Malevolence Theorized
The notion that it was always in men's interests to serve the common good had always invited cynicism. Still, many hoped that men were at least moving in a benevolent direction. As Republican France morphed into Terror and then into the military dictatorship of the Napoleonic Empire this hope faded.
The Light of Reason began to seem just as faint as the Light of Faith. Perhaps historical events spotlighted problems easier to ignore in happier times. It was obviously difficult to balance the demand for individual liberty with the need to enforce social obligations.40 It was also shockingly easy to reverse the assumption that men were naturally benevolent. The Marquis de Sade proclaimed that men could find pleasure only in other people's pain.Though often dismissed as a mere pornographer, de Sade had a keen appreciation of the weaknesses of eighteenth-century moral philosophy. Some twentieth-century thinkers give him credit for the nihilist dissolution of the humanist ideals, because he showed how rational thought could be applied to what even secular thinkers would call evil ends.41 That de Sade was so preoccupied with women and the family shows how well he understood their crucial place in moral discourse.
De Sade's first principle was radical individualism: Men were naturally egoistic and completely selfish. He went beyond Hobbesian assumptions to argue that interests of individuals are always and everywhere opposed to those of others: ‘‘The first and strongest inclination of man is incontestably to put his fellows in his power and to tyrannize them with all his might.''42 Unlike Rousseau, he considered this a law of nature, pointing to the child ‘‘who bites his nurse's nipple and breaks his rattle again and again.''43 He
94 GREED, LUST & GENDER interpreted sexual intercourse (Boswell's favorite example of the benefits of reciprocal exchange) as another form of violence, arguing that pleasure was only diluted when it was shared.
Even the most skeptical philosophers had welcomed the possibility that virtue could bring pleasure. De Sade insisted that vicious behavior was much more fun, and that men who declared otherwise were hypocrites or weaklings. Nature had constructed men to derive pleasure from the domination of others, and Nature could not be contravened. Men should, therefore, pursue their selfish pleasures with abandon. De Sade put his principles into practice, abusing prostitutes and other women to such extremes that he spent much of his life in jail. His writings challenged presumptions of natural benevolence even more effectively than his actions.
De Sade argued that the concept of the common good was not only sentimental, but incoherent, because the competing demands of individuals could never be successfully arbitrated. Where could one draw the line between satisfaction of one's own desires, and those of others? Since the line could not be drawn, it should be abandoned. Any attention to the needs of others was, according to de Sade, unnatural. This conclusion reinforced some aspects of the individualist vision. Like Mandeville, for instance, de Sade argued that the rich had no responsibility for the poor. But the abrogation of all social obligations pushed individualism to extremes that few could tolerate. De Sade claimed that the sick should be left to die, friends should be betrayed, women should be raped, and family ties should be scorned.
Nature gave men the power, and therefore the right, to take women against their will. ‘‘All men are born free... no man may be excluded from possessing a woman. All men therefore have equal rights of enjoyment in all women.''44 In one of his most famous post-revolutionary pamphlets de Sade argued that the new regime should eliminate all rules against rape, incest, and sodomy, as well as any restriction on theft or murder. It should, in other words, remove any restraints on the war of all against all. Mandeville had argued for state support of prostitution; de Sade called for the organization of public establishments where human objects of all sexes and all ages should be freely available to the ‘‘caprices of libertines''.45 Weak men should be treated as women.
The meaninglessness of family is a consistent and recurrent theme in de Sade's work. In his ideal world the results of female promiscuity are
irrelevant because men should not take responsibility for any children, not even their own. Parents owe nothing to children and children owe nothing to parents.46 In many of his narratives, the protagonist derives ultimate pleasure from persuading a father to rape a daughter, or encouraging a young woman to rape her own mother with a dildo. It is impossible to outrage Nature itself, which tolerates, and therefore justifies all.
De Sade's work was never widely read, and remains difficult to find in English translation. Its relevance to political economy would be self-evident if it were retitled to emphasize its relationship to Adam Smith's early work. De Sade created a Theory of Immoral Sentiments. He asserted that human beings were naturally malevolent, not benevolent. It seems unlikely that they are naturally either one. But de Sade had a point: the wealth of nations was not created entirely by sweet commerce and voluntary trade.