Boiguilbert’s Approach and the Role of Jansenism

As a Jansenist, Boisguilbert’s approach is typically embedded in a dark theological vision based on the fundamental “fact” of the Original Sin - Jansenism being a very pes­simistic version of Augustinian thought.

Jansenist authors raised in this context three fundamental questions: theological, moral and political. In the first place, if men substituted in their heart their own self-love for the love of God, how could they be saved? - this is the problem of the grace. In the second place, if men act selfishly in all circumstances, no morality can ever exist and any action or thought which looks charitable, altruistic or benevolent from the outside, in reality only conceals strict egoistic motivations. In the third place, and this is the most important point here, the problem of social cohesion is posed: how could a society be maintained in this context of a war of all against all, when “all men are at battle with one another” (Nicole 1671-75 [1700], 3: 116)?

In the Jansenist French tradition, the theologian Pierre Nicole (1625-1695) - and after him the lawyer Jean Domat (1625-1696), both friends of Blaise Pascal - had already given part of the answer: while it is true that man’s reason is very weak and his depravity too potent to allow anything other than passions to direct his behaviour, man never­theless realizes that he cannot achieve his aims if he attempts to use coercion. Unable to “domesticate” his passions through reason, he uses instead his reason to follow his passions: he is thus willing to submit to other men’s wishes and self-interest but only in order to fulfil his own desires.

For example, when travelling in the country, we find men ready to serve those who pass by and who have lodgings ready to receive them almost everywhere. We dispose of their services as we wish. We command them; they obey... They never excuse themselves from rendering us the assistance we ask from them. What could be more admirable than these people if they were acting from charity? It is cupidity which induces them to act. (Nicole 1670 [1677]: 204)

Thanks to this intelligent self-love, a society can endure and develop. This society, which is absolutely deprived of love, actually looks full of charity: moreover passions gener­ate strong positive social results and, as regards the production of material wealth, are incomparably more efficient than charity - all themes picked up later and developed by Boisguilbert, the Protestant theologian Pierre Bayle, Bernard de Mandeville and Adam Smith.

Would you like that a nation be strong enough to resist her neighbours? Leave the maxims of Christianity to the preachers: keep all this for the theory, and bring back the practice to the laws of Nature... which incite us... to become richer and of a better condition than our fathers. Preserve the vivacity of greediness and ambition, and just forbid them robbery

and fraud... Neither the cold nor the heat, nothing should stop the passion of growing rich. (Bayle 1704 [1705]: 600).

While necessary, this enlightened behaviour is not in fact a sufficient condition for a peaceful social life. Nicole and Domat stress that this attitude and an enduring social order cannot be achieved without the help of bonds of a different kind, the most important of which being the rules of propriety and honour, religion and, above all, the political order (“ordre politique”), that is, a very strong political organization of society implying highly differentiated and stratified estates of the realm and inequality between men (on all these points see, for example, Taveneaux 1965; Viner 1978; Faccarello [1986] 1999; 2006). Nicole’s and Domat’s conception of society is not market-based and the basic social link is still political and moral. Boisguilbert in contrast obliterates the moral and political order and brings market relationships to the fore.