The Prophets of Paris (review)

270 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The Prophets of Paris. By Frank E. Manuel. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.) This perceptive and sophisticated contribution to the history of ideas is organized around the intellectual biographies of Turgot, Condorcet, Saint-Simon, the Saint-Simoniarts , Charles Fourier, and Auguste Comte. Professor Manuel's prophets were all Frenchmen and all, he believes, can be placed in a common tradition marked by their conviction that Paris was the mount from which the new gospel had to be delivered, that love was the key to social organization, and that social and religious relationships were more significant than political forms. He presents them as prophets in the Old Testament sense--as unsparing moral critics, teachers and the "revealers of a divine historical design." They were philosophers of an age of crisis, convinced that theirs was the instant of a great human divide and therefore victims "of the anguish of futurity." The future they so confidently foretold to anyone who cared to listen, and to many who did not, has found many of their prophetic visions to be poor predictions, but for Manuel they cannot be dismissed as utopian cranks or frustrated totalitarians. Many of the issues they raised and problems they sensed have yet to be adequately confronted, and it is this prescience, particularly with regard to the psychological conditions of social existence, that Manuel wishes to emphasize. This treatment, as its author admits, is a "frank attempt at rehabilitation, to right the balance of historical judgement and bestow new worth upon thinkers who have often been treated with superficiality" (pp. 1-10). Manuel's approach to the history of ideas lends itself quite effectively to this purpose. He admits to a "romantic view of history-writing" which entails an effort to establish an intimacy with his subjects through an immersion in their manuscripts, in the "scribbled brouillons, the casual notes, the personal letters," as well as in the identity presented through their published works. His writing of history is romantic not only in this regard but much more profoundly in his historicism, which attempts an immediate empathetic confrontation with the total organic complex of his subject's life, ideas, and environment. Manuel's evident sympathy occasionally tempts him into apologetics, but essentially he is not arguing a brief for the defense but trying to understand what it was that made these men see so far, and yet with such myopic arrogance, and what it was they saw. It seemed to me that his approach is most successful with Fourier, and least so with Turgot. Charles Fourier, the self-taught travelling salesman from Besan~on, is often summarily dismissed as a cosmic crank with easy reference to his fantastic aberrations --his seas of lemonade and the copulation of the planets. Manuel helps us to understand not only the aberrations but the prescient insights by establishing the relationship between Fourier's personality and his ideas, as well as by tracing the connections between apparently contradictory conceptions. He does not misuse this technique of intellectual biography by patronizing or justifying a system of thought with reference to its psychological antecedents, but rather helps to illuminate a philosophy by examining the reasons for its expression. This works particularly well with Fourier, an obsessed and deprived personality, whose great contribution, according to Manuel, was the assimilation into a social doctrine of the fundamental needs and drives of mankind--its "manifold wants, its secret desires, and its obstinate fixations" (p. 203). Both Fourier and the SaintSimonians believe that it was pointless to tinker with the social environment without regard for permanent psychological realities, but the latter hoped to sublimate human passions through a social organization that redefined them, while Fourier wanted a social system that would provide for their total gratification (p. 226). Occasionally Manuel rather triumphantly unearths striking parallels with our present BOOK REVIEWS 271 concerns that do not demonstrate the vision of his seers into the future so much as his discovery of analogues in the past. Fourier's case is not particularly strengthened by the observation that his vision of a climate so benign under the regime of phalansteries as to render tire very poles inhabitable is "no longer as...