Human Nature

Questioning of religious authority required some consideration of what might take its place. What limits should be imposed on the pursuit of individual self-interest? Most French Enlightenment thinkers offered a functionalist response—those limits which serve the interests of human society.

Rational economic man knew where his gender interests lay. Most French Enlightenment thinkers defended the authority of men in general and husbands in particular. Montesquieu suggested that families could never be egalitarian: French wives who considered themselves oppressed should recognize how much better off they were than women of the South. Voltaire endorsed the conventional notion that women were physically and mentally weaker than men, more naturally predisposed to virtue because they had stayed home while men had gone to war.⁴⁵ Other French writers described women as less rational, more emotional, mysterious, and passionate than men.⁴⁶ Among thinkers of the period widely recognized today, only Diderot insisted that such intrinsic differences did not justify the unfair treatment of women by society and law.⁴⁷

The French may have invented the term laissez-faire, but their leading eighteenth century thinkers emphasized the role of enlightened self­interest and the long-term benefits of cooperation. True, they viewed self-interest in masculine terms, as a force of nature (and an instrument of pleasure). But in a sense they welcomed its domestication in a marriage of commerce and the rule of law, a marriage in which small infidelities on either side might be permitted. Passion could, after all, be a unifying force. Voltaire put it this way: ‘‘If it is true that bees are governed by a queen with whom all her subjects make love, then that is a still more perfect government.”⁴⁸