Politics in the service of knowledge: The debate over the administration of medicine and welfare in late eighteenth‐century France

Abstract

In France in the years before the Revolution, critique, the search for truth in literature, was transformed into a new force in public life, into what has been called l'opinion publique,' with the potential power of checking the unrestrained authority of the absolutist state. Public opinion, so defined, arose from the efforts of members of semi-official bodies such as the Academie des Sciences and provincial academies, as well as reforming officials within the administration, who may be said to have constituted an enlightened community, and who saw themselves as the makers of an improved future, not excluding the possibility of living in a reformed political regime. Their political agenda has been commonly perceived in two ways: first, as a prologue to the Revolutionary displacement of absolutist by representative forms of government; and second, as a promise of greater opportunities for larger numbers of people to express and fulfil their needs. The present essay will argue that representative institutions constituted a new ideal, more because they were seen as the principal embodiment of enlightened public opinion than because of the possibility of establishing through them a clear demarcation between the hegemony of the state and the rights of citizens. Not enough attention has been given to this meaning of the liberal vision of politics. The primacy which the enlightened community gave to the sheer acquisition of systematic knowledge, actual and potential, should be contrasted with their lack of sympathy for the notion that political life could ensure self-development through the satisfaction of needs. Two reasons account for this. In the first place, 'scientism ',2 which had been