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Introducción
*
La presente traducción se realiza exclusivamente para uso interno de los alumnos de
la Cátedra de Historia Moderna, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos
Aires (septiembre de 2013).
Edelstein, The Terror of Natural Right 1 Traducción: Ismael del Olmo
La crítica suena extraña y poco feliz. Una cosa era criticar el contenido
específico de la Constitución, pero otra muy distinta era cuestionar su misma
existencia. Sólo un monárquico devoto o un conspirador utopista podía criticar
a la Asamblea por haber cumplido con su objetivo de redactar una constitución.
Ciertamente, había una veta utópica en Maréchal: poeta pastoral y
librepensador antes de la Revolución, habría de convertirse más tarde en el
cerebro ideológico de la Conspiración de los Iguales, un grupo comunista
insurreccional liderado por Graco Babeuf en 1795.2 Pero en 1791, como en
1789, Maréchal era primero y ante todo un ferviente republicano: tan temprano
como en 1781 había rechazado a la monarquía en tanto “maquinaria
impracticable y superflua”, argumentando que “sin reyes los estados sólo
necesitan magistrados”.3
De Livio a Maquiavelo, y de Milton a Madison, sin embargo, el republicanismo
había siempre gravitado en torno a la idea constitución: Maquiavelo observó
que “para el mantenimiento de las buenas costumbres, son necesarias las
leyes”.4 Era gracias a los grandes legisladores —hombres como Moisés, Minos,
Confucio, Licurgo, Solón, o Numa— que los estados habían podido sobrevivir
(ya se tratara de repúblicas o principados). La idea de que sólo las leyes
naturales no escritas podían proveer los fundamentos de una república viable
resultaba inconcebible. El derecho natural podía constituir una base para las
leyes civiles, pero nunca se considero como factor suficiente en sí mismo.
¿Cómo podemos interpretar, entonces, la extraña declaración anticonstitucional
y al mismo tiempo republicana de Maréchal? ¿Acaso refleja meramente las
cavilaciones de un panfletario confundido? Antes de rechazarlas de plano,
haríamos bien en considerar que estas mismas ideas aparecen también en los
escritos no publicados de un líder clave de la primera República francesa,
Louis-Antoine Saint-Just. “El estado de sociedad no es el producto de una
convención”, había argumentado Saint-Just; agregaba que “el arte de
establecer (...) una sociedad por un pacto o por transformaciones forzadas es
el arte mismo de destruir la sociedad”.5 Para Saint-Just, así como para
Maréchal antes que él, el derecho natural ofrecía leyes suficientes: “Al no poder
existir sociedad alguna que no esté fundada en la naturaleza, el estado (la cité)
no puede aceptar otras leyes más allá de las de la naturaleza. (...) La ley no es,
entonces, una expresión de la voluntad sino de la naturaleza”.6 Las
constituciones y legislaciones civiles que no se contentaran con hacerse eco de
las leyes de la naturaleza eran perniciosas para la sociedad.
Este no era el republicanismo de los antiguos, rótulo con el que a menudo se
ha calificado al jacobinismo de Benjamin Constant en adelante: Esparta,
Atenas, incluso Roma, eran conocidas por sus elaboradas constituciones,
obsequio de legisladores cuasi-divinos. Tampoco era éste el republicanismo
clásico: Maquiavelo tenía poco o nada que decir sobre la ley natural. Percibía a
la república y a sus constituciones como el más elaborado de los sistemas
políticos.7 Las afirmaciones de Saint-Just pueden traernos a la memoria el
republicanismo moderno de los revolucionarios norteamericanos, pero también
aquí las apariencias engañan: sea que enfaticemos el origen ‘liberal’ o
‘republicano’ de este emprendimiento político, sería un sinsentido sugerir que el
caso norteamericano no exhibe rastros de ambas tradiciones. La Declaración
de Independencia pudo haber comenzado por proclamar la fe del Congreso (o
al menos la de Jefferson) en las “leyes y el Dios de la naturaleza”, pero el resto
† El autor utiliza aquí el vocablo outlaw, que puede ser traducido alternativamente
como “bandido”, “bandolero”, o “forajido”, entre otros. Sin embargo, el contrapunto
frecuente que el texto realiza entre el inglés outlaw y el francés hors-la-loi obliga a una
traducción más literal del término, con el fin de no perder el hilo del razonamiento ni
los juegos del lenguaje que lo sustentan [n. del. trad.].
NOTAS
Penguin, 2003), 1.18; 160. In The Prince, Machiavelli had famously pointed to the need
for “good laws and good arms” to hold on to a state (chap. 12). On the place of the
constitution in classical republicanism, see Quentin Skinner’s observation on how “the
laws relating to the constitution... served to ensure that the common good was
promoted at all times,” in “The Republican Idea of Political Liberty,” in Machiavelli and
Republicanism, ed. Gisele Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 306; see also J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian
Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975;
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 169 and passim.
5 OEuvres complètes, ed. Michele Duval (Paris: Lebovici, 1984), 922 (hereafter cited as
SJ).
6 Ibid., 950–951.
7 On the distinction between republicanism of the ancients and “classical
republicanism”, see Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical
Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1992), and Wilfried Nippel, “Ancient and Modern Republicanism: ‘Mixed
Constitution’ and ‘Ephors,’ ” in The Invention of the Modern Republic, ed. Biancamaria
Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 6–26. For Constant, see “The
Liberty of Ancients Compared with That of Moderns,” in The Political Writings of
Benjamin Constant, trans. and ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988).
8 Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City,
NJ: Doubleday, 1978), 63; see also Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the
American Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967);
and Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1969). For the“liberal” interpretation, see notably
Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political
Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955); and Joyce Appleby,
Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1992). For a review of these different currents, see Daniel T. Rodgers,
“Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79, no. 1
(1992): 11–38.
9 See Keith Baker, “Transformations of Classical Republicanism in Eighteenth-Century
Machiavellian Moment. One could take this narrative analysis one step further and ask
whether Hayden White’s “tropological” theory of historiography, famously outlined in
Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1975), may not be better suited for political thought. Both
Machiavelli’s republicanism and The Prince, for instance, seem to adhere to the
tragicomic genre: Fortune is always meddling with our affairs, but intelligence and
daring (virtù) can overcome her—until a certain point, when fate wins out in the end.
Rousseau’s second Discourse, by contrast, recounts a classic tragedy of human
society, which is fated to descend into iniquity and corruption. Obviously, not every
political narrative will obey the rules of literary genre, but the parallel seems
promising.
14 I compare these two narratives in chapter 1, with respect to Mably.
15 For instance, Andre Delaporte, in L’idée d’égalité en France au XVIII e siècle (Paris:
PUF, 1987), reads a number of eighteenth-century authors through the prism of the
golden age myth; like many French scholars, however, his methodology is derived from
the work of Mircea Eliade and Carl Jung, and his observations are much more
oriented toward ancient wisdom than toward political theory or history. For a similar
effort, see Raoul Girardet, Mythes et mythologies politiques (Paris: Seuil, 1986). I
propose a different approach to the study of modern myths in“Editors’ Preface:
Mythomanies,” with Bettina Lerner, Yale French Studies 111 (2007): 1–4.
16 I am borrowing the concept of a “naturalized” myth from Roland Barthes,
Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (1957; New York: Hill and Wang, 1984), 129.
17 This pragmatic understanding of myth is deeply indebted to Georges Sorel’s
see Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and
France, c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). On France more
specifically, see Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship:
Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1970); by the same author, see also “Law”; and by Julian H.
Franklin, Sovereignty and the Mixed Constitution: Bodin and His Critics,” in The
nature et des gens (Amsterdam: n.p., 1706) and Les devoirs de l’homme et du citoyen
(Amsterdam: H. Schelte, 1707), and his later edition of Grotius’s Le droit de la guerre
et de la paix (Amsterdam: P. de Coup, 1724). Barbeyrac’s extensive, often critical,
footnotes presented to his readers a much more liberal version of natural right,
derived from Locke, whose ideas his commentaries contributed to disseminate in
France. Burlamaqui’s (equally Lockean) textbooks were published beginning in 1747;
see in particular his Principes du droit naturel (Geneva: Barrillot, 1747) and his
Principes du droit politique (Amsterdam: Zacharie Chatelain, 1751). On both these
authors, see Derathe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la science politique, and, on
Burlamaqui’s meddling in Genevan politics, Helena Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva:
From the First Discourse to The Social Contract, 1749–1762 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
22 Maximilien Robespierre, “Pour Marie Somerville,” in OEuvres de Maximilien
Robespierre, ed. Societe des etudes robespierristes (1913; Ivry: Phenix editions, 2000),
2:344 (hereafter cited as Rob.). The law of nations was brandished here against the
“barbarous people” (338) living in a “savage land” (343) of France who had imprisoned
a widow for debts: clearly a case of “indignant humanity” (339)! Thankfully, “Europe is
not populated by savage hordes” (388). On the relation between the droit des gens, or
law of nations, and natural right, see the prologue.
23 This reformist current could also be described as neo-Stoic: Michael Sonenscher, in
Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French
Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), noted the importance of Stoic
principles in Physiocratic thought. Robespierre similarly declared, in his own “study”
of the Revolution’s origins, that “stoicism preserved the honor of human nature”; see
“Sur les rapports des idees religieuses et morales avec les principes republicaines, et
sur les fetes nationales,” 18 floreal an II (May 7, 1794), Rob., 10:454.
24 Rosenblatt, Rousseau and Geneva, demonstrates, for instance, how natural right (in
the figure of no less than Burlamaqui) was closely associated with patrician
arguments against the bourgeoisie.
25 There is a growing bibliography on French republicanism in the Old Regime. See
Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), esp. 16–26. On
neoclassicism in painting, see notably Thomas Crow, Emulation: David, Drouais, and
Girodet in the Art of Revolutionary France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
28 Baker, “Transformations of Classical Republicanism,” 34.
29 Ibid., 36.
30 For Kant, see “Perpetual Peace,” trans. Lewis White Beck, in On History, ed. Beck
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001), 95–96. In The Social Contract (2.6),
Rousseau defined the republic as “tout Etat regi par des loix, sous quelque forme
d’administration que ce puisse etre” (“any state governed by laws, regardless of its
administration”) (OEuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond
[Paris: Gallimard/Pleiade, 1959–95], 3:379). For examples of this distinction in
revolutionary France, see Raymonde Monnier, “Republicanisme et revolution
francaise,” French Historical Studies 26, no. 1 (2003): 104–5. Gareth Stedman Jones
suggests that another source for Kant was a 1791 article by Sieyes; see “Kant, the
French Revolution, and the Republic,” in Invention of the Modern Republic, 155.
31 See Bell, Cult of the Nation, 140–68; Marisa Linton, The Politics of Virtue in
Enlightenment France (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Jay M. Smith, Nobility Reimagined:
The Patriotic Nation in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
2005); and John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism, and the
Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).
32 Both of whom were in contact with Bolingbroke and echoed the sentiments of his
“country” ideology; see Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of
Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 150–52;
see also Harold Ellis, Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy: Aristocratic Politics in
Early Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); and Kent
Wright, “The Idea of a Republican Constitution in Old Regime France,” Republicanism:
A Shared European Heritage. On Bolingbroke and “country” ideology, see Pocock,
Machiavellian Moment, 478–86 and passim. On the “Real Whig” current of
republicanism, see Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959).
33 See, for instance, the “Conclusion” to his Mémoire des pensées et sentiments, in
Oeuvres complètes, ed. Jean Deprun, Roland Desne, and Albert Soboul (Paris:
Anthropos, 1970–72), 3:127–70.
34 See notably Hammersley, French Revolutionaries and English Republicans ; and
Michigan Press, 1970), 31. On Hesiod’s version of the myth (which interrupts the
steady decline with a heroic age, between those of bronze and iron), see Jean Pierre
Vernant, Mythe et pensée chez les Grecs (Paris: Maspero, 1965). On the golden age
myth in classical antiquity, see notably Harry Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age in the
Renaissance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 3–31; Jean-Paul Brisson,
Rome et l’âge d’or: de Catulle à Ovide, vie et mort d’un mythe (Paris: La Decouverte,
1992); and Jacques Poirier, ed., L’âge d’or (Dijon: Figures libres, 1996).
38 Vid, “Aurea prima sata est aetas, quae vindice nullo, / sponte sua, sine lege fidem
rectumque colebat,” Metamorphoses, I, lines 89–90. For the syllabus used in most
collèges, see Harold Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A
Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1937); and L. W. B. Brockliss, French Higher Education in the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Centuries: A Cultural History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).
39 The oft-quoted line in Virgil is iam redit et Virgo, redeunt Saturnia regna. On this
Journal of Philology 76, no. 1 (1955): 34–46. Both of these Virgilian texts also figured
on nearly every collège syllabus.
41 See Levin, Myth of the Golden Age; and Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial
Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). For a canonical example, see
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le roman de la rose, ed. Armand Struebel
(Paris: Libraire Generale Francaise, 1992), notably vv. 13879–970. This romance was
republished in the eighteenth century by N. Lenglet du Fresnoy: Le Roman de la
Rose... (Paris: Vve Pissot, 1735). For the early modern period, see Levin, Myth of the
Golden Age; and Jean-Pierre van Elslande, L’imaginaire pastoral du XVII e siècle (Paris:
PUF, 1999). The chief example of this Arcadian mode is Honore d’Urfe’s multivolume
novel L’Astrée (1607–25).
43 For further details and references pertaining to this paragraph, see chapter 2.
44 Keith Baker, “Enlightenment and the Institution of Society: Notes for a Conceptual
History,” Main Trends in Cultural History, ed. Willem Melching and Wyger Velema
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), esp. 119–20; see also Brian Singer, Society, Theory, and
the French Revolution: Studies in the Revolutionary Imaginary (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1986); Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in
Eighteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Daniel
Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–
1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994). As Pierre Manent argued in An
Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994), the separation of society from the state in the eighteenth
century was also the founding act of liberalism. As such, this depoliticization also
provides the ground for Carl Schmitt’s critique of liberalism; see Political Theology:
Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005). For Paine, see Common Sense (Mineola: Dover,
1997), 2–3. For Saint-Just, see chapter 4.
would be done to), of themselves, without the terrour of some Power to cause them to
be observed, are contrary to our naturall Passions . . . And Covenants, without the
Sword, are but Words and of no strength to secure a man at all. Therefore,
notwithstanding the Lawes of Nature (which every one hath then kept, when he has
the will to keep them, when he can do it safely), if there be no Power erected . . . every
man will and may lawfully rely on his own strength and art, for caution against all
other men,” Leviathan, ed. C. B. Macpherson (London: Penguin, 1985), chap. 17; 223–
24. The other quote is from chap. 14.
47 As Hobbes remarks, “The Right of Nature, that is, the naturall Liberty of Man, may
by the Civill Law be abridged, and restrained: nay, the end of making Lawes, is no
other, but such Restraint . . . Law was brought into the world for nothing else, but to
limit the naturall liberty of particular men,” Leviathan, 26, 315.
48 As we will see, Hobbes was following here the Spanish jurist Francisco de Vitoria;
see Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace: Political Thought and the International
Order from Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
49 John Dunn remarks that for Locke, “The state of nature . . . is a jural condition and
the law which covers it is the theologically based law of nature,” The Political Thought
of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 106.
50 Second Treatise, in Two Treatises of Government (1690), ed. Peter Laslett
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), §8. As Dunn notes, for Locke, such
offenders “no longer have any rights at all against other men,” Political Thought of John
Locke, 108.
51 See especially Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and
“Trade, Plantations, and Property: John Locke and the Economic Defense of
Colonialism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 55, no. 4 (1994): 591–609. On the
transition from medieval to early-modern natural right theories, see Brian Tierney, The
Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–
1625 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997).
53 Correspondance Politique de l’Europe: Ouvrage Périodique par une Société de Gens
3.
55 “Discours sur le jugement de Louis XVI,” November 13, 1792; SJ, 378.
56 SJ, 379.
57 Didier Thirion, speech against the king, in Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860,
Baker, vol. 4 of The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture
(Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1987–94).
69 Simeon Bonnesoeur-Bourginiere, speech to the Convention, December 6, 1792; AP,
54:118.
70 On this discourse, see Jacques Guilhaumou, “‘La terreur a l’ordre du jour’: un