I

The early writings of Thomas Carlyle were littered with explicit references to Epicureanism. For instance, in ‘Wotton Reinfred’ (1826–7), Carlyle railed against ‘Utilitarians, Epicureans, and other tribes of the avowed alien’.Footnote ¹ Several years later, he not only accused the editor of the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey, of being ‘Epicurean in creed’, but also lamented the fact that his neighbour, Leigh Hunt, was ‘filled with Epicurean Philosophy’.Footnote ² Finally, in 1835, Carlyle once again sighed over the fate of his ‘Epicurean generation’.Footnote ³

Recently, Frederick Rosen has suggested that Carlyle was in fact protesting against the Epicureanism of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832).Footnote ⁴ However, as other recent scholarship has shown, Epicureanism was far from being confined to Britain, having flourished in equal measure during the French and German Enlightenments.Footnote ⁵ In this sense, the current article will seek to supplement Rosen's findings, offering a detailed analysis of Carlyle's response to French and German neo-Epicureanism. As J. G. A. Pocock has pointed out, there was no single unifiable phenomenon known as ‘the Enlightenment’, the term being subject to a number of shifting, and often contradictory, meanings.Footnote ⁶ Bearing this in mind, the current article will examine not only Carlyle's polemic against the French Epicurean Enlightenment, but also his debts to the German anti-Epicurean Enlightenment.

There are five principal reasons for undertaking such an inquiry. First, it will deepen our understanding of the role of ancient Greek and Roman thought in Carlyle's work, a subject hitherto overlooked.Footnote ⁷ Second, while there is by now a huge body of literature regarding eighteenth-century Epicureanism, relatively little attempt has been made to pursue the story into the nineteenth.Footnote ⁸ As one recent commentator has pointed out, Carlyle's works constituted ‘a generational revolt in print’, whereby the nineteenth century differentiated itself from the eighteenth.Footnote ⁹ As this article will make clear, rejection of Epicureanism, and particularly French Epicureanism, played a key role in this transition. Third, such an investigation will also serve to shed new light on the ‘obsessive antipathy to selfishness’ that so characterized Victorian public moralism, and particularly the common contrast between, on the one hand, French ‘egotism’ and ‘immorality’, and, on the other, English ‘character’, ‘manliness’, and ‘duty’.Footnote ¹⁰ Fourth, as the article will also suggest, Carlyle's appropriation of the anti-Epicureanism of the German Enlightenment made an important contribution to the moral discourse of the Victorian era, and particularly its stress on disinterested virtue. Fifth, it will be argued that Carlyle's rejection of Epicureanism was also of great significance to Victorian political thought, undermining faith in the self-equilibrating potential of modern commercial society, and justifying the need for an active, interventionist state.

Finally, one important proviso ought to be advertised at the very outset. In what follows, the aim is emphatically not to provide an accurate, reliable history of eighteenth-century French Epicureanism, nor, for that matter, of eighteenth-century German anti-Epicureanism. Rather, the aim is to demonstrate: first, that Carlyle read a number of French and German authors whose works touched upon certain Epicurean themes; second, that Carlyle understood the French authors to be advocating self-indulgence and a utilitarian morality, which he considered to be ‘Epicureanism’; third, that Carlyle understood the German authors to be advocating disinterested virtue and free moral activity, which he considered to be ‘anti-Epicurean’; and fourth, that no matter how inaccurate and distorted Carlyle's understanding of these authors might have been, it was nonetheless his understanding, which he transmitted to his contemporaries. Given Carlyle's centrality to the moral and political thought of the Victorian era, this is of crucial importance to understanding the transition from eighteenth-century Enlightenment to nineteenth-century ‘Victorianism’, from discourses of commercial society and laissez-faire to those of state intervention and social reform, and from philosophical materialism to philosophical Idealism.Footnote ¹¹

II

Before examining Carlyle's response to the Epicureanism of the French Enlightenment, it will be helpful to outline briefly the doctrines of Epicurus himself. According to Epicurus, all of our ideas were originally derived from physical sensations. The most important springs of human action were the desire to experience pleasure, and the desire to avoid pain. However, Epicurus did not enjoin a life of animalistic sensuality, but rather a prudent calculation of which actions would bring most pleasure, and least pain, in the long term.Footnote ¹² In sum, Epicurus concluded that a pleasurable life consisted in ease and tranquillity, ‘the absence of pain in the body and of trouble in the soul’.Footnote ¹³

This philosophy had important political ramifications. According to Epicurus, virtue and justice were instrumental and artificial, being worthy to the extent that they served as a means to one's own sensual gratification. In particular, he argued, virtue and justice were necessary to the security and stability that a life of pleasure required. Such theories distinguished Epicurus from other ancient Greek thinkers, such as Aristotle and the Stoics, who posited a natural inclination towards sociability, and who understood virtue and justice in terms of obedience to the eternal laws of nature, worthy of being pursued as ends in themselves. In ancient Rome, the followers of Epicurus were roundly condemned by Cicero, who accused them of undermining traditional Roman ideals of duty, and discouraging service to the commonweal.Footnote ¹⁴

During the early modern period, a number of French thinkers brought about a resurgence of interest in Epicureanism. Indeed, as one recent commentator has put it, ‘for the better part of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, France was the undisputed haven of Epicureans’.Footnote ¹⁵ As the rest of this section will demonstrate, the young Carlyle had in fact dabbled with the Epicurean literature of this period, albeit somewhat patchily and superficially. As he put it in the semi-autobiographical novel ‘Wotton Reinfred’ (1826–7), his hero had studied ‘the modern literature of France’, only to conclude that ‘the philosophy of Epicurus was not made for him’.Footnote ¹⁶ As this section will also make clear, Carlyle understood ‘the philosophy of Epicurus’ to mean primarily indulgence of the self-regarding passions, and advocacy of a utilitarian morality.

One important reference for Carlyle would have been Montaigne's Essays (1580). Here, Montaigne cited repeatedly from the Epicurean poet Lucretius, arguing that ‘pleasure’ was the ‘end’ of life, and that ‘even in virtue, our ultimate aim is enjoyment’. Explicitly referencing ‘Epicurus’, Montaigne also emphasized the importance of prudence, that is, the avoidance of pleasures that ‘bring larger pains in their wake’. In sum, he argued, the greatest ‘pleasure’ would ultimately be derived from tranquillity and ‘rest’.Footnote ¹⁷ Having borrowed the Essays from the Edinburgh University Library, Carlyle proceeded to compose an entry on Montaigne for the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1820).Footnote ¹⁸ While praising Montaigne as ‘patient and good-natured’, Carlyle took exception to his ‘egotism’, which, he claimed, amounted to ‘the practice of an epicure’.Footnote ¹⁹

Far more important for the revival of Epicureanism in France, however, was the philosopher Pierre Gassendi, and particularly his On the life and death of Epicurus (1647) and Treatise on Epicurean philosophy (1649).Footnote ²⁰ Here, Gassendi sought to vindicate the Epicurean doctrine that ‘pleasure appears everywhere to be at the beginning and indeed the end of a happy life’. Moreover, he also argued that the ‘Good’ was simply ‘that which is Profitable’.Footnote ²¹ Admittedly, Carlyle does not seem to have read Gassendi first-hand. However, in an entry to his journal in 1827, he noted that ‘Gassendi’ was said ‘to be the father of the existing French Philosophy’.Footnote ²²

Thanks to Gassendi, Epicurean ideas found wide resonance in France over subsequent years. For instance, in his play The doctor in spite of himself (1666), which the young Carlyle certainly read, Molière wrote that ‘in this world’, ‘the great affair is pleasure’.Footnote ²³ According to Molière, it was necessary to take men as they were, to accept that ‘everything’ worked by ‘interest’, and to promote an easy-going sociability, based on utility and reciprocal advantage.Footnote ²⁴ Some years later, Carlyle condemned the ‘Profit-and-Loss Philosophy’ of ‘Molière Doctors’, who claimed that ‘Self-sacrifice, Heaven, Hell and such like…used to be true: but we have changed all that, nous avons changé tout cela!’Footnote ²⁵

More important than Molière, however, were a variety of late seventeenth-century religious writers. According to the latter, the Epicurean doctrine that men were motivated by a selfish desire for pleasure was largely compatible with the orthodox Christian notion of sin.Footnote ²⁶ Blaise Pascal (1623–62), for instance, argued that ‘in the current, fallen state of our soul, it is inconceivable that the soul could will something other than what it likes to will, i.e. what delights it most’.Footnote ²⁷ Having written the entry on Pascal for the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1823), Carlyle would have no doubt been aware of such arguments.Footnote ²⁸ Similar claims regarding the force of ‘self-love’ were also made in La Rochefoucauld's Maxims (1665), which the young Carlyle certainly read.Footnote ²⁹ As Carlyle pointed out, ‘La Rochefoucauld’ supposed that ‘self-love’ was the ‘motive of all our actions’, and thus represented ‘man’ as ‘the sport of his passions’.Footnote ³⁰ For his part, Pierre Bayle included an entry on ‘Epicurus’ in his Historical and critical dictionary (1695–7), which Carlyle also read.Footnote ³¹ Here, Bayle argued that the Epicurean ‘doctrine of the chief good’, while ‘likely to be misinterpreted’, was ‘in fact very reasonable’, since ‘no one could deny’ that ‘the felicity of man consists in pleasure’.Footnote ³²

The eighteenth century saw a further flourishing of Epicurean thought in France. Once again, Carlyle claimed that such writers were in fact advocating little more than indulgence of the self-regarding passions, a utilitarian approach to morality, and an instrumental understanding of virtue. As Carlyle put it in ‘Burns’ (1828), the ‘French wits’ of the eighteenth century had thus been characterized by an ‘avowed sensuality, and unbelief in all virtue’.Footnote ³³ No matter how crude and exaggerated this interpretation of the writers in question might have been, Carlyle upheld it with some vehemence, as the rest of this section will show.

One notable figure in this regard was Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657–1757).Footnote ³⁴ In 1820, Carlyle borrowed several volumes of Fontenelle's works from the Edinburgh University Library, including the ‘Dialogues’ (1683) and ‘On happiness’ (1724).Footnote ³⁵ In the former, one of Fontenelle's interlocutors counselled the pursuit of ‘pleasures’ that were ‘simple, relaxed, [and] calm’, while another character affirmed that ‘the passions’ were the driving force of ‘everything’. In the latter work, Fontenelle propounded the typically Epicurean doctrine of prudence, writing that we ought always to ‘calculate’ the true ‘value’ of ‘pleasures’. On this basis, one would realize that ‘a calm life’ would bring the greatest pleasure in the long run.Footnote ³⁶

According to Carlyle, Fontenelle, towards the end of his life, had said that ‘he wished he could live sixty years longer, and see what that universal infidelity, depravity and dissolution of all ties would turn to’.Footnote ³⁷ This was perhaps a reference to some of the younger Epicurean thinkers that Fontenelle encountered during his later years. For instance, Fontenelle frequently visited a salon based at the Château de Sceaux, another member of which was the young Voltaire. In his early poems, Voltaire gave expression to several key Epicurean doctrines. For instance, in the ‘Epistle to Madame G.’ (1716–17), he wrote that ‘pleasure is the object, the duty, and the aim of all reasonable beings’, while in ‘The man of the world’ (1736), he put forward a thoroughgoing defence of luxury.Footnote ³⁸ Indeed, such Epicurean themes continued to resonate in Voltaire's later works. For instance, in On the singularity of nature (1768), Voltaire claimed that ‘nothing was more respectable than the morality of the Epicureans. This consisted in distancing oneself from public affairs, these being incompatible with wisdom.’Footnote ³⁹ Having accumulated a collection of Voltaire's works, Carlyle set about writing a long article about him, this finally appearing in 1829.Footnote ⁴⁰ Here, Carlyle denounced what he considered Voltaire's addiction to ‘private vice’, as well his preoccupation with ‘menu plaisirs’. According to Carlyle, Voltaire was, in sum, a typical man of ‘the eighteenth century’, ‘polite, attractive, most cultivated, but essentially self-interested’.Footnote ⁴¹

Another French thinker upon whom Carlyle wrote around this time was Diderot. In an entry to the Encyclopaedia on ‘Epicureanism’ (1755), Diderot praised Epicurus as ‘the only ancient philosopher who knew how to reconcile morality with the true happiness of man, and its precepts with the appetites and needs of nature’. Moreover, Diderot also drew attention to the recent revival of interest in Epicurean thought, claiming that ‘Epicureanism has never had more radiance than in France, and above all during the last century.’ On the whole, Diderot considered such doctrines harmless, telling his readers that ‘when pleasure brings no pain in its wake, do not hesitate to embrace it’.Footnote ⁴² Unsurprisingly, such statements led one contemporary to accuse Diderot and his collaborators of being ‘more Epicurean than Epicurus himself’.Footnote ⁴³ In later life, Diderot attempted to soften his conclusions, stressing the compatibility of pleasure with disinterested virtue.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, this did little to placate Carlyle. Having read through the entirety of ‘Diderot's works, five and twenty volumes of them’, Carlyle went on the offensive, publishing an article entitled ‘Diderot’ in 1833.Footnote ⁴⁵ Here, he denounced Diderot's claim that ‘Virtue is synonymous with Pleasure’, reserving particular ire for the Encyclopaedia. Against Diderot's gospel of ‘Duty-made-easy’, Carlyle argued that ‘Virtue’ had nothing to do with ‘Pleasure’, and much to do with ‘Pain’.Footnote ⁴⁶

Three years after the appearance of Diderot's ‘Epicureanism’, Claude Adrien Helvétius published his treatise On mind (1758). Here, Helvétius agreed with La Rochefoucauld, to the effect that ‘self-love is a sentiment deeply engraved upon us by nature’. However, in an attempt to ditch the religious, Augustinian baggage of the term ‘self-love’, Helvétius introduced an alternative term, namely ‘interest’. As he explained, although the ‘word interest is generally confined to the love of money’, it could also be employed in ‘a more extensive sense’, to refer ‘to whatever may procure us pleasure, or exemption from pain’. According to Helvétius, ‘interest’ was at work ‘at all times, and in all places’. Moreover, it was also the source of sociability and justice, men having ‘united in society’ as a means to satisfy their ‘interests’ better. Finally, Helvétius argued that the legislator ought to employ ‘the love of pleasure’ as ‘a bridle, by which the passions of individuals might be directed to the public good’.Footnote ⁴⁷ In 1820, Carlyle had borrowed On mind from the Edinburgh University Library, and his writings over subsequent years were littered with hostile references to Helvétius.Footnote ⁴⁸ For instance, in ‘Diderot’, Carlyle sarcastically remarked that ‘De l'Esprit’ breathed ‘the freest Philosophe-spirit’, while in Sartor resartus (1833–4), he attacked the doctrines of ‘Helvétius and his set’ regarding ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Pain’.Footnote ⁴⁹

Following the outbreak of the French Revolution, Helvétius's materialism, sensualism, and utilitarianism were given a new lease of life by the so-called ‘Ideologues’.Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1823, Carlyle recorded his intention to read the works of several leading Ideologues, including ‘De Gerando’ and ‘De Tracey’.Footnote ⁵¹ Moreover, in ‘Goethe's Helena’ (1828), he sneered at those members ‘of the French Institute’ who considered ‘virtue’ some ‘bubble of the blood’, and, in Sartor resartus, referred contemptuously to ‘Ideologists’.Footnote ⁵² However, Carlyle reserved particular ire for Pierre Jean George Cabanis's On the relations between the physical and moral aspects of man (1802), a work in which Cabanis had explicitly praised ‘Epicurus’.Footnote ⁵³ For instance, in The life of Schiller (1825), Carlyle complained that ‘Dr. Cabanis’ had treated ‘the connection between the animal and spiritual nature of man’ in ‘so offensive a fashion’.Footnote ⁵⁴ And, in ‘Signs of the times’ (1829), Carlyle once again inveighed against ‘Dr. Cabanis’ and ‘his Rapports du Physique et du Morale de l'Homme’, which, he argued, ‘may be regarded as the ultimatum of mechanical metaphysics in our time’.Footnote ⁵⁵

In sum, the young Carlyle had read a number of French Enlightenment writers whose works contained certain elements of Epicureanism. In Carlyle's eyes, such ‘Epicureanism’ amounted to little more than self-indulgence, pleasure-seeking, and utilitarian morality. On the basis of this somewhat simplistic reading of the writers in question, he vehemently rejected what he considered to be their ‘Epicurean’ philosophy. Indeed, Carlyle probably had himself in mind when, in ‘Wotton Reinfred’ (1826–7), he remarked that his hero had studied ‘the modern literature of France’, only to conclude that ‘the philosophy of Epicurus was not made for him’.Footnote ⁵⁶ As the Saint-Simonians, a group of early French socialists whom Carlyle famously encountered in 1830, put it, Carlyle's early writings thus constituted a protest against the ‘petty moralism’ of ‘Helvétius’ and ‘Cabanis’, which, in its emphasis on ‘egotism’, ‘interest’, and ‘utility’, reproduced the ‘sensualism’ of ‘Epicurus’.Footnote ⁵⁷

III

For the young Carlyle, the German Enlightenment promised deliverance from the Epicureanism of the French. Before moving on to look at Carlyle's engagement with a number of anti-Epicurean German thinkers, however, it is necessary to note one exception, namely Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813). A follower of Diderot and Helvétius, Wieland was perhaps best known for his novel The history of Agathon (1766–7). Here, he put forward several typically Epicurean doctrines, one character declaring: ‘satisfy your natural desires, and enjoy as much pleasure as you can’. Furthermore, in the same work, Wieland also posited self-interest as the basis of sociability, claiming that the ‘law of nature’, ‘seek your own best’, had been superseded by ‘the social state’, in which men ‘united’ in order to seek ‘their social best’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Unsurprisingly, this led numerous German contemporaries to accuse Wieland of Epicureanism.Footnote ⁵⁹ In 1819, Carlyle borrowed several volumes of Wieland's works from the Edinburgh University Library.Footnote ⁶⁰ Moreover, he soon made clear his objections, claiming that Wieland had spent his life promoting ‘a species of diluted epicurism’, ‘borrowed’ from ‘the French’.Footnote ⁶¹

However, for the most part, Carlyle considered the writings of the German Enlightenment valuable insofar as they provided an antidote to French Epicureanism. Indeed, as several scholars have pointed out, the later decades of the eighteenth century saw a widespread reaction against Epicureanism in Germany. Integral to this was the rejection of pleasure, self-interest, and utility, in favour of moral freedom, disinterested virtue, and republican duty.Footnote ⁶² In sum, as Carlyle put it, ‘the middle of last century’ had seen ‘the giant spirit of Germany awaken’ from ‘Parisian Erotics’, ‘Scepticism’, and ‘Sensuality’.Footnote ⁶³

In this regard, one of the most important figures for Carlyle was the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).Footnote ⁶⁴ In his Critique of pure reason (1781), Kant had rejected the epistemology of Epicurus, particularly his sensualism and empiricism. In contrast, Kant insisted that there could be no direct knowledge of ‘things in themselves’, independent of the knowing, thinking subject.Footnote ⁶⁵ Moreover, in a subsequent work, the Critique of practical reason (1788), Kant had taken exception to Epicurus's claim that human beings were motivated by sensations of pleasure and pain, and that the latter also provided an adequate criterion by which to judge the moral worth of an action. In contrast, Kant argued that in order to be truly ethical, an action must be motivated solely by obedience to a principle formulated by pure reason. Sensations of pleasure and pain, Kant argued, were purely empirical and subjective, differing from individual to individual. For this reason, they could not provide the basis for a ‘categorical imperative’, that is, a general, universal maxim, valid for all individuals, in all places, and at all times. In sum, Kant argued that virtue and duty existed independently of pleasure and pain, and ought to be pursued as ends in themselves.Footnote ⁶⁶

Of course, one must be wary of exaggerating the extent of Carlyle's acquaintance with Kant's work. Indeed, Carlyle most likely never finished the Critique of pure reason, the only work of Kant that he actually read.Footnote ⁶⁷ Moreover, his understanding of Kant was undeniably crude. In particular, Carlyle tended to reduce Kant to an old-fashioned idealist, thus obscuring the novelty of his system.Footnote ⁶⁸ However, the question of whether or not Carlyle fully understood what he read is perhaps less significant than the creative use he made of it.Footnote ⁶⁹ So far as the present article is concerned, what matters is the way in which Carlyle drew upon Kant in an attempt to overcome the Epicureanism of the French Enlightenment. For instance, in The life of Schiller (1825), Carlyle noted Wieland's opposition to the philosophy of Kant. Wieland, he explained, ‘had, all his life, been labouring to give currency among his countrymen to a species of diluted epicurism’, borrowed from ‘the French’, only to see this suddenly swept away ‘with the violence of a tornado’.Footnote ⁷⁰ The following year, in Carlyle's ‘Wotton Reinfred’ (1826–7), the hero Wotton encounters another character, Dalbrook, who rails against ‘Epicureans’, before proceeding to introduce Wotton to the principles of ‘Kantism’. ‘Happiness’, Dalbrook declares, ‘is not man's object’. In particular, he argues, ‘there is something better in man than self-interest’, ‘the divine law of virtue’ being something more than ‘a drudge's bargain’.Footnote ⁷¹ Similarly, in ‘State of German literature’ (1827), Carlyle contrasted ‘Kant's system’ with the theories of various ‘French’ thinkers. Whereas the French attempted to explain the ‘existence’ of ‘Virtue’ through reference to ‘the world of Sense’, Kant found it ‘written as the beginning of all Philosophy, in obscured but ineffaceable characters, within our inmost being’. In particular, Carlyle added, the ‘Kantist’, unlike the ‘French’, maintained that ‘Virtue’ was ‘Virtue, and not Prudence’.Footnote ⁷²

In addition to Kant, another German anti-Epicurean thinker important to Carlyle was Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805).Footnote ⁷³ In a private letter, Schiller had complained of the prevalence of a ‘refined Epicureanism’, which ‘suffocated all energy of character’, ‘fettered’ man to his physical ‘wants’, and fostered both ‘passivity’ and ‘servility’. In opposition, Schiller, like Kant, advocated the possibility of free moral activity.Footnote ⁷⁴ Admittedly, there is no evidence that Carlyle ever read this particular letter. However, it is clear that he nonetheless grasped and appreciated the anti-Epicurean thrust of Schiller's thought. For instance, in The life of Schiller, Carlyle noted the opposition between the ‘epicurism’ of Wieland and the philosophy of Kant. Continuing, he explained how Schiller had further developed Kant's insights, particularly in his Letters on the aesthetic education of man (1794). Here, Carlyle explained, Schiller had set out ‘a scheme of morality’ that rose above ‘Utilities’ and ‘Reflex-senses’, and which sought to ‘derive the duties and chief end of man from other grounds than the Philosophy of Profit and Loss’. In particular, Schiller had called upon man to rise above his external senses, into ‘a calm cloudless height of internal activity’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Two years later, in ‘State of German literature’, Carlyle once again cited from Schiller's Letters, to the effect that man ought to ‘look upwards to his dignity and the law, not downwards to his happiness and his wants’.Footnote ⁷⁶ And, finally, in ‘Schiller’ (1831), Carlyle explained how Schiller had set out to refute the various ‘Happiness-Systems (Gluckseligkeitssysteme)’ of his era, and to convince his readers that ‘man has in him something higher than a Love of Pleasure’. Continuing, Carlyle wrote:

In sum, in German authors such as Kant and Schiller, Carlyle found a compelling alternative to the Epicureanism of the French. As the foregoing section has shown, this philosophy sought to rise above pleasure and pain, asserting that man was capable of genuinely disinterested virtue, and positing free, moral activity as the end of life.

IV

In the following section, it will be suggested that Carlyle's hostility to French Epicureanism (or, at least, his own interpretation of it) continued to resonate in his subsequent political writings. In the first place, Carlyle continued to deny that the pursuit of pleasure was an appropriate end for the life of the individual. For instance, in his Lectures on the history of literature (1838), Carlyle inveighed against the Roman poet Horace, who, he claimed, ‘belonged to the Epicurean school of philosophy’, having ‘no thought of anything but how to make himself comfortable, and to enjoy himself in this world’. Later in the lectures, Carlyle also attacked the ‘French literature’ of the eighteenth century, which, he argued, had no message other than ‘that Pleasure is pleasant’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Several years later, in Past and present (1843), Carlyle continued his polemic against Epicureanism, denouncing those who would wallow in ‘vulturous hunger for fine wines’, ‘gilt carriages’, and other ‘Epicurisms’. The ‘whole wretchedness’ of ‘these generations’, he claimed, stemmed from the ‘pretension’ to be ‘happy’, ‘happy’ as ‘the fattest pig of Epicurus’.Footnote ⁷⁹

Following Kant and Schiller, Carlyle argued that men ought rather to lay aside happiness, and recognize ‘the Infinite Nature of Duty’.Footnote ⁸⁰ In particular, they would have to lay aside their ‘own poor egoism, hungry love of happiness &c’, and acknowledge that ‘Self-renunciation’ was ‘the beginning of virtue for a man’.Footnote ⁸¹ In this sense, a virtuous man would have not only to renounce pleasure, but also to embrace pain. As Carlyle put it in Past and present: ‘In a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie.’ In sum, Carlyle called upon his generation to rise above the sordid selfishness and sensuality of the eighteenth century, and thus to emerge as ‘noble European Nineteenth-Century Men’.Footnote ⁸²

In addition to rejecting the pursuit of pleasure as an end for the life of the individual, Carlyle also took exception to Epicurean, utility-based theories of sociability and justice. Indeed, such theories had been particularly prevalent in eighteenth-century France, numerous thinkers arguing that in a modern commercial society, the role of government was to manage, harness, and balance the self-regarding passions of the governed.Footnote ⁸³ Furthermore, in Carlyle's mind, such notions seem to have been bound up with the doctrine of ‘public opinion’. As several scholars have shown, during the final years of the Old Regime, it had become increasingly common to argue that government ought to rest upon the ‘opinion’ of the governed, and to secure the allegiance of the latter by satisfying their ‘interests’.Footnote ⁸⁴ In ‘Voltaire’ (1829), Carlyle inveighed against ‘the age of Louis XV’, which, he argued, had been ‘an experiment, on the great scale’, to establish whether ‘a political system’ could survive on ‘Self-interest’ alone. He continued:

In this sense, the faith of the ‘Philosophes’ in ‘Public Opinion’ was, according to Carlyle, misplaced. Without ‘some belief in the necessary, eternal…nature of Virtue’, he argued, ‘Public Opinion’ could never provide ‘a basis of public or private Morals’. No matter how far the ‘Philosophe’ might succeed in his quest to ‘enlighten self-interest’, the latter would never offer an adequate substitute for ‘Virtue’.Footnote ⁸⁵

Interestingly, Carlyle's hostility to French Epicureanism also seems to have contributed to his notorious polemics against laissez-faire. Indeed, several scholars have suggested that Epicureanism, with its emphasis on self-interest and utility, in fact provided the psychological underpinnings of early French political economy.Footnote ⁸⁶ For instance, in an early letter, Carlyle noted that ‘Utility’ had come ‘into vogue’ with the ‘French Revolution’, and continued to linger ‘in the heads of the Political Economists’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Several years later, in ‘Chartism’ (1839), Carlyle castigated the ‘Europe of the Eighteenth Century’, particularly its ‘French Philosophisms’, before asserting that ‘the principle of Laissez-faire has terminated, and is no longer applicable at all, in this Europe of ours’. ‘That self-cancelling Donothingism and Laissez-faire’, Carlyle declared, had been ‘the practice of the whole Eighteenth Century’, but must not be allowed to ‘prolong itself into the Nineteenth’.Footnote ⁸⁸ Similarly, in Past and present, Carlyle suggested that ‘Laissez-faire’ was not merely an economic doctrine, but meant more generally leaving ‘all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause’. In sum, Carlyle argued, ‘enlightened Egoism’ and ‘Laissez-faire’ would never provide ‘a practicable Law of Union for a Society of Men’.Footnote ⁸⁹

In opposition to such Epicurean theories of an instrumental, artificial sociability, Carlyle sought to reassert a broadly Platonic version of natural law, and to advocate an active, interventionist role for the state.Footnote ⁹⁰ For instance, in Past and present, he argued that ‘eternal Justice’ was distinct from ‘momentary Expediency’, and was thus irreducible to ‘interests’. Similarly, ‘Nature and her Laws’ operated independently of ‘Public Opinion’. Rather than catering to ‘interest’ and ‘opinion’, therefore, the end of government was to bring the nation into harmony with ‘Nature's Laws’.Footnote ⁹¹ Moreover, given that only the ‘wise man’ had ‘insight into what is what’, it followed that only he was ‘fit to administer, to direct, and guidingly command’.Footnote ⁹² In short, Carlyle sought to reassert the necessity of disinterested, virtuous authority, rejecting the eighteenth-century notion that ‘all goes by self-interest and the checking and balancing of greedy knaveries’.Footnote ⁹³

That Carlyle's political writings represented an assault upon eighteenth-century French Epicureanism was abundantly apparent to his contemporaries. For instance, in 1852, one reviewer wrote that ‘we have pretty well got rid – thanks to him – of the skeptical Epicureanism of last century’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Similarly, another reviewer, writing during the same year, claimed that Carlyle's work had been directed against ‘the modern liberal school’, this being composed primarily of ‘Epicureans’. According to ‘political Epicureans’, the reviewer wrote, ‘physical good’ was ‘the chief end of man’. In this sense, ‘moral training and discipline are not needed: all that is wanting is, that no erroneous opinions, no superstitions, should divert the mind from a single-eyed devotion to the comfort of the body’. ‘That the French Encyclopedists were thorough Epicureans’, the reviewer added, ‘will certainly not be questioned’. In opposition to such thinkers, the reviewer explained, Carlyle had sought to reassert the ‘sense of duty, the contempt of pleasure and pain’.Footnote ⁹⁵ Finally, some years later, in his History of European morals (1869), Carlyle's friend W. E. H. Lecky inveighed against the modern ‘Epicurean’ school, particularly as represented by ‘La Rochefoucauld’ and ‘Helvétius’. According to such thinkers, Lecky wrote, the sole ‘motive to virtue’ was ‘enlightened self-interest’. In particular, since ‘co-operation and organization’ were ‘essential to our happiness’, it was prudent to place ‘some restraint’ upon ‘our appetites’ and obey the law. Against such erroneous teachings, Lecky quoted from ‘Carlyle's Hero-worship’, to the effect that ‘it is not to taste sweet things, but to do noble and true things…that the poorest son of Adam dimly longs’.Footnote ⁹⁶

V

In his final major work, Frederick the Great (1858–65), Carlyle had set out to portray the king of Prussia as the model of a heroic, virtuous ruler. However, as one reviewer pointed out, Carlyle was only able to do this by ‘constantly patronizing Frederick, making the best of him, exclaiming and protesting that, although he was a heathenish old brute, he still fought and wrought so well that anything may be forgiven him’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Similarly, another reviewer noted that Carlyle had frequent recourse to ‘pumice, pipe-clay, stucco, and Paris-plaster, to whitewash the unseemly, and supply the defectuous’.Footnote ⁹⁸ In this section, it will be argued that the source of much of Carlyle's embarrassment was Frederick's unabashed proclivity for French Epicureanism.

As several of Carlyle's sources made clear, Frederick spent his life immersed in Epicurean philosophy. For instance, in his Anecdotes of King Frederick II of Prussia (1788–92), which Carlyle certainly read, Friedrich Nicolai explained how ‘the king had been drawn to the philosophical doctrines of Epicurus, largely through his diligent reading of [the Epicurean poet] Lucretius’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Similarly, in his Autobiography (1809), which Carlyle also read, the philosopher Johann Georg Sulzer recounted an interview during which he and the king debated ‘the Epicurean system of philosophy’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ However, despite having read both these works, Carlyle made no reference to Frederick's Epicureanism.

In addition to the testimonies of contemporaries, Carlyle would also have come across frank avowals of Epicureanism in Frederick's own letters. For instance, in a letter to Voltaire, Frederick claimed that ‘philosophy comes to us from Epicurus [and] Gassendi’, before declaring himself ‘their disciple’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Similarly, in a letter to the French philosopher d'Argens, Frederick once again referred to ‘my master Epicurus’.Footnote ¹⁰² Evidently embarrassed by such statements, Carlyle's strategy was simply to suppress them. While it would have been possible to quote Frederick's ‘letters’ to various ‘French lights of the firmament’ in ‘some quantity’, Carlyle wrote, ‘it is better not’. In particular, the correspondence between Frederick and Voltaire was ‘a very dull one’, and would be ‘very wearisome to the reader’. Besides, Carlyle assured his readers, such letters did not at all reflect Frederick's ‘real inner man’.Footnote ¹⁰³

Alongside his correspondence, Frederick's published works were also replete with Epicurean doctrines. For instance, several of Frederick's early poems were modelled on Lucretius, and, in one poem, he explicitly described himself as ‘a friend of Epicurean sentiments’, who loved ‘all pleasures’.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Again, Carlyle's response was simply to suppress the offending articles. Frederick's ‘poetries’, he wrote, were ‘not of value’, and ‘nobody, not even Friedrich himself, will think it necessary that we say much [about them]’.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Finally, Frederick's prose works also contained a number of Epicurean doctrines. For instance, in his Anti-Machiavel (1740), Frederick argued that ‘self-love’ was the ‘principle of all our virtues’. In particular, he argued, individuals would resist their ‘passions’, and obey the law, only if they were convinced that they stood to gain some ‘advantage’ by doing so.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Once more, Carlyle chose to censor this side of Frederick, claiming that ‘we can any of us read [the Anti-Machiavel] in a few hours; but, alas, almost none of us with the least interest, or, as it were, with any profit whatever’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In short, Carlyle was reduced to insisting that Frederick was important for what he ‘did’, not what he ‘thought’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

While Frederick himself was bad enough, his entourage was even worse. Indeed, in a much earlier essay, Carlyle had noted Frederick's patronage of several French philosophers, wryly describing him as the ‘nursing-father’ of the ‘new Church of Antichrist’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In his biography, Carlyle was somewhat more coy, stating that ‘Friedrich cannot be said, either as Prince or as King, to have been superlatively successful in his choice of associates.’Footnote ¹¹⁰ In short, as Voltaire pointed out in a letter that Carlyle actually quoted, Frederick had transformed his court into ‘the Garden of Epicurus’.Footnote ¹¹¹ One such member of Frederick's entourage was the philosopher d'Argens, already referred to above. According to one of his contemporaries, d'Argens was not only a ‘very voluptuous man’, but also a ‘decided Epicurean’.Footnote ¹¹² For his part, Carlyle clearly held d'Argens in contempt, describing him as an ‘extremely dissolute creature’, full of ‘frothy speculation’.Footnote ¹¹³ In addition to d'Argens, Frederick's court also hosted the philosopher and mathematician Maupertuis. In his ‘Essay on moral philosophy’ (1749), Maupertuis put forward the typically Epicurean argument that there was no qualitative distinction between ‘sensual’ and ‘intellectual’ pleasures, and that ‘the most noble pleasures are the largest’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Again, Carlyle obviously held Maupertuis in low regard, writing of how he ‘published a little Pamphlet on Happiness (Sur le Bonheur); it is very dry and miserable’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Carlyle also expressed considerable unease regarding Frederick's patronage of ‘M. Helvétius, who wrote De l'Esprit’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ However, he reserved particular contempt for another member of Frederick's court, the physician and philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie. In his System of Epicurus (1750), La Mettrie had celebrated the joys of terrestrial life, writing: ‘Let pleasure be our present, for we only are what the present is.’Footnote ¹¹⁷ Similarly, in his Discourse on happiness (1748), La Mettrie claimed that ‘even in virtue, our ultimate objective is pleasure’, while, in his Art of enjoyment (1751), he asked: ‘What does it mean to be an Epicurean? It means to pursue pleasure, and, in this sense, Epicurus lives in all our hearts.’Footnote ¹¹⁸ For his part, Carlyle expressed dismay that ‘Friedrich not only tolerates [this] poor madcap, but takes some pleasure in him.’ Following La Mettrie's death, brought on by eating ‘a whole pheasant-pie’, Frederick delivered a eulogy at the Royal Academy. This, Carlyle wrote, ‘might as well have been spared’. In sum, Carlyle could not avoid the conclusion that ‘the King's French Colony of Wits were a sorry set of people’.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Frederick's patronage of such French Epicureans provoked fierce resentment amongst contemporary German intellectuals.Footnote ¹²⁰ For instance, the philosopher Johann Georg Sulzer, already referred to above, sought to make a stand against the influence of Epicureans within the Academy. Rejecting ‘Epicurean maxims’ as ‘dangerous’, Sulzer argued that man's true ‘happiness’ lay not in ‘sensual’ pleasures, but rather in free ‘moral’ activity. Like Kant and Schiller, Sulzer argued that the latter consisted in acting in accordance with a ‘moral maxim’, even if to do so went ‘against my own immediate, sensual pleasure’.Footnote ¹²¹ Remarkably, Carlyle seems to have sympathized with such ‘native literary men’, clearly preferring them to Frederick's French entourage. Particularly notable amongst such ‘worthy men’, he wrote in his biography of Frederick, was ‘Sulzer’.Footnote ¹²² Indeed, as Carlyle had explained in an earlier letter, ‘Sulzer’, unlike Frederick's French protégés, ‘was a man who, like Rousseau, believed in the native goodness of mankind’.Footnote ¹²³

VI

In conclusion, the young Carlyle had perused many of the Epicurean writings of the French Enlightenment. According to Carlyle, such ‘Epicureanism’ consisted primarily in an emphasis upon pleasure and pain as the springs of human action, and a positing of self-interest as the foundation of sociability in a modern commercial society. However, Carlyle soon came to reject such notions, seeking salvation in the writings of Kant and Schiller, who stressed the possibility of disinterested virtue, and the importance of free, moral activity. Indeed, the Epicureanism debate continued to resonate in Carlyle's subsequent political writings, particularly his notorious polemics against laissez-faire and ‘public opinion’, and his advocacy of an active, interventionist, and ethical role for the state. Finally, in Carlyle's last major work, Frederick the Great, he found himself faced with the unenviable task of painting an Epicurean into a patina of heroic virtue. Despite his best efforts, however, Carlyle's biography remained haunted by the spectre of Epicureanism. In this regard, he could not help but sympathize with Sulzer, who articulated many of the anti-Epicurean arguments that Carlyle had already encountered in Kant and Schiller. Nonetheless, as Carlyle's contemporaries recognized, his writings had done much not only to discredit the Epicureanism of the French eighteenth century, but also to shape the moral and political ideals of the British nineteenth. In sum, as Carlyle's friend W. E. H. Lecky put it shortly after his death, ‘Carlyle’, much like ‘Rousseau’, had acted as ‘the great alternative medicine of his time. In the midst of an optimist, [E]picurean, sceptical, factitious, and self-complacent society…he appeared like a figure of another age, preaching a kind of belated and distorted Puritanism.’Footnote ¹²⁴