Philosophie et Politique chez Andrew Michael Ramsay, and: Les Voyages de Cyrus avec un Discours sur la Mythologie, and: Les Principes philosophiques de la religion naturelle et révélée dévoilés selon le mode géométrique (review)

The life and works of the chevalier Andrew Michael Ramsay are an unusual way into the political and intellectual pre-occupations of early eighteenth-century Europe. He was, it could be said, Scotland’s Vico, even if his own blend of scriptural history and conjectural history did not quite match the Neapolitan’s imaginative and analytical flair. Ramsay was a Jacobite who, from his arrival in 1709 until his death in 1743, lived most of his adult life in France. There, he became an admirer and disciple of François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai until his death in 1715 and, along with Bossuet and Malebranche, one of the triad of great political theologians of the last years of the reign of Louis XIV. Later, Ramsay became a member of the famous Entresol club and, later still, played a leading part in a grandiose but failed attempt to turn freemasonry into something like the official ideology of a reformed French monarchy. His first published work, a Philosophical Essay on Civil Government, appeared in 1721. It was followed in 1723 by Fénelon’s authorized biography, and, in 1727 (in both English and French), by one of the early eighteenth century’s most wide-ranging discussions of moral and political reform, The Travels of Cyrus, a work modelled explicitly on Fénelon’s own, even more successful, Adventures of Young Telemachus, whose full, posthumous version, had been edited by Ramsay himself.

Throughout this period, Ramsay was working intermittently on his most ambitious work, The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion (‘the great work’ as, not entirely ironically, he called it), but died before it was completed. It was published, with the assistance of the Scottish moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson, five years after Ramsay’s death. The ‘great work’, with its very literal interpretation of God’s general will to save everyone, soon acquired a significant following, particularly in North America. The scale and scope of Ramsay’s intellectual legacy have yet to be fully explored, but the range and content of his thought are now available for inspection both in the two new editions of The Travels of Cyrus and the Philosophical Principles by Georges Lamoine (who, in doing so, has also translated ‘the great work’ into French for the first time) and in the major new monograph by Marialuisa Baldi. Anyone wanting to get the measure of the various types of challenge to received moral and political ideas made not only by Hobbes, Spinoza and Bayle, but also by Cum-berland, Cudworth, Newton, Locke, Malebranche, Fontenelle and Fénelon, would do well to read it because, for all his intellectual idiosyncrasies, Ramsay was both a remarkably widely read and, at times, quite an acute critic of almost all the major thinkers of the early eighteenth century. As Baldi shows, his attempts to come to terms with the assorted implications of their work relied on something like the same type of conjectural history as Vico was to use, but with a more conventional focus on the moral and intellectual resources that had been available to the very first humans before the Fall and, in keeping with the same scriptural idiom, before the bifurcation of human history into the different trajectories followed by the Jews and the Gentiles. Here, Ramsay’s historical speculations echoed those of another of his intellectual mentors, the Originest Protestant theologian Pierre Poiret, with a stronger emphasis on the...