diderot's hospitality

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Northeastern Political Science Association

Of Hobbes and Hospitality in Diderot's Supplement to the "Voyage of Bougainville"Author(s): Jimmy Casas KlausenReviewed work(s):Source: Polity, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Apr., 2005), pp. 167-192Published by: Palgrave Macmillan JournalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3877117 .Accessed: 23/02/2012 16:35

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Polity * Volume37, Number 2 * April 2005? 2005 NortheasternPolitical Science Association 0032-3497/05 $30.00www.palgrave-journals.com/polity

Of Hobbes and Hospitalityin Diderot's Supplement tothe Voyage of BougainvilleJimmy Casas KlausenUniversityof California,Berkeley

The Enlightenmentphilosophe Diderot'sSupplement to the Voyage ofBougainvilleoffersrichpossibilities or theorizing elationsamong nationsandencounters mong mutuallyoreignpeoples.In theSupplement nd related exts,Diderot akes hospitality s the paradigmatictandard or all humansociabilityConsequently,e uses practicesof hospitality s the standpoint rom which tocriticizeFrench olonization f inhabited and.Diderotpresents"Hobbist"renchcolonialpracticesn thefigure f theFrenchxplorerBougainville, hosehospitablereceptionby native Tahitians id not preventhim fromviolatinga host/guestrelationshipn claiming Tahiti or the French crown. Starting rom Diderot'scomparison f Bougainvilleo Hobbes,thisessayputsDiderotian ospitalityntorelief hrough n extended ontrastbetween t andHobbesian narchyPolity 2005) 37, 167-192.doi:10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300013Keywords Hobbes,Thomas;Diderot,Denis;imperialism; nlight-enment;hospitality

Jimmy Casas Klausen is a doctoral andidate t the Universityf Californiaat Berkeley nd is currentlyinishinghis thesis,"Primitivesccumulating: heAlienEncounters f Rousseau&Diderot." is workspansthefieldsofpoliticalthought, nterstate oliticaltheory,anthropology,nd postcolonial heory.Heplans to undertake exta projecton HugoGrotius,oguepower and thesea.Weep,wretchednativesofTahiti,weep.But et itbe forthecomingandnottheleavingof these ambitious,wicked men.

-Denis Diderot,Supplemento the Voyage f BougainvilleNo one everspeaksof Diderotian nternational elations heoryas one mightdo of Hobbesian,Grotian, r Kantian heories.Forthisno one likelywill weepand Denis Diderot east of all. It is, however, he contentionof this essay thatDiderot'sSupplemento the Voyageof Bougainvilleoffersrich possibilities or

theorizing elationsamong "nations:'ndspecifically ortheories hatwouldpayheed to the texture of encounters among peoples. Diderot composed his


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168 HOBBES & HOSPITALITYIN DIDEROT'S SUPPLEMENT

Supplement as a means, in part, of coming to terms with the place of France in ageopolitical order after the Treatyof Paris of 1763, and with the ramifications ofthe successful circumnavigation of the earth by Louis-Antoine de Bougainvillebetween 1766 and 1769. However, although the narrative of the Supplement mayfocus on relations between a group of seafaring Frenchmen and the natives ofTahiti,the Supplement does not confine itself to an analysis of pre-RevolutionaryFrench imperialism. Rather, by criticizing Bougainville and his crew ofinternational "Hobbism,"Diderot explores the ethics and politics governingcolonization.

TheSupplementis written as a set of dialogues nested around one monologue,a structure that permits Diderot to employ a number of voices and registersto payhomage to, to satirize, and to parrot the views of French lumidresand Englishpolitical theorists of the previous century. Effectively, hen, Diderot rendered thetext a ventriloquist'sstage for a variety of arguments of Enlightenment politicaltheory-notably the Baron de Montesquieu'smultiplex theory of the constitutionof political societies by geography, history, and culture, and Jean-JacquesRousseau's more thoroughgoing critical reconstruction of polities based on thecapacities inherent in human perfectibility-but while the Supplement is proofand fruit of indebtedness in the history of political thought, it would be unfair tosee Diderot as a purely derivative thinker.' Certain ideas can be found moredirectly or systematically stated in The Spiritof the Laws or the First or SecondDiscourse, but Diderot quite explicitly differs from their authors by assuming thathumans are not only sociable, but actively seek to render assistance to others.Hence, especially as attempts to theorize hospitality and the reception offoreigners by nation-states have risen to prominence in recent years,2 Diderot'sanalyses of hospitality deserve fresh attention because, while he never system-atically explicates a theory of interpersonal and international sociability, he doesstraightforwardlystructure hospitality as an encounter among peoples and,uniquely, takes hospitality's model of encounter as paradigmatic of humansociability and, therefore, of politics. This neither Montesquieu nor Rousseaudoes. Thus, Diderot's text contributes acute insights to discussions of foreigners,

1. Neither the Supplement nor the draft text on which it is based (which I discuss below) waspublished during Diderot'slifetime. While this fact may raise methodological questions of intention andreception, I leave them aside as peripheral to the scope of this essay Moreover,the scholarly debate onwhether Diderot contributes anything original to the canon of political theory has been ongoing since atleast the 1930s; for a succinct summary, refer to Ira O. Wade, The Structureand Form of the FrenchEnlightenment, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 1:390-405.2. Forexample, Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJand Oxford:PrincetonUniversity Press, 2001); Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:Columbia University Press, 1991); Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest(Stanford, CA: Stanford UniversityPress, 2001); PeterSahlins, UnnaturallyFrench:Foreign Citizens in theOld Regime and After (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2004); Alain Montandon,ed.,L'hospitaliteau XVIIIeSiecle (Clermont-Ferrand:Presses UniversitairesBlaise Pascal, 2000).


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Jimmy Casas Klausen 169

hospitality, immigrant settlement, and cosmopolitanism that differ from conclu-sions based in Montesquieu's and Rousseau's works.Diderot comes to his conclusions about the proper relations among peoplesby opposing neither colonization nor the appropriation of private property perse.3 Rather,the Supplement tests the limits of colonization and appropriation bytaking these for granted as political practices among nations, but Diderot exertspressure on their presuppositions and consequences in order to distill a setof ethicopolitical principles, based in laws of nature, by which colonization andthe recognition of property as private can properly take place. By appending"properly," mean to emphasize not only the means by which colonization andthe privatizationof propertycan be said to be appropriate,seemly or aboveboardvis-d-vis others, but also the preconditions which make their existence quacolonization and private property (rather than, say, martial conquest andcommunal use) possible in the first instance. In the Supplement to the VoyageofBougainville and ancillary texts, the means by which Diderot tests the practicesof colonization and private property are his presentation of hospitality, that is,the reception of strangers, as paradigmatic of human natural sociability As heconceives it, "hospitality s one of the surest indices of the instinct and destinationof man forsociability. Arisingfrom naturalcommiseration, hospitalitywas generalat first. Itwas nearly the only link among nations."4

By according a primary place to hospitable attitudes as a natural instinctamong humans, Diderot explicitly sets his political theory in opposition to thevision of an international state of war that he could glean from Hobbes'sLeviathan. Far from being evidently analogous, the effects of Hobbes'sinterpersonal and international states of war ramifyquite differently,5particularlywith respect to the practice of hospitality.In Hobbes's state of nature, mutuallybenevolent sociability among individual human beings is not naturalin the senseof original and instinctual. However,understanding fromexperience or by reasonthe horrors of war, individuals seek peace, but the only stable and credibleinterpersonal peace worthy of the name can occur only after they covenant to

3. Pace Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: deologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and Francec.1500-c.1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), Chapter 6; Sankar Muthu,Enlightenmentagainst Empire (Princeton, NJ and Oxford:Princeton UniversityPress, 2003), Chapters2-3.Both argue emphatically that Diderot opposed colonialism.4. Diderot, Contributionsd I'Histoire des deux Indes, Oeuvres (Politique), ed. LaurentVersini (Paris:Editions Robert Laffont, 1994), III:684-85 (paragraph break suppressed). This and all subsequenttranslations of texts from French editions, unless otherwise noted, are my own.5. David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations: From Thucydides to the Present(Oxford and New York:Oxford UniversityPress, 1998), Chapter7; MarkA. Heller, "TheUse and Abuse ofHobbes: The State of Nature in International Relations,"Polity 13 (Fall 1980): 21-32; MurrayForsyth,"Thomas Hobbes and the external relations of states,"British Journal of International Studies 5 (1979):196-209.


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establish an authority that could later guarantee, by threat of force, sociablerelations such as tacit covenants of hospitalityAlthough Diderot does not discuss hospitalityas a "covenant:'tacit or express,he does imply that being a host presupposes that the partyhosted will practice aform of gratitude that involves the respectful recognition of what is the host'spropertyand of how much of that property is granted for the guest's use and forwhat length of time. Makingit the object of his FourthLawof Nature,Hobbes, too,recognizes the importance of gratitude in the search for a stable peace, butoutside of a commonwealth such laws of nature can at best remain onlyprudential rather than imperative. Moreover, Hobbes's giving occurs of self-interest, "[f]or no man giveth, but with intention of Good to himselfe ..." Andthe call for gratitude, too, can be trumped by self-interest when a recipientperceives that gratitude would oblige him to the giver in an untoward or self-endangering way. Inshort, according to Leviathan,only a leviathan would makehospitality possible among persons by coercing donors and recipients, guestsand hosts, to deem one another trustworthy (Gift-givingand hospitality bothinvolve the transfer-permanent in the former case and temporary in the latter-of a claim over a good. This shared structure invites an occasional elisionbetween them.)While, of course, hospitality among peoples cannot take place withouthospitality among persons, Diderot's accusation of international "Hobbism"nonetheless turns on Hobbes's inability to imagine relations among nations thatdo not operate as do those ties one might find in a den of brigands:that is, neverfully trustworthy, lways able to be trumped by temporary personal advantage orsubjective judgments about other parties' infringements,and therefore, accordingto Hobbes, not binding ties at all. As the latterputs it, "Covenantsof mutuall trust,where there is a feare of not performance on either part . .. are invalid."6Due tothe absoluteness of the power that Hobbes would accord the sovereign, nosovereign could covenant with another without compromising its very status asan independent authority, without being in some sense conquered-for, asovereign lacking "an absolute Libertie, to doe what it shall judge . . . mostconducing to their [the Commonwealth's members] benefit" does not quiteexercise sovereignty any longer.7'To subject a group of smaller leviathans to abigger one is to render those smaller leviathans void qua sovereigns, althoughthose dependencies' subjection to a higher authority makes their own mutualinterrelations possible. However, in the absence of an overarching effectivecovenant among nations, the trustworthinessof one nation to another can never

6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan,rev.student ed., ed. RichardTuck (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996 [1651]), 105, 100 (cf. 96, 102).7. Hobbes, Leviathan, 149;cf. 90, 244, 352, 396. Heller is unique in stressing this point in "The Useand Abuse of Hobbes"


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Jimmy CasasKlausen 171

be mutual and full. Any people that would thus render hospitality unto anotherwould be irrationally ritteringaway its goods and should expect neither gratitudenor reciprocity from its guests. The need for trustworthiness, though, is moreurgent interpersonallythan internationally.Individualhumans may perish withoutothers' aid and so will renounce for survival's sake the absoluteness of theirliberty; sovereigns do not, by definition, need other sovereigns to survive andcompromise sovereignty in giving up liberty.To all of this, Diderot would respond: tantpis, too bad, such are the risks ofattempting to overcome human misery, and natural sociability-as humaninstinct and end-demands ties like hospitality among peoples, even if such tiescan be abused. And hospitality,one must note, is a particularly fragile relation,easily abused because of the seeming enormity of the trustrequired on the partofhosts and guests, who have no context for trust. (Even as concerns the familiarrather than strange host or guest, can one ever really guarantee that one'strustworthiness is not being built up steadily to be later betrayed as part of aconfidence game? This question always skulks about in Hobbes's reservationsabout giving, gratitude, and mutuality in the state of nature.) The conception of"politics"in Diderot's oeuvre does not by any means condone abuses of humansociability; rather it takes root in the present and constant risk of those abuses.Diderot would have us theorize politics on the basis of the extreme case-that is,the limit case presented by the risk and abuse of the sociability that makespolitical life possible at all. By contrast, Hobbes constitutes politics in theLeviathanby evacuating interpersonal relations of riskby recourse to the externalmechanism of a leviathan. Diderot's Supplement provides a seemingly extremeadvocacy of mutual trust among strangers as against Hobbes's contention thatsuch relations amount to irrationaland therefore invalid ties. One can only everenjoy hospitality,trust,and mutual social ties by leaving oneself open to others-liars, thieves, or sinners though those others may be-this is Hobbes's fear andDiderot'shope. Whereas Hobbes saw no law and no hospitality without a solid,though coerced, external guarantee of trustworthiness, Diderot saw theconditions for trust, law, and property-as well as the outer limits of principledcolonization-in that risky form of human sociability called hospitality.To arriveat hospitality,though, Diderot startsat "Hobbism," nd it is the chargeof international Hobbism volleyed by Diderot at Bougainville that provides thegrounds for the extended comparison between the political theories of Diderotand Hobbes at the core of this essay So what might Diderot have intended byderogatorily using Hobbes's name to name something? And how might this"Hobbism"bear any relation to a theory of international relations extrapolatedfrom Hobbes's Leviathan?

The notion that Bougainville "enforces""Hobbism... from nation to nation"originally appears in Diderot'sunpublished "Compterendu du Voyageautourdu


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172 HOBBES & HOSPITALITYIN DIDEROT'SSUPPLEMENT

monde."This compte rendu gives an assessment of Bougainville's account of hisworld tour in 1766-1769, Voyage autour du monde par la fregate du Roi LaBoudeuse et la flu^teLEtoile 1771).8 In a concluding apostrophe of the "Compterendu,"Diderot pleads,Ah! Monsieur de Bougainville, move your ship away from the shores of theseinnocent and fortunateTahitians.... Youtake possession of theircountry,as ifit did not belong to them.... You are the stronger,and what does that mean?Youcry out against social Hobbism and enforce it from nation to nation. Dealwith them, take their produce [denrees], bring them yours, but do not putthem in chains.9

This accusation of "Hobbism," although it lurks in the prehistory of theSupplement to the Voyageof Bougainville, does not show up there in so manywords. The "Compte rendu" consists of two parts, a review and an emotionalapostrophe, each of distinct literary tone and register.The more straightforwardassessment of the man Bougainville, his maritime achievement, and hispublished account thereof provides-often verbatim-the material for a dialoguebetween A and B, two well-read personages of the Age of Reason, in the firstsection of Diderot'sSupplement. Diderot's tristeapostrophe to Bougainville endsup being voiced by a Tahitianelder at the seashore in the Supplement'ssecondsection, "TheOld Man'sFarewell"Again, Diderot recycles almost verbatim thecontents of this apostrophe, but he drops the mention of international Hobbism,since a native of recently "discovered"Tahiticould not credibly have known whatHobbism signified.1oWhat makes Bougainville Hobbist is not so much his circumnavigation of theearth, but that for which the circumnavigation was symptom: a desperateambition to take new possessions to replace those that France had ceded toBritainafterthe Seven Years'War.France had long ago established armed tradingoutposts overseas, but an ignoble defeat in the Seven Years' War drasticallysevered its global reach. The Treaty of Paris of November 1763 was quitepunishing for France in that its "Most Christian King" had to cede to his"BrittanickMajesty"all of Canada, holdings east of the Mississippi RiverexceptNew Orleans,and other possessions in Africa and the Caribbean. The postbellum

8. Louis-Antoinede Bougainville, Voyageautour du monde par la fregate du roi La Boudeuse et laflidteL toile (N.p.: Folio-Gallimard,1982), 31.9. Denis Diderot, "Compte rendu du Voyage autour du monde'"Oeuvres completes, ed. HerbertDieckmann et al. (Paris:Editions Hermann, 1975-1995), 12:509-19; 514-15 qtd.10. Five sections-the two just described, two subsequent sections that stage a French/Tahitiandialogue, and a closing dialogue between A and B-comprise the Supplement in full. For a briefformalistic discussion of the complete text, see HerbertDieckmann, Introduction, Diderot'sSupplementau Voyagedu Bougainville (Geneva: Droz, 1955), cxxxiv-cxxxvii.


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balance sheet proved disastrous-indeed, disgraceful-for France's globalaspirations. Nothing could restore French losses, Canada above all. Hence,daring and compensatory national achievements-viz., new colonies-would bein order after 1763.

Enter, then, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, man of the moment. "Severalregions of America were found by the courageous royal subjects of yourancestors," he humbly recalls in the address to Louis XV that prefaces Voyageautour du monde. That statement described the order of things before the Peaceof Paris, but Bougainville then alludes to the status quo postbellum when hecontinues,

... Different causes as much interior as exterior have since appeared tosuspend the taste and activity of the nation in this regard.YOURMAJESTY ould profit from the leisure of the peace to procure byway of geography knowledge useful to humanity Under your auspices, SIRE,we have entered into your service; trials of all sorts awaited us at each step,[but] patience and zeal were not lacking of us.

Discovery and geography,then; knowledge and conquest: Bougainville wanted tomark off his achievement as more enlightened than those of conquistadors orexplorers of bygone days by bringing his voyage in line with a more scientificage." Nevertheless, the imperialistic history of voyages of discovery did not byany means disappear in light of these enlightened pretensions-in the compterendu'sapostrophe and the Supplement,Diderot would address this unshed pastof expropriation.Long before departing for the South Pacific, and mere months after the Peaceof Parisin 1763, Bougainville captained several missions to the Malouines (calledthe Falklandsby England), where he wanted to set up a small settlement to serveas a base of operations for French vessels leaving for austral regions by way of

Tierra del Fuego. In late 1763, Bougainville took possession of the island group inthe name of the King of France.Serving in part to answer the cession of France'spast colonies to Englandas well as the latter's bid for maritime preeminence, theMalouines turned out to be a vexed possession from the start.Although officiallyallied with France,Spain worried that a base so near South America might disturbits colonies there, while England was already making competing claims to theislands. At the urging of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bougainvillenegotiated their sale to Madrid in late 1766. This accomplished, he then made

11. Bougainville, Voyageautour du monde, 34.


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final preparations and set sail for his famous circumnavigation, the first eversuccessfully undertaken in service of the French throne. All in all, Bougainvillezealously promoted the global maritime cause of the French nation: the SevenYears'War seemed to prove to him that much was at stake geopolitically in theability to lay legitimate claim to newly discovered territoryin the name of theKing of France.

Although the "Judgmentof Bougainville's Voyage"sheds favorable light onBougainville, he nevertheless stands for an anxious-indeed, pathological-postbellum project of imperial expansion in the compte rendu'sapostrophe andin "The Old Man'sFarewell."Consequently, the explorer's association with thatform of intra-Europeannational competitiveness dependent upon the conquestof inhabited overseas territoryis what furnishes "Hobbism" ts derogatory forcefor Diderot in 1771. Based on an elision of "Bougainville"and "Hobbes,"Diderot'sreferences to the former's"tak[ing] possession of [the Tahitians'] country"and ofthe Frenchmen's being "stronger"mean to recall the latter'sdescription of ananarchic state of nature, specifically a state of war among nations wherein themightier will tend to reign for howsoever long.12The anarchy and inequality that Diderot describes in the "Compterendu" isnot interpersonal,not the "social Hobbism"that Bougainville had ostensibly beenknown to "cryout against'," ut international ("fromnation to nation"). Crucialtoany exploration of Hobbesian anarchy,the interpersonal/internationaldistinction(which, to be sure, cannot always be maintained with absolute rigor) goes to theheart of what sets "The Old Man's Farewell"apart from other sections of theSupplement.(Because the critique of internationalHobbism by way of hospitalityis confined to this section, I focus on it almost exclusively.) This second section,the Supplement'sonly monologue, is positively jeremiadic in its evocations ofrepentance and quasi-divine vengeance:

"Weep,wretched natives of Tahiti,weep. But let it be for the coming and notthe leaving of these ambitious, wicked men. One day you will know thembetter. One day they will come back, bearing in one hand the piece of woodyou see in that man's belt [a crucifix], and, in the other, the sword hanging bythe side of that one, to enslave you, slaughter you, or make you captive to theirfollies and vices.. "

12. Diderot, "Hobbisme," xcerpted in Political Writings,ed. and trans. John Hope Mason &RobertWokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 27-29. See also Leland Thielemann, "Diderotand Hobbes,"DiderotStudies II(1952): 221-278, esp. 228, 236-39. Cf.Jacques Proust, "LaContributiondeDiderot Al'Encyclope'die t les theories du droit natural:'Annales Historiquesde la RevolutionFrangaise35 (1963): 257-86, esp. 277-78.


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Then turningto Bougainville, he continued, 'And you, leader of the ruffianswho obey you, pull your ship away swiftly from these shores. . . . Go awayleave, and may the seas that spared you on your voyage absolve us of theirguilt and avenge us by swallowing you up before your return."13

Some recent Diderot commentators, reacting to previous schools of criticism thatsaw in the Supplementan eloquent noble savagery coupled with a straightforwardcondemnation of European civilization, dismiss the bittermonologue of "TheOldMan's Farewell"as articulating the ethnocentric lack of openness-indeed thestifling and self-destructive traditionalism-of Tahitiansociety Complementarily,the Supplement's other sections have been lauded as models for culturalexchange, social adaptation, or a dialogical critique of society because they arepresented as dialogues, a literary genre often characterized by formal equalitybetween representative positions and an openness among the fictionalparticipants (and the reader) to new positions.14Such arguments are mistaken in that they privilege the formal equality ofdialogue, that is, they privilege the text's other sections, at the expense of thecritique of European geopolitics in "The Old Man's Farewell" Exploring thedifferences between Hobbes's interpersonal and international anarchies,respectively, "social Hobbism" and "Hobbism . . . from nation to nation,"willactually show how this lauded interpersonal dialogic equality occurs against thebackground of inequality between peoples. Hobbes argues in the thirteenthchapter of Leviathan that "Naturehath made men so equall, in the faculties ofbody, and mind"that each individual at base shares the same abilities and ends.In its essentials, Diderot agrees with Hobbes's assessment of the basic humanequality in faculties (if not in fact). The Supplement'sconversations te7e d tete(i.e., the literary form of every section but "TheOld Man'sFarewell")bear thisout: they are for all intents and purposes practices of mutuality,reciprocity,andequality,but they can only be imagined as such by isolating them from the widercontext of the superiority of French force in taking advantage of Tahitianopenness and ultimately conquering Tahiti.Despite a basic agreement, Diderot'sand Hobbes's political theories diverge on the ramifications of the fundamentalequality of human faculties-the former believes that it results in naturalsociability,while the lattercomes to antithetical conclusions-and what results isthat Hobbes and Diderot wend quite separate paths through property and

13. Denis Diderot, Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville, rpt. in Political Writings,41, 42, 45.Hereafter,page references to this text will appear parenthetically in the body of the essay14. Dena Goodman, Criticism n Action: EnlightenmentExperimentsin Political Writing, Ithaca, NY:Cornell UniversityPress, 1989), Chapters6-8. Cf. WildaAnderson, Diderots Dream (Baltimore, MD:JohnsHopkins UniversityPress, 1990), Chapter4; Claudia Moscovici, "AnEthics of CulturalExchange: Diderot'sSupplement au Voyagede Bougainville,"CLIO30.3 (2001): 289-307.


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relations among peoples. The outrageous fortunes of Tahitian hospitality willindicate the extent of Diderot'sand Hobbes's theoretical schism.Hobbes makes three inter-related determinations based on the equality ofhuman faculties. First,that it leads to quarrel. The natural equality of faculties

among humans is such that there consequently "arisethequality of hope in theattaining of our Ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing whichneverthelesse they cannot both enjoy they become enemies; and in the way totheir end (which is principally their owne conservation, and sometimes theirdelectation only), endeavour to destroy,or subdue one an other."Hence, "in thenature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrell. First, Competition;Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly,Glory. .. The first,maketh men invade for Gain;thesecond, for Safety; and the third, for Reputation."As Hobbes reconstructs thenaturalstate, naturalequality among individuals implies that each one shares anequal hope of gain; this in turn implies competition and therefore a climate ofgeneral insecurity (Diffidence) and sporadic aggrandizement (Glory).

Bellicosity thus being natural to insecure men, the state of nature-that is,"during he time men live without a common Powerto keep them all in awe"-isa state of war. Hence, the second determination from the general equality offaculties is that, by hook or by crook, individualswill practice temporary forms ofsociability for the sake of survival. Actual inequalities of body or mind that mightlead to an individual'sbeing destroyed or subdued are easily overcome "bysecretmachination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger."Prudence dictates that one consent (which here is the same as being coercedunder the duress of a general climate of hostility) to ally oneself with others toavoid violent death. Such alliances among "auxiliariesof war"(a phrase from DeCive) would likely last only so long as the specific threatwere present since, asonly Hobbes could couch it, "menhave no pleasure, (but on the contrarya greatdeale of griefe) in keeping company, where there is no power able to over-awethem all11"'5hus, the final determination, the equality of faculties that drivesindividuals into a state of war and into ephemeral defensive alliances (or perhapsoffensive ones-the distinction loses rigor in Hobbesian anarchy) also renderseach equally able to submit to a power that can "over-awe" ll individuals equallyAccording to Hobbes, covenants and alliances for peace and survivalsimply donot last among equals because as equals they tend to militate against evaluationsand enforcement by their own peers. Hobbesian individuals trust the judgmentand punishment of infringements only to an awesome superior.Hobbes constructed his state of nature from a number of sources-historical,scientific, philosophical, psychological-but some of the sources that he thought

15. Hobbes, Leviathan, 86, 87, 88. Boucher (Political Theories of InternationalRelations, Chapter 7)and Forsyth ("Hobbes and the external relations of states") stress the importance of "auxiliariesof war"


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would most keenly punctuate his analysis were proto-ethnological: travelers'andcolonists' descriptions of savages. "It may peradventure be thought',"Hobbesexplains to those who might accuse him of fancy, thatthere was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this;and I believe it wasnever generally so, over all the world: but there are many places, where theylive so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except thegovernment of small Families, the concord whereof dependeth on naturalllust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutishmanner,as Isaid before.'6

Here finally was something that Diderot could work with: ethnologicaldescription. Diderot was not himself a builder of grandiose rational systems,and he indeed criticized it in Hobbes: "He had the fault of systematic thinkers,that is, of generalising from particular facts and skilfully bending them to fit hishypothesis."'7 It was through empirically based analyses from history andtravelogues that Diderot could criticallysituate Hobbes's construction of a state ofnature and counterpose his own. Contra Hobbes's American "brutish" avages,then, the Supplement brings such a project to fruition based on Bougainville'sdescription of Tahitianhospitable savages.

According to speaker B'sunderstanding, Bougainville had already contradictedmuch that Hobbes had asserted about savage inhabitantsof a state of nature:"thecruelty among [savages] which has sometimes been observed is apparentlydueonly to their daily need to defend themselves against wild beasts. The savage isinnocent and gentle whenever his peace and securityare left undisturbed.All warsspringfromconflicting claims to the same property" 39). The old man supportsB'sstatement: "We are innocent, we are content, and you can only spoil thathappiness. We follow the pure instincts of nature, and you have tried to erase itsimpression from our hearts. Here, everything belongs to everyone, and you havepreached Ican't tell what distinction between 'yours'and 'mine"' 42). In these twostatements, Diderot approaches Hobbes on property and interpersonal anarchyobliquely, accepting some premises and modifying or rejecting others.While Diderot would agree that a notion of stable private property can onlycome with society, he differs from Hobbes on three accounts. First,society doesnot necessarily presume the institution of private property, that is, propertydefined by exclusive use. In addition to being a place where "everythingbelongsto everyone,"Tahitirepresents a society governed by hospitality and covenants of

16. Hobbes, Leviathan,89 (emphasis added).17. Diderot, "Hobbisme," 7. Diderot was himself somewhat guilty of such "bending"of facts insofaras he willfully ignores Bougainville's mention of class hierarchies in Tahiti which somewhat mars thepicture of natural plenty, communalism, and polygamy See Bougainville, Voyageautour du monde, 267.


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mutual and collective interest.Second, Diderot agreed, though in a perverse way,with Hobbes's statement that, prior to the erection of a coercive power to definelaw and obligation, "all men have Rightto all things."However,whereas Hobbespursued one conclusion from the lack of a right to proprietary recognition byothers-namely the fact of tenuous possession where "no Mine and Thine [be]distinct; but onely that to be every mans, that he can get; and for so long, as hecan keep it"18--Diderotconcluded from the Tahitian case that a society couldactually successfully practice stable communal right and mutually establisheduse without positive laws.19Third, Diderot seems to suggest that, except for thecause of protecting one's liberty,wars and quarrel occur subsequent to propertyrather than anterior to it. This last point, about war's being anterior to property,may sound like Rousseau's infamous statement in the Second Discourse that the"firstperson who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to saythis is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founderof civil society,"whose act prompted "manycrimes, wars, murders, . . . miseriesand horrors."20 Because, however, Diderot argues from natural sociability andRousseau argues from naturalasociality, the markingof privatepropertyis alwaysalready a declaration of war for Rousseau but always presupposes an invitationtohospitality for Diderot.

Startinglike Hobbes from the assertion of a naturalequality of faculty,Diderotcomes to quite separate conclusions about natural sociability (rather thaninterpersonal anarchy) and property.Before I launch further nto a considerationof the disparate elements of Diderot's argument-he is so opposed to Hobbes'sespritde systime that he almost never assembles an identifiable structure-let meoutline preliminarilythe underlying logic that takes us from equality of facultiesto propertyvia human sociability and that distinguishes Diderot'sposition on thestate of nature from others. As one may recall, Diderot posits that humansociability arises "fromnatural commiseration." ('"Arisingrom natural commis-eration, hospitality was general at first.")As equally miserable (com-miserating)beings, equal in their individuallyweak faculties of body and mind, humans seekeach other out for mutual succor, and the fact that they do so naturally andoriginarily comprises Diderot's direct response to "Hobbist"encounters in thestate of nature. Original hospitality sets the Supplement's answer to Hobbes's

18. Hobbes, Leviathan, 101, 90.19. "Nothing there was deemed evil by sentiment or law apart from what was evil by nature,"'Brecounts (66). The co-terminous relation between law and nature would obtain among men only,perhaps. Especially as concerns their sexuality, women are excluded from communal right by beingmade the objects of it.20. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Originand FoundationsofInequalityAmong Men, rpt.inRoger D. Masters, ed., The First and Second Discourses, trans. Roger Mastersand Judith R. Masters(NewYork:St Martin'sPress, 1964), 141-42.


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Leviathanapart from Montesquieu's and Rousseau's. Montesquieu, for one, seesnot hospitality in the state of nature but fear and mutual avoidance:A man in the state of nature . . . . would at first feel only his weakness; histimidity would be extreme: and as for evidence, if it is needed on this point,savages have been found in forests; everything makes them tremble,everything makes them flee.

In this state, each feels himself inferior;he scarcely feels himself an equal.Such men would not seek to attack one another, and peace would be the firstnatural law.Eventually, though, "the marks of mutual fear would soon persuade them toapproach one another,"and soon heterosexual union and "desire to live insociety" would follow.21At one point in his Essay on the Origin of Languages,Rousseau adopts a similar schema of savages' initial fear of other humans, soontamed by the experienced repetition of encounters, but he earlierstresses thatthe"natural effect of the first needs was to separate men, not to unite them:"22Emphatic about "primitive"humans' self-sufficiency, independence, and asoci-ality, Rousseau posits that cooperative practices of sociability arise only out oftemporary necessity and are therefore occasional and incidental,23 not theinstinct and end that Diderot later posits when he writes, "manalone and on hisown could do nothing to preserve himself. So he had to unite and associate withhis fellows, to make common use of their strength and intelligence. . . . Such isthe origin, advantage and aim of society".24

Arguing,against other French readers of Hobbes, for an instinct of sociabilitywhose paradigmatic form is hospitality,Diderot derives a notion of propertythatwould come into being as soon as any two humans encountered each other. ForHobbes, property comes into being with society, but the only society worthy ofthe name is one where there is a superior power to trump private, personaljudgments.Wecan infer fromDiderot'spresentation of naturalsociability that anyencounter between humans-including "bandits in the depths of their caves"-constitutes a society, and therefore property will exist at every such encounterwithin or without a government. For Diderot, each person's right to property21. Montesquieu, TheSpiritof the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M.Cohler et al. (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1989), 6, 7.22. Rousseau, The Firstand Second Discourses ... and Essay on the Originof Languages, ed. andtrans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Harper& Row, 1986), 246-47, 245.23. Discourse on the Originand Foundation of Inequality (ed. Masters), 126, 145, 151, 156, 219-20,226.24. Diderot, extract from Histoire des Deux Indes, rpt. in Political Writings, 169-214; 198 qtd.Hereafter,references to this Englishtranslation will be cited internally


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180 HOBBES & HOSPITALITY IN DIDEROT'S SUPPLEMENT

would thus be based originally in natural law rather than in any positive lawcreated by a leviathan. Any one person's (e.g., the host's) offering or withholdingobjects to another person (the guest) is a bid to both the mutual recognition ofpersonhood and the relational recognition of the bounds of each person'sproperty The risk of abuse or willed misrecognition of those bids inheres insociability rather than being indicative of anarchy. The potential state of warforms part of Diderot'sconcept of human sociability ratherthan existing exteriorto it, and the radical encounter between peoples utterlyalien to one another asimplied by international hospitality dramatizes sociability as its inherent risks ofabuse. Hence, war comes after and against not only naturalsociability but alsothe mutual recognitions of property that derive from it.

In other words, nature in Tahiti,and among savages in general, is peaceful, notcompetitive. When savages do resort to violence, they do so against beasts or, inthe exceptional case, against those beastly humans who would aggressivelythreaten theirsecurity The supposedly "civilized"Europeans,though, are anothermatter. Diderot had already called them Hobbist, alluding to Hobbes'sinterpretation of the international scene: "in all times, Kings, and Persons ofSoveraigne authority,because of their Independancy, are in continuall jealousies... having theirweapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another.., whichis a posture of War."25nthe Supplement Diderot refutes, as he claims Bougainvillehad been known to do, the notion that a Hobbesian state of war obtained locallyamong individual human beings ("social Hobbism"), but in having accusedBougainville of international Hobbism in the compte rendu, Diderot admits thedescriptive historical value of Hobbes's version of the martial state of nature onthe international scale.26 France, after all, has proven with its Seven Years'Warand Bougainville's very presence in Tahiti that it will quarrel from both GloryandCompetition, for conquest of discovered territory is, especially when it isinhabited, but such quarrel by other means.The Tahitian elder, knowing nothing of how Tahiti was a mere pawn inEuropean nations' struggles for ascendancy-not knowing, that is, the extent towhich Tahiti has been in medias res, in the middle of the thing or in the midst ofthe action--can only express complete bewilderment: "So this land is yours?Why?Because you set foot on it!If a Tahitianshould one day land on your shoresand engrave on one of your stones or on the bark of one of your trees, This landbelongs to the people of Tahiti,what would you think then?"(42). Diderot oftenresorts to describing the Tahitians as "innocent:'because they are unaffected bythose European machinations called Glory and Competition. They express no

25. Hobbes, Leviathan,90.26. As does Rousseau on occasion: see RichardTuck, TheRightsof Warand Peace: Political Thoughtand the International Orderfrom Grotius to Kant (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1999), 197-207.


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interest in pursuing what other nations would consider the Glory of conqueringothers; nor do they want to participate in a high stakes Competition to expandtheir territorywhose risk and possible result might be their consignment to asubordinate status in someone else's global hegemony. They are innocentbecause they have heretofore remained content. "Everythinghat we need and isgood for us we already possess,"the Tahitian elder sagely confirms, " ... .Do notfill our heads with your factitious needs and illusory virtues" (43).Even the third cause of quarrel, Diffidence, the elder explicitly shuns: "Ohfellow Tahitians,oh my friends! There is one way to avert a dreadful fate, but Iwould ratherdie than counsel you to take it. Let them leave, and let them live."Although lacking all confidence about these and future Frenchmen's motives,indeed, certain that someday Tahitians "will be subject to them, as corrupt, vileand miserable as they are" (42), the old man will not advise preemptive violencefor the same reason that Hobbes believed such violence probable: naturalequality. Addressing again Bougainville and his men, the elder declaims:

We are free, but into our earth you have now staked your title to our futureservitude. You are neither a god nor a demon. Who are you, then, to makethem slaves? .... You are not a slave, you would rather die than be one, andyet you wish to make slaves of us. Do you suppose, then, that a Tahitiancannotdefend his own liberty and die for it as well? This inhabitant of Tahiti,whomyou wish to ensnare like an animal, is your brother. You are both children ofNature. What rightdo you have over him that he does not have over you? Youcame; did we attack you? Have we plundered your ship? Did we seize you andexpose you to the arrowsof our enemies? Did we harness you to work with ouranimals in the fields? We respected our own image in you. (42-43)

For the old man, Hobbes's equality "inthe faculties of body, and mind"actuallyinterdicts rather than invites a challenge to the "equalityof hope in the attainingof our Ends" As children of nature, equal in faculties of strength and intelligenceif not in fact,27 the Tahitianpresumption-contra Hobbes--is against aggressionin the natural state and, more radically, against the automatic assumption thatthese sea voyagers' ends must oppose or mutually exclude the natives'.Nevertheless, Diderot's formulation does not preclude an understanding of justwar, for the Tahitian elder reveals that his people have enemies against whomthey die, if necessary, in defending their liberty.However, while the elder regards contemptuously the French claim to Tahiti,in the absence of manifest attempts at enslavement or extermination, potentialTahitiandiffidence does not result in preemptive violence. Instead, these savages

27. The old man calls the French ailors"stronger"n termsof force,not in physicalrobustness(42;cf.43).


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182 HOBBES & HOSPITALITY IN DIDEROT'S SUPPLEMENT

cleave to an ideal of hospitality,and their ostensibly uncompromising practice ofit prevents them from disrespecting their own image in these French voyagers.The Tahitians never attacked but, rather,extravagantlywelcomed these visitorswho came in gigantic wooden hulls.When Bougainville's ship neared the shore of Tahitia great mass of hollowed-out trees was launched on the water. In an instant, his vessel was encircled;wherever he turned his gaze he witnessed demonstrations of surprise andgoodwill. Food was thrown to him, arms were outstretched. .... Witness inyour mind's eye this spectacle of hospitality,and tell me what you thinkof thehuman race. (46)

Speaker B, whose words these are, supposes of course that one will think onlyhighly and nobly of the human race based on the Tahitians'display.They had nocontext either to deem trustworthyor to distrust the strangerswho appeared overthe horizon. They could not guarantee that these visitorswould not rape, pillage,and slaughter them. In fact, the French did some of each. Hence, the high andnoble thoughts of humans' addressing their fellows as worthyof equal rightoccuronly against the background of loss. Thisdescription of hospitality comes directlyafter the old man's jeremiad, so by the time the reader imagines the spectacle ofhospitality,he or she will have known that Bougainville'sparty, n order to enforcethe distinction between mine and thine, did attack-ignobly-and thus chose notto give the benefit of their diffidence to the other: "The Tahitianwho ran to meetyou, to greet you, who welcomed you crying, 'tal'b, riend, friend',you killed. ....He offered you his fruits,his wife, his daughter,his hut, and you killed him for ahandful of beads which he took without asking" (44). In this contrast betweenprivate appropriation and hospitality lies the coup de grace of "The Old Man'sFarewell," or Diderot herein explores terrain nearly absent in Hobbes's martialstate of nature.

As we shall soon remark,Diderot develops a tripartite theory of colonialism,one element of which veritablyturnson the question of hospitality,for to conqueris more than anything to be a shockingly bad guest. Here in the Supplement,Diderot emphasizes the continuities and discontinuities between private propertyand hospitality-that is, the potential abuses of the latterand its transmogrifica-tion by the French into the former-by figuringthe problem throughthe bodies ofTahitian women. Hence, the elder transforms"possession"into an accusation bypairing it with "victim":" . . . you were invited; you joined us. Wespread beforeyou the abundance of our country. When you desired young girls, all (exceptthose not yet entitled to show their face and breasts) were placed before youcompletely naked by their mothers. That was how you took possession of thetender victim of our obligations as hosts" (45). What Diderot brings into


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representation by making women's bodies the objects of hospitality is not justan ostensibly fair clash between hospitality and property (announced by theslaughter of the generous Tahitian attracted by beads), but rather the takingadvantage of a hospitality-inspired society by one governed by privateappropriation. As I mentioned above, even Hobbes realized (in his Fourth Lawof Nature) that hospitality and gift-givingcall, prudentially at least, for gratitudeon the part of the recipient or guest. (Hobbes did not, however, believe thatproperty could pre-existcivil society, so it is not really quite clear what gift-givingwould entail without the ability to transfer tacit title expressly from "mine"to"thine")As the Supplement would have it, though, to abuse generous hospitalityby taking advantage of it is not just to show a lack of gratitude but, worse, tocorrupt hospitality with "mine" and "thine,"with the exclusiveness of privateproperty claims.The French, endowed with the ancient King Midas'saffliction, turn what theytouch into private property rather than gold. "Our daughters and our wivesbelong to us all. You shared that privilege with us . . . You have butchered oneanother for them, and they have come back stained with your blood" (42).Generous and hospitable, Tahitian women become objects of property. LikeEngland, France, and Spain over the Malouines/Falklands, then, Bougainville'smen dispute private claims to Tahitian women-temporary claims, to be sure,since none of the French actually remains at Tahiti,but no less exclusive for thatreason. In writing their property deeds in blood, the French commit the mostshockingly improper category confusion between land, "which cannot feel orthink or desire or will; which one takes or leaves, keeps or sells, without itsuffering or complaining,' and a person, "which does have freedom, will, desire;which has the ability to give itself up or hold itself back forever;which complainsand suffers;and which can never be an article of exchange unless its character sforgotten nd violence s done to its nature"50, emphasisadded).Of course, by dramatizing the conquest of Tahiti as the victimization ofTahitianwomen, Diderot too permitssome category confusion. As Diderot wouldhave it, naturalright,inviolable in principle, is realized in tandem with the laws ofhospitality when the object of the host-guest relation is land. While Diderot doesnot himself entertain an extended theorization of the relations between host andguest, he does, nevertheless, implicitly draw upon a discernible phenomenologyof the hospitality relation that in turn informs his critique of improper Europeancolonization. Hospitality always involves the transferfrom one person to anotherusufruct (by definition, temporary) of a good. One of the goods that for Diderotserves as an absolute limit case to hospitality is another's habitation. (Theother absolute limit case for hospitality, which I will not discuss here, is thehuman body Hospitality stands in extreme tension with natural right whenthe object of the relation is a person, treated precisely as if lacking in "freedom,


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will, desire."28)The exceptionality of inhabited land becomes clear when theguest unilaterally and abusively alters the conditions of hospitality along thedimension either of temporality or of degree of exclusivity.

Hospitality need not involve the transfer of a temporary right of use that isexclusive of others. A host may, for example, ask that two guests share a bed. Ifusufruct is granted exclusively, however, and for an indefiniteperiod of time, thenhospitality borders on gift-giving, n which the title of possession is recognized, atleast tacitly by the involved parties, to have changed in perpetuity.Hosts oftengive things to their guests that effectively imply exclusive transfers in perpetuitysince the transferred objects either get consumed (like a repast), or arestraightforwardgifts. Aside from the cases of comestibles or token gifts, though,an indefinite period of transfer still remains ultimately temporary. In sum, thedistinction between hospitality and gift-givingachieves a certain acuity when theproperty over which rights are transferred is the site of reception (land,habitations, even the human body). Hospitalitytakes place at a fixed site, at leastwith respect to the link between guest and host. It could occur between twoships' captains at sea, for example, but one fixed and present person-whowould become the host-would still be receiving an arriving and becoming-present other-who would become a guest and who, in becoming such, wouldbring the entire set of relations into being. In other words, the host will havereceived the guest as if he or she were a gift;the guest gives the host the giftof heror his (temporary) presence, which is what gives presence to the host qua host.Hence, Jacques Derrida has provocatively maintained thatthe guest becomes thehost of the host, that is, the host of the hospitality relation itself.29The guest's gift of her or his presence at the site of reception cannot, however,be a gift in perpetuity lest the guest no longer be guest strictlyspeaking but holderof some other status. Hospitality as such thus presupposes that the guest willeventually absent himself or herself qua guest from the site of reception, to whichhe or she enjoys only temporaryright.When this absenting does not happen, thatis, when the guest effectively takes possession of the site of hospitality itself bytaking the unilateral initiative to make the hospitality his or hers in perpetuity,then he or she becomes a guest forever,which is to say,nevermore a guest. If thehost's perpetuation of the hospitality relation turns into gift-givingor a cession oftitle, a guest'sabusive perpetuation of the hospitality relation is bald theft not onlyof the object of property in question but, more crucially,of hospitality itself andthe attempt at sociability. In the Supplement, the French rob the Tahitiansof the

28. The contradictions between Diderot's sexual egalitarianism and the Supplement's patriarchalpresentation of women's sexuality are so complex as to warrant another essay entirely In this limit case,Diderot's commitment to natural right conflicts most obviously with practices of hospitality29. Jacques Derrida,De I'hospitalite Anne Dufourmantelle nviteJacques Derridad repondre (Paris:Calmann-LUvy, 997), 111.


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gift they had originally given the latter merely by having arrived and havingbecome present to render the Tahitians hosts. By claiming Tahiti for France, theFrench rob the Tahitians of hospitality by robbing them of the gift of theFrenchmen'sown absolutely temporary presence as guests.In brief, to take advantage of hospitality is to turn the temporary extension ofa claim into an exclusive rightof possession. Toabuse hospitality in such a way is,indeed, to end the hospitality relation itself. French imperial primitiveaccumulation occurs not as simple appropriation but as an expropriation froma host and therefore via an offense against the (natural) law of hospitality.Thecorruption of practices of hospitality by certain dimensions of private propertyserves as a mordant indictment in itself of European conquest, but Diderot alsotells much more through the fate of his Tahitian women. The Supplementdramatizes not just that Tahiti is besieged by-in medias res-an internationalHobbesian state of nature centered on European states, but it demonstrates howHobbes's state of nature gets implanted into Diderot's state of natureprecisely inthe moment of the creationof "artificial an."Indeed, the SupplementmocksHobbes's notion of the Leviathanas an artificialman by suggesting not that it putsan end to an external state of war among persons but ratherthat it introduces warinternally into personhood:

Once upon a time there was a natural man; inside him was introduced anartificial man, and within his breast there then broke out a continual war,lasting the whole of his life. Sometimes the naturalman is stronger,sometimeshe is laid low by artificial, moral man; in either case the miserable monster isracked, torn, tortured,stretched on the wheel, constantly groaning, ceaselesslywretched, whether moved to delirium by a false striving for glory or boweddown and battered by misbegotten shame. (71-72)

Morallyspeaking, at least, human life became "solitary,pore, nasty,brutish andshort"after the advent of the artificial man; it was not already miserable in thatfantastic age beforeonly to be ameliorated by the Leviathan.This is all to say thatDiderot gives the lie to Hobbes by suggesting that the latter'sstate of nature isalready a state of civilization and not at all natural (in the sense of originary),especially if it better describes relations among peoples rather than "particularmen ... in a condition of warre one against another."30 Rousseau had alreadymade such a reproof of Hobbes in the Second Discourse and supplanted it withhis own more natural state of nature, where savage man was "withoutwar andwithout liaisons, with no need of his fellow-men, likewise with no desire to harm

30. Hobbes,Leviathan,0. Cf.C.B.Macpherson,ThePoliticalTheory f Possessive ndividualism:Hobbes to Locke (Oxford and New York:Oxford University Press, 1962), 19-46, 68-69.


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186 HOBBES& HOSPITALITYN DIDEROT'S UPPLEMENT

them."31 However, Diderot's state of nature-what one gleans of it from hisrepresentation of Tahiti-differs from both Hobbes's and Rousseau's in that hissavages are neither bellicose nor asocial and isolated; rather, hey "carriedwithinthem a seed of sociability which tended continually to be developed": hospitality,which promotes the survival of individuals and of the species (205).Now, one must note emphatically that Diderot does not by any means opposethe institution of property. Elsewhere in his political writings, he argues thatindividuals must enjoy "the sacred and imprescriptible right of property,"bywhich sovereign political authority may be constrained (179). The Supplementmerely contrasts property with hospitality rather than suggests that the latterpreclude a version of the former.Indeed, as by now should be clear, a notion ofproperty, even private property, conditions the very possibility of hospitalityinsofar as hospitality presupposes authorized usufruct of a good. That conditionof possibility also can destroy hospitality by absorbing it-by accumulating itsgoods. When the attitude of expropriator,instead of that of guest, confronts thehost, then property becomes the condition of hospitality's own annihilation. Inhis adieux, the Tahitian elder would already foresuffer this history of imperialprimitive accumulation.

Comprehending in the Supplement the stakes of imperialism for those non-Europeans caught in medias res, Diderot was careful to enumerate in acontribution to Abbe Raynal'sHistoryof the Two Indies the various conditions, asdictated by "reason and equity," hat would render colonization permissible quacolonization. (ForDiderot it is not a question of proscribing it altogether but of itstaking place properly, without expropriation.) As Diderot sees it, preciselybecause all humans are naturallyequal in right,the degree to which a territory spopulated must govern how a foreign partymay interactwith its host or would-beneighboring society Diderot counsels three principal approaches, according towhether "thecountry is deserted, or it is partlydeserted and partlyinhabited, or itis fullyinhabited."32 he firstcase is simple: it may be appropriated legitimately bythose who make the "firstwell-attested discovery" (175, 176). The third case alsoought to be simple, although the Supplement suggested how it could succumb tosubversion: "If t is fully inhabited Ican lay legitimate claim only to the hospitalityand assistance which one man owes another." fhospitality is not forthcoming orthe natives receive their visitors with hostility,Diderot asserts that the latter mayseize by force that which they require forsurvival.However,if the natives do fulfill

31. Rousseau, Discourse on the Originand Foundations of Inequality 137. Even sex, so important toTahitian hospitality remains a merely animal appetite in Rousseau's state of nature. As Hobbes hadconceived it in his comment about American savages' "naturall ust:'sexual attraction does not issueforth any exogamous social ties. Indeed, war and incest are the social relations of his savage America.32. RichardTuck identifies precursors to this view in Thomas More'sUtopiaand in the jurisprudenceof Alberico Gentili, but he does not mention Diderot. See Tuck'sTheRightsof Warand Peace, Chapter 1.


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their obligations as hosts, and if "I [qua guest] demand more, [then] I become athief and a murderer" All of that seems clear enough, but Diderot pursues theanalysis of guest versus settler-colonist furtherto clinch the point that they neverdo necessarily coincide: "Let us suppose that I have been accepted. I havebecome acquainted with the country's laws and moeurs. They suit me. I want tosettle there. ffl am allowed to do so, it is a favour done to me, and a refusal cannotoffend me" (175, emphasis added). In Diderot's geopolitical order, when thecountry is fully inhabited, that is, when the society and the land that it inhabitscannot support an influx of people either technically (in terms of its division oflabor) or ecologically33 then the right of foreigners extends only to (ultimatelytemporary) subsistence, or rather to the hospitality that would provide it.Conversely settlement by foreigners in inhabited regions is a favor,governed aprioriby hospitality,and never a right.The naturalrightto the ownership of landresides with those who already occupy and use it.In the case of colonization when the land is partly inhabited and partlydeserted, Diderot resolves problems that Hobbes left fatally unspecified. "Ifthecountry is partly deserted and partly occupied:' Diderot begins, "then thedeserted part is mine. Throughmy labour Ican take possession of it" Ifnecessary,one can exert legitimate force: "Theexisting inhabitant would be a barbarian ifhe suddenly came and tore down my hut, destroyed my plantations andplundered my fields. I could resist his incursion by force." Such defensiveviolence resonates with Hobbes'sanalysis, but as I explain below, though, Hobbesproves somewhat equivocal about the limits of both violence and possessionamong encountering peoples, while Diderot keenly wants to specify what can betaken and defended as exclusive dominion: "Ican extend my domain up to theborders of his [the existing inhabitant's] land."However, "Theforests, riversandsea-shore are common to us both, unless their exclusive use was necessary to hislivelihood. The only other thing he can demand of me is that I shouldbe a peaceful neighbour and that my settlement should in no way threaten him"(175-76).

Note, first,that the attitude inspiringpotential colonization has changed here,and, further, that Diderot has transposed that attitude with each principle. Ifhospitality and reciprocal guest-graciousness appropriately configure potentialsettlement in fully peopled places, and discovery (accompanied by appropria-tion) is a legitimate principle for completely uninhabited places only, thenneighborliness would properly rule where habitation remains partial. And whatneighborliness means here, what its peace depends upon, is the clear delineation

33. Orou articulates criteria forjudging a society's sufficiency as follows: "Hasthe land of your birthmore people than it can feed? In that case your ways are neither worse nor better than ours. Can it feedmore than it has? In that case our ways are better than yours" (48).


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of boundaries of mine, yours, and ours together as concerns mattersof livelihood.Privatedominion, the right of use exclusive of others, conditions neighborliness,but more interestingly, neighborliness also may entail the (re-)institution ofdesignated commons, so lately unfashionable in post-feudal Europe.

By contrast with Diderot's conditions and qualifications of colonization,Hobbes remains conflicted about colonization's relation to violence andappropriation. The reason for this contrast again originates in their divergentconclusions from fundamental equality of faculties of body and mind-Hobbes'smutual hostility and Diderot's universal hospitality. As consistent with thearguments about the tenuousness of possession in the state of nature, propertyonly really comes into existence with a sovereign power to awe individuals into amutual renunciation of quarrel.Hence, colonies-in the sense of relativelystablesettlements of landed property-cannot maintain themselves, either internallyorexternally, in the absence of a commonwealth that can secure and guide them.Hobbes thus describes colonies at one point in Leviathanas the "Procreation,orChildren of a Common-wealth": "numbers of men sent out from the Common-wealth under a Conductor, or Governour, to inhabit a Forraign Country,eitherformerly voyd of Inhabitants,or made voyd then, by warre."Problematically,toomuch turns on the insertion and location in this passage of "then," or, on thequestion of these foreign countries' being void or having been (violently) madevoid of native inhabitants, Hobbes states something possibly contrary later.Discussing the necessity of laws to prevent idleness in able-bodied masterlessmen, he asserts:

The multitude of poor, and yet strong people still encreasing, they are to betransplanted into Countries not sufficiently inhabited: where neverthelesse,they are not to exterminate those they find there;but constrain them to inhabitcloser together,and not range a great deal of ground, to snatch what they find;but to court each little Plot with art and labour, to give them their sustenancein due season. And when all the world is overchargdwith Inhabitants,then thelast remedy of all is Warre;which provideth for every man, by Victory, orDeath.

If the country is void of other humans, Hobbes sees no need for offensiveviolence. When the country is not void, then does the "then" mean that wararises, in such a case at such a time, as an option to make it void for newsettlement? Perhaps,but it is worth asking how war's "makingvoid" occurs. Evenfor Hobbes, who so keenly wanted to fix the significations of things, "warre" antake on expansive meaning: "the nature of War,"et us recall, "consisteth not inactuall fighting, but in the known disposition thereto" The second passage oncolonies suggests, then, that "warre"might work to make a country void in two


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ways: by extermination, as when the world teems with inhabitants, or as themeans to compel natives by threat of thuggish force "to inhabit closer together."Space itself would qualify as one of those "thingsneedfull for the maintenance,and motion of the whole Body" of the commonwealth, so its denial by othersthrough alternate means such as exchange would be cause for "justWarre."34Internally ordered by the leviathan, like the members of the mother-common-wealth, but erring into the wilderness of international anarchy under its aegis,Hobbes's colonies simultaneously serve as shocktroops and suffer as the mostexposed flank in that final war for living space.

Significantly,uniquely,although colonization is still foundationallya matter forDiderot of enjoying exclusive use of a plot of land, that is, private property,hereorients the question of priorinhabitance away from the related question of howuse can become exclusive (what conditions signify exclusivity) and toward thequestion of how an encounter among peoples ought to occur if it takes place. Bycoming back to property through hospitality and neighborliness, Diderot wastherefore able to entertain a varietyof discernments about livelihood that Hobbescould not. Diderot's qualification regarding "forests, rivers, and sea-shore" ascommon to colonist and native "unlesstheir exclusive use was necessary to [thelatter's] livelihood" recognizes that livelihood may be practiced by means otherthan agriculture.In realizing this, Diderot did not erect as universal a standard ofefficiency in the use of land that was actually tied to a particular form oflivelihood. The "artand labour,"as Hobbes puts it, of some forms of livelihood,such as hunting, does not occur sedentarily but actually requires that one "rangea great deal of ground."The result of Diderot's making the attitude toward an other primary is thatwhen he does return to the secondary concern of the conditions of exclusivity,hedoes so with pluralstandards for the signification of property use, and livelihood.Propertyin some form would remain the end, in the sense of prior inspiringaim,but it could not come first. One had to returnto property throughthe politics ofhospitality or neighborliness, if one encountered others with established usagesand forms of livelihood-and equality of right demands one to presume thatothers do have such established usages and forms. Diderot's conception ofpolitics takes root in the harrowing difficulty of negotiating the role that privacywould play in the encounters with others that attend natural human sociability.While sociability is necessary for the mutual recognitions that property requires,and while property conditions the possibility of hospitality and neighborliness,

34. Hobbes, Leviathan, 101, 125 (on property); 175, 239 (colonies); 88-89 (definition of war); 171(just war). Cf. Paolo Pasqualucci, "Hobbes and the Myth of 'Final War"' 1990), rpt. in Great PoliticalThinkers:Hobbes, ed. John Dunn and Ian Harris(Cheltenham and Lyme:EdwardElgarPublishing, 1997),III:272-282. Pasqualucci does not consider Hobbes's elastic definition of war or the conditions forjustwar.


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the specific forms that property would assume depend upon the outcome ofhospitality and neighborliness. The riskalways remains that propertywill pervertthose very relations, like hospitality and neighborliness, in which it ispresupposed; and that, consequently, hospitality and neighborliness as such willnever take place. Neighborliness and hospitality per se succeed only in theabsence of the divisive, defensive order of private property In their most radicaland proper sense, hospitality and neighborliness are social relations that incitethe recognition of propertyby an excess of public relations across boundaries ofmine and thine:

Every people is justified in providing for its present and futuresafety IfI set upa stockade, amass weapons, and put up fortifications, a people's deputieswould be wise if they came and said to me: 'Areyou our friend? Are you ourenemy? If a friend, what is the purpose of all these preparations for war? Ifanenemy, you will understand why we destroy them' And the nation will besensible if it immediately gets rid of a well-founded fear. (176)

The attemptto exclude others (potential neighbors or guests) from one's propertyby walling it off as intentionally beyond friendly relation already undermines themutual recognition that makes property possible as a social relation in the firstinstance. The best defense and method for a people's security is not the defensiveposture of Hobbes's "weapons pointing, . . . eyes fixed on one another"35 butrather the friendly openness of human sociability.These principles of colonization put the Tahitian elder's censure of thebehavior of Bougainville's men into fuller perspective. His farewell reveals thatsomething is lacking in a version of colonization that approaches women as ifthey were land, and all lands as if they were uninhabited ("virgin,'as it is called).In response to Bougainville and the imperial order he emblematizes, Diderotoffers an alternate vision of encounter, one that complicates what counts ascolonization and how "expropriation"gets signified. Insofar as Diderot places theemphasis in his analysis of colonization on the various ethical postures availableto a foreigner and a native, his writingstranscend the more narrow constructionsof colonizer/colonized, which effectively declare an ethical transgression butcannot detail even retrospectively the rights or obligations obtaining for bothparties.Without human sociability-without one human's having been open to andhaving hosted another-there cannot have been language or law,not to mentionpropertyor peoples. Hospitality, nsofar as it posits a law of sociability priorto allpositive, practical iterations of law,grounded Diderot'scritique of European acts

35. Hobbes, Leviathan, 90.


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of conquest in an ethics of radical encounter. The consequences of a Diderotianemphasis on hospitality for a law of peoples are enormous. By arguing that thereexists a law of hospitality to which all people or peoples encountering oneanother are beholden, Diderot effectively makes three points. First,no people isin a position of exteriority to law, as a Hobbesian "realist"perspective wouldsuggest about the relations among states. (For Hobbesian states-which do not,let us recall, have a power above them which can enforce decrees that promotecommodious interrelations-the laws of natureare only prudential, not binding.)In other words, no people legitimately forms a law unto itself from which it couldexempt itself in its relations with other peoples: there is no such Archimedianpoint with respect to law; there are no true outlaws-not human ones anyway.Second, imposing one's own standards of positive law (that one presumablyobeys) on an other people in an encounter with them is tantamount to conquestand therefore an abuse of proper human sociability. And, third, as legitimatecritique of law demands a position of interioritywith respect to it, being the guestin a hospitality relation is the minimum of interiority needed for legitimatecritique of the host's positive law, but that critique must occur by way of naturallaw (for guests who will remain guests) or immanently by way of the host's ownpositive law (for those guests who no longer remain guests because invited to staywith the host, or who were never guests in the first place, as in the case of so-called "guest"workers).Diderot considered an outsider's imposition of his or her own particular,positive law on a people as among the worst excesses: "thatpeople could expeland kill me if Iseized women, children and property;if I infringed its civil liberty;if I restrictedits religious opinions; ifI claimed to give it laws; if Iwished to make itmy slave. Then Iwould be only one more wild animal in its vicinity,and no morepity would be due to me than to a tiger"(176, emphasis added). The performanceof such acts relegates one not merely to outlaw status vis-d-vis ocal standards butalso utterlybeneath the ken of righthumanity Diderot'sindignation makes sensethrough his commitment to seeing the laws of hospitality as the natural lawsgoverning human sociability which exist prior to and outside of any positive law.It is the laws of hospitality-the proper recognition due a host by the guest, andvice versa, within the hospitality relation-that the French have transgressed.Hence, the French have violated not only local positive law but, morefundamentally,natural law,which governs hospitality and makes it possible.This is to imply that hospitalityentails not only recognizing and respecting thetemporary transfer of titles of use over objects of property but-as much aspossible-a more fundamental recognition and respect for the established locallanguages and laws that constitute the host's conditions of propertyas animatedin the hospitality relation. While the guest may be a strangernot only to the placeof the host but also to the host's language of right, the guest's fundamental


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192 HOBBES& HOSPITALITYN DIDEROT'SUPPLEMENT

ignorance does not excuse her or him from attempting to respect the host's laws.It is the over-facile resignation to the outlaw's position that Diderot wanted todiscourage in the Supplement. Such a critique is what he aims at when-in aseeming capitulation to reformism or, worse, conformism-he writes in closing:"We must speak out against senseless laws until they're reformed and, in themeanwhile, abide by them. Anyone who on the strength of his own personalauthorityviolates a bad law thereby authorises everyone else to violate the good.... Let's ollow the good chaplain's example and be monks in France and savagesin Tahiti"(74). To assume private authority in the face of established laws andmoeurs is to become less than human, that "wild animal"who knows nothing ofsociability and the politikon zoon.

Hospitality among nations entails that foreigners will not only abide by themandates of hospitality but also, since these in turnpresuppose that the guest willsubmit to the general expectations of a host, respect the host's established localmoeurs and laws as these constitute the parameters of each instance ofhospitality.The guest's willed ignorance or active disobedience of the host's lawsand moeurs puts that guest in violation of natural and positive laws, not above oroutside of them.

diderot's hospitality

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