Gabriel Bonnot de Mably
Encyclopedia
Grenoble
Grenoble is a city in southeastern France, at the foot of the French Alps where the river Drac joins the Isère. Located in the Rhône-Alpes region, Grenoble is the capital of the department of Isère...
, 14 March 1709 – 2 April 1785 in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
), sometimes known as Abbé de Mably, was a French
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
philosopher and politician
Politician
A politician, political leader, or political figure is an individual who is involved in influencing public policy and decision making...
. He was born in Grenoble
Grenoble
Grenoble is a city in southeastern France, at the foot of the French Alps where the river Drac joins the Isère. Located in the Rhône-Alpes region, Grenoble is the capital of the department of Isère...
of a legal family, and, like his younger brother, the well-known philosopher, Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac was a French philosopher and epistemologist who studied in such areas as psychology and the philosophy of the mind.-Biography:...
(30 September 1715 – 3 August 1780), took holy orders. He was a popular 18th century writer.
Biography
Mably was born to a noble family. His education included a Jesuit college, and early on he pursued an ecclesiastical career, enrolling in a seminarySeminary
A seminary, theological college, or divinity school is an institution of secondary or post-secondary education for educating students in theology, generally to prepare them for ordination as clergy or for other ministry...
. He abandoned that path to enter the diplomatic corps
Diplomatic corps
The diplomatic corps or corps diplomatique is the collective body of foreign diplomats accredited to a particular country or body.The diplomatic corps may, in certain contexts, refer to the collection of accredited heads of mission who represent their countries in another state or country...
in 1742. His diplomatic career was a short one, ending in 1746. Afterwards, he focused on scholarly pursuits, for which he became the most known.
Writings
His most known contribution is Entretiens de Phocion, a dialogueDialogue
Dialogue is a literary and theatrical form consisting of a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more people....
first published in 1763, which introduced themes of his mature thought. However, there are two works published posthumously which subsequently were to have a profound effect on the early deliberations on the assembly of the Estates-General in 1789 - an enlarged version of an earlier work (1765) 'Histoire de France' and 'Des droits et des devoirs du citoyen', written in 1758 but Mably held back the manuscript from publication and arranged for his executor to have it published after his death. It appeared in May,1789 to great acclaim despite efforts by the authorities to suppress it by confiscating many copies. Unfortunately, the way the Revolution was conducted later led to the very circumstances that Mably warned against in his book.
His works contributed to the later concepts of both communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
and republicanism
Republicanism
Republicanism is the ideology of governing a nation as a republic, where the head of state is appointed by means other than heredity, often elections. The exact meaning of republicanism varies depending on the cultural and historical context...
. He advocated the abolition of private property
Private property
Private property is the right of persons and firms to obtain, own, control, employ, dispose of, and bequeath land, capital, and other forms of property. Private property is distinguishable from public property, which refers to assets owned by a state, community or government rather than by...
, which he saw as incompatible with sympathy and altruism, and conductive only to one's antisocial or egotistical instincts. Mably's writings contain a paradox
Paradox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...
: he praises elitist Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
, but also the enlightened Stoic
STOIC
STOIC was a variant of Forth.It started out at the MIT and Harvard Biomedical Engineering Centre in Boston, and was written in the mid 1970s by Jonathan Sachs...
views on natural human equality
Social equality
Social equality is a social state of affairs in which all people within a specific society or isolated group have the same status in a certain respect. At the very least, social equality includes equal rights under the law, such as security, voting rights, freedom of speech and assembly, and the...
. Mably went even further than the traditional Stoic argument about all men possessing a divine spark
Divine Spark
The idea, most common to Gnosticism but also present in most Western Mystical Traditions such as Kabbalah and Sufism that all of mankind contains within itself the Divine Spark of God which is contained or imprisoned in the body....
, as well as progressed beyond the liberal belief in equality before the law
Equality before the law
Equality before the law or equality under the law or legal egalitarianism is the principle under which each individual is subject to the same laws....
, arguing for the equality of needs. His argument that virtue
Virtue
Virtue is moral excellence. A virtue is a positive trait or quality subjectively deemed to be morally excellent and thus is valued as a foundation of principle and good moral being....
was above the material wealth
Wealth
Wealth is the abundance of valuable resources or material possessions. The word wealth is derived from the old English wela, which is from an Indo-European word stem...
, criticizing idleness, found rapport with those critical of the inherited wealth and privilege of unworking nobility
Nobility
Nobility is a social class which possesses more acknowledged privileges or eminence than members of most other classes in a society, membership therein typically being hereditary. The privileges associated with nobility may constitute substantial advantages over or relative to non-nobles, or may be...
.
Mably's complete works were published in 15 volumes in 1794-1795, with an obituary/biography by Gabriel Brizard
Gabriel Brizard
Gabriel Brizard often known as Abbé Brizard, and sometimes by the pen-name Gallophile , was a writer and historian whose work was popular and respected in the 18th century. He was a lawyer at the Parliament of Paris...
.
List of 18 published works by Gabriel Bonnot de Mably
(1709 - 1785)
Posthumous publications of individual works - 1786 until 1794
Posthumous Complete works to 1795
Recent Translations in English by Simon de Vries
- Concerning the Rights & Duties of the Citizen - Comtal Publications, 2008 - ISBN 0955797403
- Letters to Madame the Marchioness of P **** on the Opera - Comtal Publications, 2010 - ISBN 9780955797415
Further reading
- Johnson Kent Wright, A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Thought of Mably (Stanford University Press, 1997).
- V. I. GuerrierVladimir GuerrierVladimir Ivanovich Guerrier was a Russian historian, professor of history at Moscow State University from 1868 to 1904. As the founder of the "Courses Guerrier", he was a leading instigator of higher education for women in Russia....
, L'Abbé de Mably, moraliste et politique (Paris: 1886) - Mably's work is catalogued at the French National Library
- Charles Philippe Dijon de Monteton, Der lange Schatten des Abbé Bonnot de Mably. Divergenzen und Analogien seines Denkens in der Politischen Theorie des Grafen Sieyès, in: Thiele, U. (ed.): Volkssouveränität und Freiheitsrechte. Emmanuel Joseph Sieyes' Staatsverständnis, Nomos, Baden-Baden, 2009, S. 43-110