## 1. Biography




Holbach was born in 1723 in Edesheim. He was raised in Paris,
principally by his uncle, Franciscus Adam d'Holbach, and
attended the University of Leiden from 1744 to 1748 or 1749. Holbach
particularly enjoyed the parties there. It is likely that, at least at
first, the dinners Holbach gave in Paris were modelled on the parties
he attended at Leiden. In 1749, Holbach married his second cousin,
Basile-Genevieve d'Aine. About 1753 or 1754 both his
uncle, Franciscus, and his father in law died, leaving Holbach a
considerable fortune. 




Holbach used his great wealth to throw the dinner parties for which he
is famous. He owned a house in Paris in rue Royale, Butte Saint-Roch,
which, generally, had a guest list restricted to serious
intellectuals, and a chateau at Grandval where, in addition to his
coterie, Holbach also hosted social friends and
relatives. Holbach's coterie included intellectuals who,
although their positions varied on many issues, shared at least a
willingness to entertain views that many would have thought too
radical to be discussed in social settings. The coterie met from the
1750s into the 1780s. The group evolved over time, but its core
members, Alan Kors has argued, were Denis Diderot, the encyclopedist;
the diplomat and cultural critic Friedrich-Melchior Grimm; the
naturalist Charles-Georges Le Roy; the writer and critic
Jean-Francois Marmontel; the historian and priest abbe
Guillame-Thomas-Francois Raynal; the doctor Augustin Roux; the
poet and philosopher Jean-Francois de Saint-Lambert; the writer
Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard; the pamphleteer Francois-Jean,
chevalier de Chastellux, the pamphleteer abbe Andre
Morellet; and the philosopher Jacques-Andre Naigeon. Many of
these men were, like Holbach, avowed atheists and many also pushed
radical, even revolutionary political agendas. So the general
character of his coterie might suggest that Holbach was a figure on
the fringe of Parisian society, a kind of eccentric parvenu with a
taste for scandal.




However, Holbach managed, despite what one might expect, to keep his
coterie firmly in the mainstream of European society. French nobles,
as well as ambassadors from countries across Europe--Denmark,
England, Naples, Saxe-Gotha, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Wurtemburg, and
Sweden--attended his dinners. So did prominent intellectuals of
all kinds, including, at different times and with different degrees of
enthusiasm, the philosopher and novelist Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the
mathematician Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, the historian Edward
Gibbon, the writer Horace Walpole, the chemist Joseph Priestley, the
social critic Cesare Beccaria, the philosopher Nicolas-Antoine
Boulanger, the statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin, the actor
David Garrick, the philosopher Claude-Adrien Helvetius, the
philosopher David Hume, the economist Adam Smith, and the novelist
Laurence Sterne. Holbach was known in France not primarily as a
political radical but as *le premier maitre
d'hotel de la philosophie*. Many in Paris coveted
invitations to rue Royale, and Holbach's house was the first
stop for many prominent international visitors.




Holbach's character must have been remarkable to have maintained
a salon in which the espousers of political and religious reform met
so freely and so often with visitors who either cannot have been
accustomed to such open dialogue or who were themselves parts of the
establishment under attack. Indeed Rousseau, who himself came to feel
unwelcome by the coterie, nevertheless memorializes Holbach in *La
nouvelle Heloise*, as the paradoxical figure, Wolmar, an
atheist who nonetheless embodies all of the Christian virtues. In
addition to his good character, Holbach's generosity at table
(his dinners and especially his wine were famously good) and in
supporting many of his acquaintances may explain his success at being
both a pillar and a critic of society. Perhaps, also, Holbach was not
in the eyes of many of his contemporaries as clearly a radical as some
other members of his coterie. He did publish some of the most
notorious works of the French Enlightenment, including *Le
Christianisme devoile* (*Christianity
Unveiled*),
*Systeme de la nature* (*System of Nature*) and
*Le Bon Sens* (*Common Sense*). These books evoked long
and heated responses from such notable figures as Voltaire, abbe
Bergier, and Frederick the Great; *System of Nature* and
*Common Sense* were condemned by the parliament of Paris and
publicly burned. Holbach, however, was not in his own time as notorious
as his books. He was careful always to publish anonymously, so that
those who did not know him or who did not care to think of him in that
way, might have remained at least partially ignorant of his religious
and political views.




Holbach's coterie met for thirty years, from the early 1750s until
about 1780. During that time his first wife died and he married her
younger sister, Charlotte Suzanne d'Aine, with whom he had four
children. Holbach wrote prolifically throughout this time. According to
Vercruysse, Holbach authored or coauthored over fifty books and over
four hundred articles. He died in 1789.


## 2. Metaphysics: Matter and Motion, Cause and Effect




The metaphysical position with which Holbach is most often associated
is a negative one: atheism. Although indeed Holbach devotes the entire
second volume of *Systeme de la nature* and all
of *Le Bon Sens* to the defense of atheism and the criticism of
particular claims about God, his views do not hold great philosophical
interest. They emphasize well worn topics such as the problem of evil,
the impossibility of discussing intelligibly what is unknowable, the
suspect psychological origins of religious belief, and the confusion
of traditional descriptions of God in terms that are simply the
negation of genuine descriptive terms: for example, to say that God is
infinite is just to deny that God is finite. None of these arguments
is unique to Holbach or especially well presented by him. His positive
metaphysics, on the other hand, has been somewhat overshadowed by his
long and loud expressions of atheism, and it will be the focus of this
discussion.




Holbach takes nature to consist in matter and motion and nothing else.
Nature is known to us, when it can be known, as a sequence of causes
and effects: 



> The universe, that vast assemblage of every thing that
> exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our
> contemplation nothing but an immense, an uninterrupted succession of
> causes and effects. [*System of Nature*, 15]




Holbach's metaphysics, then, is mechanistic, in that any correct
explanation of an event will refer only to matter, motion, and the
laws which describe their combination. Holbach's ambitious attempt to
draw from this sparse metaphysics answers to questions often thought
to involve something more than this, his *Systeme de la
nature*, is badly marred, in some places, by over-simplification
and, in others, by dogmatism. Indeed Goethe in his memoirs
(*Dichtung und Wahrheit* vol. 9, 490-492) credits the
account of nature in this work with forever turning him away from
French philosophy. Nevertheless, Holbach's metaphysics does form the
basis for his engaging religious, ethical, and political views, and it
does so by means of an innovative recasting of a traditional account
of the properties of matter. 




Holbach's account of matter may best be understood against the
background of the Lockean account, which is more familiar and from
which in large part it is developed. (Israel 2006 traces the sources
of the views of Holbach and the coterie in detail.) On Locke's
account of bodies (Book 2, Chapter 8 of his *Essay*), all
bodies possess "real" or "primary" qualities
(solidity, extension, figure, number, and motion). Real qualities are
those which are "inseparable" from the bodies
themselves. To take Locke's example (*Essay* 2.8.9), a
grain of wheat will have solidity, extension, figure and so on when it
is intact, and it will retain these properties whatever happens to
it. Locke distinguishes primary qualities from powers in bodies to
produce sensations in observers, which he calls secondary
qualities. Secondary qualities, for example, are color, sound, taste,
and so on. Because he hesitates to call secondary qualities real
qualities, it is clear that Locke takes them to have a metaphysical
status different from that he gives primary qualities.




There may be several different ways of accounting for Locke's
distinction between primary and secondary qualities. The important
aspect of the distinction for the present discussion is that on
Locke's view we ought always to explain a secondary quality in terms of
a primary quality by which it produces the relevant sensation in us.
Colors, sounds, smells and so on are on Locke's account powers that a
body has as a result of its particular shape, motion, and so on which
produce the relevant sensations in observers: "[Secondary
qualities] are only Powers to act differently upon other things, which
Powers result from the different Modifications of those primary
qualities" (*Essay* 2.8.23). For example, in arguing that some,
apparently more genuine properties of fire, such as heat, are really on
the same footing with qualities such as the tendency to melt wax that
are more obviously relational, Locke holds that each of these qualities
alike are powers that a body has in virtue of its primary qualities to
produce certain effects[my emphasis added]: "...the power in fire to
produce a new color, or consistency in wax or clay *by its primary
qualities* is as much a quality in fire, as the power it has to
produce in me a new idea or sensation of warmth or burning"
(*Essay* 2.8.10). For Locke, then, all bodies have primary
qualities, and any secondary qualities that they have are to be
understood in terms of the primary qualities that produce them.




Holbach maintains something like Locke's distinction between primary
and secondary qualities, but he does not insist that the properties of
bodies that Locke calls secondary qualities, are properties that bodies
possess in virtue of particular primary qualities. Matter, for Holbach,
is whatever makes up bodies and causes the sense impressions that we
have of them. Matter, in general, may be said to have properties in the
sense that there are some properties that anything which is matter will
possess. These properties are roughly the Lockean primary qualities
(with the important exception of motion, of which more below). However,
Holbach holds that matter is a class, rather than a particular thing,
since different objects may possess different properties as well:



> A satisfactory definition of matter has not yet been
> given...[Man] looked upon it as a unique being...whilst he ought to
> have contemplated it as a *genus* of beings, of which the
> individuals, although they might possess some common properties, such
> as extent, divisibility, figure, etc., should not, however, be all
> ranked in the same class, nor comprised under the same
> denomination.




So we may say that both a fire and a building have extent,
divisibility and so on, but that a building has some properties, such
as grayness, that fire lacks and that fire has some properties, such as
luminance, that the building lacks. It may be that some of the
properties that some but not all particular bodies have are to be
understood in terms of primary qualities, but Holbach does not insist
on this point. The properties which Locke called secondary qualities
are not distinguished from primary qualities by the fact that they are
rightly understood in terms of them. Rather, the only distinction
between these properties and primary qualities is that primary
qualities are in all matter alike and secondary qualities are in only
some bodies. Of fire, for example, Holbach writes:



> Fire, besides these general properties common to all
> matter, enjoys also the peculiar property of being put into activity by
> a motion producing on our organs of feeling the sensation of heat and
> by another, which communicates to our visual organs the sensation of
> light. [*System of Nature*, 24]




Fire, in other words, besides having figure, extension and the other
properties of matter in general, has also the "peculiar"
properties of heat and luminance. These further properties are,
metaphysically, no different from the properties common to all matter,
on Holbach's view, and they belong to fire in just as basic and
just as mysterious a way as its extent and figure. 




Holbach's choice of example reflects a likely familiarity with
criticisms of the Lockean basis for the distinction between primary and
secondary qualities found in the writings of Berkeley and Holbach's
friend and correspondent, Hume. Both of these authors use the example
of the feeling of pain in heat (Berkeley, *Three Dialogues* I;
Hume *Treatise* 1.4.4, 3) as a first step in demonstrating the
mind-dependence of all properties of body alike and so of casting into
doubt any supposed difference in kind between primary and secondary
qualities.




Holbach's recasting of the distinction between primary and secondary
qualities in terms of properties that matter possesses universally and
properties that only some bodies possess helps him to avoid the
Berkeleyan criticism of the distinction. Holbach never claims, as Locke
does, that properties such as color and sound have a metaphysical
status different from that of the primary qualities. Lockean secondary
qualities are, for Holbach, basic, inexplicable qualities of matter on
a par with extension and solidity and distinguished from them only on
the grounds that they are possessed by some bodies and not others.
Because Holbach allows that some matter possesses qualities that other
matter does not possess, his notion of matter is more varied than
Locke's. For Locke, all matter is homogenous, in the sense that it
possesses all of the primary qualities and no other real qualities
besides. For Holbach, matter is heterogenous. It is a



> genus of beings, of which the individuals, although they
> might possess some common properties, such as extent, divisibility,
> figure, etc., should not, however, be all ranked in the same class, nor
> comprised under the same general denomination. [*System of
> Nature*, 3]




The heterogeneity of matter in Holbach's metaphysics puts him at a
disadvantage to the traditional Lockean view, in a sense. Locke's
account of matter, if true, is simpler and has great explanatory power:
the full panoply of sensations that we encounter are to be explained by
an account of our sensory organs, a short list of primary qualities,
and the laws which govern their interaction. Holbach, on the other
hand, requires separate explanations for each perceived property. He
promises an explanation of all phenomena in terms of matter and motion,
but delivers not even a framework for such an explanation.




In another sense, though, the heterogeneity of matter is helpful to
Holbach's project. Materialistic accounts of human nature are often
thought to fail just because human beings seem to have properties, such
as thought and freedom, that matter does not have. In making matter a
genus of varied beings, Holbach creates a view flexible enough to
accommodate an account of human nature more robust than that of many
other materialists:



> ...Man is, as a whole, the result of a certain
> combination of matter, endowed with particular properties, competent
> to give, capable of receiving, certain impulses, the arrangement of
> which is called organization, of which the essence is, to feel, to
> think, to act, to move, after a manner distinguished from other beings
> with which he can be compared. Man, therefore, ranks in an order, in a
> system, in a class by himself, which differs from that of other
> animals, in whom we do not perceive those properties of which he is
> possessed. [*System of Nature* 15]




Holbach's naturalism requires that human nature be understood in terms
of laws and that human action be comprehended under universal
determinism. But it allows that, in many ways, human beings may differ
in kind from other bodies, even animals, and it allows that human
beings may have many properties, notably thought, that have
traditionally been denied to matter. 




The heterogeneity of matter in Holbach's account contributes to the
vagueness of that designation. Matter can to some extent be understood in
the ordinary sense of anything that has extention, figure, and so on.
However, because matter also may or may not have any number of
properties not ordinarily understood to belong to matter, such as
thought, it is not entirely clear what may not be matter. Motion is
likewise and for similar reasons a vague term in Holbach. Where matter
is understood simply as extension and some other very simple
properties, motion may be thought of in similarly simple terms, as a
velocity, acceleration or, perhaps, as an impulse with a certain
direction. Once matter is thought of, after the manner of Holbach, as
something with properties which are perhaps best not understood in
spatial terms, its motion may be much more difficult to define.
Although he sometimes speaks of matter and motion in narrower senses,
Holbach's tendency is simply to identify matter and motion with the
general terms cause and effect. Holbach typically identifies bodies
with causes and motions with effects, but he also allows that motions
may be causes:



> A *cause* is a being which puts another in motion,
> or which produces some change in it. The *effect* is the change
> produced in one body by the motion or presence of another. [*System
> of Nature* 16]




To understand human beings and human society in terms of matter and
motion, then, is simply to understand them in terms of causes and
effects. Holbach's naturalism in ethics and political theory
extends to a commitment to ground those disciplines in an account of
human nature understood in terms of lawlike regularities, most
importantly, psychological laws. But Holbach is not a naturalist in
the stricter sense of attempting to understand human beings in terms
of the same laws that explain the rest of nature. Determinism is
universal, in Holbach's view, but different sorts of bodies may
have peculiar properties that require peculiar explanations. Despite
his avowed materialism, Holbach does not demand the sorts of reductive
explanations of mental events that materialism might ordinarily seem
to require. 


## 3. Ethics: Virtue for the Sake of Happiness




Holbach's ethics is naturalistic in the sense described. Like
his major influence in this area, Spinoza, he undertakes to explain
human beings with the same clarity and rigor that others explain
geometry (*Elements de la morale universelle*,
Preface). The laws that Holbach depends upon in accounting for human
nature are primarily psychological laws and may be peculiar to human
beings. For Holbach, like Spinoza and Hobbes, holds that each person
seeks his own preservation (*System of Nature*, 40; cf,
Spinoza's *Ethics* IIIp9 and Hobbes's *De
Homine*, Chap. 11--Holbach's is still the most widely
available French translation of the latter). As both of these authors
do, Holbach associates the ends of action also with happiness, so that
happiness and self-preservation are, in his ethics, generally speaking
related, and an individual's interest is understood by Holbach
in terms of either (and where he distinguishes between them, both) of
these. 




Ethics on Holbach's account, then, amounts to enlightened
self-interest, vice to a failure to recognize the means to one's
interest, and moral rules to hypothetical imperatives which dictate the
means to happiness or self-preservation:



> [Man] was ignorant of his true interests; hence his
> irregularities, his intemperance, his shameful voluptuousness, with
> that long train of vices to which he has abandoned himself, at the
> expense of his preservation, at the risk of his permanent felicity.
> [*System of Nature*, 14]




Because people desire what morality provides, they will as a matter of
course be motivated to do what is moral, provided they know what that
is. The ignorance that Holbach describes here, however, is what causes
people to fail to act rightly. So what ethics requires is an
investigation into ignorance: In what respects are people ignorant?
What are the most dangerous forms of ignorance? How is ignorance to be
overcome? 




One of the most dangerous kinds of ignorance, on Holbach's analysis,
is an ignorance of nature and, in particular, of the causes of good and
evil in it. Like Spinoza, Holbach argues that we tend to personify
nature, projecting our interests and purposes onto matter that is, in
fact, different from us (*System of Nature*, App. 17; cf,
Spinoza's *Ethics* I, App.). This produces, on Holbach's
account, the belief in God and other religious beliefs (such as the
belief in heaven and hell and immortality) which in turn cause us to
pursue self-preservation in misguided ways:



> The ignorance of natural causes created Gods, and imposture
> made them terrible. Man lived unhappy, because he was told that God had
> condemned him to misery. He never entertained a wish of breaking his
> chains, as he was taught, that stupidity, that the renouncing of
> reason, mental debility, and spiritual debasement, were the means of
> obtaining eternal felicity. [*System of Nature*,
> 349-350]




Holbach was notorious in the 18th century for his atheism and for his
criticisms of Christianity. Indeed today these topics most frequently
engage philosophers and historians who study Holbach (see Kors 2005
and Fonnesu 2006, for example), and Holbach continues to be a hero of
defenders of atheism, including the popular philosopher Michel
Onfrey. There is no doubt that a great deal of what Holbach wrote was
inflammatory and intended to be so. However, the fact that at least
some of his polemics, furious though they may have been, arose in the
context of developing an account of virtue should mitigate the
impression of Holbach as a purely destructive thinker or (merely) a
lover of scandal. His criticism of religion, and of Catholicism in
particular, is founded at least in part in the conviction that
religion is the source of vice and unhappiness and that virtue can
only be fostered in people who seek to preserve themselves in the world
of their immediate acquaintance:



> Renounce your vague hopes; disengage yourself from
> overwhelming fears...do not attempt to plunge your views into an
> impenetrable future... ...Only think then, of making
> yourself happy in that existence which is known to you; if you would
> preserve yourself, be temperate, moderate, and reasonable; if you seek
> to render your existence durable, do not be prodigal of pleasure;
> abstain from everything that can be harmful to yourself or
> others. [*System of Nature*, 162;
> cf. Spinoza's *Ethics* IVP42C2S]




Holbach's ethics, as Rousseau recognized, is not nearly as
revisionary as his theology. As this passage makes clear, his
conception of human virtue is quite traditional. Preservation and
happiness, as Holbach conceives them, involve most of the same
practices that the religious views Holbach denounces require for
eternal preservation and felicity. Perhaps the principal practical
difference between morality as Holbach conceives it and the Christian
morality as Holbach understands it lies in the self-abnegation Holbach
finds valued in Christian morality. For Holbach, temperance, moderation
and so on are virtues that one acquires out of a love for pleasure and
life. On the other hand, he takes these virtues, as they are understood
traditionally, to involve an unhealthy denial of one's love for wine,
food and other familiar pleasures. Temperance and moderation, for
Holbach are the best means to the enjoyment of wine and food, whereas
in the views he criticizes they are virtues by which we deny the value
of such enjoyment.


## 4. Political Theory: Ethocracy




Holbach's political theory, which he developed for the most part after
his metaphysics and ethics, extends his ethical views to the state.
Having described human interest as happiness and preservation in the
*System of Nature* and *Common Sense* in 1770 and 1772,
Holbach went on to develop a notion of the just state or, to use his
own term, "ethocracy," founded for the purposes of securing the general
welfare. This theory is presented in several works published during the
1770s, *La politique naturelle* (*Natural Politics*,
1773), *Systeme social* (*The Social System*,
1773), *La morale universelle* (*Universal Morality*,
1776), and *Ethocratie* (*Ethocracy*, 1776). Holbach's
foundational view is that the most valuable thing a person seeking
self-preservation can do is to unite with another person: "Man is of
all beings the most necessary to man" (*Systeme social*,
76; cf. Spinoza's *Ethics* IVP35C1, C2, and S). Society, when it
is just, unites for the common purpose of preservation and the securing
of welfare, and society contracts with government for this purpose. 




Holbach's theory of social contract has two stages. The first is
social. When individuals realize that others are the greatest helps to
their own welfare, they make a pact with one another, uniting in order
to obtain personal and proprietary security and other benefits of
society (*Universal Morality* 1.86; *Politique
Naturelle*, 1.1). To strike such a pact is part of each person's
reason:



> Help me...and I will help you with all my talents..work for
> my happiness if you want me to concern myself with yours...Secure for
> me advantages great enough to persuade me to give up to you a part of
> those which I possess. [*Politique Naturelle* 1.1, Ladd's
> translation]




This social contract, the contract between individuals in society, is
never broken. 




The second stage of the social contract is more narrowly political.
It is a contract that society, in order to secure the general welfare,
strikes with a sovereign power, usually understood by Holbach to be a
king limited, or at least informed by, a body of elected
representatives (*La politique naturelle* 3.17). This second
social contract for Holbach, as for Locke, may be broken. Holbach is a
thoroughgoing utilitarian: where the government fails to secure the
general welfare, which consists principally in securing property and
basic freedoms such as the freedoms of speech and religion, society has
a right to revolution (*La politique naturelle*, 4.5).




Perhaps because of the less cautious advocacy of right to revolution
among other members of his coterie, particularly Naigeon, or perhaps
because he criticized the kings of his time so fiercely, Holbach is
sometimes regarded as an advocate of revolution. Holbach's
discussion is tentative, however. He describes the right in *La
politique naturelle* (4.5 ff.) as a product of the natural
instinct for self-preservation. Like Hobbes (*Leviathan*, XXIX,
23), Holbach expects that obedience to a sovereign will break down
where individuals feel the need to secure their own lives. This is
also why sovereigns need to take care to look after citizens'
welfare and education. Where they fail to do these things, citizens
come to be ruled not by reason but by passion, and revolution
results. Holbach's right to revolution, then, is less an
advocacy of revolution than a warning to avoid the conditions that
lead to it.