China, Russia, and the Intellectuals

...In Russia—and in the other enlightened despotisms of the North—the ancient alliance of the throne and the altar seemed about to be replaced by the alliance of throne and philosophy...

...He compared Catherine to Lycurgus and Solon and was never at a loss to explain away her failings...

...He was a kind of unofficial public-relations expert for her until her death...

...Frederick the Great, in one of his letters to Voltaire, provides us with a first clue for understanding Voltaire's infatuation with China...

...it was This article forms a chapter from Lewis Coser's forthcoming book, Men of Ideas, to be published this spring by Free Press, with whose kind permission it is here reprinted...

...In China, the literati, wise and incorruptible counselors to the Emperor, exercised both administrative and judicial power...

...He wrote, "They were moved with rapture at the vision of a country in which the sovereign [is] absolute but free from prejudice...

...But at home, their scope of action seemed fatally limited because the King was prevented from right action not only by personal insufficiency but also by built-in checks to his power...

...A certain degree of self-interest helps to account for this Russophilia...

...If Russia had succeeded in thirty or forty years, through enlightened legislation, in overcoming a lag of three centuries, then indeed one could continue to believe in the perfectibility of man and be optimistic about progress...

...But even before he had any relations with the Russian court, he had written that Peter "resolved to be a man to command men, and to create a nation," that Peter had single-handedly changed the greatest empire in the world, had "civilized his people...

...The elite of the word tries to establish its ascendancy where there is no elite of any other kind...

...And l'Abbe Baudeau, one of the principal members of the physiocrats' circle, wrote, "More than three hundred twenty million people live there [in China] as wisely, happily and freely as men can ever be...

...To the father of physiocratic doctrine, Quesnay, China was a model state "founded on science and natural law...

...Interest on the part of powerful foreigners flattered him and bolstered a self-esteem that was often badly shaken by discouragement at home...

...Reason could not be expected to prevail in a society split into autonomous, warring powers, in which parlements checked the court and the clergy, subservient to Rome, utilized the secular arm in its struggle against the Enlightenment...

...China and Russia, to the philosophes, were unlike in many respects, but they had one thing in common and a most important thing at that: In both those great empires, the men of letters served in places of eminence, at the very center of things...

...Marmontel, whose Belisaire Catherine herself had translated into Russian, and Grimm, her most assiduous correspondent, never tired in their championship of the virtues of the Empress's regime...

...and in which all offices are obtained by written examinations...

...Tocqueville summed it all up in his continuation of the passage quoted at the beginning of this essay...

...in the spirit of those who are made to govern...

...And, according to Voltaire, if a certain lack of progress might be discerned, it was due to the fact that they had attained so high a point of perfection that they saw no need to push any further...

...Catherine II assiduously courted the Parisian enlighteners...

...What impressed Voltaire even more than the beneficent rule of a benevolent Emperor was the fact that the Emperor was surrounded by men of letters, an official class of literati chosen on a rational basis, free from the corruptions of organized religion and the particularistic criteria of rank and birth...

...Although some of the philosophes were not beyond opportunism and even venality, other factors must also have been at work...

...Russia was much better known, yet we find idealizations of Russian conditions in the writings of Voltaire, Diderot, Helvetius, Grimm, and many others that fully match their unrealistic ideas of China...

...Suffering from a multiplicity of laws and authorities, fragmentation of political will, lack of concerted planning in governmental affairs, and all the privileges accruing to favored estates and orders, the philosophers yearned for a body politic that would be efficiently run by a central administration...

...Not all admirers of Catherine derived such material benefits from their commerce with the Empress, and, further, Voltaire and many of his friends admired the long-dead Peter the Great as much as his successor...

...Yet it would certainly be most unfair to aver that self-interest was the main spur to admiration of Catherine and her administration...

...But how could even wiser kings prevail against the domination of the "eternal yesterday" in the old countries of the West...

...And what, if not enlightened despotism, had allowed the Russians to make such giant steps forward...

...and as if the writers had forgotten about the furious rhetoric they had hurled, and were still hurling, against the tyrants...

...Russia had made enormous progress within the short span of a few decades...

...What then was more rational than to turn in admiration and respect to those countries in which enlightened rulers, unhampered by tradi tion and precedence, were willing to accept the advice of philosophers...

...In 1763, she bought Diderot's library for 15,000 francs but left it in his possession—giving him a pension of 1000 francs a year for assuming the task of librarian...

...they preached the defense of freedom against the arbitrary powers of the state...

...China seemed to the philosophes a society in which things got done...

...Almost 200 years later we encounter a very similar one among European and American intellectuals...

...The greatest happiness of a nation," wrote D'Alembert, "is realized when those who govern agree with those who instruct it...

...The Empress Elizabeth had commissioned his biography of Peter and had liberally rewarded him after that piece of hack work had turned out to her satisfaction...

...It moved ahead so fast that, in many respects, it was already a model for countries of much older civilization...

...You might have thought," writes Paul Hazard, the great intellectual historian, "that you were looking at a minuet: the Princes bow to the philosophers, the philosophers return the bow...

...They got done, moreover, with the help and under the guidance of wise scholars, of fellow philosophes...

...is to do more than to win a hundred battles, because millions of others depend on the will of such men...

...Leibniz had already said it: "To win the spirit of a single man such as the Czar or the monarch of China...

...The same reasoning seems to account, in somewhat modified form, for the philosophers' Russophilia...

...The Jesuits had been led to make a number of major concessions to traditional Confucian culture in their effort to bring the Chinese to the Faith, and they had therefore a vested interest in presenting an idealized picture of the country of Confucius...

...it was, in fact, one of the most impressive means of progress...

...in fact shared by a great many among the eighteenth-century philosophes...

...enlightenment was a sport of kings but hardly a matter for realistic guidance...

...Yet the orientation that has been sketched here, though not the only possible one, is significant...

...Such an administration would know how to deal with the obstructions of rank and birth and how to order the affairs of the state in the mirror image of universal reason...

...It is most advantageous for the prince and the state," wrote Voltaire, "when there are many philosophers...

...To enlighten an absolute monarch appeared a most advantageous short cut on the road to the universal reign of reason...

...Everything, they argued, is possible if, in a country that had been until recently wholly barbaric, one man aided by right reason could transform a whole people...

...But why did the philosophes turn specifically to Russia, and how does one account for their Sinophilia, since clearly no tangible or even intangible benefits could have been expected to descend upon deserving philosophers from the Son of Heaven, even when similar benefits were possible from the Semiramis of the North...

...Catherine ruled Russia with rude and despotic practicality...

...It comes therefore as a shock to realize that many of the philosophes, as well as such other champions of liberalism and individualism as the physiocrats, the ancestors of classical economics, admired the societies of China and Russia above all others in their day...

...and it was the kings who were using them...

...Voltaire in particular never tired of singing the praises of China, "the widest and best policed nation of the world...

...Despotism, of course, if properly enlightened, turned out upon inspection to be by no means so horrible as Montesquieu had pictured it...

...Frederick wrote that he visualized Voltaire ever repeating to his friends, "Seeing that only one law prevails throughout the whole vast empire of China, must you not desire, oh my countrymen, to imitate them in your little kingdom...

...As if the mighty ones had forgotten how they had persecuted, and were still persecuting, writers who were trying to undermine their authority...

...I admire Catherine, I love her to folly," he wrote a few years later, "the scyths become our masters in everything...

...They live under a most absolute but most just government, under the richest, the most powerful, the most humane and the most welfare-conscious monarch...

...Two years later, she gave him 50,000 francs for fifty years in advance...

...In Russia, on the other hand, the necessary progress was assured because despots, enriched by the advice of the enlightened from abroad, could freely knead with their own hands the paste of the future...

...The philosophers having no particular interest to defend, can only speak up in favor of reason and the public interest...

...Louis XV, of whom so many had expected so much, had turned out to be vacillating and corrupt...

...The philosophers' hopes, of course, came to nought...

...That imbecile and barbarous government . . . appeared to them the most perfect model for all of the nations of the world to copy...

...And imagine, said Voltaire, that the Emperor could do nothing without consulting "these men educated in the law," who would check all tendencies toward arbitrary action...

...When intellectuals are out of tune with political trends at home, they are apt to look for more congenial harmonies abroad...

...His successor was an honest simpleton...

...Intellectuals who had sought to guide power managed in the end only to legitimize it...

...There the powerful knew how to give due honor to the men of letters...

...Such idealization by the philosophers was not, however, due to ignorance alone...

...France persecutes the philosophers and the scyths favor them...

...His admiration for Peter the Great was equally unbounded...

...D'Alembert was offered the tutorship to the heir of the Russian throne...

...Such treatment, according to Peter Gay, "created some false impressions among the philosophers...

...The sole remedy against all the ills involved by the immensity of our States, the multiplicity of our laws, the slowness and uncertainty of our justice, the impunity of resourceful and clandestine crime and the favor of unjust power," wrote Grimm, the confidant of Catherine, "the sole remedy, if it exists, must be sought in the heart and character of him to whom the right to rule has come with his birth...

...they were all too easily tempted to imagine themselves, at least on occasion, in the role of Plato and Aristotle, and to imagine their royal friends as a Numa or Lycurgus...

...This is a paradox worthy of attention...

...To instruct the people would take centuries, to enlighten an elite was a most arduous task, and the shortest route was, in Voltaire's words, "to make a revolution...

...Voltaire never tired in his praise of Catherine...

...Not finding anything about them which seemed to conform to their ideals," wrote Tocqueville of the physiocrats, "they went to search for it in the heart of Asia...

...The intendant Poivre, whose writings were considered authoritative by the physiocrats, went so far as to assert in his Travels of a Philosopher that, "China offers an enchanting picture of what the world might become, if the laws of that empire were to become the laws of all nations...

...Did not Diderot write, "Each century is characterized by a specific spirit...

...Russia's advance revived the spirits of those discouraged by the anarchy and apparent hopelessness of the political scene at home...

...There one could paint with broad strokes upon the canvas of the future...

...others were given similar tangible proofs of the Empress's support...

...French knowledge of Chinese affairs was, of course, fragmentary...

...A modern political scientist, Suzanne Labin, has written, "The contributions of Voltaire's vigorous mind were not approved by an ancient society stuffed with traditions, but his light was accepted in the faintly illuminated North, where a despot, free from the shackles of an ancient civilization, could smile prettily at his theories...

...It is no exaggeration to say that every one of them in some part of his writings passes an emphatic eulogy on China...

...One need not be obsessed with the merits of the Chinese," he wrote, "to recognize at least that the organization of their empire is in truth the best that the world has ever seen, and moreover the only one founded on paternal authority...

...Most of it came from Jesuit missionaries, and their accounts were, to say the least, not always free from a bias imposed by the need to defend themselves against their theological adversaries in the famous quarrel over the Chinese ceremonies...

...Almost all the philosophes were royalists at home, usually supporting the King's party against parlements and estates...

...In the meantime, it was good indeed to have respected philosophers who could find enlightened arguments for calling crimes "family quarrels" and for justifying wars of aggression or the pitiless suppression of peasant jacqueries...

...Rousseau and Montesquieu, for different reasons, never shared their contemporaries' enthusiasm for Russia and China...

...which has for religion only a philosophy, and for an administration only men of letters...

...In consequence, the country was well ordered and well policed, the customs agreeable and refined, the mores simple, and the people content...

...The French philosophes, so the schoolbooks usually say, were mighty champions of liberty...

...The social position of the man of letters in the eighteenth century helps to account for his fascination with "enlightened rulers...

...Even though such despotism might not be wholly suitable at home, it certainly was the most potent means to allow "underdeveloped countries" to reach quickly and even to surpass the lands of older civilization...

...In his isolation at home, persecuted, censored, forbidden to publish his books in France, he was naturally prone to look abroad for encouragement and support...

...to use modern terminology, it seemed to have jumped many stages of development...

...They "thought they were using the kings...

...This strange Sinophilia was not limited to the physiocrats...

...He acknowledged that she had had a hand in the assassination of her husband but referred to this event as "family quarrels" and "bagatelles...

...What times are these," he wrote to D'Alembert...

...There is almost equally enthusiastic language about the Chinese in the writings of Diderot and Helvetius...

...In their rage for order, they were wont to forget their passion for liberty...

...Leibniz had already expressed similar enthusiasm in an earlier day...

...The "elite of the word" cannot be said, as Miss Labin seems to have assumed, to have a single, unified orientation toward the men of power...

...In enlightened Russia, in contrast to Western Europe, the sovereign was not hindered by all sorts of obsolete and obsolescent resistance to his beneficent actions...

...The spirit of ours seems to be that of liberty...