because his followers had succeeded in scattering their seed widely in the Netherlands and drawn in many who had allowed themselves to be seduced by his seductive but sophistic system, generating a deep malaise in Dutch society.66
Adherents of Spinozistic naturalism, contended Kaas, were philosophically ‘blind’, victims of fallacies and imposture. But this is unsurprising, he added, since human reason, since the Fall, is deeply defective, which is what allows the arguments of the Spinozists to appear convincing to superficial minds. He himself, he says, had earlier been so attracted by the apparent cogency of reason that he too had been disastrously lured by it ‘to the very borders of the Deists and atheists’ and now thanked God for pulling him back ‘in time’ before he had succumbed to Spinoza and ‘his ruinous followers’. Society in England, France, Germany and “also the ground of our republic is sown”, he admonished, with the poisonous weeds left by generations of “Spinozists, Deurhofisten, Hattemisten, Leenhofisten, naturaalisten, materialisten, deisten, atheisten, vrijgeesten and Socinians”.67
Making matters even worse, he added, there were also some preachers blindly set on elevating ‘reason’ above Revelation, his particular bête noir being the philosopher-theologian, Paulus van Hemert (1756-1825), an ex-Reformed preacher labelled by Kaas a ‘foul Socinian’ who during the 1780s frequented the Remonstrants and Collegiants in Rotterdam and whose Bible exegesis showed unmistakable traces of Spinoza’s influence.68
“Il est heureux”, remarked Cerisier, in his Tableau, with undisguised Spinozistic sarcasm, “que des erreurs [ie. of Spinoza’s philosophy] qui ôtent encore la vraie
65 M.A. Wielema, Filosofen aan de Maas(Baarn, 1991), p. 116; Pieter Kaas, Verhandeling over de
waarheit(1788) printed in Wielema loc.cit, pp. 247-63, here pp. 251, 254. 66 Wielema, Filosofenp. 55.
67 Ibid., p. 257.
base de la morale, n’aient pas eu une influence dangéreuse sur ceux qui l’enseignaient”, and even more fortunate for Spinoza himself, he added, “qu’il ait passé sa vie au milieu d’un peuple tolérant”.69 Adolf Hendrik Hagedoorn
(1732-1806), a member of the same Rotterdam society as Kaas, and someone who composed a treatise about freedom of the will around 1780, wholly disagreed with such seditious insinuations.70To claim, as Spinoza does, that nothing is without
a cause but yet that the universe, the totality of everything, has no cause, by assigning the cosmos no maker, was, held Hagedoorn a flagrant contradiction in terms, for this is to refuse to assign the whole what Spinoza allocates to its parts.71 Such a non-sequitur, he argued, entirely undermines Spinozism, a vital
point to make, in his view, since all the naturalistencontend for fatality and deny ‘freedom’, thereby showing themselves to be disciples of Spinoza and destroying all morality.72The antidote, he too asserts, was the Newtonian philosophy which
eclipses Spinoza’s and proves beyond all possible doubt, against the naturalisten, that the universe was created by an ‘intelligent’ maker and that moral ‘freedom’ is an actual thing.
But the revived Dutch Spinoza debate of the 1780s amounted to much more than just a straightforward clash between the Cerisiers and the Hagedoorns. For there were several remarkable interventions which greatly complicated the controversy. The Orangist Hennert, for example, teaching at Utrecht was firmly convinced that the conventional method of demolishing Spinoza, recommended by the likes of Martinet, Hagedoorn, and Kaas, was a disastrous mistake. A fervent adherent of Locke’s philosophy,73 he had no doubt that British empiricism had totally
destroyed the foundations of Spinoza’s metaphysics as of those of Leibniz and the Wolffians. But he also judged that parts of Spinoza’s philosophy, notably his psychology, analysis of the passions, and doctrine of association, were based on an empirical methodology and of such high quality, that it would be disastrous to permit the naturalistenand materialists to boast of Spinoza as the founder of their world outlook. The entire Dutch Enlightenment tradition of condemning Spinoza as intellectually inconsistent, atheistic, and materialist, he judged misconceived,
69 Cerisier, Tableauix, p. 572. 70 Wielema, Filosofen, pp. 115-16.
71 Adolf Hendrik Hagedoorn, Verhandeling over de mogelijkheid en dadelijkheid der vrijheidprinted in Wielema, Filosofen, pp. 234-46, here pp. 234-8.
72 Ibid., pp. 243, 245-6.
and something immediately to be abandoned. For philosophical ideas, he pointed out, were now massively penetrating Dutch coffee-house culture in a debased and superficial form which was feeding the proliferation of cheap pamphlets and wrong thinking.74
As vulgarized philosophy, observed Hennert, was being brought to the people in heaps whether his academic colleagues liked it or not, it was vital for responsible professors, like himself, to try to control this dangerous process. The correct strategy, he held, was to accept his own far-reaching reassessment of Spinoza and employ it to drive a broad wedge between Spinoza and the author of the Système de la nature (d’Holbach) whom he, like so many at the time, considered the true intellectual leader of the ‘hedendaagsche Atheisten’. Accordingly, Hennert sought to deny that Spinoza did identify God and the cosmos as one. If Spinoza must be designated an ‘atheist’ in public debates, then he insisted that “Spinoza’s atheism is of the least dangerous kind as it is very difficult to understand and rests on foundations far removed from the usual way of thinking”. Indeed, Hennert sought to persuade readers that Spinoza was actually an ‘Idealist’, to be bracketed together with Malebranche, Leibniz and Berkeley and “and no crass materialist who derives all happenings from mechanistic causes, like a clock or other mechanism but one who takes the divine understanding to be the origin of the world.”75
To abandon Spinoza to the materialists and atheists would be ruinous, according to Hennert, not because the man in the street was likely to read Spinoza, or understand his ideas, but for a quite different reason: because whatever the dozens of writers who had tried to refute Spinoza had claimed, the fact was that the most intelligent and learned were bound to find his reasoning cogent. For within his own (mistaken) premises Spinoza was, contrary to traditional Dutch arguments, supremely persuasive and often quite devastating. His demolition of teology, for instance, was equalled by no other thinker: “niemand is my bekend” [no-one is known to me], remarked Hennert, “die het stuk der eindoorzaken sterker bestreden heeft dan Spinoza” [who has more powerfully countered the doctrine of final causes than Spinoza].76Spinoza, in other words, was simply too
74 Ibid., pp. 12-12v.
75 J.F. Hennert, ‘Over den aart der wysgeerte van Spinoza’ in Hennert, Uitgeleezene verhandelingeni, pp. 1-40, here pp. 31-3.
76 Johan Frederik Hennert, ‘Derde verhandeling over de wijsgeerte van Spinoza’ in Hennert,
good a philosopher to be lightly left to the enemy. Rather it was a matter of vital concern for society that this philosopher should be sanitized and incorporated into the regular canon as a misguided ‘Idealist’ of extraordinary penetration and cogency who did not, after all, attack religion or seek to undermine morality as d’Holbach and Diderot certainly did.
Hennert’s solution to the new Spinoza probem in Dutch society may not sound very convincing to us today but his focusing on the social and cultural mechanism by which Spinoza was routinely linked to naturalism within Dutch society was highly pertinent; for this clearly worried many at the time. If it remained scarcely feasible openly to express favourable opinions about Spinoza, before a sizeable gathering, and strong inhibitions persisted against mentioning Spinoza at all, except privately, naturalism was clearly making massive inroads everywhere and becoming more and more of a worry. The embattled Patriot professor, Van der Marck with his doctrine of the pius Naturalistaeven held that naturalism was not irreligious – if one sufficiently redefines the meaning of the word ‘religious’.77 Consequently, the
spread of radical thought, as the evidence of private letters and memoranda shows, though chiefly a private affair or, at least, something that proceeded among small informal circles, nevertheless produced a situation in which identification of both naturalism and individual freedom with Spinozism could only reinforce the latter right across the spectrum of the Dutch intellectual elite. Van der Marck himself remarks that the fact he based everything on the unchanging order of nature led people in Groningen to assume that he was ‘Spinozist’.78 When restored to
academe by the Patriots in Deventer, in 1783, this remarkable scholar celebrated his return by publishing one of the most uncompromisingly egalitarian pamphlets of the decade, claiming the Creator of nature had “established absolute equality and perfect liberty for mankind and has ordained that whosoever violates these rights is in a state of sedition against God’s lawful society”, urging everyone to defend these rights against oppressors.79 Naturalism was indissolubly linked to
equality, democracy, and Spinozism.
Since the spread of naturalism, and the removal of the miraculous, could not be
77 Bedenkingen en Bezwaren[…] uit name van de weleerwaerde classis van Groningen[…] op en
tegen de academische lessen van Mr Frederik Adolph van der Marck[…] met Deszelfs verklaring op en tegen die bedenkingen(Groningen, 1782) (Knuttel, 18997), pp. 24, 42-3, 166, 221. 78 Ibid, pp. 220-1.
