Gabriel Bonnot de Mably

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

8 min readMar 15, 2023

Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (14 March 1709–2 April 1785 in Paris)

Today is 314th anniversary of the birthday of Gabriel Bonnot (14 March 1709–2 April 1785 in Paris), who was born at Mably, Loire and become better known as Gabriel Bonnot de Mably.

In the volume The Social & Political Ideas of Some Great French Thinkers of the Age of Reason: A Series of Lectures Delivered at King’s College, University of London, during the Session 1928–29, C. H. Driver in a contribution jointly about Morrely and Mably gives as an interesting portrait of Mably:

“In 1741 Cardinal de Tencin entered the Ministry, and on the recommendation of the Cardinal’s sister Mably was appointed his private secretary. This contact with official life was destined to have great influence on Mably’s later development. Its first result was the composition, for the new Minister’s instruction, of an abridgement of all the peace treaties since Westphalia. Mably also used to prepare the necessary memoranda and reports for de Tencin. It is said that in 1743 it was he who drew up the terms of the treaty which Voltaire took to Frederick II; three years later he prepared the negotiations for the Congress of Breda. But the Cardinal and his secretary quarrelled in 1 748, on account of a Protestant marriage which the former wished to annul. Henceforth Mably lived in strict retirement for the rest of his life; he refused to be under an obligation to anybody, and withdrew completely from men and from practical affairs. He consecrated himself entirely to his love of Greek and Roman antiquity, to his philosophy and to his writings; and attempted first, by reading and reflection, to find the path to happiness and virtue for mankind, and then to point out that path, by voluminous writings, to an evil and unhappy world. His retirement accentuated in him, apparently, his native reserve, austerity, and pessimism, features which run through all his works and his life to the end.”

Many writers refer to Mably’s pessimism; he also became famous (or notorious) for his advocacy of a nascent form of communism. In a contribution to the volume The Secular Mind: Transformations of Faith in Modern Europe: Essays Presented to Franklin L. Baumer, Randolph W. Townsend Professor of History, Yale University, John Frederick Logan wrote in “Superstition, Impiety, and the Enlightened Legal Order: The Theoloigical Politics of the Abbé Mably”:

“A prolific writer whose Oeuvres completes fill some fifteen volumes and touch on a wide variety of topics, Mably (1709–1785) was to influence both the Jacobins and the Babouvists, as well as much of subsequent revolutionary socialism. Although Mably’s views on private property have provoked considerable scholarly debate, his confrontation with the pivotal issue of the proper scope and role of religious belief has largely escaped attention. Yet Mably did, in several of his works, come to grips with this issue, most explicitly in his essay entitled ‘De la superstition’.”

While one can understand the attraction that Mably exercised due to his advocacy of communism, when such things were rarely even conceived, his historical pessimism is of more interest to me, and philosophy of history could probably benefit from a better appreciation of the role of pessimism (and optimism) in the understanding of history. Henry Vyverberg wrote an entire book on Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment, in which he writes:

“Nature, Mably insists, is good, and the natural man necessarily shares in this goodness. Here Mably encounters the eternal enigma of the genesis of evil out of good; as a solution he simply asserts that man himself, as contrasted with nature, is the author of evil. Man and society have strayed inexplicably from the bosom of nature and must reintegrate themselves in the natural order. The first model for this reintegration is not savage pre-civilization, but rather the simple and austere republics of antiquity. It is an uncomplicated social life at which Mably aims — a regime based upon non-propertied equality and distinguished by the absence of that avarice and luxury which are inseparable from the pursuit of commercial gain.”

In the Introduction, Vyverberg summarizes his project in this way:

“The central contention of the present study is simply this: that a belief in progress was neither the exclusive focus nor the one logical consummation of Enlightened French philosophy, and that historical pessimism too had its roots deep in the ‘philosophical’ movement itself. The eighteenth century saw a rich proliferation of intellectual currents, and within this growth lay potentialities immensely dangerous to that rationalistic-optimistic synthesis which too often is assumed to have been the ultimate contribution of the century. The thought of the Enlightenment was neither as disembodied and visionary, nor as simple or oversimplified, as it was once imagined, and as it is pictured now and again in our own day.”

This seems to me to be an important corrective to our understanding of the Enlightenment. Somewhere I don’t recall I once read that the American Founding Fathers had what one might call a counter-intuitively pessimistic conception of human nature, and it was this view of the dark possibilities of human nature that enabled the conception of society that could aim at ideals like liberty while still being a hard-headed compromise with what was known of history, and of how many hopeful historical experiments have failed. If I could recall the source of this claim I would cite it and quote it here, as it perfectly exemplifies Vyverberg’s point.

Several writers characterize Mably’s pessimism as being the result of a disappointed idealism, in Norman Hampson, who noted that, “Mably’s utopian vision of the characteristics of a regenerated French society was accompanied by a growing pessimism about the possibility of their realization.” Hampson further wrote of Mably’s pessimism:

“The years 1771 and 1772 entrenched Mably in his pessimism. In France, Maupeou seemed to have swept away the Parlements without any great difficulty. Mably had tended to regard the Swedes, together with the Swiss, as the least corrupt nations in a degenerate age and he thought that he had also seen signs of national regeneration within Poland. In 1772 the Swedish coup d’etat and the first partition of Poland put an end to that and a prolonged stay in Poland in 1776–7 convinced him that the country was beyond redemption. In a world governed by sots et fripons, the only course of action for a virtuous Pole — and presumably for a Frenchman too — was to cultivate the private virtues in retirement. He failed to respond to the attempts at reform in the early years of the reign of Louis XVI. In a dialogue on the grain trade, a character called ‘Mably’ dismissed free trade as something that would profit only merchants, encourage avarice and lead to eventual monopoly. He was as dismissive of Necker as of Turgot, believing him to be motivated primarily by the pursuit of personal power. Even if he had higher motives, the corruption of French society would defeat all attempts at reform.”

J. Wright in his paper “Conversations with Phocion: The Political Thought of Mably,” gives a more sophisticated interpretation of Mably’s historical pessimism:

“Mably’s major writings of the 1760s were for the most part written in a spirit of measured optimism, buoyed by his belief that a ‘révolution ménagée’ as he termed it — on the model of the Dutch revolt, the English revolutions of the seventeenth century, or the installation of Estates rule in contemporary Sweden — was at least possible in France. As it happened, this optimism did not last. The ‘Maupeou coup’ of 1771, which brought to an end to twenty years of parlementary agitation ‘from below,’ and the repeated failure of Enlightened reform from above, both in France and elsewhere, combined to make the prospects for the recovery of French ‘liberty’ increasingly remote to Mably. He ended his intellectual career in a sombre mood. The common theme of his last writings — a series of dialogues left unpublished at his death — might be termed the failure of agency: the tragic inability of mankind, individually and collectively, to master its fate by escaping from the constraints of custom and circumstance. But this final pessimism reflected more than mere political disappointment. It was in a sense the inevitable expression of a classical republican outlook — a ‘Machiavellian moment,’ as it were — prolonged into the disconcerting context of the twilight of French ancient régime.”

Certainly what Wright calls the failure of agency — “the tragic inability of mankind, individually and collectively, to master its fate by escaping from the constraints of custom and circumstance” — is a thought that many of us have entertained, and which might be called fate, or determinism, or even despair, if one has invested one’s hopes in Enlightenment conceptions of progress.

August Ludwig von Schlözer (05 July 1735–09 September 1809), a younger contemporary of Mably, was prompted to respond to Mably’s historical pessimism, opening his open letter “On Historiography” with this observation:

“Is Mably not unfair to our modern times, unfair even to himself? Did the people presented in ancient history really possess a greatness and nobility which cannot be found in the new? And does modern history present only persons who are inferior by far to those of ancient Greece and Rome?”

In the Battle of the Books, Schlözer would have been a defender of the Moderns, as he went on to say in this letter:

“Altogether I should regard it as an inexplicable miracle, if ‘as all sciences have progressed’ the historiographer of our eighteenth century should not have surpassed, let alone equalled, the ancient Greeks and Romans, or even Buchanan and Grotius.”

But Schlözer, while expressing his esteem for Mably, goes on to criticize Mably’s “merely belletristic history,” implying that Schlözer himself had at least glimpsed a more scientific history. Schlözer may have been right, and certainly subsequent historiography was to pursue a more scientific history, and to debate what a scientific history ought to be, but I don’t think that Schlözer fully recognized the problem of the failure of agency with which Mably was wrestling, and with which we continue to wrestle today, so much further down the pike of the Enlightenment and scientific history.

Further Resources

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