the right to live a happy life, followed by some instructions of how to achieve happiness and arguments about the importance of love. The text ends in what can be read as a reflection on her relationship with Voltaire.
Du Châtelet’s major work, however, was the translation of Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), or the Principia in short, into French. As this work contained complex mathematical arguments, no French translation had yet become available. Where others tried and failed, du Châtelet completed the work, while pregnant with her second daughter. Zinsser (2006) recounts the pressure du Châtelet was under to finish it in time. Time was limited, since du Châtelet, informed by her doctor, knew for a while that there was little chance that she would survive having a second child. She completed the work just days before dying in childbirth in 1749. Her contribution to the Enlightenment and to a new bourgeois perception of morality that would come to be part of the foundation of political economy remained, was lost sometime in the nineteenth century, only to be recovered in the twenty-first century.
The debate on a secular ethics, or the new morality of commercial society, also took place on the other side of the Channel. In Scotland, an important center of the Enlightenment movement, David Hume (1711–76) published A Treatise of Human Nature (1739). He was known as an atheist, which prevented him from ever holding an academic position (Carlyle, 1973). Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Adam Smith’s predecessor at the University of Glasgow, stressed the tendency in human beings to engage in benevolent actions. The second part of his An Inquiry into the Original of our Idea of Beauty and Virtue (2004 [1726]) addressed “the moral good and evil” and described benevolence as a driving motive in human behavior. These discussions were all part of the larger debate on “the nature of man” that evolved around David Hume at the time. Although they did not have access to academic institutions, women writers made substantial contributions to these debates anyway. Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800), for example, critiqued and compared Shakespeare’s and Voltaire’s works and the morals ingrained in them, deciding – of course – in favor of Shakespeare. So, who was this Elizabeth Montagu?
Elizabeth Robinson was born into a gentry family in Yorkshire in 1718 and was the older sister of Sarah Robinson Scott, author of A Description of Millennium Hall (1762). Elizabeth was a smart, spirited young woman who obtained most of her education from her grandfather, a librarian at the University of Cambridge (Kuiper and Robles-García, 2012). In her early twenties, she married money: the 54-year-old landowner and scholar Edward Montagu, owner of several coalmines and large estates. Elizabeth Montagu would become a well-known member of London society. Until a few decades ago, we only knew her as the Queen of the Bluestockings. The Bluestocking Society was a group of women and a few men who gathered over dinner to discuss culture, politics, and their writings. After the death of her husband in 1776, Elizabeth took over the management of the coalmines and estates, which she ran successfully for the rest of her life; indeed, so successfully that, at her death, she was the richest woman in England.
Elizabeth Montagu wrote a few essays that brought her literary and academic recognition; her main work was an Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear, published in 1769. Her arguments go back to Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher (and yes, the same philosopher who influenced Émilie du Châtelet), who was also popular in cultured circles in London at the time. Montagu is merciless in her criticism of Voltaire, French’s most famous and respected philosopher and playwright. According to Montagu (1769), his “translations often, and … criticism still oftener, prove he did not perfectly understand the Words of the Author; and therefore, it is certain he could not enter into its Meaning.” She counterpointed Shakespeare’s historical approach to drama, the wide range of characters that figure in his plays, and his use of language, to the French theatric tradition in which, according to Montagu, the characters used eloquent but often pompous rhetoric and the historical accounts tended to be romanticized. Her daring essay caused a diplomatic row between England and France. It also brought her an invitation from the Académie Française to attend one of their meetings (on the balcony – as a woman she did not have full access) during which her essay was read out (Kuiper and Robles-García, 2012).
Montagu stressed particularly Shakespeare’s extraordinary ability to let the audience sympathize with his main characters, rich or poor. She did this against a background in which sympathy was a widely discussed concept and the authority on the topic was Adam Smith. The two had met on a trip to Scotland in 1766 and both had pleasant memories of their conversations, but they did not keep in contact.
At that point in time, Smith had already completed his work on morality, the result of his years of teaching moral philosophy to the students (all male) at Glasgow University. It was his perception of moral behavior that precedes in terms of both time and argument his Wealth of Nations (1976 [1776]). In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1984 [1759]), Smith describes and reconstructs the process through which individual middle-class men and boys develop self-consciousness and begin to achieve independent moral standing, and thus obtain the right to moral judgment and decision-making. Smith conceptualizes this process as an internal and rational process in which sympathy, or the ability to place oneself in another person’s shoes, plays a crucial part, as does “the impartial spectator,” the imaginary independent bystander through whose eyes one can reflect on one’s own behavior. Smith saw sympathy as the means for the individual to obtain insight into his own passions and to understand the behavior of other humans, or not – in the latter case passing a negative judgment. To make a well-based judgment, the individual would need to fully identify with the impartial spectator. In the absence of God and the Bible, the individual had to imagine how an impartial spectator would look at any given situation and then take that judgment into account when assessing his own behavior and that of the other in the situation, and thus be guided in deciding what to do. By identifying fully with the impartial spectator, the individual could also obtain a strong sense of self-command and suppress his personal passions, particularly his fears and anger. Women do not play a role in this treatise on moral behavior and only incidentally figure as foil for Smith’s arguments on the development of the moral behavior of men.
In articulating his moral philosophy, Smith applied and defined a specific conceptualization of masculinity. Both Stewart Justman (1993) and I (Kuiper, 2003) have analyzed Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments as a gendered text, a text that is structured by a specific definition of masculinity and femininity. Justman sees Smith’s reasoning as an attempt to retain male autonomy in the context of the emerging commercial society, which was generally perceived as feminine. Applying a psychological framework, I describe Smith’s reasoning throughout his book as a way to construct a masculine identity by identification with an imaginary father. For Smith, who never met his father since he died a few months before his son was born, it is the identification with the impartial spectator that provides a man with the moral authority to make decisions: “The man of real constancy and firmness, the wise and just man who has been thoroughly bred in the great school of self-command … He does not merely affect the sentiments of the impartial spectator. He really adopts them. He almost identifies himself with, he almost becomes himself that impartial spectator, and scarce even feels but as that great arbiter of his conduct directs him to feel” (1984 [1759]: 146–7)
Although Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments is an impressive account of the process through which men develop a conscience, the perception of this process is limited to modern standards, and women play hardly any role in the book. It is, nevertheless, Smith’s understanding of human nature and his perception of masculinity or “manhood” that would become ingrained in political economy as the moral basis for economic decision-making – or rational choice, which is how individual economic behavior came to be defined. In the context of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, women were neither considered rational nor legally able to make contracts (see, e.g., Folbre, 2009).
Smith’s book found its way across the Channel where it was widely read in intellectual circles in France. A leading salonnière in Paris, Sophie de Grouchy de Condorcet (1764–1822), translated the treatise into French, and this became the standard French translation for the next two centuries.
