Corporeal Sociability, Organisation, and the Theology of Abbé Pluquet (1716-1790)

Abbé François-André-Adrien Pluquet’s (1716-90) efforts to combat monist materialism and religious heresy are well-known to scholars of the eighteenth century.[1] He gained the attention of his contemporaries by writing a three-volume Examen du fatalisme in 1757 and solidified his notoriety in 1762 with his Dictionnaire des hérésies, both of which demonstrated his robust intellect.[2] These works not only showed his desire to refute ancient and modern systems of deterministic philosophy, but they also revealed what one historian has termed his “enlightened orthodoxy”—a willingness to engage with and treat fairly his intellectual adversaries.[3] Pluquet then shifted his target away from the traditional “Refutation of...” or “Examination of...” approaches to intellectual engagement.[4] Instead, he addressed the contemporary issues of the natural sociability of humans and la querelle du luxe (the luxury debate), writing into a clustered field of diverse opinions that did not always divide neatly along religious lines.

This article will focus on Pluquet’s text De la Sociabilité. By the time he published De la Sociabilité in 1767, Pluquet had been appointed professor of moral philosophy and history at the Collège de France (1766) and had become a notable man of letters, even allegedly refusing an offer to contribute to the Encyclopédie.[5] I argue that in order to oppose materialism and its socio-moral component luxury, Pluquet maneuvered on the same medico-physiological plane as materialists. He used contemporary understandings of the human body to bolster his own socio-theological beliefs and updated the natural law tradition in the process.[6] Pluquet’s work serves as a representative case study for a new approach to society that developed in the mid-eighteenth century, when social thought and political-economic debates became rooted in the human body. Like many contemporaries, Pluquet focused on the bodily organisation and the sensory network, which could become overwrought if they fell victim to dissolute lifestyles.

Pluquet’s work also sits awkwardly in historiographical debates over a “moderate enlightenment,” “Christian Enlightenment,” “Christian utilitarianism,”[7] “Catholic Enlightenment,” “enlightened orthodoxy,” “anti-philosophie,” and “Counter Enlightenment.”[8] Ulrich Lehner, for example, has used “Catholic Enlightenment” to denote the varied strands of thought that were “designed to defend the essential dogmas of Catholic Christianity by explaining their rationality in modern terminology and by reconciling Catholicism with modern culture.”[9] Non-radical thinkers, though, did not simply assert reason as a tool, as the philosophes supposedly did; “enlightened Christians,” according to Helena Rosenblatt, “turned to the discourse of sentiment and sensibility”—a corporeal vocabulary.[10] Moreover, Kara Barr has recently argued that “moderate enlighteners” viewed debates on the nature of the soul as “an opportunity to strengthen the religious foundations of the soul using radical new ideas, and to encourage human progress in the process.”[11]

Abbé Pluquet not only exemplifies Barr’s desire to “explain how the soul became material,” but his work also shows that religiously-minded thinkers did not hew singularly to issues of theology and metaphysics, reason and faith.[12] As Leslie Tuttle’s examination of dreams in this forum reinforces, Catholic theologians and Christian apologists made new ontological claims about uncertain cognitive activities (such as dreaming and the imagination), thus problematizing the staid dichotomy of mind/soul/reason and matter/body/error. If Christianity came to be seen as “a bridle to the unsociable passions...[and] a ‘spur’ to the civilizing process,” it was by using contemporary physiology of the human body to criticize contemporary socio-economic changes and explain proper moral behavior.[13] Pluquet’s own entanglement with the pressing issues of his day—like luxury, commerce, and sociability—reveals the fundamental importance of the human body to “cultural commonalities between the Enlightenment and the so-called Counter Enlightenment,” in Jeremy Caradonna’s critique of an idea-centric approach.[14] Jeffrey Burson has similarly sought to counter historiographical tendencies to create ideological groupings by concentrating on process, active engagement, “entanglement,” and “a ‘culture of enlightening’.”[15] Burson defined “the notion of historical entanglement [as] the manner in which an ‘object’ of historical study (for example, a concept, discourse, or identity) is constituted at the meeting point or intercrossing among various historical contexts, as opposed to its being considered in only one isolated discursive context.”[16] Pluquet’s work crossed multiple discursive contexts to fasten the discourses of social and economic commerce to the human body.

In De la Sociabilité, Pluquet moved beyond a philosophical examination and repudiation of materialism and fatalism to challenge what he perceived to be the social consequences of radical thought.[17] Three key contexts provoked Pluquet to write De la Sociabilité. First was the rise of heterodox thought in mid-eighteenth century France and individuals willing to defy religious conventions, either through clandestine manuscripts, illicit publications, or publicly in the Encyclopédie.[18] The quarter-century prior to De la Sociabilité had seen a powerful stream of radical texts issue from Denis Diderot, Julian Offray de la Mettrie, and Claude-Adrien Helvétius. Their approaches foregrounded the material body as responsible for psychological development, ratiocination, and morality. In addition, doctors, natural philosophers, and médecin-philosophes provided, purposefully and not, material explanations for vital processes.[19] Following Isaac Newton’s work on gravitation and attraction, natural philosophers recalibrated their positions regarding the likelihood of forces internal to matter. The discovery of Trembley’s self-reproducing polyp in 1744 demonstrated that matter itself could possess the qualities of autogeneration or automobility, and the “thinking matter” debate, which stemmed from a provocative query by John Locke, put defenders of an immortal and immaterial soul further on their heels.[20] The Swiss médecin-philosophe Albrecht von Haller's (re)discovery of the irritability of muscular fibers and the sensibility of nerves provided a framework for subsequent medical doctors and natural philosophers to link anatomical structure and physiological function to monist materialism.[21] Furthermore, the long-simmering debate over animal souls and the distance between humans and animals shifted by mid-century to be about organisation. La Mettrie and Charles-George Le Roy, for example, both argued that humans were simply more complex animals; reason and sensibility was a matter of physiological degree, not metaphysical substance. As Anton Matytsin observes, “the materialists offered a systematic reassessment of intelligent and sentient behavior without references to theology and metaphysics.  La Mettrie and Le Roy called for increasingly empirical and physiological approaches to the understanding of animal behavior. Their appeals reflected the gradual separation between natural philosophy and physiology, on the one hand, and metaphysical philosophy and theology, on the other.”[22] As the human body came to be seen as autonomous and self-reliant, requiring no immaterial stimulus, Pluquet adapted his theology to physiology.

Second, Pluquet’s De la Sociabilité garnered attention as an implied critique of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s infamous contribution to the natural law tradition, Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (1755).[23] Pluquet criticized Rousseau’s ideas that humans were not inherently rational and that nature had created humans solitary and unsocial. In contrast, he extended Samuel von Pufendorf’s (1632-1694) conception of sociability, itself an attempt to “reconcile the theories of [Hugo] Grotius (sociability) and [Thomas] Hobbes (self-interest).”[24] According to Pufendorf, humans are naturally weak and vulnerable; thus, sociability was a natural-historical, though not innate, expression of their self-interest to associate for protection.[25] In mankind’s early ages, human needs and desires surpassed those of animals, who could sate themselves through instinct, and Pufendorf argued that sociability was the solution to meet the unlimited growth of desires, an argument Pluquet would later replicate in his own conjectural history. Jean Barbeyrac (1674-1744) made Pufendorf’s writings on natural law available in French—Les Devoirs de l’Homme et du Citoyen (1707) and Le Droit de la Nature et des Gens (1706)—thus publicizing Pufendorf’s elevation of sociability from an inclination (Grotius) to a natural law.

By the mid-eighteenth century, the Encyclopédie offered multiple articles that treated various facets of natural law and demonstrated its mutability. Denis Diderot (1713-1784) described natural law as a universal “interior feeling” (sentiment intérieur), and Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui (1694-1748) sought to derive universal natural rights from “reason and human nature,” especially an “internal moral sense,” following the work of Francis Hutcheson.[26] Pluquet, then, augmented natural law tradition steeped in Pufendorf's theories by embodying sociability and the relationships of affinity humans felt for each other. This solved Pufendorf’s challenge of “converting such an external obligation [rational understanding of natural law] into an internal one.”[27] Pluquet elaborated on the cognitive components and sensory processes of sociability and natural law, only gestured at by Diderot and Burlamaqui, and attributed to “Nature” the inscription of sociability in the body. Understanding the fundamental nature of human relations, of which natural law was an integral pursuit, was “central to one of the defining debates of the Enlightenment, namely whether and to what extent the cognitive, including moral, powers of humanity were adequate to the conduct of life in this world.”[28]

Third, alongside intellectual debates, Pluquet responded to socio-economic changes, addressing “conduct of life in this world.” Pluquet confronted the effects of the “consumer revolution”; at least, he claimed to identify the intellectual underpinnings of it.[29] He broadened his attack on materialistic philosophy by blaming its adherents for the growth in consumption of luxury goods and the subsequent unleashing of “the passions.” Neo-Epicureans, materialists, and fatalists, or those he claimed found utility in the most ignoble passions, would undermine the natural sociability instilled by Nature and the Supreme Being. Pluquet therefore mingled Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and La Mettrie together with David Hume, Jean-François Melon, and Bernard Mandeville. In their own way, each of these thinkers trumpeted the passions, rather than reason, as the main motivator of social interaction.[30] Mandeville, for example, presented the selfish and often dishonorable motivations of humans in society and the consequences of their actions as proper guides for social order and economic policy. For him, humans were observably passionate rather than hopefully virtuous and rational. Pride, envy, and vanity would propel commerce and industry, and thus distribute wealth, as individuals defined themselves through their possessions.[31] Montesquieu, Jean-François Melon, J.-C.-M. Vincent de Gournay, and numerous others had argued for the civilizing capacity of commerce freed from governmental constraints, what Montesquieu called le doux commerce.[32] The drive to acquire was thought to be rational, controllable, and virtually innocuous; it would force individuals, and thus nations, to practice commercial exchange peacefully and reciprocally. Advocates of commerce as a softener of manners and polisher of mores still put forward a corporeal-centered perspective that highlighted the natural-ness of passions and affects, the optimistic pursuit of “agreeable sensations,” and an ethical approach that reduced morality to the human organisation.

For Pluquet, the pernicious influence of this type of thinking diminished the power of the mind and quieted the voice of nature calling individuals to find happiness through sociability. The text De la Sociabilité represented Pluquet’s portrayal of materialism and the burgeoning luxury market in an immediate social frame.[33] What is less commonly observed, though, is Pluquet’s use of contemporary medical and physiological theories to undergird his criticism of the social ills presented by materialism and commercial luxury. Pluquet marshaled evidence from the human body to ground a new vision of society, looking to “take back” the body from materialists who drew attention to physical explanations for human life and actions. According to Pluquet, the Creator embodied in humans the social virtues of amitié (goodwill and friendship), bienveillance (benevolence), and reconnaissance (the memory of a kindness done).

Charles T. Wolfe has recently expounded a particularly useful account of “materialist embodiment,” characterized partly by “an anti-mechanistic doctrine which focuses on the unique properties of organic beings.”[34] From the 1740s, “embodiment” grew from a “more dynamic notion of man, man as a unified biological organism....Thought and feeling (in all their modes) take their place alongside properties such as irritability, muscular contractions, blood flow, and numerous physical processes, taking place in organs, nerves, and brain.”[35] The dynamic notion of individual bodies highlights a “visceral” feature (“vital fluids, touch, affects and passions”) and a “reductionist component,” in which assertions of immaterial agents are reduced to neurological pathways.[36] Embodiment implies ontology. In opposition to the metaphorical relationship of bodies behaving like machines, embodiment treats a new experience “of what it is to be in a body” and how “an embodied agent inhabits the world, not as one body amongst others (atoms and asteroids and Fanta cans) but as a subject in her own environment.”[37]

Pluquet was surely not sympathetic to materialism in any of its forms. Unlike his apologetic contemporaries Laurent François (1698-1782), the Jansenist curé Guillaume de Maleville (1699-1756), and Benoît Sinsart (1695-1776), however, Pluquet did not “refute the materialist position...[by asserting] the essential distinction between the spiritual soul and the physical body.” Nor did he press that the “union of these separate substances...is purely contingent on the will of God, who desires to grant the soul the means to rule over the temporal sphere.”[38] His work evinces a symmetry with “materialist embodiment.” De la Sociabilité placed moral action in a “biologically and psychologically complex account of what it is to be an embodied agent, acting in the midst of a variety of causal chains, some fully internal, some external.”[39] In an attempt to naturalize sociability, counter the consequences of le doux commerce, and stymie the effects of materialism, Pluquet described human activity and behavior as a system of bodily traces, impressions, and passions that form the human organisation, not the result of a rational will and concomitant spiritual component.

Pluquet opened his wide-ranging De la Sociabilité with a rational reconstruction of the “state of nature” to illustrate the principles of social organization, and he placed sociability at the base of all interaction. Humans could only achieve happiness by following nature, which “conducts all humans to the peace and happiness for which she has destined them by the principles of sociability interior to all.”[40] Nature created humans weak in order to force them to unite and forge reciprocal links. The ability to create societies, alongside the capacity to reason, made humans unique and superior to animals.[41] The principles of natural sociability, or what Pluquet called the “science of happiness,” should precede all disciplines of knowledge and legislative thought.[42] Across two volumes and 900 pages, Pluquet addressed the state of nature, the socially useful and socially harmful passions, and the role of the sovereign in channeling the activities of subjects toward society. He wielded an entire corporeal vocabulary to elaborate la nature humaine—disposition, tempérament, constitution, organisation—but his refrain was always that sociability was a natural part of the corporeal organisation. The insatiable pursuit of physical sensations (or “agreeable sensations”), purportedly espoused by egoistic materialists, was unnatural and immoral; it numbed the sensibility so necessary to generate proper social relationships.

Pluquet conceived of humans as unique creatures, blending a corporeal organisation physically-inferior to other animals with a superior faculty of reason that led them to coalesce.[43] Although Pluquet noted regional variations in bodies—climate, education, and moeurs—he argued that humans possessed an organisation capable of registering and fulfilling basic physical needs, translating sense data into impressions (information), storing this information in memory, and reflecting upon it.[44] Reason was the “torch” or “lights” that guided humans to understand their reciprocal relationships; yet, the most important attribute of human bodies was the ability to feel social connections.[45] Individuals were naturally-constituted for sociability. Not only did they need each other to defend from animal aggressors and obtain sustenance in early societies, but nature built human bodies sensitive to the moral existence of others: “In order to distinguish actions that are useful or harmful to others, man received from nature an organisation which makes him feel [ressentir] the good and the bad that they feel [éprouver].”[46] Human bodies were the sources of sociability, just as nature intended. This interior feeling could be blunted or stifled in bodies hardened by destructive corporeal habits, as Pluquet feared in a world of philosophical materialism and luxury, but it could not be totally erased.[47] What Pluquet defined as une loi naturelle was timeless, corporeal, and should serve to undergird society.[48]

Pluquet paired a moral vocabulary of the social virtues with a corporeal vocabulary. The social virtues (or le sentiment de l’humanité) were embodied.[49] They could only flourish in a body whose organs and sensory network were properly disposed, not deranged by an inflamed imagination or rendered languid by overindulging in sensual pursuits.[50] Human physiology processed social interaction similar to the way it processed physical sensations, but Pluquet claimed human interaction impressed the sense organs more powerfully than interaction with physical objects.[51] Humans did not process the images of an agreeable fruit, for example, in the same way they did a suffering individual; nature’s organisation equipped humans with a sentiment or sensibility that felt social interaction differently.[52] This, according to Pluquet, was the “law of sensibility”: we feel pleasure when we perform a good for another individual or society, and we feel pain when we injure another.[53]

Pluquet argued throughout De la Sociabilité that individuals communicated their emotions through all of the senses. Just as the touch of a hot stove initiates a series of sensory operations, by the connection of our physical constitution and sensibility humans express and transmit their happiness and pain.[54] In the process of expression, they communicate with and to their spectators:

Cries, moans, and tears act on the organs of other humans, and their organs shaken [ébranlés] by this stimuli convey the impressions to their soul. Their soul is found affected by the image of pain, so to speak, as wax is stamped by the imprint of a seal. Such is the nature of the human soul and of its union with the body that it cannot be moved by the image of pain without itself feeling the sentiment. In this way, by the corporeal organisation, if one suffers, his soul acts not only on the organs in order to manifest the feelings, but also on the souls of all others, which makes those who hear his cries or see his tears feel his pain.[55]

Pluquet used the unique term organisation to describe the incorporation of constituent parts into one creature. The idea of an “organized body,” or organisation, was at the center of mid-century debates about the origins and processes of human animation. Natural philosophers sought to understand the stages and vital processes of life: generation, development of the organs, senescence, sensibility, and thought. Through a variety of experiments and philosophical conjectures, what Étienne Bonnot de Condillac referred to as “statue,” many thinkers found in the notion of organisation a way to account for these processes. Organisation was both a mechanical means of describing the arrangement of the organs and a more active way of linking that arrangement to larger vital properties in humans and animals (e.g. Théophile de Bordeu’s metaphor of the swarm of bees). Organisation, thus, conjoined anatomical completeness to the property of life. To uncover the development of organisation, or explain the ways in which a conglomeration of organs, nerves, muscles, and tissues gave rise to thought and sensibility, was the key to understanding human life, morality, and society. The implications of new medical and philosophical speculation brought to the fore a number of critical questions about the vivifying principles of human life. Where did sensibility fit in corporeal organisation? Was sensibility a product of organisation, or was it innate to matter itself? Could the sensibility of matter explain the generation of life without spiritual infusion? Could a natural, non-religious ethics be derived from the sensibility of an organized body? These questions increased the pressure on religious thinkers to demonstrate the location and function of the soul in a body clearly organized, activated, and mobilized by natural procedures. Materialists like La Mettrie and Diderot used the concept of an “organized body” to explain the appearance of thought and dynamic properties in humans, eschewing an immaterial soul or an incorporeal vitalizing agent and activating matter itself.

Pluquet’s approach to organisation was similarly comprehensive. Organisation was the “principle of life,” which housed the capacity to reflect, and an organized body incorporated a set of moral characteristics: sociability, kindness, and benevolence.[56] Humans had a particular organisation that merged the physical and the moral, or more traditionally the body and the soul. As the “cries, moans, and tears” passage suggested, individual bodies record and share the pleasures and pains of others, linking the immaterial soul and material sensations of one organized body to another in a natural law of sociability.

The transmission of such emotion and the corporeal reception by neighboring bodies describes the principles necessary to society that Pluquet labeled amitié and reconnaissance. Essentially, amitié “is the pleasure produced by the resemblance that a [person] perceives between himself and others,” an action that generates universal, moral harmony just as gravitational attraction does in the physical universe.[57] Feeling amitié is the natural state of the organisation. The companion characteristic reconnaissance was “the sentiment of attachment and zeal produced by the memory of a kindness or service.”[58] We are naturally compelled to please, and be pleasing to, others, and nature ensured that we repeat such behavior. By reproducing the sensory elation when we recall the bienfait or bienfaiteur, our cognitive faculty of memory recompenses our beneficent actions or those actions of which we were the beneficiary.[59]

Pluquet linked a metaphor of the rebirth of sentiments in one’s heart to the physical retracing of the impression on the brain during the process of reconnaissance.[60] The image of an individual with whom we are in perfect amitié makes on our brain “an impression more profound than all other objects; the animal spirits accustomed to circulating in the traces that represent it to us do not permit us to forget. The idea exists always in our memory as one of kindness and fellow-feeling, which cannot be effaced from our memory and continues to exist in our mind and heart.”[61] Our organisation, then, is programmed to be sociable and love all members of society. When individuals stray from this path by engaging in self-interested or voluptuous activities, they suffer the pain of a disordered corps; the fleeting sensations of pleasure cannot compare to the enduring sentiments of sociability.[62]

The sentiment that prompts individuals toward reciprocal social relations was not a disembodied spirit identified only by rational meditation; it was consubstantial. Human nature did not exist outside the corporeal organisation, which was naturally-constituted to feel pleasure by assembling in society. The body could nevertheless become disorganized and altered through age, a gluttonous diet, or a dissolute lifestyle; this was not natural, but equilibrium could always be restored.[63] Pluquet recognized the potency of sensationalism as a moral philosophy and epistemology, but he attempted to undercut its physicality by clinging to an immaterial soul and Supreme Being. Ultimately, though, he relied on physiological and cognitive processes within the body to explain natural sociability and its moral resonance. In order to sustain an argument for the centrality of sociability and a morality based on a natural or interior sentiment, Pluquet chose to demonstrate positively the multiple ways in which the body was anchored in society and the world of sense data.

Pluquet claimed that sociability was fundamental to human nature and repeatedly depicted human nature through physical, bodily processes. Although “society” became “the space of autonomy or freedom from the demands of authoritarian rulers claiming a transcendental ground of legitimacy,” Pluquet did not emancipate individuals from their états or ordre to pursue free exchange.[64] Bodies demanded a particular kind of moderated social and economic commerce in the ancien régime corporate structure, and Pluquet grounded sociability in the capacity of the human body to avoid addiction to overconsumption or self-aggrandizement.

Pluquet challenged certain aspects of the traditional social hierarchy, but he found états to be a useful, divinely-sanctioned, ordering principle.[65] Happiness could be found by feeling the interior sentiments of amitié and reconnaissance that linked individual bodies in society, and reason tells us, according to Pluquet, that grandeur, élévation, and crédit are either distributed by chance or nefariously appropriated through base behavior.[66] Yet, happiness could not be found in attempting to elevate one’s état by wearing the symbols of a superior rank.[67] Pluquet lamented the untoward displays of wealth and the unnecessary violence accompanying slights of honor.[68] He did not argue that universal organisations necessitated a leveling of society or a redistribution of états. In fact, he calculated that our habits formed at a young age added to our natural dispositions equaled our “social character.” Through this formulation, Pluquet justified stratification: “one could render the practice of social virtues necessary to an individual’s happiness in the état they would be placed.”[69] Despite the use of the conditional tense, we have no reason to believe that Pluquet imagined tearing down the traditional états. After all, he maintained the early-modern analogy between sovereigns/monarchs and fathers, who ruled singularly but tenderly in their domain, and he praised the noble, hereditary distinctions of virtuous families.[70]

Pluquet repeated that individuals find happiness in the social virtues and that nature crafted the organisation specifically for social commerce, but the uniformity of body did not lead him to demand a society of equals. He still defined the social destiny of members of the Third Estate by the robustness of their bodies rather than their natural sentiment: “All individuals [les hommes] are not born with equal dispositions for cultivating the earth, for managing herds, or for hunting down ferocious animals... It would be necessary for some public authority to assign individuals to their class and their functions.”[71] Pluquet did question the foundation of a society of distinctions and privileges, arguing that distinction should be a product of social function or utility, and alluded to a reshuffling of useless members of various états. Pluquet contended, however, that he demonstrated “humans are not naturally envious and jealous, and that nature attaches happiness to the practice of social virtues in whichever état or conditions an individual finds himself; [therefore,] the equality of happiness can exist with the difference that subordination puts between men in a society.”[72] Pluquet diagnosed individuals who assert their superiority and scorn inferiors as suffering from a blunted and numb sentiment d’humanité.[73] Like the materialists and fatalists that served as his interlocutors, Pluquet’s corporeal analysis did not lead inevitably to freedoms, liberties, or a lifting of restraints.[74]

Pluquet made his deepest mark by attacking heresy and heterodoxy, by attempting to expose and uproot the supposed toxic influence of irreligious philosophes whose ideas undermined throne, altar, and society. Twenty years after the publication of De la Sociabilité, in his two-volume Traité philosophique et politique sur le luxe (TPPL, 1786), Pluquet cemented the link between luxury, materialism, and social disorder that he began in De la Sociabilité. He baldly stated that luxury led to materialism, and vice versa, and he primarily blamed adherents of the Classical philosopher Epicurus.[75] “Luxury deprives society of all the advantages provided by religion,” he wrote; it propels individuals toward excessive expenditures, sensual pleasures (la volupté), and vice over virtue. Luxury destroys the “empire of conscience” and compels humans to use violence and artifice to obtain their desires.[76] Society breaks down as passions are unleashed, crime increases, and nobody feels duty-bound to their fellow citizens.[77]

As Pluquet noted in De la Sociabilité, luxury and frivolity substituted nature’s system of happiness for one that found an ersatz version in “a continual and rapid succession of a multitude of...sensations” that repeatedly extinguish each other.[78] Luxury forced its adherents to abandon reason, sociability, and amitié for the pursuit of corporeal pleasures, or a materialistic life dedicated to physical objects and constant movement corresponding to materialist philosophers’ interpretation of the universe. Humans then became creatures that merely sense rather than contemplate and reason.[79] “Is it not evident,” Pluquet demanded, “that if you efface [the divine natural law of sociability] from the mind of man, he becomes the toy of all the impressions [made] by objects on his organs; that he is dragged by all of the passions and desires raised in his heart....that he is no longer anything but a sensible automaton, and that he can become a monster of cruelty?”[80]

In order to combat monist materialism and its increasing influence over both social and economic commerce, Pluquet needed to form sociability from natural, physiological principles. He pointed to changes in the human body as the essential space to observe the devastation intrinsic to a burgeoning commercial society infused by materialism. By naturalizing the consequences of human interaction, Pluquet augmented “Christian Sentimentalism.”[81] He conceded extensively principles of sensibility and organisation to his opponents, but, in the face of both new ideas and new behaviors, he reconfigured the corporeal to reflect his dualistic metaphysics and providential theology. Nevertheless, Pluquet drew dangerously close to his opponents, placing immense responsibility in the physical body for an individual’s socio-moral livelihood. Consider how La Mettrie opened his first philosophical work, Histoire naturelle de l’âme (1745): “Neither Aristotle, nor Plato, nor Descartes, nor Malebranche will tell you what your soul is....Those who want to know the properties of the soul must, therefore, begin by looking for those properties which manifest themselves clearly in the body.”[82] And, in his L’homme machine (1748), rendered anathema by all conservative and moderate thinkers, La Mettrie responded “once again, yes!” to his own question, “Does the organisation suffice to explain everything.”[83]

By the mid-eighteenth century, changing conceptions of the human body proved a threat and an opportunity. As social and economic shifts occupied the minds of contemporaries, disparate thinkers all looked to the body to make sense of and reimagine new experiences. I do not want to add another name to the list of anti-philosophes or Christian enlighteners, but I do want to draw attention to the corporeal as a source of entanglement, exemplified by Pluquet's work. As Jeffrey Burson recently argued: “The whole era of ‘lights’ [lumières] was a time in which notions of how to reform something called society or humanity by cultural, spiritual, and rational illumination abounded and intermingled in a long cultural process driven in its totality by the constructive entanglement of very disparate notions of about what ‘enlightenment’ meant and how it should be pursued.”[84] Pluquet’s corporeal sociability, as I have called it, would be familiar to supporters and opponents of luxury and commerce, as well as philosophical radicals. Contemporaries advanced variegated ontological assertions that privileged the human body to address urgent social, economic, and moral issues. Instead of identifying the Enlightenment as an “Age of ...” focusing on entangled responses to these issues that resist ideological classifications will get us closer to the heart of the matter.

1. There is a rich historiography exploring religious opposition to (perceived) materialism. See the classic work of R. R. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1939); Didier Masseau, Les ennemis des philosophes: l’antiphilosophie au temps des Lumières (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000); Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Guy Chaussinaud-Nogaret, Comment Peut-on Être un Intellectuel au Siècle des Lumières? (Brussels: André Versaille, 2011), 83-97.

2. In Examen du fatalisme, Pluquet reduced nuanced positions to two: “egoists” (Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, Hobbes) and devotees of a universal soul (Spinoza). According to Ann Thomson, “Fatalism, Christian or otherwise, meant for Pluquet ‘an inevitable chain of eternal necessary causes’ and was linked to both the inexorable working of the laws of nature and the belief that everything is decided in advance according to an overall plan, another version of divine foreknowledge.” Ann Thomson, Bodies of Thought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 213.

3. Patrick Coleman, "The Enlightened Orthodoxy of the Abbé Pluquet," in Histories of Heresy in Early Modern Europe: For, Against, and Beyond Persecution and Toleration, ed. John Christian Laursen (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 223-238. Pluquet, for example, treated John Locke’s work generously, even as materialists would use it to further claims about the materiality of life, thought, and feeling. Charles T. Wolfe, “From Locke to Materialism: Empiricism, the Brain and the Stirrings of Ontology,” in What Does it Mean to be an Empiricist, ed. S. Bodenmann and A.-L. Rey, 235-63 (Springer International Publishing, 2018), 243-44.

4. Mark Curran, Atheism, Religion and Enlightenment in Pre-Revolutionary Europe (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2012), 132.

5. Coleman, "The Enlightened Orthodoxy of the Abbé Pluquet,” 225.

6. Charly Coleman makes a similar argument in Charly Coleman, The Virtues of Abandon: An Anti-Individualist History of the French Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 126-28.

7. Andreas Gipper, “La Nature entre utilitarisme et esthétisation: l’abbé Pluche et la physico-théologie européenne,” in Écrire la nature au XVIIIe siècle: autour de l’abbé Pluche, eds. Françoise Gevrey, Julie Boch, and Jean-Louis Haquette, 25-37 (Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2006).

8. Aside from the material below, see Ulrich L Lehner and Michael Printy, A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010); Jeffrey D. Burson, The Rise and Fall of the Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010); Jeffrey D. Burson and Ulrich L. Lehner, eds., Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014); William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram, eds., God in the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Anton M. Matytsin and Dan Edelstein, eds., Let There Be Enlightenment: The Religious and Mystical Sources of Rationality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).

9. Ulrich L. Lehner, “What is ‘Catholic Enlightenment’?” History Compass 8, no. 2 (2010): 166-78, here 166-67.

10. Helena Rosenblatt, “The Christian Enlightenment,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 7, “Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution, 1660-1815,” eds. Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett, 283-301 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 292.

11. Kara E. Barr, “‘A Crucible in Which to Put the Soul’: Keeping Body and Soul Together in the Moderate Enlightenment, 1740-1830” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2014), 11.

12. Ibid., 10.

13. Rosenblatt, 291.

14. Jeremy L. Caradonna, “There Was No Counter-Enlightenment,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 49, no. 1 (2015): 51-69, here 55. See too Curran, Atheism, Religion and Enlightenment, 7, and Eric Palmer, “Less Radical Enlightenment: a Christian Wing of the French Enlightenment,” in Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment, ed. Steffen Ducheyne, 197-222 (New York: Routledge, 2017).

15. Jeffrey D. Burson, The Culture of Enlightening: Abbé Claude Yvon and the Entangled Emergence of the Enlightenment (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), 20-22. For “entanglement,” see also the introduction to Karen Hagemann, Donna Harsch, and Friederike Brühöfener, Gendering Post-1945 German History: Entanglements (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2019).

16. Jeffrey D. Burson, “Entangled History and the Scholarly Concept of Enlightenment,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 8, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 1-24, 3.

17. Curran claims that his “Christian Enlightenment” “addressed the social and moral issues raised by materialism head-on,” but his analysis only treats literary style and the broad public sphere (163).

18. Jonathan Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750-1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 56-92; Curran, Atheism, Religion and Enlightenment, 147-48.

19. Liana Vardi, The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 52-83; John H. Zammito, “Médecin-philosoph: A Persona of Radical Enlightenment,” Intellectual History Review 8, no. 3 (2008): 427-40; Anne C. Vila, Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Elizabeth Williams, The Physical and the Moral: Anthropology, Physiology, and Philosophical Medicine in France, 1750-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

20. Locke’s statement: “God can, if he pleases, superadd to matter a faculty of thinking.” Wolfe, “From Locke to Materialism”; John Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984); for the “thinking matter” debate in France, see John Yolton, Locke and French Materialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991); Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 704-13 and Enlightenment Contested, 751-80, 840-62; Anton M. Matytsin, The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 163-65.

21. Albrecht von Haller, De partibus corporis humani sensibilibus et irritabilibus (Göttingen, 1752). Francis Glisson advanced the inherent mobility and activity of matter in the seventeenth century. See Guido Giglioni, "Anatomist Atheist? The 'Hylozoistic' Foundations of Francis Glisson's Anatomical Research," in Religio Medici: Medicine and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England, eds. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company and Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1996), 115-35.

22. Anton Matytsin, “Of Beasts and Men: Debates about Animal Souls in Eighteenth-Century France,” Eighteenth-Century Thought, vol. 6 (Norwalk, CT: AMS Press, 2016): 1-32, here 29.

23. Michael Sonenscher, Sans-Culottes: An Eighteenth-Century Emblem in the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 230.

24. Peter Schröder, “Natural Law and Enlightenment in France and Scotland—A Comparative Perspective,” in Early Modern Natural Law Theories, eds. T.J. Hochstrasser and Peter Schröder, 297-317 (Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), 297. David William Bates provides an erudite reading of Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf, which, I argue, reveals Pluquet’s methodological resemblance to Pufendorf’s sociability and Hobbes’ anatomo-physiology (filtered through eighteenth-century sensationalism), rather than Grotius’ “disembodied reason.” States of War: Enlightenment Origins of the Political (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 52-92.

25. Istvan Hont, “The Language of Sociability and Commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the Theoretical Foundation of the ‘Four-Stage’ Theory,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden, 253-76 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 268.

26. Diderot, “Droit naturel” (morale), Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., vol. X (1755): 115-16, eds. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert (University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project, Spring 2013 Edition), Robert Morrissey (ed), http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu/ . For Burlamaqui, Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007), 118, and Burlamaqui, The Principles of Natural and Political Law (1747), chapter II, section X and chapter III, section I: https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/burlamaqui-the-principles-of-natural-and-politic-law. The term sentiment intérieur was not specific to sensationalist philosophy and was used from at least the late-seventeenth century to the early-nineteenth. Its meaning changed depending on user and context, but essentially it connoted a locus of emotion, selfhood, or conscience (either divinely or naturally drawing individuals toward the good). See Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 26-27, 56.

27. Bates, 84. Bates’ italics.

28. Knud Haakonssen, “German Natural Law,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, eds. Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler, 251-90 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 251.

29. For the necessity of linking political economy to the body, see Joseph D. Bryan, “Dazzled, Blinded, and Numb: Commerce, Luxury, and the French Crisis of Corps, 1750–1789,” L’Esprit Créateur 55, no. 3 (Fall 2015): 72-85; Michael Kwass, “Consumption and the World of Ideas: Consumer Revolution and the Moral Economy of the Marquis de Mirabeau,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 187-213; Michael Kwass, “Between Words and Things: ‘La Querelle du luxe’ in the Eighteenth Century,” MLN 130, no. 4 (September 2015): 771-82.

30. Pluquet, De la Sociabilité, vol. I, 33, 89. For Pluquet’s engagement with social and economic commerce, see Henry C. Clark, Compass of Society: Commerce and Absolutism in Old-Regime France (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 257-82; Henry C. Clark, “Commerce, Sociability, and the Public Sphere: Morellet vs. Pluquet on Luxury,” Eighteenth-Century Life 22, no. 2 (May 1998): 83-103.

31. Jerrold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 111-38; Edward Hundert, “Mandeville, Rousseau and the Political Economy of Fantasy,” in Luxury in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), 28-40.

32. Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). Theorists of natural law in France and Scotland found sociability to be a purifying agent of commercial society, cleansing self-interest and the passions of their unsavory flavor and sinful taint. Pluquet’s natural law of sociability supplanted self-interest.

33. On page v of Examen du fatalism, Pluquet treated the poison of luxury clinically, looking to determine the symptoms and causes. See Coleman, The Virtues of Abandon, 140.

34. Charles T. Wolfe, “Forms of Materialist Embodiment,” in Anatomy and the Organization of Knowledge, 1500-1850, eds. Matthew Landers and Brian Muñoz, 129-44 (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 129.

35. Yolton, Locke and French Materialism, 205.

36. Wolfe, “Forms of Materialist Embodiment,” 134.

37. Ibid., 130, 132. Wolfe makes a similar claim in “From Locke to Materialism,” esp. 251-63.

38. Coleman, The Virtues of Abandon, 141. I am suggesting Pluquet would also operate counter to Tuttle’s proposal in this forum that Dom Augustin Calmet privileged the realm of human consciousness, in analyzing dreams and miracles, in the face of rising “sense experience sensationists.” See too Burson’s “Jesuit Synthesis” in The Rise and Fall of the Theological Enlightenment, 1-54, 178-98.

39. Wolfe, “Forms of Materialist Embodiment,” 140.

40. Pluquet, De la Sociabilité, vol. I, xviii.

41. Ibid., vol. I, 32, 88-90, 153.

42. Ibid., vol. I, v-vi, xix.

43. Ibid., vol. I, 30-31. See also Clark, “Commerce, Sociability, and the Public Sphere,” 88. The most identifiable materialist, La Mettrie, argued similarly that animals possessed superior instinct, but humans possessed superior mental capacities as a product of their organization.

44. Ibid., vol. I, 82, 287; vol. II, 12-13.

45. Ibid., vol. I, 90.

46. Ibid., vol. I, 123; vol. II, 13-14.

47. Ibid., vol. I, 348; vol. II, 53, 308-11.

48. Ibid., vol. I, 346.

49. Ibid., vol. I, 116, 136-37; vol. II, 13.

50. Pluquet would treat this process in more detail in his Traité philosophique et politique sur le luxe (1786).

51. Pluquet, De la Socabilité, vol. I, 105.

52. Ibid., vol. II, 14-15; vol. I, 107.

53. Ibid., vol. I, 111-14, 124.

54. In a parallel analysis, Angela Haas’ contribution to this forum examines how critics of mesmerism alleged cures operated psychophysiologically through individuals’ imaginations (and, like Tuttle, Haas deftly explores limits to the epistemological authority of experience). People with weak minds and overactive imaginations, purportedly, shared “experiences” of animal magnetism and magnetized healing methods.

55. Pluquet, De la Sociabilité, vol. I, 108-9, 119. Pluquet’s conception of the relationship between sensibility and the soul may have been influenced by Albrecht von Haller, who argued that sensible parts transmitted external impressions to the soul. Pluquet argued, too, that the ultimate destination of impressions is the soul. The ability to communicate emotions and to sympathize (or “empathize” in our modern understanding) suggests a familiarity with the Montpellier Vitalists’ conception of “sympathy.” Physiological “sympathy” was the ability of internal organs to perceive the movement of neighboring organs, communicate, and thus produce vitality. Sociability and “sympathy” between individuals signified the natural interdependence of humans, according to Pluquet. I thank Liana Vardi for the notion of communicability in her “reader report” for this journal.

56. Ibid., vol. I, 124. The distance between La Mettrie, as a representative of materialism, and Pluquet, may not be so vast. According to La Mettrie, “there is so much pleasure in doing good, in feeling and appreciating the kindness we receive, so much satisfaction in practicing virtue, in being good-natured, humane, tender, charitable, compassionate and generous (this word alone includes all the virtues), that I hold that whoever is unlucky enough not to have been born virtuous has been punished enough....How then should we define the law of nature? It is a feeling which teaches us what we should not do, by what we would not like to be done to us.” La Mettrie, Machine Man, in Machine Man and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Ann Thomson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 22.

57. Ibid., vol. I, 214-16. See Devin J. Vartija, “Empathy, Equality, and the Radical Enlightenment,” in Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment, 274-91.

58. Ibid., vol. I, 164-65.

59. Ibid., vol. I, 213. Nature also fused into humans a safeguard against excess by equipping them with pleasurable sensations when they achieved the proper levels of nourishment and passion and painful sensations when they exceeded the necessary and useful (see also Traité philosophique et politique sur le luxe, vol. I, 411-13, 461-69). Pluquet’s explanation of corporeal sociability bears a striking resemblance to Adam Smith’s impartial spectator; both recognized social commerce as a natural human state, and both employed the idea that sensations and emotions were communicated between individuals, ensuring, ideally, that sociability flourished. For the “corporeal conditioning” required in Smith’s morality, see Joseph Bryan, “Beyond Metaphor: Corporeal Sociability and the Language of Commerce in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 15, no. 2 (Winter 2020): 29-50.

60. Ibid., vol. I, 164.

61. Ibid., vol. I, 213.

62. Ibid., vol. I, 154.

63. Ibid., vol. I, 126-27, 150-51, 242.

64. Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2014), 99.

65. This matches his notion in Dictionnaire des hérésies that “authority ensures stability amidst progress.” Coleman, “The Enlightened Orthodoxy of Abbé Pluquet,” 227.

66. Pluquet, De la Sociabilité, vol. II, 115-18.

67. Ibid., vol. II, 118, 170-72.

68. Ibid., vol. I, 274-76.

69. Ibid., vol. II, 184. This does not even address the question of religious differentiation. In the entry “Calvinistes” in his Dictionnaire des hérésies, Pluquet stated: “It is not perhaps in the interests of the State to let the Protestants multiply in France, but by treating them with humanity, with charity, with gentleness, could we not hope to reunite them to the Church?” Quoted in Coleman, “The Enlightened Orthodoxy of Abbé Pluquet,” 223. In his Traité philosophique et politique sur le luxe, Pluquet advocated a form of progress propelled by elite philosophical, religious, and political leaders. Clark, “Commerce, Sociability, and the Public Sphere,” 91.

70. Ibid., vol. II, 250-53.

71. Ibid., vol. II, 250.

72. Ibid., vol. II, 264.

73. Ibid., vol. I, 275-76.

74. For a brief assessment of the extent to which “Radical Enlightenment” thinkers were actually socially or politically radical, see Harvey Chisick, “Of Radical and Moderate Enlightenment,” in Reassessing the Radical Enlightenment, 61-79.

75. TPPL, vol. I, 11, 363-67. For a brief analysis of corporeal breakdown in Pluquet’s TPPL, see Bryan, “Dazzled, Blinded, and Numb,” 81-83.

76. Ibid., vol. I, 417. Pluquet named la conscience the “interior principle of strength and resolution” that nature placed in man in order to “render him capable of resisting those causes that carry him to transgress his duties” toward others. Ibid., vol. I, 417. See Pluquet’s De la sociabilité, vol. I, 338-58.

77. Ibid., vol. II, 161-66; vol. I, 132, 336-45, 444-45.

78. Pluquet, De la Sociabilité, vol. I, 182, 136. Pluquet defined luxury as “the usage of objects, which produce agreeable sensations, that man has rendered necessary to his happiness even though by the laws of nature the usage of these objects and the agreeable sensations that they produce are neither necessary nor useful to life or health nor necessary to the happiness of man.” TPPL, vol. I, 79.

79. Pluquet, TPPL, vol. I, 427.

80. Ibid., vol. I, 326, 429-30.

81. Rosenblatt, 292-97.

82. La Mettrie, Traité de l’âme, in Oeuvres Philosophiques, tome 1, ed. Francine Markovits, 123-243 (Paris: Fayard), 125.

83. La Mettrie, L’Homme-machine, in Oeuvres Philosophiques, 63-121, here 98.

84. Burson, The Culture of Enlightening, 20-22. Burson built from Dale K. Van Kley’s work, especially Van Kley, “Conclusion: The Varieties of Enlightened Experience,” in God in the Enlightenment, 278-316.