SOURCE: “The Role of Freedom and Pleasure in the State and Society,” in Gassendi's Ethics: Freedom in a Mechanistic Universe, Cornell University Press, 1996, pp. 142-67.

[In this excerpt, Sarasohn discusses the progress from Gassendi's idea of natural man to his construction of the social contracts that buttress a system of government. Frequently contrasting Gassendi's “Ethics” with the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, the critic emphasizes the importance to Gassendi of free will and the primary human drive for pleasure—tempered by prudence—in his notion of a just and moral society.]

GASSENDI'S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CONTEXT

Human beings pursue what is pleasurable and conducive to life, and flee from what is painful and detrimental to life. Gassendi and Hobbes agreed on this fundamental human imperative—although Gassendi emphasized pleasure as the primary end, while Hobbes thought that the desire for self-preservation initiated human motion. Whatever the teleological substratum of choice and avoidance, Gassendi and Hobbes were in concord that the motivation for forming the state was a utilitarian calculation of the way life could best be lived.

For both, individual self-interest was the starting point for discussing not only how human beings act as individuals, but also how they act as members of society and the state. Both Gassendi and Hobbes, starting from the importance each saw in the passions, developed concepts of prudence, deliberation and social contract to explain how human beings emerged from a state of nature to become members of a polity that guarantees life and circumscribes choices.

Gassendi was one of the first thinkers to realize the implications of Hobbes's political ideas, just as he understood Hobbes's psychological maxims. But instead of simply rejecting Hobbes's ideas about nature, man, politics, and God, Gassendi subtly adapted them to his own Catholic and philosophic sensibilities.¹ Gassendi articulated his own political philosophy at the same time he confronted Hobbes's radical political ideas.

The French philosopher acknowledged that Hobbes's analysis of political behavior had some validity, as Gassendi's prefatory letter to the 1647 edition of De Cive makes clear:

It is assuredly a work outside the common and worthy of being touched by all those who have a desire for elevated things. If I put aside what regards the Catholic religion, about which we disagree, I know no writer who scrutinizes more profoundly than he the subject that he treats in De Cive. … I know no one who has shown himself in philosophy more free from prejudice; no one who penetrates more into the matters upon which he theorizes.²

The differences between the Frenchman and his English friend lie most in how they defined reason and sociability. In Gassendi's analysis of human development, he emphasized human rationality and freedom of choice rather than Hobbes's stimulus to action, which was fear.

Gassendi believed that human beings possess the natural ability to reason and to create society. But with what criteria do they decide to do so? His answer shows that the basic coherence of his system lies in his explanation that human beings form societies “in which it would be permitted to live more comfortably, and thus to live more pleasurably; and they were led to this by nature, by reason of which they flee evil and strive after the good.”³ Pleasure, as the ultimate telos, is both the motivation for and the ultimate aim of human action, which in this case results in a social contract constituting civil society. The “good” itself is realized pleasure, and society is the medium for such pleasure. Thus, nature, by means of human nature, endowed man with the natural criterion, which initially motivated him to pursue the things necessary to life and consequently to devise things to make life more pleasurable.

While Gassendi rarely referred to God explicitly in his discussion of political philosophy, it seems clear that in his view nature is simply the immanent aspect of God's providential action: The instinctive search for pleasure, endowed by God, acts as the stimulus for societal development. Human beings form social pacts with one another as the natural result of the divinely ordained—but not determined—search for pleasure.

For Hobbes the social contract is artificial; law is imposed by the sovereign to curb man's natural passions. This cold-eyed evaluation of the origin of the state had vast ramifications for the rest of his political system. Hobbes intertwined the social contract, law, and the creation of a supreme and absolute authority so intricately that they can be separated only with the utmost difficulty. Human beings may have made the state, and created the sovereign authority, but the antithetical nature of the civil state to man's natural instincts means that this construction must be immutable—or crumble away completely.⁴

The naturalness of the pact that Gassendi envisioned is likewise crucial for his description of the civil state. In opposition to Hobbes, Gassendi adopted the view that the state, which reflects man's nature, is adaptable to changing circumstances—if the calculus of pleasure and pain dictates that change is necessary. Because the state exists to guarantee the pleasurable life, its citizens retain a power of consent.

It is important to understand that Gassendi was drawn to questions of political philosophy not only because of his relationship with Hobbes, but also for other reasons; most fundamentally, political philosophy was integral to the fabric of his moral philosophy. The three books of the “Ethics” consider, in order, happiness, virtue and fate, fortune and liberty. Gassendi's discussion of pleasure in the first book is intimately related to his theory of freedom in the third book. Not surprisingly, the second book, which contains Gassendi's political philosophy, is integrated into this structure.

In developing this schema in the “Ethics,” particularly in the first two books, Gassendi followed the traditional division of the ethics course as it was taught in the French universities of the seventeenth century. According to L. W. B. Brockliss, in his history of higher education in early modern France, “The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ethics course was divided into two parts, ethica generalis and ethica particularis. The first dealt with man as an ethical individual; the second with the individual as a member of the family and the State; hence it was divided into economics and politics.”⁵

Ethica generalis was devoted to the elucidation of the highest good, and although the professors followed an Aristotelian line, Gassendi's discussion of ethical theory essentially paralleled the university course. And just like his university contemporaries, Gassendi then turned from the general to the particular: man as a social and political being.

But politics was not just part of a pedagogical program in the seventeenth century, characterized by modern historians as “an age of crisis.”⁶ Major political upheavals—the Thirty Years War, the English Civil War, the Fronde in France—ripped through the rising nation-states. Many countries were struggling with the emergence of a strong centralized authority and its composition and relationship to the traditional orders of society. Gassendi's awareness of this turmoil is shown in a 1645 letter to his patron, Louis of Valois, commenting on everything from the English Civil War to the distribution of supplies in Lorraine.⁷

Although the crisis was reflected in every aspect of society and culture, it left its deepest mark in political theory. Some thinkers endorsed the new absolutism, while others developed systems of popular sovereignty and constitutionalism. Both defenders of the traditional rights of the aristocracy and apologists for religious rebellion adopted theories of social contract. The transformed Machiavellian concept of “reason of state” became increasingly popular at this time.⁸ Hugo Grotius speculated on natural law and the law of nations. Gassendi was familiar with these schools of political thought and adapted elements of some, just as he absorbed various Hobbesian arguments.

Gassendi's philosophic work on Epicurus in the early 1630s also encouraged this interest in politics and its philosophic justification. Defending Epicurus against the charge of disparaging rhetoric—the most political of the liberal arts—in his 1633 Vita of the Greek philosopher, Gassendi challenged Cicero's claim that “the philosophy of Epicurus is useless for the political man.”⁹ Gassendi directly addressed the question of the relationship between religion and politics when discussing Epicurus's participation in public religious ceremonies, in which the Greek philosopher did not believe:

He was present because the civil law and public tranquillity necessitated it: He condemned it because the soul gained no wisdom from it. … Inside, he was by his own law; outside, by the laws which oblige human society. Thus, at the same time he rendered what he owed to himself and to others. And I maintain that nothing could be more laudable, either in words or actions. … It is part of wisdom, that philosophers feel with a few, and as it is said, act with many.¹⁰

This stance certainly conflicted sharply with the ideals of Christian piety and Renaissance ideas of active citizenship and public responsibility. Both emphasized the ethical character of the state, a normative view which is absent here. Moreover, Gassendi's position reflects an almost Hobbesian double standard of private morality and public conformity—which somehow does not touch private integrity. But it demonstrates that questions of the nature of law, of obligation, and of the place of the individual within the state were important to Gassendi and integral to his study of Epicurus.

PRUDENCE AND PASSION

Gassendi's analysis of politics in Book 2 of the “Ethics” of the Syntagma Philosophicum is integrated within a general discussion of the virtues, beginning with a definition of prudence. Prudence is “a moral virtue, which moderates all the actions of our life correctly, both discerning good from evil, and useful from harmful, it prescribes what it is necessary to follow or avoid, and consequently it establishes men in a good and happy way of living.” It is part of the intellectual faculty, although it is so closely related to moral action and the will “that it is intertwined and mingled with it and is customarily called ‘the prince of Morality.’”¹¹

This definition is by now familiar: Gassendi's account of prudence is another formula for the calculation of pleasure and pain. Prudence teaches the “art of life”—the very aim of ethics itself—in both the social and political spheres of human activity. Private prudence teaches an individual how to conduct his private and public life; political prudence teaches how the citizens of a state can live harmoniously and happily.¹²

At the very base of this doctrine of prudence is Gassendi's unshakable conviction of individual responsibility and freedom of choice, the ubiquitous characteristic of his entire ethical theory. Prudence dictates the moral virtues, “which reasonably are not moral unless it is understood that acts of this kind are done from voluntary choice.” Prudence “is a habit of the mind, which is not certain, but conjectural; and in this it differs from science” (scientia as Aristotle defines it), because science has necessary things for its object, which cannot be otherwise. Prudence is directed toward contingent things, “which are or are not, thus they can be or be not.” Prudence is a kind of art “in which the artificer cannot fail except by his own will” and it prescribes “the ends of virtue, when we pursue good things, and the opposite of these ends, when we pursue evil things.” The general end of prudence is a happy and blessed life.¹³

Prudence is under our control since we construct our own moral lives. Moral action must be voluntary. Gassendi here used the term ex electione voluntarieque, “from voluntary choice,” which is derived from voluntas or “will,” but still conveys the meaning of a self-constituted or free choice. This contrasts with its near synonym sponte, which Gassendi usually used for a willing but not free choice. Prudential behavior is moral because it is free.

Gassendi's view of prudence contrasts sharply with Hobbes's definition. In The Elements of Law, Hobbes defined prudence simply as “nothing but to conjecture from experience.”¹⁴ The normative character of prudence is absent from Hobbes's account—although like Gassendi, Hobbes thought that prudential judgments are conjectural rather than certain. But in his discussion of prudence, Hobbes went further than Gassendi.

Since Hobbes dismissed the realist idea of extramental universals, he thought prudence—or reaching a conclusion based on past experiences—was extremely problematical. The meaning of justice, for example, may change with each particular circumstance. Thus, while past experiences are helpful in making choices, they do not result in a judgment with any supramental authority, except what is founded in individual opinion at the time of the judgment.¹⁵

Hobbes did not regard prudence as the God-endowed “prince of morality” because he downgraded the rationality of the deliberative process itself. Deliberation was for him a succession of appetites and fears that finally end in a non-voluntary act of will. Hobbes taught that human beings calculate during this deliberation, but such calculation is so connected to the passions and the act of will that it loses its character as a free rational decision.¹⁶

Hobbes, in De Cive, argued that man in the state of nature is motivated primarily by his passions, and most of all by fear—although in his calmer moments, man also possesses “right reason” in the sense of a practical reasoning ability. Thus, “the original of all great and lasting societies consisted not in the mutual good men had towards each other, but in the mutual fear they had of each other.”¹⁷

All men, Hobbes argued, want to preserve their own lives, but since they are all equally capable of killing each other in the state of nature, and because there are some men who from vainglory want to dominate, men are forced by their own fear to constitute civil society. Hobbes defined mutual fear in a manner consistent with his psychological theories: “I comprehend in the word fear, a certain foresight of future evil; neither do I conceive flight the sole property of fear, but to distrust, suspect, take heed, provide so that they may not fear, is also incident to the fearful.”¹⁸

Hobbes then argued that fear produces the decision to create the state:

for every man, by natural necessity desires that which is good for him: nor is there any that esteems a war of all against all, which necessarily adheres to such a state, to be good for him. And so it happens, that through fear of each other we think it is fair to rid ourselves of this condition, and to get some fellows; and if there needs must be war, it may yet not be against all men, nor without some helps.¹⁹

In psychological terms, Gassendi denied the Hobbesian arguments that humans are determined by their passions. He also denied the political consequences of the psychological necessitarianism: the necessary and immutable character of civil association. For Gassendi, passion does not proscribe the state, because prudence always allows human beings to calculate what is best for them—as individuals in the state of nature, and as members of the state.

The State of Nature and Natural Right

Gassendi shared Hobbes's interest in the state of nature, but his approach to the question was initially historical. Gassendi began his discussion of political philosophy with a discussion of the state of nature as seen by the ancients, who portrayed it as either a golden or a bestial age. He did not believe that these views necessarily contradicted each other: There may have been a progressive degeneration from one to the other.

In fact, he found such a development posited in Book 5 of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, the only extant description of Epicurean political theory. Book 5 clearly inspired Hobbes's description as well.²⁰ According to Gassendi's interpretation of the meaning of the text, Lucretius taught that man lived originally in a golden age, but because of the fear of violence and wild beasts, pity for the vulnerability of the weak, the inconveniences of the solitary life, and the lust of stronger men, he was impelled to enter society.²¹

Man then, according to Lucretius, created society and government out of the state of nature by means of a dual social contract, a first contract establishing society and then a second agreeing to obey legal codes. The aim of these contracts is to provide the peaceful environment vital to individual tranquillity and happiness. Gassendi commended the Lucretian analysis of why laws are obeyed: so that violence is contained and a peaceful life exists for the common good.²²

But Gassendi was dissatisfied with the Epicurean discussion because it was sketchy on the nature of right and justice, both before and after the social contract, a problem Hobbes had also addressed.²³ Epicurus had described justice as a utilitarian contract in which men swore neither to harm nor be harmed by each other; it has no transcendent or absolute value or meaning.²⁴ After a long and erudite discussion, Gassendi rejected this concept and accepted the traditional legal definition of justice, tribuendi cuique suum ius: “to give to each one his own right.”²⁵

But, Gassendi admitted, “right” had been interpreted in different ways by different people. In particular, there had been much contention concerning whether someone has right by nature (the Stoic view) or by utility (the Epicurean view).²⁶ Gassendi believed that the only way to discover what human right is, and consequently, what justice is, is to examine very closely man's beginnings in the state of nature and the subsequent development of the political state.²⁷ Just as Hobbes had, Gassendi returned to the constituent member of society—the individual in the state of nature—to determine the nature of natural right, political association, and justice.

Ethics professors in the French universities were also concerned with the state of nature. They equated it with the state of rational man before the Fall, that is, the state of a classical philosopher without the gift of grace. This idea was controversial. The Jansenists, notes Brockliss, thought “the idea was a Molinist subterfuge to mitigate the effects of the Fall; it was a theory used by ‘laxist’ theologians to suggest that God only deprived Adam of his supernatural not his natural powers, the latter, especially his reason, remaining unmarred.”²⁸

If the Jansenist accusation holds, it would suggest that Gassendi was inspired in his political philosophy as well as his moral psychology by the sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit; Gassendi's political theory credits man with the full use of reason in the state of nature.

In his own description of the state of nature, Gassendi argued that an individual can be viewed in two ways:

first absolutely, or according to himself, and as he is a man; then secondly, or comparatively, as he is related to others, and is a certain part or desires to be part of society. And certainly in the first way, he is viewed as solitary, and in a pure state of nature; that is, such as man is made by nature with all his parts, from which he is constructed, and with all his faculties, by which he is instructed.²⁹

In this first, solitary state, man is not self-sufficient, in that he does not possess within himself all the things he needs to maintain life but must seek them externally. However, nature makes these necessities, food and shelter, easily obtainable, and endows man with the innate faculty of seeking for these things and transforming them into use. Gassendi concluded:

Nature gave to man, so that he might exist, the faculty to maintain and to preserve himself. And Nature gave the ability to use all things which are necessary, conducive, and useful for his preservation. Furthermore, it is this faculty itself, which is the first right of nature; consequently, however often we use this faculty, we are judged to use a right of nature, and, in fact, the right of nature which is primary, or the most ancient gift of nature.³⁰

Thus, man's first right is the ability to use anything that he considers necessary to preserve his own life. In the state of nature, moreover, “when one person desires and pursues something, there will be other who desire and pursue it equally; and hence will arise strife, rapine, and hatred.”³¹ The cause of contention in the state of nature is not that man is naturally violent or bestial, but rather that any man has a right to anything and that no one has a secure possession in what he uses. Although man appropriates goods and property in the state of nature, he does not hold them securely. Thus, while personal use of property exists in the state of nature, private ownership does not.

Up to this point, Gassendi's description of human beings in the state of nature is close to Hobbes's, if man is considered “absolutely, or according to himself, as he is a man.”³² That is, if man is considered apart from any social intercourse whatsoever. For both Hobbes and Gassendi, the first right human beings possess is self-preservation, and the result of everyone's effort to preserve himself is war.

Hobbes's definition of the character of the state of nature is well known: “it cannot be denied but that the natural state of men, before they entered into society, was a mere war, and that not simply, but a war of all men against all men.” The root of this war of all against all is that “Nature hath given to every one a right to all” because everyone has the equal right to use anything or do anything to preserve himself.”³³ These views have a clear tie to Gassendi's remarks about the state of nature in the “Ethics”: “For in that bestial state, which is presumed free, it reasonably cost most dear, since as it was observed not long ago, there would be perpetual life and death combat, insofar as, everything belonging to everyone with equal right, no one could use anything for himself, but that another would seize it.”³⁴

Gassendi was invariably more wordy than Hobbes, but the message is the same. It is quite possible that this passage referred explicitly to Hobbes in the expression “since as it was observed not long ago.”

But Gassendi believed that a state of war actually rarely existed in the state of nature, because a person not only exists as a solitary being, but also as a potential member of the social organism. In order to avoid constant war, people make pacts by which they exchange an uncertain right to everything for a certain right to something.³⁵ Thus, the fact that man can use his reason to avoid war, and consequently to make pacts to establish the state, is a second right of nature, and is as “natural” as the first right of nature.

“Therefore,” Gassendi continued, so that man does not have to stay in this state, he “is made a sociable animal by nature.” Nature “granted him the inclination to enter upon pacts, by means of which he might take council with one another and be turned into society rightly.” Gassendi later made clear that natural right (ius naturale) can be taken in two ways: as man's faculty for maintaining life, common to all organic beings (ius animale, or animal right), and also as all his reasoning properties (ius humanum, or the right of man).³⁶ Both are equally natural and innate, but the latter enables man to realize that his interests would be served best by remitting to some extent his natural right in everything. It leads a man to make pacts with other men, who make similar remissions, leaving all with a defined and secure right in those possessions remaining. It is at this point that private property in the traditional sense, or “mine and thine” as Gassendi called it, actually comes into being.

In his description of the ius humanum, Gassendi enumerated its abilities: “Of planning, or investigating, of teaching, or learning the various arts and especially the use of fire, of pacifying among themselves and joining together in society, and living in it by certain laws. And the laws of this kind are varied, as it is necessary, either by the occasion, or on account of some better utility urging.”³⁷

People also realize by the ius humanum that all needs will be more easily fulfilled by the mutual assistance of others. Gassendi called this initial period of social reciprocity “a state of modified nature,” and it paralleled his secondary definition of man as part of society.³⁸ It seems, for Gassendi, that this stage of human development served as both a more advanced state of nature and the beginning of human society itself. It is a transitional state that contains both elements within itself.

Another contract during this state of modified nature protects the weak against the attacks of the stronger by establishing law and justice. These contracts are natural and the state of affairs and laws established by them are consequently also natural because they emanate from the faculty of human reason.³⁹ The ius humanum is transformed from a guide for individual action into a social dynamic propelling man into society.

Thus, Gassendi's social pact is natural, the outgrowth of natural reason:

Because life was uncomfortable and dangerous in that ferocious state or state without pacts, people formed an assemblage, so that they could live more comfortably and delightfully. They did this because of their own natures which led them to flee evil and seek good. … Thus, from nature, the state can be no other than society, in which pacts are begun and preserved reciprocally. For this reason people determined in common to undertake these things among themselves, so that laws or narrowed rights are retained. Since laws are nothing else but pacts.⁴⁰

This pact is vastly different from the pact Hobbes envisioned:

Last of all, the consent of those brutal creatures is natural; that of man by contract only, that is to say, artificial. It is therefore no matter of wonder, if somewhat more is needful for man to the end that they live in peace. Wherefore consent or contracted society, without some common power whereby particular men may be ruled through fear or punishment, doth not suffice to make up that security which is requisite for the exercise of natural justice.⁴¹

Thus, for Hobbes the artificial construction of society by pact does not in itself provide a legitimate and obligatory set of laws—only the supreme authority can do that once the state is created.⁴²

Gassendi's political philosophy, on the other hand, based legitimacy and obligation within the state on the voluntary actions of free agents creating a political society through social contracts, rather than the command of the supreme authority. Civil society, which is natural because it is the outcome of human nature, remains a construct of voluntary association emanating from the innate desire for pleasure. The purpose of such political bonds is to guarantee freedom and liberty to the individual. Gassendi wrote, “true and natural liberty is discovered rather in that society only, in which a man submits to the laws of society (this by his own approval or to his own advantage) and he does whatever is pleasing with what remains, and he possesses the right in his own goods, which no one can snatch away because of the public power which defends them.”⁴³

Gassendi has now determined what right is: Right is whatever remains in the power of the individual after he has established the pact. These original rights may be further limited because of utilitarian concerns, but although they have been limited, they remain “certain and free.”⁴⁴

CIVIL SOCIETY, THE STATE, AND THE RIGHT OF CONSENT

For Gassendi, the social contract sets up a limited arena of political liberties or laws, enforced by the supreme authority. But because Gassendi believed that man should always strive for happiness—inside the state as well as outside it—the establishment of the social contract was not the end of political development.

For Hobbes, human nature is static; the individual is always motivated by the same passions, and the laws of nature and human nature always reflect these psychological constants. The artificial construction of the social pact is the only dynamic moment in Hobbes's schema; afterwards, man is caught fast by his own nature and the state.

By contrast, Gassendi, while conceding a psychological constant in human behavior, believed that the prudential calculation of pleasure and pain led to constant revisions of human existence and therefore to human progress.

Gassendi elaborated these themes as he developed his political theory. He believed that although the original social contracts—to form society and to establish laws—removed many of the inconveniences of the state of nature, some remained. Accordingly, human beings—still guided by their reason to pursue what is best for themselves—make a third contract, to delegate authority to a government. Again borrowing from Lucretius, Gassendi explained, “Because it would be inconvenient for the whole multitude to come together to decide something, and individually (or even by tribe) to state an opinion, or to cast a vote; for this reason the multitude itself willingly (sponte) transfers the power either to a few people, or to some one person.”⁴⁵ Government, then, is not divine—except incidentally, as a product of man's providentially inspired pursuit of pleasure. It is the result of volition, and it is natural because it is a product of natural reason.

J. W. Gough, in his history of political thought, calls this delegation of authority to government a “contract of government” or “contract of submission.”⁴⁶ Bloch asserts that the dual or triple social contract—the contract of association and the contract of submission—found in Gassendi may be the earliest formulation of this complex kind of political theory articulated in the seventeenth century.⁴⁷ But while Gassendi's thinking does look forward to Locke and the liberal tradition of the eighteenth century, it also looks backward to the dual contract found in Lucretius.

Moreover, his work reflects social contract thinking from the middle ages, ideas further developed to justify rebellion and even tyrannicide by sixteenth-century Jesuit and Calvinist thinkers—who claimed that kings following the wrong religious formula were breaking social contracts with both God and the people. Humanist jurists of the late fifteenth century and sixteenth century employed similar contractual arguments, contending that ancient French history showed an aristocracy delegating its authority to a monarch by means of a social contract.⁴⁸

Bloch's assertion that the state is not “properly founded” until the third contract is also open to interpretation. Gassendi never directly addressed the question, but he implied that some kind of state exists as soon as the multitude forms a society, and particularly after the society begins to make laws. “The laws, which are decreed in order to produce a civil society,” he wrote at the end of his discussion of natural law, “are produced for the common utility or the common good.” The words “civil society” seem to indicate that some kind of state is produced immediately by the establishment of law, an event which Gassendi clearly placed before any delegation of authority to leaders. Furthermore, when Gassendi spoke of “the highest power,” he associated that power with the multitude who make laws, rather than with the government, which is created by the third contract.⁴⁹ If the making of law—in contrast to the creation of an institutional framework—is the mark of statehood, Gassendi clearly implied that the state predates government.

In a state structure, Gassendi maintained, sovereignty cannot be divided after it is transferred. It must reside in either the monarch, in the optimates, or in the people. Although a state may have a semblance of mixed government, in actuality only one unit possesses the supreme power, and this fact determines the nature of the state.

This analysis of the indivisibility of sovereignty is similar to Jean Bodin's, but Bodin and Gassendi differ fundamentally on the question of whether the people retain the right of consent to law.⁵⁰ Bodin, who was the foremost proponent of absolutism in the sixteenth century and still extremely influential in the seventeenth, did not envision any form of sovereignty residing in the people or arising from individuals in a state of nature. Bodin's state was formed when a sovereign power held a virtually unlimited ability to compose the law, which the citizens of the state were compelled to obey without question.⁵¹

Gassendi was responding to exigencies different from Bodin's. The sixteenth-century theorist was concerned with defending the inviolability of the state from the threatening dissolution of religious civil war. Absolute monarchy, a monarch legibus solutus, was the only response to the Calvinist and Jesuit justifications of tyrannicide and rebellion. Almost a hundred years later, new realities permitted Gassendi to utilize the “contract of submission” and to advocate a form of limited monarchy, drawing from but avoiding both the absolutism of Bodin and the radical resistance of the religious militants. The eclecticism of Gassendi's political thought is truly extraordinary.

Of the three traditional kinds of government, Gassendi favored monarchy because it provokes the fewest difficulties (one man can execute laws more efficiently than several), and those can be remedied by either succession or election. (Gassendi's casual reference to election shows his familiarity with Huguenot and constitutional arguments that monarchy was originally, and to some degree continuously, elective.)⁵² Furthermore, he argued, empirical evidence shows that the rule of one is best: The home has one master, the army one general, the universe one ruler.⁵³ Gassendi consistently compared the state to the home.

But Gassendi designated boundaries of monarchical power. In his discussion of political prudence, he argued that the ruler's duties concerned particularly war and peace. In addition, “he should hold fixed in his soul the aim and end for the sake of which he rules, and to which he is subservient. This truly is the health, security, and utility of the people.”⁵⁴ This claim duplicates the arguments of sixteenth-century Huguenot theorists, who proclaimed that magistrates were created for “the safety, the welfare and the conservation of the people” and who argued that kings should remember “it is due to the people, and for the sake of the people's welfare, that they exercise their power.”⁵⁵

Later, in his analysis “Of Justice, Right, and Laws,” Gassendi explicitly claimed that the people always retain some power of consent after the contract of government has been made: “next some laws were laid down by the princes; but it should be understood, nevertheless, that the consent of the people intervened, either expressly … or tacitly, because the power had been given and had been received mutually.”⁵⁶

Gassendi followed this passage with many of the arguments traditionally used by those arguing for some form of popular sovereignty. For example, he cited the lex regia, a principle taken from Roman law, which was interpreted to mean that when the imperium is granted to a ruler, it is delegated rather that irretrievably transferred, and therefore sovereignty remains with the people. Gassendi also included a long discussion of the difference between a king—the shepherd of his people, who rules according to the law—and a tyrant—the wolf of his people, who cares only for himself.⁵⁷

Gassendi believed that it is in the best interests of the king not to act like a tyrant. A king's chief aim, as for any man, should be tranquillity. For a king, as for any man, tranquillity is impossible without virtue, “because … the Prince is also a private man, for whom it is necessary always to possess a good character, and who will prove so much more suitable for ruling others, as much as he knows how to rule himself and order his own passions.”⁵⁸

Gassendi's good king will therefore conduct himself virtuously, for the good not only of his people, but of himself. The people will love and revere him, and he will live peacefully. But realizing that simple virtue will not always suffice in a world plagued by misguided subjects and external enemies, Gassendi provided detailed and intricate rules for running a country successfully. He advised the king to distribute justice “exquisitely,” to tax justly and to inform the people why there are taxes, to maintain a strong army and to use spies, and to punish the leaders of sedition harshly, but to be lenient to the followers.⁵⁹ The government Gassendi described certainly is not constitutionalism, but neither is it absolutism. It has the flavor of Machiavelli and raison d'etat, yet another tradition Gassendi was happy to utilize in his own political philosophy.

In general, Gassendi was drawn to arguments against absolutism. Such arguments were traditionally associated with theories of social contract, and complemented his belief that government is the result of the voluntary desires of free individuals. The entire purpose of government is to secure the greatest happiness of the individual: The individual, therefore, will not give the government the irrevocable right to tyrannize him.⁶⁰

Gassendi did not, however, draw any final implications from these arguments. He did not defend the right of the people to rebel; rather, he stated that it was in a person's best interest to obey the sovereign authority. During his discussion of public calamities—war, tyranny, the subversion of the state—he argued, “Since we may not change fate, or if you please, the decrees of eternal providence, it is better to soften the harshness by our own consent, rather than to exasperate them more by fruitless opposition.”⁶¹

Gassendi insisted that one is obligated to obey the customs of any society while living in it, because “while either nature, or law, or custom may make a thing proper, it is nature itself which orders it to be maintained, insofar as it may serve the common good, on whose preservation depends the preservation of each individual, which is natural for everyone.”⁶²

This view seems to contradict the idea of the free creation of the state and continued voluntary consent after the state has been created. It reflects an ambiguity in the terminology Gassendi employed in this political discussion. He fairly often used the Latin sponte, meaning “voluntarily,” when he discussed the social contract, rather than libere, meaning “freely.” This choice implies that the formation of the state is natural and inevitable, leaving little room for the kind of free association that he usually advocated. To the extent that the state is the result of our natures, in their inevitable pursuit of pleasure, it comes into being willingly, but perhaps not freely.

This fact may explain why we are obligated to obey and not resist political authority. In the long run, happiness is better served by obeying than rebelling. The ambiguity in Gassendi's analysis originates in his dual concept of human nature: Man necessarily pursues pleasure, but through his reason, naturally makes free choices on how that pleasure is to be achieved.

Gassendi's ambiguous analysis of freedom and necessity in the creation of the state may reflect other semantic problems as well. Patrick Riley has argued that social contract theory from the time of Hobbes was “voluntarist,” that the contract establishing the political state is legitimate because founded on the individual wills of the constituent members, freely willing whatever form the political state takes. This notion of the free will of individuals can be traced back to medieval theology, but it takes a particularly political turn in the seventeenth century: “consent or agreement based on will, understood as a moral ‘faculty,’ came to occupy a place in the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century political philosophy which it had never occupied before (not at least in the political, as distinguished from the moral and legal, realms).”⁶³

Riley also argues that the primary ambiguities found in the theories of Hobbes and other political philosophers arise because “the will” is so variously and confusedly understood in early modern times. It can be viewed as a simple physiological movement in response to external stimuli, in which case human behavior is determined, or as a moral faculty which has the power, based on knowledge, freely to strive for and choose a certain moral action. The will, understood in the second sense, then obligates because someone “freely chooses something … which is not causally necessary.” A free action is moral because it is based on the free choice of an individual, based on reason, to do or refrain from doing something. Unlike a stone, argues Riley, which must fall downward, human actions are not necessitated—because the will is free.⁶⁴

It is in just this sense that Gassendi understood human beings as the free makers and participants in political society, although for him the ambiguous connotations of the human will suggested a psychological theory that associated freedom with the intellect rather than the will. For the French philosopher, the actions of the will were always caused and therefore, to some degree, necessitated.⁶⁵ Thus, when Gassendi used language drawn from the developing voluntarist tradition, his political philosophy absorbed an element of ambiguity that made his theory less than consistent.

JUSTICE, UTILITY, AND THE LAWS OF NATURE

This seeming ambiguity—between the volitional and necessary origins of the state—is also reflected in Gassendi's concept of law. Law is a contract between people formed together in a particular society; Gassendi did not believe in a universal contract, a universal concept of justice. He noted that in different circumstances, such as when climate and terrain differ, societies develop differently—creating a great diversity of customs and laws. The particularity of the pact also means that there is no natural law among nations—particularly since one of the characteristics of law is its ability to compel, impossible among peoples of diverse customs.⁶⁶

But this state of affairs does not mean that law is completely positive or conventional in nature. While Gassendi, like Hobbes, believed that there are no universal principles with a reified existence, he did find a kind of universalism in human nature itself. Although the particular laws themselves will differ depending on how and where they are made, the process by which they are established is natural (the ius humanum), and therefore the laws are natural even if not universal. That is, the same law is both natural and the product of positive choice, just as the social contract is the product of both instinct and deliberation.⁶⁷

Gassendi experienced some of the same difficulties in deciding whether there is indeed some universal “law of nature” (lex naturae), existing before the creation of the state. On the one hand, he realized that natural law can be equated with natural instinct, which “is like a certain kind of spontaneous dictate” that leads us to eat, drink, procreate, and so forth. Presumably, obedience to such a law is voluntary (spontaneous), but not free. But there is another definition: “Natural law can be said to be found in man alone, insofar as reason is directed toward the nature of things … and thus the law of nature in these matters is nothing else than the law of reason or reason itself.”⁶⁸

In discussing the law of nature, Gassendi returned to the omnipresent binary composition of his ethical system. Clearly, natural instinct, when described as a “spontaneous dictate” (spontaneum dictamen) of human nature is the type of human freedom described elsewhere as libentia or willingness, while the secondary rational nature of humans is the same thing as libertas or the true human freedom.⁶⁹ When human beings act on instinct, their actions are voluntary; when they act on the basis of rational choice, they are free. Both states characterize men before and after the pact. Natural law spans the apparent contradiction between consent and obedience.

Once Gassendi had established the parameters of natural law, he felt he could establish some basic principles, which—if we disregard our “prejudices and preoccupations”—can be seen to characterize all humans. Essentially, in this discussion, he reiterated his view of the characteristics of human right and prudential action. First, “the most common and innate law in all men is that they pursue that which is good, advantageous, and gratifying, and they flee from what is evil, disadvantageous, and ungratifying.” Not all men feel the same thing is a good, but all will seek what they perceive to be good. Second, “anyone loves himself more than the rest, or prefers good for himself, rather than another.”⁷⁰ Here the egoism that found its original philosophic expression in ancient Epicureanism surfaced in the writings of the neo-Epicurean, where it underwrote an emerging individualistic moral code.

This conclusion has led Gianni Paganini to emphasize egoism and self-love in his analysis of Gassendi's political thought. He argues that this idea, adopted from Epicurus, was most difficult for Gassendi to reconcile with a Christianized Epicureanism. To Gassendi, argues Paganini, “self-love constitutes not only the motive of all ethical behavior, but also the cement of the political universe.” Consequently, Gassendi's universe has lost any moral anchor and its members act only out of utilitarian expediency. In this argument, Gassendi duplicates Hobbes.⁷¹

This charge echoes a similar accusation directed against Epicurus himself, by both ancient and modern commentators. Epicurus had urged the wise man to withdraw from society in order to live in self-sufficient tranquillity, thinking only of himself. Cicero reacted to the implicit selfishness of this doctrine, by insisting that in Epicureanism, “Justice totters or rather I should say, lies already prostrate, so also with all those virtues which are discernible in social life and the fellowship of human society. For neither goodness nor generosity nor courtesy can exist” in such circumstances.⁷² More modern critics have been equally scathing: Cyril Bailey accused Epicurus of “Egoistic Hedonism” and A. E. Taylor charged the philosopher with “moral invalidism.”⁷³

Other critics, however, from Seneca to more recent commentators such as Phillip Mitsis, David K. O'Connor, and P. A. Vander Waert, believe that Epicurean egoism can be accommodated to justice, fellowship, and even, in the case of Mitsis, altruism.⁷⁴ These critics, to varying degrees, emphasize the importance of happiness, community, and friendship in Epicurean philosophy, which links virtue, pleasure, and friendship so closely that the terms are virtually interchangeable. In Epicureanism, there can be no conflict between utilitarian and “pure” motives. People do things, including refraining from injustice and participating in social relationships, because they are useful and bring pleasure, a good both for the actors and others.⁷⁵

Whether this interpretation is valid for the original philosophy remains open to question, but clearly Gassendi himself argued for an integration of utilitarian egoism and altruistic action. Immediately after proclaiming his second law of nature or reason, Gassendi argued that since it is natural to love those close to oneself like offspring, loving oneself is even more natural. Likewise, it is natural to love fellow citizens more than foreigners. It is even possible to love a friend so much that one could be willing to die for him if it brought one happiness and glory. Whatever service one person does for another will bring him some personal good, if nothing else “the consciousness of being a benefactor, which is of incomparable worth.”⁷⁶

Thus, for Gassendi, individual utility blends seamlessly into sociability and love for others. It does not concern him that the original spur for such action is a kind of selfishness, because the result is an ethics of caring. One of the most fundamental axioms of the neo-Epicurean's thought is that virtue and utility are indistinguishable from pleasure, the impetus to all actions, “the first accommodation of nature.”⁷⁷

So, when Paganini argues that Gassendi's endorsement of self-interest and utility links him closely to Hobbes, he emphasizes one element of Gassendi's thought at the expense of broader themes in the Frenchman's philosophy. Paganini rightly points out that Gassendi, in a discussion of Epicurus's Principal Sayings that was part of the Animadversiones in Decimum Diogenis Laertii (1649) sounded very Hobbesian in his discussion of Epicurean concepts of justice and injustice, which are founded completely on individual utility.⁷⁸ Gassendi goes so far as to equate man in the state of nature with a wolf, just as Hobbes did.

But Paganini acknowledges that Gassendi also accepted the idea that the rule of reason exists in the state of nature, allowing human beings to act for their common benefit. So, argues Paganini, Gassendi “oscillates between positive conventionalism and the traditional paradigm of rationality.” However, Paganini argues that when Gassendi is true to his mechanistic psychology and utilitarian individualism, he falls squarely in the positivistic camp.⁷⁹

But even in Gassendi's discussion of Epicurean concepts of justice, and immediately following the analogy he drew between some humans and wolfish animality, Gassendi clarified his interpretation by arguing that such animal behavior is aberrant—just as physical deformity is the exception rather than the norm of human appearance. Most people are guided by rationality, which leads human beings to practice the golden rule and to be good, kind, and gentle.⁸⁰ Thus, confronted with the teachings of both Epicurus and Hobbes, Gassendi maintained the basic rationality and sociability of human beings throughout his ethical writings.

Such rationality starts with care for oneself. So Gassendi's third law of nature in the “Ethics” states, “each one wishes to prolong life and the integrity and free use of the members and senses and all the faculties.”⁸¹ While self-preservation is the first right of animate beings, it counts only as the third law of nature. While right characterizes all creatures, law pertains only to human beings.

Lastly, Gassendi argued, “human beings are sociable and they live in society. … The reason why men are desirous of society, as we said before, is their mutual need which is devised by nature.” Thus, society is constructed from human freedom and rationality, but at the same time is a product of a “nature” that manipulates human instinct to accomplish the creation of society. The Latin here is interesting too—Gassendi used “machinata” for devised, suggesting an almost mechanical origin of this naturally created social organism.⁸² For this early proponent of the mechanical philosophy, there is not yet the rigid distinction between nature and artifact that will characterize the formation of the state for Hobbes.

After discussing the laws of nature, Gassendi turned for a second time to the nature of positive law within the state. The laws of civil society, or the state, are created by human beings after they have composed themselves into a society. Laws reflect the common utility of the people composing the state, each recognizing that the laws must be maintained for the common good, which includes each individual's good. Once again, expediency and utility are linked indissolubly with fellowship and altruism, with reason as the binding force. The ultimate validation of positive law is human prudence, which also obligates one to obey the law after it has been established.⁸³

Even without positive law, rational men recognize the obligation to obey the golden rule, by imagining themselves in the place of other men. Such sympathetic projection is connected to the human conscience, “which is the best and most excellent councillor” a man can have. Thus, if all men were wise, “public justice would be unnecessary and useless.”⁸⁴

Both Gassendi and Hobbes realized that if all men followed the distates of prudence or right reason, the state itself would be superfluous. But Gassendi was more positive about man's eventual rise to wisdom than Hobbes was, and this optimism may underlie his vigorous espousal of a theory emphasizing the consent of the citizens as basic to the functioning of the state and the legitimacy of the positive law.⁸⁵ Nevertheless, given the nature of most men, Gassendi agreed with Hobbes that there must be some kind of coercive power behind the positive law. Human beings do not always act with prudence.

For Gassendi, the malleability of prudential behavior is grounded in the provisional nature of ethics itself. Hobbes believed he had founded a science of politics, a science more evident than physics itself, since it was based on a deductive knowledge of human behavior.⁸⁶ Gassendi's political philosophy rested on the probable and contingent, and therefore allowed more contingency in both political behavior and the study of politics.

As a political philosopher, Gassendi reflected a diverse spectrum of political theory, taking what he wanted from many prior formulations. In addition to Epicurean political philosophy, Gassendi used the ideas of proponents of both constitutionalism and absolutism. He also borrowed some notions from what Anthony Pagden calls the tradition of “political Aristotelianism”—a tradition of political thinking, reinvigorated by Thomas Aquinas, which sought the moral and universal origin of all forms of positive law, and grounded the state in natural morality and the law of nature. The adherents of this tradition, also called “iusnaturalism,” felt they were constructing a “science” of politics, an episteme. Grotius and Samuel von Pufendorf are the most famous seventeenth-century adherents of this school of political philosophy. And like Gassendi, these natural rights philosophers connected right (honestum) and utility (utile) with natural law and the preservation of the state.⁸⁷ They saw no contradiction between utilitarian and social concerns.

Gassendi corresponded with Grotius, who was closely tied to Gassendi's patron, Peiresc.⁸⁸ According to Richard Tuck, Grotius was responding to the skeptical crisis of the seventeenth century, with its implicit moral relativism, by advancing a political philosophy that demonstrated that “there were at least two universal moral beliefs (the right of self-preservation and the ban on wanton injury), and that these minimalist ethics could be used as the basis for a universal moral science.”⁸⁹ For Grotius, the principles of natural law are rooted in human reason and are consequently immutable and eternal.

Gassendi was close to this tradition when he posited a universal desire of self-preservation founded on the desire for pleasure, which is both instinctive and rational. For Gassendi, a psychological constant becomes a moral imperative, although the object of that constant is relative and transitory. But Gassendi did not reify natural law to the extent that Grotius had, because Gassendi's orientation was always to the individual who constituted society, rather than to any metaphysical principle detached from individuals.⁹⁰ The French philosopher also, of course, parted company with the natural law philosophers on the question of whether one could construct a “science” of politics, just as he rejected Hobbes's similar claim for his philosophy.

Gassendi's political philosophy is distinct in the way it combines elements from previous and contemporary political philosophies to support a new understanding of the role of the state and the individual within it. The pursuit of pleasure underlies the human constitution, and the emergence of societal custom and habit.

Thus, for Gassendi, the state itself is the product of both instinct and free choice. Civil society is both natural and a construct. It is the result of human passion—the desire for pleasure and avoidance of pain—but a passion circumscribed by reason or prudence and directed by a providential force, which finds the objects of its desires and aversions now in one thing and now in another.

In the next chapter, I demonstrate what some historians have claimed: that Gassendi is a precursor of political liberalism, and that his political and ethical thought strongly influenced John Locke. Gassendi did link ideas about liberty and the social contract formulated in earlier times to a sophisticated understanding and reformulation of Hobbesian ideas about the creation and nature of the state. Most fundamentally, Gassendi understood that an ethics based on freedom and pleasure had to accommodate a political philosophy that included both.

But in advocating these ideas, Gassendi avoided their most radical implications—the right of the individual to rebel against an authority who destroyed rights of life, liberty, and property. Temperamentally, Gassendi was one with Epicurus, who thought the wise man could best find tranquillity by withdrawing from participation in the state. Gassendi constructed a bold, influential political philosophy based on his view of human nature—but his own nature limited how far he would take it.

Notes

1. Bloch has noted that Gassendi's political ideas in Bk. 2 of the “Ethics” seem to be strongly affected by his knowledge of the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, particularly when Gassendi deals with the state of nature, social contract theory, and the emergence of political man (Bloch, Philosophie de Gassendi, xxii-xxiii).

2. Quoted by Sortais, Philosophie moderne, 2:215.

3. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:795. In all future citations, Syntagma Philosophicum will be referred to as SP. All translations made directly from the Opera are my own.

4. Hobbes's early political doctrines can be found in Elements of Law and Philosophical Rudiments, in English Works of Thomas Hobbes. Philosophical Rudiments is Hobbes's own translation of De Cive (1642), originally published in 1651.

5. Brockliss, French Higher Education, 216-27.

6. The best treatment of the “crisis of the seventeenth century” remains Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe.

7. Gassendi to Valois, January 5, 1645, in “Letters,” Opera, 6:214-15. Many of Gassendi's letters to his friends comment on current affairs.

8. On reason of state, see William F. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State (Princeton, 1972), and Keohane, Philosophy and the State, 112-13, 241-42. Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton, 1965), 82, states, “Words like expedience, necessity, self-interest, and the general welfare appear with increasing frequency in the early seventeenth century.”

9. Pierre Gassendi, De Vita et Moribus Epicuri, in Opera, 5:233-34.

10. Ibid., 5:202.

11. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:743, 737.

12. Ibid., 2:746-51.

13. Ibid., 2:734-44.

14. Hobbes, Elements of Law, 18.

15. Ibid., 18-19.

16. Ibid., 67-69.

17. Hobbes, Philosophical Rudiments, 5-6, 16. There is a good deal of debate in the recent literature on Hobbes about whether he was a “psychological egoist.” I agree with those scholars who argue that he is. On this question, see Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition, 9-24.

18. Hobbes, Philosophical Rudiments, 6n.

19. Ibid., 12.

20. Guyau, Morale d'Épicure, 198. Hobbes's contemporaries often accused him of being an Epicurean. See Richard S. Westfall, Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (New Haven, 1958), 22, 108-9, and Richard Tuck, “The ‘Modern’ Theory of Natural Law,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge, 1987), 107, who cites Pufendorf who believed that Hobbes was an Epicurean.

21. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, 147-77.

22. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:789. Lucretius's dual contract consists of a contract establishing society and a later agreement to obey legal codes (On the Nature of the Universe, 165-69).

23. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:787-91.

24. Epicurus wrote: “Justice never is anything in itself, but in the dealings of men with one another in any place whatever and at any time it is a kind of compact not to harm or be harmed” (Extant Remains, 103). On Epicurus's political philosophy, see James H. Nichols, Epicurean Political Philosophy: The De Rerum Natura of Lucretius (Ithaca, 1972, 1976).

25. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:786.

26. Ibid., 2:786-87. This was a common topic in the seventeenth century. See Tuck, “The ‘Modern’ Theory of Natural Law,” 105.

27. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:786-95.

28. Brockliss, French Higher Education, 219-20.

29. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:794.

30. Ibid., 2:794-95.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. Hobbes, Philosophical Rudiments, 9-11.

34. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:755.

35. Ibid., 2:795.

36. Ibid., 2:795, 798. This distinction is part of the common parlance of the schools. See Brockliss, French Higher Education, 292-93.

37. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:798.

38. Ibid., 2:795. This seems to duplicate Aristotle's “second nature,” where custom arises from man's rational nature. See Brockliss, French Higher Education, 293, and Donald Kelley, “Civil Science in the Renaissance: The Problem of Interpretation,” in Languages of Political Theory, 66.

39. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:755, 795. The idea that man is naturally sociable but that it requires an act of will to establish society is not original with Gassendi. J. W. Gough, in The Social Contract: A Critical Study of Its Development (Oxford, 1936, 1957), traces this topos from its origin in Aristotle, through medieval social-contract theories, until it became fairly commonplace in the seventeenth century.

40. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:795.

41. Hobbes, Philosophical Rudiments, 67-68.

42. Probably no part of Hobbes's political philosophy has received as much scholarly attention as the discussion of obligation and particularly what obligates in the state of nature. A good bibliography of the literature on obligation is given in Alan Ryan, “Hobbes and Individualism,” 90-99.

43. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:755.

44. Ibid., 2:799.

45. Ibid., 2:755.

46. Gough, The Social Contract, 1-7.

47. Olivier René Bloch, “Gassendi and the Transition from the Middle Ages to the Classical Era,” Yale French Studies 49 (1973): 52.

48. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. 2: The Age of Reformation (Cambridge, 1978), 302-38; Keohane, Philosophy and the State, 316.

49. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:801, 755, 795.

50. On Bodin's theory of the indivisibility of sovereignty, see Keohane, Philosophy and the State, 70-71, and Skinner, Modern Political Theory, 288-89.

51. Pierre Mesnard, “Jean Bodin,” in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 1:325-28.

52. Skinner, Modern Political Theory, 316-17.

53. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:756-58.

54. Ibid., 2:758.

55. Quoted in Skinner, Modern Political Theory, 327.

56. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:796.

57. Ibid., 2:757, 796. On the lex regia, see Skinner, Modern Political Theory, 130-40, 331. The lex regia can also be used to justify absolutism, if consent is given irretrievably. In this discussion of consent, Gassendi's thought coheres closely to the traditional teaching of the universities. See Brockliss, French Higher Education, 255-56.

58. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:659.

59. Ibid., 2:759-60.

60. Ibid., 2:755.

61. Ibid., 2:669-70.

62. Ibid., 2:778. A. Adam, “Gassendi: L'influence posthume,” in Pierre Gassendi: Sa vie et son oeuvre, 170, believes that the idea of a natural right founded upon the laws, traditions, and manners of human beings, “lorsqu'il fonde ainsi un véritable empiricisme historique” is in its origins a Gassendist doctrine. It seems more likely that Gassendi was familiar with Aristotelian and early modern discussions of custom, where custom was viewed as a “second nature.” Most early modern philosophers and jurists differentiated between nature and custom, and therefore would not view custom as natural in the way Gassendi did. On the history of the concept of custom, see Donald R. Kelley, “‘Second Nature’: The Idea of Custom in European Law, Society, and Culture,” in The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (Philadelphia, 1990), 131-61.

63. Patrick Riley, “How Coherent Is the Social Contract Tradition?” Journal of the History of Ideas 34 (1973): 548.

64. Ibid., 550-52.

65. On causal necessity, see Chap. 4 above.

66. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:799.

67. Ibid., 2:797-801.

68. Ibid., 2:800.

69. In Gassendi's text, a willing or spontaneous action, spontaneum, is linked with “willingness,” libentia. See “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:822-23.

70. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:800.

71. Paganini, “Epicurisme et Philosophie,” 33, 31.

72. Cicero, On Ends, 203.

73. Bailey, Greek Atomists, 515; A. E. Taylor, Epicurus (London, 1911), 22.

74. Mitsis, Epicurus' Ethical Theory, 98-128; P. A. Vander Waerdt, “The Justice of the Epicurean Wise Man,” Classical Quarterly n.s. 37, no. 2 (1987): 402-22; and David K. O'Connor, “The Invulnerable Pleasures of Epicurean Friendship,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 30 (1989): 165-86.

75. This kind of interpretation can also be found in less recent critics. See Guyau, Morale d'Épicure, 139, and Festugière, Epicurus and His Gods, 62.

76. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:801.

77. Ibid., 2:700.

78. Paganini, “Epicurisme et philosophie,” 11-12.

79. Ibid., 17-18.

80. Pierre Gassendi, Diogenis Laertii Liber X, cum nova Interpretione & Notis, in Opera, 5:158-59.

81. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:800.

82. Ibid., 2:800-801.

83. Ibid., 2:797-99.

84. Ibid., 2:802. On this, see Paganini, “Epicurisme et philosophie,” 37-38.

85. Gassendi, “Ethics,” in SP, Opera, 2:799.

86. On the notion of politics as science, see Tom Sorell, “The Science in Hobbes's Politics,” in Perspectives on Hobbes, 7.

87. Anthony Pagden, “Introduction,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, 1-17.

88. Gassendi to Grotius, April 2, 1632, “Letters,” Opera, 6:47. The tone of this letter is formal rather than intimate and it does not concern questions of political philosophy.

89. Tuck, “‘Modern’ Theory of Natural Law,” 115. Gassendi's relationship with Grotius could use more study.

90. Paganini, “Epicurisme et philosophie,” 33-34.

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