Читать книгу Demanding the Impossible - Peter Marshall - Страница 32

In France in the seventeenth century, the process of creating a nation out of the many regional communities gathered momentum. Louis XIV in particular struggled to unite the country in a strongly centralized State symbolized in the person of the monarch. He proudly announced: ‘L ’État, c’est moi’. But not all were impressed by his passion for luxury and war which led to the neglect of agriculture and the misery and ignorance of the peasants.

Since it was too dangerous to express radical views directly, libertarian thinkers used the device of an imaginary voyage to a Utopia to criticize existing society and suggest alternative institutions and practices. Gabriel de Foigny for one knew only too well how difficult it was to entertain radical ideas and to act independently. Born in Ardennes in 1630, he entered a monastery of the Order of the Cordeliers (Franciscans) and became a Catholic preacher. His unruly behaviour however led him to be unfrocked. He changed his religion and moved to Calvinist Geneva, but again he soon fell into difficulties with the authorities because of his penchant for girls and wine. On one occasion, he is said to have vomited in front of the altar while taking the service in a Temple. With little chance of becoming a solid French or Swiss citizen, he published anonymously in 1676 Les Aventures de Jacques Sadeur dans la découverte de la Terre Australe, translated in a truncated version in 1693 as A New Discovery of Terra Incognita Australis. The work landed him in jail, although he was eventually released on indefinite bail.

It is easy to see why the authorities of Geneva should be disturbed. In his Utopia set in Australia, Foigny attacks all the foundations of religion. Although the inhabitants believe in God, they never mention him and spend their time in meditation rather than prayer. They are born free, reasonable and good and have as little need for religion as they do for government. They have no written laws and no rulers. Private property does not exist. Even sex amongst the ‘hermaphrodite’ Australians is no longer necessary and the family has no role. The imaginary traveller Jacques Sadeur, a hermaphrodite himself, never found out how they reproduced but reports:

I have only observed, that they loved one another with a cordial love, and that they never loved any one more than another. I can affirm I neither saw quarrel nor animosity amongst them. They know not how to distinguish between mine and thine and there is more perfect sincerity and disinterestment amongst them than exist between men and women in Europe.¹²

Education takes place in communal houses like monasteries from the age of two to thirty-five. They spend the first part of each day at school or in scientific research, the second part gardening, and the third part in public exercise. Since they only eat fruit, they have no need for agriculture beyond gardening, and since they wear no clothes and have little furniture there is no need for industry. The society is entirely egalitarian. As an Old Man explains to Jacques Sadeur: ‘we make a profession of being all alike, our glory consists in being all alike, and to be dignified with the same care, and in the same manner.’¹³

But the most interesting thing about Foigny is that he is the first utopian to conceive of a society without government. The Old Man expounds what might be called a philosophy of anarchism:

It was the Nature of Man to be born, and live free, and that therefore he could not be subjected without being despoiled of his nature … The subjection of one man in another was a subjection of the human Nature, and making a man a sort of slave to himself, which slavery implied such a contradiction and violence as was impossible to conceive. He added that the essence of man consisting in liberty, it would not be taken away without destroying him … This does not signify that he does not often do what others desire, but he does not do so because others compel or command him. The word of commandment is odious to him, he does what his reason dictates him to do; his reason is his law, his rule, his unique guide.¹⁴

These freedom-loving people have no central government and all the decisions about their lives are taken at the local assemblies of each district or neighbourhood. Each morning food is brought by the members of each district to the common storehouse when they meet for their morning conference. They are a peaceful people and never fight amongst each other, but they are ready to defend their country against foreign invasions. But even in war, they have no leaders or commanders and they take up positions without previous discussions. The order and harmony prevailing in their society results primarily from the ‘Natural Light’ of their reason: ‘this adherence to strict reason, which unites them amongst themselves, carries them to what is good and just.’¹⁵

Foigny’s Australians, with their commitment to reason, universal benevolence and perfect sincerity, anticipate Swift’s Houyhnhnms in the fourth part of Gulliver’s Travels; indeed, they are so close one wonders whether the Tory Dean was inspired by Jacques Sadeur’s imaginary voyage. There is even a comparison at the end of Foigny’s book between the virtue and reason of the Australians and our own Yahoo knowledge ‘by the assistance of which we only live like beasts’.¹⁶ Godwin too, if had discovered the work, would have been impressed by the Australians’ practice of political justice in their society without government.