Recherches Philosophiques sur les Grecs
Contributions
- Cornelius de Pauw
- author
- Georg Jakob Decker
- publisher
Related resources
- has translation
- Philosophical Dissertations on the Greeks translation has paratext
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Notes
De Pauw's two-volume, polemical study of Ancient Greece was an important contribution to the contemporary Rome vs. Greece and Sparta vs. Athens debates, imbued with a spirit of animosity against Rousseau, Mably and Montesquieu. In it, he argued, contra Rousseau and his acolytes with their preference for martial Sparta, that the more cultivated Athenian model of democracy was the one to follow, portraying them as implacable enemies of tyranny.
De Pauw was effectively challenging the Roman consensus created by Plutarch, and perpetuated by political thinkers, such as Rousseau, Montesquieu and abbé Mably. Plutarch's strong admiration for (Roman) republican virtue and enlightened autocracy sat alongside a heavy suspicion of democracy, which coloured most readings of Athenian history from the 15th to the 18th centuries, establishing the general tone of debate. In this reading, Athenian democracy meant mob rule, indiscipline and injustice, and this retrospective view was well received in the autocracies and oligarchies of Europe, including Venice's Spartan-influenced mixed constitution.
The American and French revolutions did little to advance the arguments in favour of Athenian democracy, preferring instead to look to the more authoritarian Roman and Spartan models for emulation. While the very presence of revolution abroad strengthened the argument in Britain, and elsewhere, for keeping well clear of any such 'radical' experimentation.
Most of the Founding Fathers were generally hostile to the Greek example, with John Adams, for example, viewing democracy as the most turbulent and unstable of all constitutions. As a result, not one Greek institution (as opposed to several Roman ones) was incorporated into America's 1787 Constitution. Only Thomas Paine, in Rights of Man, part two (1792), claimed that "what Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude", while acknowledging that representative democracy was a more suitable model for a large, modern state than Athens’ more direct version.
The French edition (imported by Robson & Clarke) "of this lively, wild, and fanciful yet diligent investigator" was reviewed favourably in the Monthly Review (1788, vol. LXXIX, pp.626-34). "In his observations on the distinctions of rank in society, M. de Pauw has introduced a judicious comparison between the nobles of Athens and of Rome; and has shewn how greatly superior, in this respect, the constitution of the former was to that of the latter, where the oppressive power of the patricians was an inexhaustible source of civil discord, and of every evil which can result from that worst kind of government, an ill-constituted republic… M. de Pauw shews that the pretended equality of possessions, which has been ascribed to the institutions of Lycurgus, never did, and never could exist. According to him, all that M. de Mably has advanced concerning the Spartans, is destitute even of probability… We ought, he says, to judge of the nature of political institutions, from the effects they produce in the country where they are established."
In 1788, it was republished in Paris and then, again in 1795, as part of De Pauw's Collected Works. It was translated into German (by Peter Villaume, a Berlin professor) in 1789 and English in 1793.
For a detailed analysis of De Pauw's arguments, see Oswyn Murray, Ch.3 'Enlightenment Greece: Sparta versus Athens', in 'History and the Ancient Greeks (forthcoming). For a good account of this debate, see Jennifer Tolbart Roberts, Athens on Trial: the Antidemocratic tradition in Western Thought (1994, Princeton University Press). The most comprehensive account of De Pauw's engagement with the Ancient Greek tradition, on which Murray's account draws, will be found in the forthcoming publication by Olivier Contensou, 'Le modèle démocratique athénien chez Cornélius de Pauw. Appropriations, contexte, et filiations transculturelles'.