 Welcome to George H. Smith's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. The Political Theory of Jean Messliet In his lengthy article, Jean Messliet and the Gentle Inclination of Nature, the French philosopher Michel-Enfrais characterized Messliet as atheist, de-Christianizer, anarchist, communist, materialist, internationalist, revolutionary, and leftist. That is quite a bundle of labels. And given Enfrais' widely acknowledged expertise on Messliet, it is risky to challenge his judgments about the atheist priest. But Enfrais himself a left anarchist, and in my judgment, he occasionally succumbs to the natural tendency to find heroic precursors to his own views, even when that involves reading more into a text than is actually there. Enfrais is aware of this tendency, as is evident from his observation. In 1919, the Bolsheviks engrave his name on an obelisk in Moscow. Messliet becomes a precursor enrolled in the Soviet adventure. In his classic study, The Great Anarchist's Ideas and Teachings of Seven Major Thinkers, Paul Elzbacher divided anarchism into two basic types, communist and individualist anarchism. As Elzbacher, an individualist anarchist in the School of Benjamin Tucker noted, anarchist teachings have in common only this, that they negate the state for our future. Now, since Michel Enfrais dubbed Messliet a communist and an anarchist, we should begin with the question of whether Messliet wasn't anarchist at all. Although Messliet vehemently criticized the French monarchy and other governments of his day, condemning them as engines of despotism and ruthless exploiters of the poor, it does not follow that he endorsed the anarchist teaching that all governments are necessarily unjust and should be abolished. Of course, our opinion about this issue will depend on how we define government and state. So was Messliet an anarchist? I find nothing in his testament to support the claim that he was. On the contrary, Messliet repeatedly affirmed the need for just governments that pursue the common good, rather than the private good of privileged groups. He believed, for example, that all well-ruled republics need experts to teach virtue and to instruct men in good manners as well as the arts and sciences. If anything, this and similar remarks indicate that Messliet wished to assign to his ideal government powers that modern libertarians would reject, especially in the field of education. Children should all be raised, nourished, and supported in common with public and common goods. Similarly, they should be equally well-educated in good manners and honesty as well as in the arts and sciences, as much as necessary and suitable for each with respect to usefulness for the public and the need that it could have of their service. By educating all children in the same principles of morality and rules of propriety and honesty, it would be easy to make them all wise and honest, to make them all work together and tend to the same good and make them all capable of usefully serving their country. This would certainly be advantageous for the public good and human society. In contrast, educational diversity inspires in men only opposition and different temperaments, opinions, and sentiments, which makes them unable to tolerate one another peaceably and, consequently, to agree with others unanimously about the same good, which is a cause of continual troubles and divisions among them. Although these passages do not explicitly call for the state to provide an education that is at once universal and uniform, a secular state system is almost certainly what Messliet had in mind. The same proposal would later become standard fare among French philosophies and free thinkers, and this widespread call for state education was one of the most anti-libertarian aspects of Enlightenment thought. No self-respecting anarchist would agree with the proposal to place education in the hands of the state, nor would most anarchists agree with Messliet that education should be the same for all children. In the view of William Godwin, Benjamin Tucker, and other prominent anarchists, entrusting the state with the job of teaching values to children is like entrusting the fox to guard the hen house. As Godwin put it in Inquiry Concerning Political Justice, Third Edition, 1797, government will not fail to employ education to strengthen its hands and perpetuate its institutions. Elsewhere in the testament, Messliet clearly expressed his belief that an orderly society requires some measure of political authority. All men are equal by nature. They all hold equally the right to live and to walk upon the earth, the right to enjoy their natural liberty and to share in the goods of the land with everyone working usefully to have the things that are necessary and useful in life. But since they live in society and since a society or community of men cannot be ruled well or sustained in good order without some kind of dependence and subordination between them, it is absolutely for the good of human society that there be some kind of dependence and subordination among them. That is the language of a defender of government, not the language of an anarchist. Messliet demanded only that a government be just and well proportioned, i.e. that it should not exalt some and debase others, flatter some and trample others, give to some and leave nothing for others. Similar statements recur throughout the testament, so Hal-Michel-Enfray reached the conclusion that Messliet was an anarchist remains a puzzle to me. Let us now turn to the question of whether Messliet, if not an anarchist, was a communist of some kind. Before proceeding however, I should point out that the testament written over a period of ten years while Messliet was in his fifties is disorganized and repetitive and it sometimes substitutes over the top polemicism for reasoned arguments. Messliet apologized for some of these flaws explaining that he wrote the testament in bits and pieces when he could find free time from his priestly duties. In some respects, therefore, the testament resembles an intellectual journal more than a polish manuscript. As a result, even careful readers are bound to feel frustrated when attempting to understand Messliet's position on some important controversies. We should keep this difficulty in mind while exploring the issue of whether communism is an appropriate label for Messliet's ideas about property. Communism is a highly charged label, one brimming with negative connotations, but if we strip the term down to bare essentials and use it to signify only the doctrine that all, or most goods, should be the common property of society rather than individually owned, then there may be some justification in dubbing Messliet a communist. I say there may be some justification because Messliet was unclear about some key features of his political philosophy. In the final analysis, I think it would be incorrect to identify Messliet's ideas about property as communistic. Consider Messliet's comments about the French nobility in chapter 43 of the testament. Messliet asserted that the first nobles were bloody and cruel people, thieves and parasites, who acquired and sustained their privileged status by brute force. Thus, instead of glorifying the nobility, the French people should rather be ashamed of such a criminal and hateful birth and source, and the people should only have hatred and aversion for them. The class system in France clearly puts all of the authority, all the goods, pleasures, satisfactions, wealth, and even the idleness on the side of the rulers, the rich and the nobles, and puts on the side of the poor everything that is painful and distressing. Note that Messliet condemns the rich, along with rulers and nobles, as exploiters of the poor. How should this inclusion be understood? Should we interpret Messliet to mean that wealth, per se, can only be acquired at the expense of the poor? Modern socialists and communists would probably favor that economic interpretation, since it would corroborate their own belief in economic exploitation and class struggle. More plausible, in my judgment, would be to understand Messliet as condemning only those people who acquired their wealth by the political means of state coercion. My interpretation, if correct, would mean that Messliet did not object to wealth obtained through voluntary market transactions. Rather, his targets were those state functionaries who became rich by plundering the public via taxes and ties, along with those merchants and manufacturers who benefited from state-granted monopolies and other privileges. The rich are mentioned again in this passage from the same paragraph. The disproportion is all the more unjust and detestable for the people since it makes them entirely dependent on the nobles and the rich, and it makes them, so to speak, their slaves to the point of making them suffer not only their put-down scorn and abuse, but also their persecution, injustice, and mistreatment. Again, we must ask, what did Messliet mean by the rich? In the course of explaining his position, Messliet quoted the following passage from another writer, the anonymous author of a book titled Letters Written by a Turkish Spy. There is nothing so vile and so abject, nothing so poor and despicable as the peasantry of France. Moreover, they work only for the rulers and the nobles, and with all their work they still have great trouble to earn enough bread for themselves. In a word, the peasants are absolutely the slaves of the rulers and nobles, whose lands they give value to and from whom they rent their farms. They are no less oppressed by the public taxes and the salt taxes than by the individual burdens that their masters impose on them, without even considering what the clergy unjustly demand of these poor unfortunates. Here, the exploiting class is expressly identified as those who make money from the coercive mechanism of government. Thus, given Messliet's scathing taxes, it is reasonable to conclude that his condemnation of the rich pertains specifically to those members of the ruling class who acquired their wealth through taxes, ties, and other governmental revenues coercively extracted from the ruled. But Messliet never explicitly distinguished between the economic and political means of acquiring wealth, so a certain amount of guesswork is required to reach this conclusion. On the other side of the ledger, we have Messliet's criticisms of private property. For example, we see his approval of Blaise Pascal's contention that the usurpation of all lands and the evils that ensued came only from the fact that each individual wanted to appropriate for himself the things that should have been left in common. Likewise, the divine Plato banished from his Utopia the words mine and thine, judging rightly that so long as there was something to divvy up, there would always be dissatisfaction which breeds wars and lawsuits. Elsewhere in the testament, Messliet wrote in brief if all the goods were wisely governed and dispensed, no one would have to fear drought or poverty for themselves or their families since all the goods and riches would exist equally for everyone, which would certainly be the greatest good and happiness that could happen to men. The key question about such passages which recur at various places in the testament is whether Messliet thought that the economic equality he desired should be brought about by voluntary means or whether such equality should be coercively imposed by government. I take up this problem which is essential to determining whether or not Messliet qualified as a communist in any significant sense of the word in the next chapter. Visit www.libertarianism.org