Kindness as the Foundation to Community: For a ‘Radical Equality Tempered by Benevolence’. Joseph Rey of Grenoble (1779-1855)

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the work of the jurist and political and social theorist, Joseph Rey. It explores Rey’s role within a French and international network of intellectuals and conspirators who sought to overthrow established monarchies and replace them with popularly elected democratic republics. The article shows how Rey’s extensive writings on legal, political, social and educational questions give a unique insight into France’s political, intellectual, social and ideological life in the first decades of the nineteenth century. We argue that Rey’s contribution to the debates that defined the modern ideological categories of liberalism, republicanism and socialism was significant in its endeavour to reconcile all three. This attempt at reconciliation was motivated by a powerful desire to end the internecine struggles that marked France in the aftermath of the Revolution and Empire. This led Rey to draw on the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and the Philosophical Radicals in order to nourish a French republican liberalism rooted in the work of the Idéologues and combine this with his profound reading of Robert Owen’s work on co-operation. It goes on to show how Rey became known as France’s principal representative of Owenism, and sought to shape the debates between the dominant schools of French Socialist thought, Fourierism and Saint-Simonianism, by introducing into those discussions a radical conception of equality and the idea of co-operation. Rey’s attempts to reconcile the liberal-republican preoccupation with liberty and self-governance with socialist considerations on equality and social justice stand out from the works of his contemporaries. It is this unique, and long-forgotten, contribution to French and European political and social thought that makes Rey worthy of renewed attention.