British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

BA PDF Symposium 2005

26 April 2005

Abstracts

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Dr Ruth Scurr

Virtue Politics: Robespierre's Forlorn Substitute for a Science of Society

In strong contrast to revolutionary contemporaries who attempted to analyse society objectively and to construct causal models drawing on the heritage of Enlightenment theories of sociability, Robespierre understood it normatively as a domain for the instantiation of virtue. For him, the Terror became an extreme, but necessary, means of generating virtuous human agency in circumstances of social and political crisis where there was no securely established motivational base for it. He never developed a systematic understanding of society to rival that of the abbé Sieyès, Condorcet or Pierre-Louis Rœderer, but chose to prescind from the available intellectual resources for thinking causally about society, to focus instead on judgements about the ways in which it is edifying for individuals to behave. He derived the normative content of his moralised conception of human agency from the notion of a providential religion.

The contrast between these two approaches to society – the objective and the normative – played a pivotal role in the politics of the Revolution. Sieyès, Condorcet and Rœderer are all examples of social and political theorists who entered the Revolution in 1789 with high and influential expectations for what a science of society could achieve or guarantee. By the time of the Terror in 1793, their expectations had been severely disappointed. Robespierre's narrower fixation on evaluating individual human agency proved more compelling in the crisis in political authority facing France. But his victory was extremely short-lived. To understand the history of the science of society during this short but dramatically intense and consequential period, it is necessary to account for Robespierre's decisive triumph over his opponents, and to explain why that victory proved impossible to sustain.

Dr Ruth Scurr took up the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship in 2000, after completing a Cambridge PhD, 'Conceptualising the Modern Republic: P.L. Rœderer's cours d'organisation sociale'. Since 2001 she has held her fellowship at part-time in order to combine it with the demands of two very young children.