Two concepts of providence and two concepts of pity: A reply to Gilbert Faccarello and Jimena Hurtado

Abstract

I am grateful to Gilbert Faccarello and Jimena Hurtado for their clear, fair, and comprehensive accounts of my book. I agree with Faccarello that one of the main points of the book is my analysis of Smith’s appropriation of Rousseau. I thought this part would be controversial, and I am very glad that Faccarello found it innovative and convincing. I am also thankful to Hurtado for noticing the stand I take for the practice of intellectual history as a dialogue between the past and the present. Both authors raise some objections, none of which is trivial or superficial. Faccarello focuses on the categorization that is introduced in chapter 2 and used through to the end of the book: the distinction between an Epicurean/Augustinian tradition (Hobbes, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, Nicole, Mandeville, Melon, Hume and Montesquieu) and a neo-Stoic tradition (Shaftesbury, Butler, Hutcheson, Rousseau, Charles Bonnet, Adam Smith). Faccarello does not disagree with the validity of this distinction in a broad sense, but he proposes a number of counterexamples drawn from Nicole and Boisguilbert, who belong to the Augustinian tradition and yet express views on Providence that are inconsistent with what I describe as Augustinian providentialism. As Faccarello puts it, I distinguish between an Augustinian tradition of Providence as miracle and a neo-Stoic tradition of Providence as law. According to Faccarello, Nicole and Boisguilbert, who are both unambiguously Augustinian, reject the notion of Providence as miracle and embrace the notion of Providence as law. This point is crucial for Faccarello (1986), who has argued that Boisguilbert could be seen as a forerunner of modern political economy because he describes the economic order as a self-regulating mechanism driven by self-interest. No miracle is to be seen or expected here: divine Providence works in ways