Thesis
In praise of vanity : the Augustinian analysis of the benefits of vice from Port-Royal to Mandeville
- Abstract:
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This is a study in the moral and political thought of the French Catholic Augustinian moralistes of the third quarter of the Seventeenth Century, and their Protestant successors, Pierre Bayle and Bernard Mandeville.
Although La Rochefoucauld, Pascal, and Nicole are best known for their closely observed and pessimistic analyses of human nature, this thesis focuses on a second feature of their thought: their arguments for the constructive potential of human corruption. The moralistes' starting point is provided by Augustinian and 'reason of state' accounts of the necessity that the human condition imposes upon us of making good use of bad means. Eager to challenge what they deemed to be a facile and conceited commitment to a natural virtue amongst their humanistic contemporaries, the French Augustinians elaborated upon this account in an original direction; they offered an exceptionally optimistic analysis of the possibilities of human cupidity, presenting it as the stuff from which a remarkably happy social life might be generated. Indeed they went so far as to offer satirical vindications not merely of the exploitation of human corruption, but of human corruption itself.
Of course the moralistes' arguments did not simply replicate one another, and the main body of the thesis attempts to distinguish between the different elaborations they gave to their defences of vanity. After a chapter on political and cultural context, Chapter 2 explores some of the sources of the moralistes' arguments in the writings of St. Augustine, and the sceptical humanists, especially Montaigne. The third chapter is devoted to La Rochefoucauld; having offered an account of the Augustinian intentions of the Maximes, the last part of this chapter seeks to draw attention to the presence in that work of a satirical vindication of vice and vanity. Pascal is the central figure in this study, and both Chapters 4 and 5 highlight the existence in the early parts of the Pensées of an audacious defence of the vanity of the people against their philosophical critics. The penultimate chapter is devoted to Nicole's more cautious and derivative account of the obligation of respecting conventions of civility and political obedience which channel vice in a beneficial direction.
Chapter 7 argues that Bayle's and Mandeville's well-known paradoxes concerning the potential of corruption run along lines already laid down by the Port-Royalists. In other words (and as the Conclusion suggests) Bayle's and Mandeville's analyses should be seen, like those of the Catholic moralistes, as contributions to a tradition which reaches through sixteenth-century Tacitists and sceptics like Montaigne, to the Enlightenment - a tradition which played an important but relatively neglected role in shaping eighteenth-century debates about commerce and virtue.
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Authors
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- Type of award:
- DPhil
- Level of award:
- Doctoral
- Awarding institution:
- University of Oxford
- Language:
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English
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- Deposit date:
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2023-10-19
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- Copyright holder:
- Ben Rogers
- Copyright date:
- 1994
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