Essais de politique (review)

Georges Lamoine's edition of the political writings of the early eighteenth-century Scottish Jacobite Andrew Michael Ramsay contains the two original versions of what, in English, was published in 1722 as an Essay on Civil Government: wherein is set forth the necessity, origin, rights, boundaries and different forms of sovereignty, with observations on the ancient government of Rome and England. According to the principles of the late Archbishop of Cambrai. The two earlier French texts, published in 1719 and 1721, differ slightly both from one another and from the later English translation, and Lamoine's new edition—the first to present both French versions in accessible form—makes it easier to consider the significance of these differences. The earlier of the two French texts, published under the short title Essai de politique, has sixteen chapters and is divided into two parts, while the later version, entitled Essai philosophique sur le gouvernement civil, contains eighteen chapters and has no internal divisions. There were also significant differences in the titles, arrangement, and content of the chapters. As Lamoine shows in his introduction to this edition, much of the purpose of these changes was to clarify Ramsay's claim about compatibility between the content of his book and the 'principles' of the archbishop of Cambrai, François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon. Here, the difficulty of ascertaining which of Fénelon's various principles could be taken to be fundamental—as between, for example, his interest in agricultural prosperity or his concern with the theology and anthropology of 'pure love'—was reinforced by the further problem of reconciling absolute sovereignty with moderate government in a way that could be taken to correspond to the message of Fénelon's Telemachus. Almost all of Ramsay's major publications could be said to have engaged with these questions, from the Essai de politique to the Travels of Cyrus to his final, posthumously published Philosophical principles of natural and revealed religion. Thanks to Georges Lamoine all these works are now available in accessible modern editions, and it may now be possible to develop a fuller and clearer picture of the strange ideas of this unusual historical figure.