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<meta name="KeyWords" content="Epicurean,De Rerum Natura,Lucretius,Letter to Menoeceus,Epicurus,Plato, Aristotle,Human Action,Epicureanism,Ludwig von Mises,philosophy">
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<td width="500" align="center"><a href="http://www.quebecoislibre.org"> <img border="0" src="http://www.quebecoislibre.org/titreql.gif" width="370" height="75"></a></td>
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<td bgcolor="#EAFFEA" style="border-left: 1px solid #99CC99; border-right: 1px solid #99CC99; border-top: 1px solid #99CC99" width="190" align="center"> <p class="texte8">Montreal, April 15, 2005 • <a href="http://www.quebecoislibre.org/05/050415-1.htm">No 153</a></p></td>
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<td width="460" align="center"> <p class="text10">SPEECH</p></td>
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<td style="border: 2px solid #FFFFFF" align="center"> <p class="texte8"> <a href="http://www.quebecoislibre.org/apmasse.htm">Martin Masse</a><br> is publisher of <i>QL</i>.</p></td>
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<td width="100%" align="center"> <p class="texte14">THE EPICUREAN ROOTS OF SOME CLASSICAL LIBERAL AND MISESIAN CONCEPTS</p></td>
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<td width="100%" align="right"> <p class="texte10v">by Martin Masse </p></td>
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<td width="100%"> <p class="text10"> <i><font color="#000066" face="Arial,Helvetica"><font size="-1">This presentation was delivered at the <a target="_blank" href="http://www.mises.org/upcomingstory.asp?control=67">Austrian Scholars Conference</a> organized by the Ludwig von Mises Institute on March 18, 2005, in Auburn, Alabama. </font></font></i> </p></td>
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<td> <p class="text10"> On <a href="http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap8sec2.asp">page 147</a> of <i>Human Action</i>, Ludwig von Mises writes:<br> <br> <i>The historical role of the theory of the division of labor as elaborated by British political economy from Hume to Ricardo consisted in the complete demolition of all metaphysical doctrines concerning the origin and the operation of social cooperation. It consummated the spiritual, moral and intellectual emancipation of mankind inaugurated by the philosophy of Epicureanism</i>.</p><p class="text10"> This is a rather strong statement. Epicureanism, says Mises, inaugurated the spiritual, moral and intellectual emancipation of mankind. There are several other passages in his books where he mentions this philosophy in a very favourable light, but without ever explaining in details why. And although a lot of attention has been devoted to the influence of Aristotle, Aquinas, the Scholastics, the French liberals and others on Austrian ideas, as far as I know, nobody has ever paid attention to Epicurus. <br> <br> Now, why would Mises make such a claim in relation to a philosophy that has been so reviled for 2000 years? Stacks of new books devoted to Plato, Aristotle and other philosophers of Antiquity appear every year. But if you go to a university library, you will usually find a shelf or two containing books on Epicureanism, and that's for all those that were published in the past hundred years. <br> <br> Epicureanism has been largely forgotten. And when it is mentioned, it is usually the distorted view that has been propagated since Antiquity that is being repeated. Epicureanism is said to be the philosophy of "Eat, drink and be merry because tomorrow you die." An "Epicure" is a depraved and irresponsible individual only concerned with bodily pleasures. In Austrian terms, we would say he has very high time preference. <br> <br> I even read in an <a target="_blank" href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/yates/yates87.html">article</a> posted on <i>LewRockwell.com</i> that the unbridled hedonism of the Epicureans played an important role in the transformation of ancient Rome from a republic to an empire. There is not a shred of historical evidence that they had that kind of influence, and Epicureans were not a licentious lot anyway. On the contrary, their goal was tranquility of mind. For them, it is true, all pleasures were good, including those of the body. But they tried to attain happiness by planning their lives in the long term in the most rational way possible. <br> <br> Epicurus' ethics can be summed up by this sentence from his <a target="_blank" href="http://www.epicurus.net/en/menoeceus.html">Letter to Menoeceus</a>: "For it is not drinking bouts and continuous partying and enjoying boys and women, or consuming fish and the other dainties of an extravagant table, which produce the pleasant life, but sober calculation which searches out the reasons for every choice and avoidance and drives out the opinions which are the source of the greatest turmoil for men's souls." <br> <br> Let me briefly give you some general information. Epicurus was born in 341 B.C., only six years after Plato's death. He was 18 when Alexander the Great died. This event conventionally separates the classical Greece of independent city-states from the Hellenistic period, when Alexander's generals and their dynasties ruled vast kingdoms in the former Persian Empire. He set up his school in a Garden in the outskirt of Athens. There is very little that survived from his many books. But fortunately, the work of his Roman disciple Lucretius, who lived in the
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<td width="570" style="border-left: 1px solid #99CC99; border-top: 1px solid #99CC99; border-bottom: 1px solid #99CC99"> <p class="text12g">« To me, Epicureanism is the closest thing to a libertarian philosophy that you can find in Antiquity. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, were all statists to various degrees. Epicurus focused on the individual search for happiness, counselled not to get involved in politics because of the personal trouble it brings, and thought that politics was irrelevant. »</p></td>
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<td> <p class="text10"><br> In a <a href="http://www.epicurus.info/etexts/Jefferson.html">letter</a> to William Short sent in 1819, Thomas Jefferson writes "I too am an Epicurean. I consider the genuine (not the imputed) doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us." But what's also interesting is that our friends the Marxists also thought Epicurus was a great philosopher. Marx himself did his doctoral dissertation on the differences between the atomism of Epicurus and his forerunner Democritus. <br> <br> Most books on Epicureanism published in France in the 20th century were written by Marxists. (Well, I suppose you could say that of most books published in France on any topics in the 20th century…!) I have a booklet on Lucretius at home published in France in the 1950s in a collection called <i>Les classiques du peuple</i> – The classics of the people. In the Acknowledgement section, the author thanks all the Soviet specialists of Epicureanism and materialism for any original insight that might appear in the book.<br> <br> Marx found in Epicureanism a materialist conception of nature that rejected all teleology and all religious conceptions of natural and social existence. And to get back to Mises, that's also precisely what he liked about it. The section of <i>Human Action</i> in which you find the quote I read at the beginning is called, "A Critique of the Holistic and Metaphysical View of Society." In it, Mises denounces all the nonrationalist, nonutilitarian and nonliberal social doctrines which, he says, "must beget wars and civil wars until one of the adversaries is annihilated or subdued." <br> <br> As most of you probably know, Mises included natural law traditions in these non-scientific doctrines, a crucial point over which Rothbard and many of his followers who are here present disagreed with him. He embraced a utilitarian view instead, for which "Law and legality, the moral code and social institutions are no longer revered as unfathomable decrees of Heaven. They are of human origin, and the only yardstick that must be applied to them is that of expediency with regard to human welfare." <br> <br> Epicurus had reacted against the Platonic concepts of Reason with a capital R, the Good, the Beautiful, Duty, and other absolute concepts existing in themselves in some supernatural world. For Epicurus, what is moral is what brings pleasures to individuals in a context where there is no social strife. The Epicurean wise man will keep the covenant and not harm others not because he wishes to comply with some moral injunction being imposed from above, but simply because that's the best way to pursue his happiness and keep his tranquility of mind.<br> <br> Mises says the same thing when he repeats his adherence to utilitarianism, which looks upon the rules of morality not as absolutes, but as means for attaining an individual's desired ends through social cooperation. In his book <i>Socialism</i>, he writes: "The ethical valuation 'good' and 'evil' can be applied only in respect of ends towards which action strives. As Epicurus said <span lang="en-us">[</span>…<span lang="en-us">]</span> Vice without injurious consequences would not be vice. Since action is never its own end, but rather the means to an end, we call an action good or evil only in respect of the consequences of the action." To Mises, Epicureanism inaugurated the emancipation of mankind precisely because it led to utilitarianism. <br> <br> The very basis of praxeology, the logic of human action, rests on Epicurean concepts. Epicurus says that nature compels all living beings to search
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<td align="center" style="border-left: 1px solid #99CC99; border-right: 1px solid #99CC99; border-top: 1px solid #99CC99"> <p class="texte8"> <a href="http://www.quebecoislibre.org/05/050415-1.htm">INDEX NO 153</a> • <a href="http://www.quebecoislibre.org/philo2.htm">WHAT IS LIBERTARIANISM?</a> • <a href="http://www.quebecoislibre.org/archives4.htm">ARCHIVES</a> • <a href="http://www.quebecoislibre.org/apsujets.htm">SEARCH QL</a> • <a href="http://www.quebecoislibre.org/apmasse.htm">OTHER ARTICLES BY M. MASSE</a></p></td>
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<td align="center" style="border-left: 1px solid #99CC99; border-right: 1px solid #99CC99; border-bottom: 1px solid #99CC99"> <p class="texte8"> <a href="mailto:ql@quebecoislibre.org?subject=subscribe to QL"> SUBSCRIBE TO QL</a> • <a href="http://www.quebecoislibre.org/whoarewe.htm">WHO ARE WE?</a> • <a href="http://www.quebecoislibre.org/whoarewe.htm#submission"> SUBMISSION GUIDELINES</a> • <a href="http://www.quebecoislibre.org/whoarewe.htm#reprint">REPRINT POLICY</a> • <a href="mailto:ql@quebecoislibre.org?subject=article 050415-14">WRITE TO US</a></p></td>
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<td align="center"> <p class="texte8"><a href="http://www.quebecoislibre.org">CURRENT ISSUE</a><img border="0" src="arrow.gif" hspace="3" width="4" height="7"></p></td>
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</body>
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</html>
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