Koselleck was a German historian who wrote this book as his dissertation in 1959. His book makes the case that the Absolute State, propounded by Hobbes and optimized by pre-revolutionary France, successfully cleaved morality from the political sphere, following the religious civil wars that engulfed Europe after the Reformation. The Peace of Westphalia created spheres of authority between sovereign States, but also gave their subjects freedom of conscience within the borders of each Absolutist State. Morality was effectively divorced from public policy. The Enlightenment, with its primacy of reason, beginning with Locke, began to chip away at this wall between politics and conscience. It was this very private space, carved out by the State, which allowed the Enlightenment to first flourish. “The bourgeois intelligentsia set out from the private inner space within which the State had been confining its subjects. Each outward step was a step towards the light, an act of enlightenment…. The public, without surrendering its private nature, became the forum of society that permeated the entire State…. With every step the Enlightenment was shifting the jurisdictional borderline which the Absolutist State had carefully sought to draw between politics and the moral interior.” Koselleck continues, “Locke virtually requires citizens to proclaim their private opinions to be generally binding laws, for it is only in their independent judgment that the power of society is constituted, and only in the constant exercise of moral censure will this censure prove to be a law…. Reason needs the perpetual process of critique to establish itself as supreme authority, so it is only in constant performance of censure that the moral views of Locke’s citizens rise to the State of generally binding laws.” Locke introduces public morality into the Absolutist State. “Locke gave a political charge to the interior of the human conscience which Hobbes had subordinated to State policy. Public actions were now not merely subject to the authority of the State but at the same time to the moral authority of the citizens. What Locke had thus put into words was the decisive breach in the Absolutist order, the order expressed in the relationship of protection and obedience. Morality was no longer a formal matter of obedience, was not subordinated to the politics of Absolutism, but confronted the laws of the State.”
Koselleck goes on to describe the Republic of Letters and its role in spreading the idea of criticism across Europe. He focuses on Pierre Bayle, “By including all areas of human knowledge and history in the critical method and involving them in an infinite process of relativisation, Bayle turned criticism into the essential function of reason…. If criticism is the ostensible resting place of human thought, then thought becomes a restless exercise in movement. Criticism is the activity that marks reason as a factor of judgment, a constant goad to the process of pro and con…. Criticism was not confined to philological, aesthetic or historical concerns but became, more generally, the art of arriving at proper insights and conclusions via rational thought.” Bayle posited that criticism was still separate from politics, but only because it was supra-politics. “The critic stands above the parties; his task is not to ‘destroy’ but to ‘establish’ the truth. He enters into competition with a rational State that sets itself above the religious groupings. Not that he creates a new order here and now; the reign of criticism is non-partisan only in an infinite process of renewal…. The self-assurance of criticism lay in the connection of the critic to the yet-to-be-discovered truth.” For Bayle, truth and freedom were intimately connected. “The critical process for seeking out the truth can be set in motion only under conditions of absolute freedom. In the Republic of Letters everyone is therefore the master of all and subject to the judgment of all. The civil war that was unexpectedly did away with by the State reappears; and, moreover, in that private inner realm which the State had to grant man as man. There, absolute freedom, the bellum omnium contra omnes, reigns; truth is the common goal of all, and criticism—which all engage in and to which all are subject—is the true sovereign in the spiritual conflict. Sovereignty rules relentlessly, and all share it. Bayle’s Republic of Letters, extended to the State, is the total democracy which Rousseau conceived of half a century later. It provides the model of a form of government in which civil war, even if only one of minds, has legitimacy and is the basis of legitimacy…. The King as ruler by divine right appears almost modest alongside the judge of mankind who replaced him, the critic who believed that, like God on Judgement Day, he had the right to subject the universe to his verdict.”
Commingling with the advancement of morality into the political sphere was the idea of the public moving as one in an ever-forward march of progress. “Although the divine plan of salvation was secularised into a rational plan of history, it also became the philosophy of history that assured the course of the planned future. The philosophy of progress offered the certainty (neither religious nor rational but historico-philosophical) that the indirect political plan would be realised and, conversely, that rational and moral planning determines the course of history.”
Rousseau was the man who finally explicitly developed the idea of the General Will. “As a member of Bayle’s Republic of Letters, Rousseau could imagine the neutralisation of the bruising contradiction of subject and man in no other way than through the subjugation of all to one and one to all…. In the ‘miraculous state’ in which no one rules yet everyone obeys and is at the same time free, the revolution is sovereign…. Rousseau’s crucial step was to apply the concept of sovereign will, which the Enlightenment had excluded from its purview, specifically to the moral autonomy of society. He claimed the sole, unconditional will, the accepted basis of the sovereign decision of the absolute ruler, for society. The result was the volonte generale, the absolute general will as a law unto itself.” At this point, society had been completely subsumed by the State and the State had been completely subsumed by society. There was no longer a private sphere for individual morality and conscience. The State had become a moral beast. “More and more, the will to link political rule—via the parlements or in the form of a constitution—to the eternally valid laws discovered and proclaimed by society, joins the theoretical link of the supreme State power to the interests of society.”
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