FOUR SHORT LINKS
"Peuples, ne permettez donc pas à vos prétendus maîtres de faire, même le bien, contre votre volonté générale" — Deleyre

AM | @HDI1780

[1] Helvétius. Felicito desde aquí a José-Manuel Bermudo por la primera traducción de De l'esprit al castellano. El profesor Bermudo es un incansable divulgador de los ilustrados radicales. Los lectores de este blog tal vez recuerdan que desde aquí notamos la gran influencia de Helvétius sobre algunos puntos importantes de la Histoire des deux Indes, en particular en lo relativo al liderazgo político (1, 2, 3). Queda mucho trabajo por hacer sobre este punto. Afortundamente, ahora tenemos una herramienta más.

(*) Claude-Adrien Helvétius. Del espíritu [1758]. Barcelona: Editorial Laetoli, 2013. Traducción de José-Manuel Bermudo. [web].
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[2] Ferguson. There is a new intellectual biography of Adam Ferguson, by Ian McDaniel (*). In his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), Ferguson rejects the idea of trade humanism that is so forcefully expressed in the first two editions of Histoire des deux Indes. From the editors: "Democratic forces, intended as a means of liberation from tyranny, could all too easily become the engine of political oppression—a fear that proved prescient when the French Revolution spawned the expansionist wars of Napoleon". Did Raynal and/or Diderot read Ferguson as they toned down their optimism about trade in the 1780 edition of HDI?

(*) Ian McDaniel. Adam Ferguson in the Scottish Enlightenment. Harvard, 2013. [web][Jeffrey Collins: "A Skeptical Modern", Wall Street Journal, 25 March 2013].
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[3] Hegel. "Hegel remained a 'Raynalist' throughout his life", writes Susan Buck-Moors in her widely debated 2009 book on Hegel and Haiti (*). But it was Denis Diderot who penned the chapters in Book XI of Histoire des deux Indes that caused such a deep impression on the young Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Ms Buck-Moors also notes that Hegel "was fascinated, perhaps terrified" by Adam Smith's account of pin making in Wealth of Nations (p. 5). Here again we see the influence of the co-authors of HDI: it was Alexandre Deleyre's article EPINGLE in Encyclopédie that inspired the Scottish economist.

(*) Susan Buck-Moors. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.
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[4] Struensee. I have just discovered this essay on Johann Friedrich Struensee's rise and fall (*). The author, Jonathan Israel, notes that "The removal of such restrictions [press freedom] was also the goal in the early 1770s of Diderot and of such writers as Naigeon, Raynal, Deleyre and others of their circle". This is a fascinating episode indeed. While I am all in favor of Struensee's ideas, it is perhaps worth reflecting about the manner in which he introduced them — decrees. One can guess from the lack of enthusiasm displayed by Diderot —who fails to mention Struensee in his revision of Deleyre's Tableau de l'Europe—, that he had little taste for such "gouvernement arbitraire" (see HDI 1780, xix.2, p. 41).

(*) Jonathan Israel: "Libertas Philosophandi in the Eigthteenth Century: Radical Enlightenment versus Moderate Enlightenment (1750-1776)", in Elizabeth Powers (ed.) Freedom of Speech.The History of An Idea. Bucknell University Press, 2011, pp. 1-19.
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