Bringing Together the Essay and the Second Treatise: d’Holbach Interpreter of Locke

Résumé

The present article focuses on eighteenth-century French radical and atheist philosopher Paul-Thiry d’Holbach to gauge the extent to which his political ideas may be informed by Locke’s Second Treatise. While rejecting the Rousseauian notion of a state of nature intended as a historicalperiod when human beings lived outside society, d’Holbach inherits from Locke the idea that particular polities are the result of a tacit,constantly renewed social contract. As the products of a covenant, governments must pursue the preservation and best interests of the‘community’ or ‘Nation’, as Locke and d’Holbach would respectively call it, prolonged failure to do so necessarily resulting in their loss oflegitimacy and ultimately paving the way to revolution. Naturally wary of Locke’s decision to ground the legitimacy of an authority (andtherefore a community’s right to rebel against it) on its exactitude in enacting a ‘Law of Nature’ based, in turn, on God’s will,d’Holbachreplaces this ‘Law of Nature’ with what he terms amour éclairé de soi. For d’Holbach, a person’s realisation that their individual well-being is inextricably connected to that of others depends on their more or less intuitive understanding that an action is good in so far as it promotes happiness or pleasure and wrong when it  bringsabout unhappiness or pain (Principle of Utility). While d’Holbach’s replacementof the ‘Law of Nature’ with the secular notion of amour éclairé de soi may seem toundermine Locke’s philosophy at its very core, the reality is that the two principlesare extremely close and fundamentally interchangeable. Locke’s political philosophy,d’Holbach seems to wish his most perceptive readers would realise, can easily be turnedinto a perfectly consistent secular theory. He thus (artificially) brings together Locke’sepistemology and more radical political ideas, and successfully overcomes a wellknown aporia within the British empiricist’s philosophical corpus, one that has beeninvestigated