Condorcet and the logic of technocracy.

• Author: Beauchamp, Gorman
• Position: The Dangers of Oligarchy - Marquis de Condorcet - Essay

One of Goya's etchings in the series called Los Caprichos of 1796 depicts a sleeping figure, his head resting on a writing table, pen and paper scattered around him. Around the sleeping man hovers a shadowy swarm of bat- and owl-like creatures, and at his feet lies a fierce looking cat, perhaps a witch's cat. The inscription of the etching reads: "El sueno de la razon produce monstruos"--the sleep (or dream) of reason produces monsters. The meaning of this allegorical tableau has been construed in two different and opposing ways. One interprets it to mean that when reason sleeps the dark monsters of irrationality are then free to venture forth unchecked--a rather Freudian reading. The other interpretation holds that the dream of reason itself produces the nightmare vision: that the monsters are the very spawn of reason--what might be called the Burkean reading. Whichever, if either, is right, the second serves as a leitmotif running through the criticism of scientifically planned societies that began in reaction to the French Revolution. From Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre in the eighteenth century through such twentieth-century critics as Lewis Mumford, Karl Popper, and Isaiah Berlin, the utopian concept of a rationally planned or dirigiste society is viewed as one of reason's most nightmarish monsters.

Burke, the British statesman and political theorist, believed that the "metaphysicians"--by which he meant the Enlightenment philosophes--bore responsibility for the convulsions of the French Revolution. Of these figures, he famously declared:

a more dreadful calamity cannot arise out of hell to scourge mankind. Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of a man. It is like that of] the Principle of Evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil. (1) In England, the radical William Godwin, author of Political Justice, was held by his enemies to be just such a demonic influence: his ideas, claimed Burke, were "the brood of that putrid carcase [sic] the French Revolution," and Horace Walpole designated him "one of the greatest monsters exhibited by history." (2) In this perfervid vein, anti-Jacobin opinion developed the trope of the rationalistic social philosopher creating a wild, death-dealing force--Revolution--that he cannot control and that ultimately destroys its creator. This, of course, is the plot of Frankenstein; and, indeed, many explications of Mary Shelley's novel discover in it an attack not only on rogue science, its ostensible subject, but even more so upon the political philosophy held liable for the French Revolution, the Enlightenment's own Frankensteinian Monster. Read so, Frankenstein appears as an allegorical version of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, itself described as "an externalized, Gothic melodrama" that "denounces armed insurrection as a pernicious monster set free by experimenters and reformers." Thus Dr. Frankenstein becomes the fictive equivalent of a Voltaire, a Rousseau or a William Godwin, who--not so incidentally--was Mary Shelley's father. (3)

Percy Shelley's chemistry, writes one of his critics, is but a cipher for his politics (4); similarly Mary Shelley's chemistry--or whatever science accounts for Victor Frankenstein's creation--is a "political chemistry," cautioning against the reformist radicalism of her father and his sort, whose utopian schemes contained the seeds of pernicious historical monstrosities. Frankenstein thus emerges as the archetype not only of the mad scientist of science fiction, but also of the mad social scientist of twentieth-century dystopias: the Well-Doer of Zamyatin's We (1921), the World Controller of Huxley's Brave New World (1936), Big Brother of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four (1948) are avatars of Frankenstein-as-social-scientist.

The concept of a science of society--the possibility, that is, of discovering a "social physics," to employ Auguste Comte's phrase--emerged in the Enlightenment and reached its apogee, if not its end, in the nineteenth century with Positivism and similar movements. In such schema, society must be artificially--that is, scientifically--recreated, according to some rational blueprint drawn up in accord with the laws of social physics and realized by the techniques of social engineering. Rousseau, in a crucial passage in The Social Contract, offers the essential desideratum of the Utopian social engineer:

He who dares to undertake the making of a people's institutions ought to feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual, who is by himself a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a greater whole from which he in a manner receives life and being; of altering a man's constitution for the purpose of strengthening it; and of substituting a partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence nature has conferred on us all. He must, in a word...