The Desire for Fame

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According to sentimentalist social theory in the eighteenth century, moral action finds its natural home in small societies. Benevolence, the source of moral action, is natural to humans, and it expresses itself, in the Earl of Shaftesbury's phrase, as a "herding impulse." As long as this impulse gives rise to a small community, Shaftesbury writes, it guides the spirit of the group: "In less parties, men may be intimately conversant and acquainted with one another. They can there better taste society, and enjoy the common good and interest of a more contracted public. They view the whole compass and extent of their community, and see and know particularly whom they serve, and to what end they associate and conspire." Adam Ferguson, similarly, argues that the moral instincts of mankind appear where we feel ourselves part of a close-knit, well-defined social order: "When we are involved in any of the divisions into which mankind are separated under the denominations of a country, a tribe, or an order of men any way affected by common interests, and guided by communicating passions, the mind recognizes its natural station; the sentiments of the breast, and the talents of the understanding, find their natural exercise."

But mankind's intrinsic sociability, and with it the moral instinct, become obstructed in large societies because they have too much material to contend with. Shaftesbury and Ferguson speak of a breakdown of vision when "society grows vast and bulky" (Shaftesbury 76): no "visible band is formed, no strict alliance" in the "body politic at large" (76); "members can no longer apprehend the common ties of society, nor be engaged by affection in the cause of their country" (Ferguson 363). Shaftesbury observes that sentiment accordingly flags; people cannot feel a strong social impulse toward a group whose outline and identity they cannot readily see: the "close sympathy and conspiring virtue is apt to lose itself, for want of direction, in so wide a field" (75).

Bernard Mandeville, who argues rather for an instinctive selfishness in human nature, nevertheless agrees that moral law might govern the social order in small communities; but it will prohibit the growth of the community beyond certain narrow bounds. Scale proceeds from luxury, self-indulgence, fraud, and other vices, according to Mandeville. If "Mankind could be cured of [these] Failings"—which "they are Naturally guilty of"—they would "cease to be capable of being rais'd into such vast, potent and polite Societies, as they have been."

The sentimentalists argue that the expansion of society has an ambivalent moral consequence. On the one hand, people in a large society are driven by their sociable, sympathizing instinct to form smaller societies within the larger one. "To cantonise is natural," writes Shaftesbury, "when the society grows vast and bulky" (76). People long to feel the "confederating charm"; where they cannot feel it naturally, they find ways to produce the feeling artificially: "Distinctions of many kinds are invented. Religious societies are formed. Orders are erected, and their interests espoused and served with the utmost zeal and passion" (76). Within the confines of such social orders, people feel themselves in the "natural station" Ferguson speaks of. "Wisdom, vigilance, fidelity, and fortitude, are the characters requisite in such a scene, and the qualities which it tends to improve" (362). But in the society at large, or in the field of humanity generally, these distinctions breed conflict. They are responsible for political factions, tribal prejudices, and wars between countries. "'[T]is in war that the knot of fellowship is closest drawn," writes Shaftesbury (76). "In territories of considerable ex-content ... the national union, in rude ages, is extremely imperfect. Every district forms a separate party; ... their feuds and animosities give more frequently the appearance of so many nations at war, than of a people united by connections of policy" (Ferguson 364). David Hume observes that the very impulse to be sociable tends to throw people back upon their private interests in a large society, and a general selfishness takes over: since things which are contiguous to them impress them most strongly, they neglect their political interests in an extended society, and concern themselves exclusively with their private circle of friends and business associates.

This line of thought, by linking moral sentiment to a particular social circumstance—that is, the limited circle of personal affection and acquaintance—tends to drain that sentiment of its authority as an ordering principle. Its value comes to seem equivocal. Man-deville explains this consequence in a notoriously robust form. For him, the two spheres of experience here—the private and the public—exist in sharp contrast, and as such they force us to doubt the general application of moral precepts. Vice produces personal misery; but since it is essential to the growth of society as a whole, its wickedness is only relative to one's perspective. One is bound to hate vice, especially if one is victimized by it, but Mandeville urges that one might learn, at any rate, "more patiently to submit to those Inconveniencies, which no Government upon Earth can remedy" (55) as long as one considers the benefits that vice brings to society at large: that is, one should suppress moral judgments in favor of social and economic aims. Mandeville compares this conflict of perspectives to the experience of walking in the London streets: people wish the streets were cleaner "whilst they regard nothing but their own Cloaths and private Conveniency; but when once they consider, that what offends them is the result of the Plenty, great Traffick and Opulency of that mighty City, if they have any Concern in its Welfare, they will hardly ever wish to see the Streets of it less dirty" (57). This contrast of perspectives does not absolutely dispel the authority of moral concerns; but it means that moral philosophy cannot hope to generalize its maxims.

Intellectual historians find in sentimentalist social theory as well a drift toward an institutionally and economically defined conception of social order, and away from one based on moral precepts. Though eighteenth-century social philosophers reject Mandeville's idea that social prosperity requires and depends upon private vice, they nevertheless tend to affirm his view that, in the analysis of large masses of people, it is relevant only in a roundabout way, if at all, to invoke the precepts of traditional moral wisdom. Ferguson claims, in a Mandevillean moment, that the internal feuds of a nation are beneficial because the participants "acquire a spirit ... in their private divisions, and in the midst of a disorder, otherwise hurtful, of which the force, on many occasions, redounds to the power of the state" (364). More generally, society runs on the united strength of a vast array of businesses and institutions which work out their proper relations among themselves without the guidance of any governing...