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 DIAGNOSING SOCIAL PATHOLOGY

Can a human society suffer from illness like a living thing? And if so,
how does such a malaise manifest itself? In this thought-provoking
book, Frederick Neuhouser explains and defends the idea of social
pathology, demonstrating what it means to describe societies as “ill,”
or “sick,” and why we are so often drawn to conceiving of social
problems as ailments or maladies. He shows how Rousseau, Hegel,
Marx, and Durkheim – four key philosophers who are seldom taken
to ­constitute a “tradition” – deploy the idea of social pathology in
comparable ways, and then explores the connections between societal
illnesses and the phenomena those thinkers made famous: ­alienation,
anomie, ideology, and social dysfunction. His book is a rich and
compelling illumination of both the idea of social disease and the
importance it has had, and continues to have, for philosophical views
of society.

Fr eder ick Neu houser is Professor of Philosophy at Barnard

College, Columbia University, and Permanent Fellow at the Center
for Humanities and Social Change in Berlin. His books include
Fichte’s Theory of Subjectivity (Cambridge University Press, 1990),
Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory (2000), Rousseau’s Theodicy of
Self-Love (2008), and Rousseau’s Critique of Inequality (Cambridge
University Press, 2014).

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press
 DI AG NO S I NG S O C I A L
PAT HOL O G Y
Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim

FR EDER ICK N EU HOUSER

Barnard College, Columbia University

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© Frederick Neuhouser 2023
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names: Neuhouser, Frederick, author.
title: Diagnosing social pathology : Rousseau, Hegel, Marx,
and Durkheim / Frederick Neuhouser.
description: 1 Edition. | New York, ny : Cambridge University Press, 2022. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
identifiers: lccn 2022009563 | isbn 9781009235037 (hardback) |
isbn 9781009235020 (ebook)
subjects: lcsh: Social problems. | Sociology – Philosophy.
classification: lcc hn18 .n478 2022 | ddc 361–dc23/eng/20220224
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URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.

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 Für Gene, das Gute in leiblicher und geistiger Gestalt

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Published online by Cambridge University Press
 Contents

Preface page ix
Note on Citations xx

1 Can Societies Be Ill? 1

2 Society as Organism? 29
3 Marx: Pathologies of Capitalist Society 45
4 Marx: Labor in Spiritual Life and Social Pathology 72
5 Plato: Human Society as Organism 92
6 Rousseau: Human Society as Artificial 105
7 Durkheim’s Predecessors: Comte and Spencer 139
8 Durkheim: Functionalism 156
9 Durkheim: Solidarity, Moral Facts, and Social
Pathology 192
10 Durkheim: A Science of Morality 229
11 Hegelian Social Ontology I: Objective Spirit 255
12 Hegelian Social Ontology II: The Living Good 281
13 Hegelian Social Pathology 312
14 Conclusion: On Social Ontology 345

Bibliography 351
Index 360

vii

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Published online by Cambridge University Press
 Preface

When I began this project ten years ago, my plan was straightforward –
and, as I now see, naive: I wanted to demonstrate the indispensability of the
concept of social pathology for normative social philosophy and, by draw-
ing mostly on resources from European thinkers from Rousseau onward,
to articulate more precisely than had been done before how illness in the
domain of the social ought to be conceived. My initial strategy for defend-
ing this concept was to consult contemporary philosophy of biology and
medicine with the aim of finding a generally accepted account of sickness
and health in biological organisms that would serve as the basis for arguing
that analogous features of social life justified applying the concepts of health
and illness to social phenomena. Two discoveries led me to revise my plan.
The first was that contemporary philosophy of biology and medicine, no
less discordant than other fields of philosophy, offered no uncontroversial
account of health or illness that I could simply avail myself of in defending
the idea of pathology in the social domain. Moreover, the controversies only
increased when turning from purely physiological conceptions of health,
applicable to nonhuman organisms, to conceptions of health appropriate
to human beings. It is not only that in the human realm a new category
appears – that of mental health – but also, and more interestingly, that, in
contrast to the case of veterinary medicine, no full account of bodily health
for humans can be given that abstracts from what I call (and explain below)
the “spiritual” aspects of human beings. Although the account of social
pathology I provide in this book is informed by ideas deriving from the
philosophy of biology and medicine, I have had to decide for myself which
aspects of the views on offer there belong to the best account of illness in
human beings (and other animals) and shed the most light on what illness
in the social domain might consist in.
The second discovery that led me to change my plan for this book was that,
as I soon found when presenting my ideas in academic contexts – among
contemporary philosophers, political theorists, and sociologists – resistance
ix

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 x Preface
to the concept of social pathology is so entrenched that framing my task
as an outright defense of that concept generated premature dismissals of
my claims and unfruitful disputes that tended to reenact long-familiar aca-
demic debates rather than shed light on the phenomena that interested
me. At the same time, when I described my project to nonacademics, I
was greeted with a degree of enthusiasm I had never before experienced
when trying to explain to “laypeople” what I wrote about as a philoso-
pher. In earlier years my attempts to say something, when asked, about
the self-positing subject, moral autonomy, or the conditions under which
the will of a citizenry could be considered “general” and therefore binding
for all had elicited mostly polite responses and not so lightly veiled (but
understandable) attempts to change the topic of conversation. Suddenly,
I discovered, nonacademics had some sense of what I was talking about
and were eager to volunteer their own examples of ways in which society
appeared to be ill. (Not surprisingly, this tendency increased dramatically
in the United States after 2016, even if the political events that evoked this
response merely made it no longer possible to ignore pathological condi-
tions that had been developing for decades. Now the question is no longer
whether that society is sick but whether it – especially its version of liberal
democracy – is dying.) What, I asked myself, did the responses of my fel-
low citizens, if not my fellow academics, say about the relevance of the
concept of social illness?
These experiences changed my conception of my project. I decided to
start from a fact about the discourse of social pathology that seems incon-
trovertible: beginning at least with Plato there appears to be an irresistible
propensity among philosophers, social theorists, cultural critics, and jour-
nalists of very different outlooks – and not only in the West – to conceive
of social problems and their solutions in terms of the vocabulary of ill-
ness, health, and cure. From Plato’s fevered polis (Plato 1992: 369–74e)
to Shakespeare’s “something … rotten in the state of Denmark”1 to
Machiavelli’s “hectic fevers” (or wasting disease) of the state2 to Hobbes’s
infirmities of “the body politic” (boils, scabs, bulimia, rabies, epilepsy,
parasitic worms3) to Frank Lloyd Wright’s description of “landlordism”
as a social disease (Wright and Pfeiffer 2008: 418), thinkers of various
epochs seem irrepressibly drawn to “illness as metaphor” in the domain
of social philosophy (Sontag 1978: 74, 77, 78). Moreover, despite the fact

1 Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene iv.

2 Machiavelli [1532] 1950: 11.
3 Hobbes [1651] 1994: ch. xxix.

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 Preface xi
that conceptions of physiological illness have varied greatly over the cen-
turies, the tendency to think of social problems on the model of illness
has remained strikingly resilient.4 My project, then, is an attempt to take
seriously the indisputably widespread impulse to think of societies as sus-
ceptible to falling ill by trying to understand the powerful pull it exerts on
our imagination and to assess what value the concept of social pathology
might have, even when we reject the idea that human societies are simply
biological organisms writ large.
With this starting point in view, a slightly different question came into
focus: What does the irresistible urge to think in terms of illness when
thinking about social problems say about the nature of human society?
Or, posed in “ontological” terms: What kind of thing must human society
be if it is vulnerable to falling ill? This book, then, is about the connec-
tion between social ontology5 and the discourse of social pathology, and
its central claim is that we can learn something important about human
social life by taking seriously past and present attempts to understand and
criticize society using a vocabulary borrowed from medicine. Establishing
this constitutes a limited defense of the concept of social pathology by
showing that theorists who employ that concept have good reasons for
turning to the language of illness; that their doing so is motivated not
by a priori philosophical commitments but by empirical inquiry into the
real phenomena of social life; and that conceiving of social problems as
pathologies enables one to discover and think productively about aspects
of social life that cannot be grasped by discourses confined to the catego-
ries of legitimacy, justice, or moral rightness, as typically (and narrowly)
construed by most Anglo-American political philosophy.
As a result of these revisions of my project, its central argument is no
longer that critical social philosophy must employ the language of social
pathology but, more modestly, that there are good reasons for doing so and
that an outright dismissal of that theoretical framework risks losing sight
of important social phenomena that purely moral or political approaches
to social life cannot capture. It is true that many of the critical concepts of

4 The metaphor of social illness is so widespread that one can find it in nearly every issue of a serious
newspaper or treatise devoted to social issues. Two examples are Krugman (2019) and Mau (2019),
which analyzes the problems of contemporary eastern Germany using the analogy of a bone fracture.
5 A caveat: social ontology as pursued here is a less abstract project than many contemporary analytic
philosophers take it to be, e.g., Gilbert (1989), Tuomela (2013), and Searle (1995). A good discussion
of analytical social ontology can be found in Stahl 2013: ch. 4. My project is continuous with but still
broader than the accounts of social reality offered by Searle (1995 and 2010) and Descombes (2014).
Anthony Giddens uses the term in roughly the sense in which I use it (Giddens 1984: xx).

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 xii Preface
social theory that we should continue to take seriously have been, or can
be, formulated without explicit reference to pathology. Among them are
alienation, ideology, reification, colonization of the life-world (Habermas
1987: 232; Hedrick 2018: ch. 5), and the tendency of capitalism to generate
recurring crises. And yet even when the language of pathology is absent,
most of these critiques have been formulated within the framework of a
conception of social reality that places the idea of life at its core. It is note-
worthy that almost every thinker who can be read as a theorist of social
pathology – including Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Durkheim, Dewey,
and Habermas – understands social reality as social life, where the term
“life” is just as important as “social.” That social reality is social life is the
main ontological claim I investigate here.
No doubt this book has many defects, but one is especially worthy of men-
tion upfront: the accounts of social pathology reconstructed here take the
nation-state as the basic unit of social analysis despite the increasingly glo-
balized nature of social life nearly everywhere. Globalization does not mean
that the nation-state has become irrelevant to social theory and c­ ritique –
numerous decisions of import are still made at that level – but it does mean
that many determinants of social life within nation-states are inseparable
from processes and developments that extend far beyond their national
borders. To varying degrees, Hegel, Marx, and Durkheim are aware of the
increasingly international character of modern life, but their diagnoses of
social pathology, and my reconstructions of them, do not for the most part
reflect this awareness. (Such awareness does appear, among other places, in
Hegel’s allusions to the “necessity” – internal to civil ­society – of colonial
expansion [PhR: §248], and Marx, more than any thinker covered here,
provides resources for considering how, under capitalism, international
social life might exhibit pathologies not visible from a merely national per-
spective.) Contemporary critical theorists urgently need to think further
about whether – and if so, how – classical accounts of social pathology can
be expanded to take account of global interdependence. At the very least,
there are surely distinct pathologies that afflict formerly colonized societies
that do not show up if one focuses only on states in Western Europe and
North America. Even more important, the social dynamics between the
global North and South, or between former colonizers and colonized, can
be expected to exhibit patterns of “functioning” not visible from a merely
national perspective. The question is: Is the category of pathology useful
for understanding these dynamics? Is dysfunction a relevant concept, given
that the “healthy” functioning of former colonizing nations relies on ethi-
cally objectionable relations to their counterparts? Or are the interactions

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 Preface xiii
between these two poles (and among the nations that somehow lie between
them) so asymmetric and oppressive that thinking of them as composing
a single “organism” that might or might not function well obscures rather
than illuminates our contemporary condition? (Is there, even in biology,
an example of an organism whose functioning depends so thoroughly on
“higher” organs living at the expense of the “lower”?) These are important
questions that I have not addressed here.

Although the chapters of this book are devoted mostly to specific think-
ers, its structure is unusual and calls for explanation. Most obviously, I
do not discuss the figures I treat in chronological order. Instead, chapters
are arranged conceptually, beginning with less complex conceptions of
social pathology and social ontology and proceeding to increasingly richer
accounts of what human societies are and of the illnesses to which they
are susceptible. As readers will quickly discover, this scheme yields only
a loose form of organization. For the most part, I do not offer a develop-
mental argument that proceeds by revealing defects in the theories covered
in earlier chapters and showing them to be remedied by the theories that
come after them. I in no way want to suggest that the specific pathologies
discussed in earlier chapters are less deserving of our attention than those
examined later. Still, the general account of society and social pathology
found in the final three chapters is more sophisticated and theoretically
adequate than those treated earlier. In this sense, then, Hegel is the hero of
this book, although I do not take this to mean that Hegelians have noth-
ing to learn from Marx, for example, the first figure discussed in detail.
Perhaps I am trying to say that much of what we can learn from Marx can
be integrated into Hegel’s framework, whereas important possibilities for
pathology rendered visible by Hegel would go undetected if we restricted
ourselves to Marx’s understanding of (capitalist) society. It follows that my
approach here, like that of my past work, is more syncretic and concilia-
tory than many readers find appropriate. I will not defend this approach
beyond saying that, as with most ways of doing things, it has its advantages
and disadvantages. I hope that some of those advantages come across to
readers of this book despite its less than perfect structure.
The initial two chapters of this book are introductory. The first
explores the concept of social pathology in general, distinguishing five
interpretations of that idea from the conception of social illness I adopt
here. It also discusses various advantages and disadvantages of the con-
cept of social pathology, especially the circumstance that diagnosing
a society as ill allows one to thematize defects in social life that the

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 xiv Preface
narrower category of injustice cannot capture. Chapter 2 investigates
the ways in which theories of social pathology do and do not rely on a
picture of human societies as akin to biological organisms and argues
for a limited version of that analogy.
In Chapters 3 and 4, after a brief survey of conceptions of social pathol-
ogy that can be found in Marx, I focus on those bound up with his account
in Capital of the formula for the circulation of capital, which distinguishes
money that is capital from money that is merely money (and, so, provides a
definition of capitalism) in terms of the function money plays in each case.
Marx’s biological language makes it plausible to interpret the dysfunctions of
capitalism he points to here as social pathologies. One of his contributions to
theories of social pathology is to bring to light an ambiguity in the concepts
“functional” and “dysfunctional”: the same phenomenon that appears func-
tional from the perspective of what capital requires to function can appear
dysfunctional from a broader perspective that takes into account the good
of capitalism’s participants. Exploring this point requires us to introduce the
idea of a distinctively spiritual aspect of human existence, an idea that will
accompany us throughout this book. Indeed, the chapters’ main thesis is
that Marx regards social life as spiritual in the same sense I attribute later to
Hegel’s social theory, namely, as informed by the aspiration of social mem-
bers to unite in their social activity the ends of life with those of freedom.
Related to this is the claim that capitalism’s failure to allow for the unity of
life and freedom constitutes its principal defect for Marx and the core of the
most important conception of social pathology I ascribe to him. Finally, I
argue that Marx’s conception of human society leaves out certain elements of
the spiritual aspect of social life that theories explored in later chapters enable
us to incorporate into a more adequate social ontology.
Chapters 5 and 6 focus on Plato and Rousseau in order to explore the
ontological thesis that thinking of societies as functionally organized systems
that are artificial, or humanmade, is crucial to understanding how theories
of social pathology can ascribe nonarbitrary standards of healthy func-
tioning to social institutions. The first of these points is set out in Plato’s
Republic, and it is appropriated by many later social philosophers, includ-
ing Hegel, Comte, Spencer, and Durkheim. Rousseau is the first modern
philosopher to elaborate the second point in a form that is promising for
contemporary social thought. The most important sense in which social
institutions are made by us is expressed in Rousseau’s claim that institu-
tions are grounded in conventions. The upshot of this claim is that a kind of
self-consciousness, or subjectivity, is intrinsic to social life, namely, a col-
lective acceptance of the authority of the rules governing social institutions,

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 Preface xv
which, in the most fundamental of these, includes a shared conception
of the good that explains their “point,” part of which consists in (some
version of) the freedom of social members. Because acting in accordance
with such a conception is constitutive of the activity in which institutional
life consists, the functions of institutions – including a conception of their
healthy functioning – are accessible, if imperfectly, to the agents on whose
activity those functions depend.
Chapter 7 briefly treats two social philosophers who directly influenced
Durkheim: Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer. Although Durkheim’s
position is more sophisticated and compelling than his predecessors’, exam-
ining their theories serves to introduce several themes that play a key role
in his social philosophy. Looking at his predecessors’ use of the society–
organism analogy, their versions of functional explanation and functional
analysis, and their conceptions of what a scientific sociology must be like
will help us to understand not only the content of Durkheim’s positions
but also some of the arguments – formulated in conversation with Comte
and Spencer – behind his claims. This chapter distinguishes three types
of functional explanation employed by Comte that shape the discussion
of Durkheim’s method in the following chapter, especially with regard to
what I call functional analysis. Perhaps most important, the chapter argues
that Comte and Spencer rely too heavily on the society–organism analogy,
leading to an overly biologistic understanding of the types of normative
critique available to social pathologists.
Chapter 8, the first of three devoted to Durkheim, examines his ver-
sion of functionalism in social theory. I reconstruct his position with an
eye to defending it as far as possible and to determining which aspects of
it are worth retaining for a contemporary understanding of social pathol-
ogy, including, most fundamentally, the functionally organized character
of human societies. Focusing on his claims regarding the moral function of
the division of labor, I examine the tortuous epistemological issues bound
up with his ascriptions of functions to specific features of society, includ-
ing the relation between functional explanation and functional analysis.
I argue that the method underlying his functional analysis is best under-
stood as a complex form of holism whose claims depend less on single facts
and individual arguments than on the plausibility of the whole picture of
society that emerges from a variety of mutually reinforcing arguments,
empirical facts, interpretive suggestions, and analogies. In this respect
Durkheim’s method for ascribing functions to social phenomena bears
similarities to other interpretive enterprises, from the reading of texts to
(even) the construction of theories in the natural sciences.

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 xvi Preface
Chapter 9 continues my discussion of Durkheim by explaining his
understanding of moral facts and the conception of social solidarity at the
core of his account of the division of labor’s function in organized societ-
ies. These views expand on Rousseau’s understanding of human society as
normatively constituted – governed by rules accepted as authoritative by
social members – and also introduces the idea, of central importance to
my account, that healthy social institutions serve moral and not merely
“useful” social functions. On the basis of these discussions I lay out the
resources Durkheim has for conceiving of social pathology and examine
in detail the modern pathology most important to him, anomie. Finally, I
reconstruct his understanding of what is bad about social pathology – why
social members should care about whether their society is ill.
Chapter 10 reconstructs Durkheim’s conception of sociology as a sci-
ence of morality, which bears similarities to Marx’s historical materialist
account of morality but in addition claims to legitimize the moral systems
whose existence it explains. I distinguish three tasks of Durkheim’s science
of morality and conclude that Durkheim does not adequately explain how
historically specific moral systems can claim a moral authority that does
not reduce to the narrowly functional value they have for social reproduc-
tion. Finally, looking ahead, I suggest that Hegel’s conception of spirit
offers more promising resources for doing precisely this by understand-
ing morality and social reproduction as inextricable aspects of social life,
neither of which can be reduced to the other, and by conceiving of the
moral ideals of later societies as rational responses to crises, both functional
and moral, encountered by earlier societies, where the idea of a rational
response to such a crisis plays a key role in justifying the later moral ideals
under question.
Chapter 11 begins my discussion of Hegel’s social philosophy with an
extended examination of objective spirit. This concept is central to Hegel’s
social ontology because it specifies the kind of being, or reality, character-
istic of the social world and distinguishes it from other domains of real-
ity, such as nature and subjective spirit (or mind). I first explain what
objective spirit means for the most compelling exponent of such a view of
social reality today, Vincent Descombes – borrowing as well, but to a lesser
extent, from Durkheim and John Searle. I end with an overview of some
respects in which Hegel’s view goes beyond Descombes’s. This chapter
distinguishes four claims espoused in some version by all of the major posi-
tions I consider in this book: (i) There is a form of mindedness that exists
outside the consciousness of individual social members; (ii) the externally
existing mind, embodied in social institutions, is in some sense prior to the

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 Preface xvii
individuals whose lives are ruled by them; (iii) social reality depends on a
collective acceptance of its institutions’ normative rules; and (iv) such rules
constrain what social members do but also expand their practical possibili-
ties and hence enrich their agency.
Chapter 12 continues the discussion of Hegel by examining his charac-
terization of human society as the “living good.” As the term “living” sug-
gests, this aspect of his position can be read as his distinctive take on the
familiar analogy between human societies and living organisms. For him
that analogy implies that human societies both incorporate the processes
of life (in carrying out the activities necessary for material reproduction)
and mirror them in the sense that social and biological life exhibit a similar
structure. The latter claim appeals not only to the functional specialization
of human societies emphasized by Plato and Durkheim but also to the
idiosyncratic Hegelian thesis that the processes of biological and social
life are like those of “subjects,” the principal characteristic of which is
to maintain itself by positing “contradictions” internal to itself and then
negotiating them in a way that establishes its own identity without com-
pletely abolishing the internal differences it has posited. (What this means
will become clearer in the chapter itself.) If Hegel emphasizes the continu-
ity between life and social being, he also insists on the differences between
mere animal organisms and spiritual beings (including human societies):
most importantly, the presence of self-consciousness and the capacity
for freedom. The realm of (objective) spirit, then, consists in cooperative
processes of life that are imbued with ethical significance deriving from
their potential to be consciously self-determined, a potential that the life
processes of mere animal organisms lack; thus, spiritual activities are life
processes that simultaneously aim at realizing the freedom of those who
carry them out. At the end of this chapter these ideas are fleshed out by
examining how Hegel’s famous master–slave dialectic brings to light the
fundamental elements and structure of any set of human relations that
count as a society.
Chapter 13 examines Hegel’s understanding of both animal and mental
illness and, making use of the concepts of objective spirit and the living
good, extrapolates an account of various conceptions of social pathology
that his social philosophy licenses. It argues that for Hegel social patholo-
gies should be understood not only in terms of impaired functioning gener-
ally or as imbalances among specialized functional spheres, but also as ways
in which society fails in the spiritual task of enabling its members to relate
to life in the mode of freedom. Specific forms of such pathologies include
(but are not exhausted by) social practices losing their spiritual features and

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 xviii Preface
becoming indistinguishable from processes of mere life; social impediments
to the realization of practical selfhood, such as inadequate sources of recog-
nition or the generation of infinite, unsatisfiable desires; forms of ideology
involving a mismatch between what social members do and what they take
themselves to be doing in their social practices; the failure of social life to
bring together the ends of life and those of freedom, including cases where
social participation becomes merely a means for staying alive rather than
a site of freedom; and socially caused impairments of individuals’ ability
to reconcile themselves to the fact of death. The final paragraphs of this
chapter point to the form of immanent critique found in Hegel’s account
of bondsman and lord as a promising solution to one problem encountered
by Durkheim’s science of morality, namely, its inability to provide an ethi-
cal justification of social norms that avoids reducing the point of morality
to its mere functionality for social reproduction.

I am indebted to many individuals and institutions who have aided

me in the writing of this book. I am sure that I have failed to mention
some of them here, and to them I apologize. Most recently, I had the
good fortune to receive extensive anonymous comments from two atten-
tive and insightful readers of the manuscript whose help was enlisted by
Cambridge University Press. I have also benefited from philosophical
conversations with many individuals: Mark Alznauer, Barbara Carnevali,
Maeve Cooke, Mattia Gallotti, Amanda Greene, Axel Honneth, Rahel
Jaeggi, Jan Kandiyali, Bruno Karsenti, Philip Kitcher, Richard Moran,
Karen Ng, Andreja Novakovic, Lea-Riccarda Prix, Eva von Redecker,
Isette Schumacher, Achille Varzi – and undoubtedly many others.
Two institutions provided the generous support of research stays that
greatly enhanced my ability to make progress on this project: the Center
for Humanities and Social Change, Humboldt University (Berlin) and
School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS-Paris). In
addition, many academic audiences patiently endured lectures in which, in
early phases of the project, I tried to work out ideas not yet fully formed,
including at Boston University, City University of New York, Colgate
University, Columbia University, DePaul University, School for Advanced
Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS-Paris), Georg August University
(Göttingen), Georgetown University, Goethe University (Frankfurt),
Harvard University, Humboldt University (Berlin), Indiana University,
Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt), International Hegel Conference
(Göttingen), International Hegel Congress (Stuttgart), Kansas State
University, New School for Social Research, New York University Law

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 Preface xix
School, North Carolina State University, Oxford University, Princeton
University, School of Higher Economics (Moscow), Stockholm University,
Technical University (Darmstadt), Metropolitan Autonomous University
(Mexico City), Catholic University (Lima), University Ca’ Foscari
(Venice), University of Lucerne, University of Lausanne, University of
Leiden, University of California–Riverside, University of Cambridge,
University of Essex, University of Georgia, University of Helsinki,
University of Pittsburgh, University of Sydney, University of Toronto,
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and York University.
Hilary Gaskin, as always, provided invaluable advice throughout the
writing and editing process. Finally, Eugene O’Keefe continually pushed
me to make my prose more concrete and, more importantly, provided
support of a nonacademic sort without which I might never have finished
the book.

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 Note on Citations

Although I refer throughout to English translations of primary texts, I have

revised many quotations, often substantially, in order to render the original
passages more accurately.
I have made use of the following abbreviations in citing the texts I refer
to most frequently:

Vincent Descombes
IM The Institutions of Meaning (1994)

Émile Durkheim
DLS The Division of Labor in Society (1984)
[cited by page number, followed by page number in French]
II “Individualism and the Intellectuals” (1969)
[cited by page number, followed by page number in French]
ME Moral Education (1961)
[cited by page number, followed by page number in French]
RSM Rules of Sociological Method (1982)
[cited by page number, followed by page number in French]
S Suicide: A Study in Sociology (1997)
[cited by page number, followed by page number in French]
SP Sociology and Philosophy (2014)

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

EL Encyclopedia Logic (1991)
[cited by section number, where A refers to the Addition to the
cited section]

xx

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 Note on Citations xxi
PhG The Phenomenology of Spirit (2018)
[cited by paragraph number (e.g., PhG: ¶182)]
PhM 
Philosophy of Mind: Part Three of the Encyclopedia of the
Philosophical Sciences (1971)
[cited by section number, where A refers to the Addition to the
cited section]
PhN Philosophy of Nature: Part Two of the Encyclopedia of the
Philosophical Sciences (2004)
[cited by section number, where A refers to the Addition to the
cited section]
PhR Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1991)
[cited by section number (e.g., PhR: §270A), where A refers to
the Addition to the cited section]
VPR Die Philosophie des Rechts: Die Mitschriften Wannenmann (1983)

Immanuel Kant
CJ Critique of Judgment (1987)

Karl Marx
Cap. Capital, Vol. 1 (1992)
MER The Marx-Engels Reader (1978)
MEGA Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels Gesamtausgabe (1975)
[cited by volume and page number (e.g.,
MEGA: XXIII.529)]

Friedrich Nietzsche
GM On the Genealogy of Morals (1989)
[cited by essay and section number (e.g., GM: III.13)]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau
DI Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1997a)
[cited by English page numbers followed by French]
OC Oeuvres Complètes, Vol. 3 (1964)

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 xxii Note on Citations
PE Discourse on Political Economy (1997b)
[cited by English page numbers followed by French]
SC The Social Contract (1997c)
[cited by book, chapter, and paragraph numbers (e.g., I.3.ii)]

John Searle
CSR The Construction of Social Reality (1995)
MSW Making the Social World (2010)

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 chapter 1

Can Societies Be Ill?

This chapter offers some preliminary thoughts about the general concept
of social pathology and its usefulness for social philosophy. The first sec-
tion distinguishes five conceptions of social illness that differ from the
one I endorse in this book. Following that, I discuss various advantages
and disadvantages of the concept of social pathology. Finally, analyzing
a ­little-known example of Rousseau’s, I illustrate various possible features
of a sick society that help to illustrate how that concept aids us in under-
standing and evaluating social reality.

Rival Conceptions of Social Pathology

It is necessary to say something first about the sense in which I speak of
social pathology in this book since the term has various meanings – I note
here five – that I want to distinguish from my own usage. There is, for
example, a very simple conception of social pathology, according to which
(i) a society is “ill” whenever a significant number of its members is ill.1 (I will
often place “ill” and its synonyms in quotation marks to remind us that
those terms are used metaphorically.) One might claim to find this con-
ception of social pathology in Richard G. Wilkinson’s Unhealthy Societies:
The Afflictions of Inequality, which marshals empirical evidence for the
claim that developed societies with extensive economic inequality tend to
have higher rates of illness among their members – including among the
better off – than more egalitarian societies (Wilkinson 1996: 3). In this case
the unhealthy societies mentioned in the book’s title are simply those with
large numbers of physiologically unhealthy members.
Two features of this simple conception of social pathology distin-
guish it from the one I employ here. First, it makes illness in the social

1 Honneth (2014a: 684) mentions and rejects this conception.

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 2 Can Societies Be Ill?
realm derivative of nonsocial illness. In Wilkinson’s case the illnesses in
­question are physiological, but one could devise a similar conception of
social pathology that referred to mental illness instead.2 Such a conception
does not countenance a distinct way in which societies can be ill that is
not traceable back to the physiological or mental illnesses of its members.
Second, this conception of social pathology requires no understanding of
human society as anything more than a collection of individuals. It offers
an aggregative picture of social pathology, in which a society’s being ill
consists simply in the logically prior fact that many of its members are ill.
Such a view does not depend on any specifically social understanding of
human society, of how it is structured, or of what its distinctive functions
consist in.
In fact, however, Wilkinson’s unhealthy societies come closer to exem-
plifying social pathology in the sense I defend here than the previous
paragraph suggests. For his thesis is not only that unhealthy societies are
those that contain many physiologically ill individuals but also that such
societies foster those illnesses. According to this second, more complex
conception of social pathology, (ii) societies are ill just in case they play a
substantial causal role in making a large number of their members physiologi-
cally or mentally ill; that is, the illnesses of social members indicate social
pathology only if those illnesses have social causes. In Wilkinson’s case
the relevant cause of the illnesses found in the individuals of an unhealthy
society is a social phenomenon – economic inequality – which both con-
sists in social relations (not in properties individuals possess on their own)
and is explained by supraindividual features of society, such as its economic
structure or its laws and practices.
I have no objection to regarding Wilkinson’s unhealthy societies as
pathological since the illnesses of their members result from distinctly
social factors. A society that makes many of its members ill qualifies as
pathological, but its specifically social pathology resides in the social
dynamics that produce the illnesses of its members. As I argue through-
out this book, the socially pathological character of such a society lies in
its ­dysfunctional dynamics, not in its members’ physiological or mental
illnesses. To see why Wilkinson’s examples count as social pathologies,
compare them with a society with inordinately high rates of physiological
or mental illness where this is due to (nonsocially caused) environmental

2 One might interpret Freud as suggesting a conception of social or cultural pathology of this type:
late nineteenth-century Viennese society was sick because of a high incidence of neurosis among its
(especially female) population.

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 Rival Conceptions of Social Pathology 3
changes. As this case suggests, the mere fact many persons in a society are
ill does make that society ill.
Wilkinson’s unhealthy societies are not, however, paradigm cases of
sick societies, for they suggest too narrow a picture of social pathology.
This is because, like the first conception of social pathology, his account
­presupposes a picture of what health in individuals consists in and then
speaks of social pathology whenever social conditions negatively affect
the health of social members so conceived. As I treat the concept here,
social pathology does not require that individual social members them-
selves be ill, either mentally or physically. To see this point, consider
Marx’s account of ­alienation. Workers are alienated in capitalism, but this
does not imply that they are ill. What makes capitalist alienation a social
pathology is that it is a systematic result of capitalism’s class structure and
its mode of organizing production and accumulation. As noted above,
social p
­ athology consists in a dysfunction at the level of social structure
or in a society’s constitutive dynamics. Whereas anything that counts as a
social pathology must be bad for (at least some) social members, the way in
which i­ndividuals are negatively affected generally does not take the form
of illness. To take another example from Marx: the inherent tendency of
capitalism to produce recurring crises qualifies as a social pathology but
not because those crises make individuals sick (even if illness might be one
effect of the unemployment produced by crises). Such crises produce alien-
ation and poverty for many – and would not constitute a social pathology
if they did not have some such negative effects – but they are relevant to a
theory of social pathology because they are signs of d ­ ysfunction in social
processes, not because they make individuals ill.
My claim that social pathologies must be bad for at least some social
members does not, however, imply that socially caused suffering is either
a necessary or a sufficient feature of social pathology. Some philosophers
of medicine place suffering at the center of their accounts of illness, and
certain social theorists likewise regard (iii) “social suffering” as the hallmark
of social illness.3 My objection to this conception is not that suffering is a
rare feature of social pathologies – it is not – but that it blinds us to the fact
that felt suffering need not be present in them. (And, as Durkheim notes
in making the same point, plenty of organic illnesses do not involve suffer-
ing either [RSM: 87/50].) Here, again, think of Marx’s claim that although

3 Honneth (2007: 686) rejects this conception as well. For a treatment of social suffering and its rela-
tion to social pathology, see Renault (2017).

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 4 Can Societies Be Ill?
the bourgeoisie is alienated in capitalism, it “feels confirmed and at ease
in its alienation, experiencing it as its own power” (MER: 133/MEGA:
II.37). Conversely, taking social suffering as a sufficient indicator of social
pathology yields false positives: when I walk in my neighborhood in Berlin
and see passersby’s expressions of pained outrage at seeing so many black
faces or hijab-wearing women in “their” streets, I am reminded that not all
social suffering is a response to genuine social ills. (Moreover, as Nietzsche
reminds us, some suffering, as in pregnancy, signifies growth and new pos-
sibilities rather than degeneration or dysfunction.)
None of this implies that theorists of social pathology should avoid
­taking the expressed suffering of social members seriously but only that
one cannot assume that experienced suffering in the social domain by itself
indicates social pathology. Rather, social theorists (some of whom them-
selves belong to suffering groups) must interpret suffering and judge it in
light of normative criteria – those implicit in some inclusive version of the
idea of a good human life – that go beyond experienced physical or psychic
pain. This may sound harsh or paternalistic, but it is nevertheless true that
social suffering must be articulated and made comprehensible to those who
do not suffer from it if social transformation is to occur. In the twentieth
century this was seen, by the “sufferers” themselves, as a ­principal task of
the Civil Rights movement in the United States, of w ­ omen’s liberation, of
unionization drives, and of lesbian and gay politics. In all these cases those
suffering from the relevant injustices and pathologies succeeded in trans-
lating their suffering into terms that those not directly afflicted came to
understand as ethically compelling. The mere expression of social ­suffering
that was previously invisible to others played a major role in the progress
achieved by these social movements, but even more important was their
ability to articulate the meaning of their suffering to others, showing it to
be an injustice or, more broadly, a grievous impediment to living a good
human life.
A fourth conception of social pathology conceives of society on the
model of an individual human being and of its illnesses as (iv) large-scale
versions of physiological or mental illnesses that afflict individual humans.4
Plato’s positing of an isomorphism between polis and soul moves in this
direction, as does the famous frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan depicting
the commonwealth as a super-sized human individual. Although strange,
it is not unheard of to depict social pathologies as near-literal analogues

4 Honneth (2014a: 684) describes this conception as “the collective understood as a macro-subject.”

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 Rival Conceptions of Social Pathology 5
to the physiological illnesses suffered by human bodies, as does the
Leviathan’s notorious (and entertaining) Chapter XXIX. It is more com-
mon and more plausible, however, to think of social pathologies ­conceived
of on this model as collective forms of mental illness, as in popular invo-
cations of collective psychosis, when describing contemporary political
discourse in the United States or in Carl Jung’s conception of collective
neurosis (Jung 1964: 85). On this model of social pathology, human s­ ociety
is conceived of as an organism (or collective subject) and is taken to be
ill when it falls short of the standards of health applicable to individual
organisms (or subjects). Although I do not take a stand on the plausibility
of accounts of collective mental illness, I distance myself from the general
model of social illness that informs them. None of the classical instances of
social pathology rely on that model, and, more important, thinking of the
relevant functions of social life as close analogues to those of human bodies
or minds diverts our attention from real social phenomena and from the
specifically social dysfunctions in which, according to my account, social
pathologies consist.
Finally, there is a loosely defined conception of social pathology that
once enjoyed wide currency in academic circles, especially in the United
States. Developed by sociologists in the first half of the twentieth century,
it achieved popularity in the 1960s and 1970s outside academia, when it
became common in the press and among social workers to refer to (v) a
haphazardly collected group of “social problems” – including poverty, crime,
drug abuse, “promiscuity,” and racism – as social pathologies (Mills 1943:
165–80).5 Pathology in this conception is defined primarily as a deviation
from prevailing social norms and is often understood as a failure on the
part of individuals to “adapt” or “adjust” to those norms. The norms in
question include such “virtues” as thrift, sobriety, heterosexual monogamy,
discipline in work, and commitment to family, all of which are regarded
as essential to social order and as conditions to be reproduced rather than
called into question.
Even if such pathologies are condemned primarily because of the threat
they pose to the smooth functioning of society, they are also taken to
be bad for the afflicted individuals, and the social work inspired by this
conception of social pathology was surely motivated more by the desire to
improve the lives of individuals than by the larger aim of putting society in
order. For this reason, this conception of social pathology goes beyond the

5 See, for example, the “social disease” about which the Jets sing in “Hey, Officer Krupke!” in West Side
Story.

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 6 Can Societies Be Ill?
alternatives discussed above in expanding the idea of social illness beyond
a narrowly physiological or psychiatric definition to include social phe-
nomena that appear as pathological only in the light of broader normative
criteria for a good or flourishing human life. Poverty, for example, counts
as pathological for this view not because it makes the poor sick, physically
or mentally, but because (as Hegel pointed out) it prevents them from
achieving basic goods – satisfying work, self-esteem, forms of relaxation
and enjoyment – available to the better off in their society. In relying,
however implicitly, on some idea of the human good and of how social
conditions can promote or hinder it, this conception of social pathology
takes us a step away from the original idea of illness. This, however, is not
its defect. (The fact that homosexuality, for example, was long taken to be
one of these pathologies should remind us, however, of the dangers inher-
ent in judging social conditions to be pathological according to prevailing
criteria for a good human life, as well as of the fallibility of our present
judgments as to what fails to meet those criteria.) For, as noted above, a
central claim of this book is that an adequate conception of pathology in
the social domain must be normative in respects that go beyond the nar-
rower ideas of physiological and mental illness.
I do not deny that some of the problems picked out by this conception
of social pathology are indicative of pathologies, but I reject the loose con-
ception of social illness it employs. One respect in which that conception
is insufficiently social shows itself in the fact that it was often interpreted as
attributing responsibility, even moral blame, for social pathologies to the
“maladjusted” and undisciplined individuals whose (for example) “weak
ego structures” (Rigdon 1988: 113) prevented them from complying with
social norms. The tendency of this conception of social pathology to mor-
alize social problems is surely connected to its deeper theoretical deficiency,
namely, the implicit assumption that a list of “social problems” constitutes
an account of social illness. My chief objection to this once-popular way of
regarding crime, poverty, and drug abuse, then, is not that it is excessively
normative but that it lacks a sufficiently complex conception of human
social life to grasp the problems it concerns itself with as social patholo-
gies in the more robust sense in which I employ the concept here. For on
this conception, diagnoses of social pathology are made independently of
any specific understanding of a society’s structure or basic functions. The
problem with this approach is not that it regards alcoholism or crime or
high rates of suicide as social ills but that, in the absence of an account of
a society’s structure and basic functions, its diagnostic procedures amount
to little more than compiling a list of diverse problems, the causes of which

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 Disadvantages of the Concept of Social Pathology 7
it then locates in a variety of social conditions. As C. Wright Mills pointed
out, this way of conceiving of social pathology is capable only of “collect-
ing and dealing in a fragmentary way with scattered problems” (Mills 1943:
166). Mills can be taken to imply that an enlightening conception of social
pathology must do more than uncover a diversity of ways in which indi-
viduals are afflicted by social conditions; it should also be able to say how a
society in its basic structure is deformed or unbalanced, or how its essential
functions are disrupted, impaired, or misaligned. One way of expressing
this point is to say that a high rate of alcoholism might indeed be a symp-
tom of social pathology (rather than, say, the effect of cold, dark winters)
but that the pathology resides in a deeper functional deficiency of society
that explains the high incidence of alcoholism and reveals its connections
to other social ills bound up with the same pathology.

Disadvantages of the Concept of Social Pathology

It is important to acknowledge that there are good reasons – conceptual,
rhetorical, and ideological – for approaching the idea of social pathology
with skepticism. There can be no doubt, for example, that the concept has
been used, by philosophers and politicians alike, in the service of projects
that are intellectually and morally objectionable. To cite the most egre-
gious instance: Nazi ideology made extensive use of the idea of a diseased
society to impress on its adherents the need to attack with violence those
parts of the body politic – those groups of human beings – in which soci-
ety’s malady, imagined varyingly as syphilis, cancer, or tuberculosis, was
thought to reside (Sontag 1978: 82–3).6 Along with the notion that sickness
must be treated by violent means, the baffling idea that agents of disease
are morally culpable, and therefore deserving of punishment, appears to
be a persistent element of our (mostly unconscious) attitude to the basic
fact of our vulnerability to illness, and this creates a standing potential for
corrupting our responses to whatever phenomena we diagnose as social
pathologies. Some of the oddness of our moralistic attitude to illness is
evident in the fact that it often coexists with its precise opposite: some-
times a condition’s being regarded as an illness functions to shelter the ill
from moral condemnation, as in the thought, regarded not long ago as
progressive, that homosexuals are not morally depraved but sick, implying

6 In an interesting example of how metaphors can travel in the reverse direction, plague was under-
stood in the Middle Ages as a sign of moral pollution, which, requiring a scapegoat, led to massacres
of Jews.

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 8 Can Societies Be Ill?
that medical treatment rather than persecution is the appropriate response
to “abnormal” sexual orientation. In any case, the line between regarding
persons as ill and perceiving them as depraved is easily traversed, as can
be seen in the fact that academic sociologists in the United States today
are most likely to associate the discourse of social pathology with “social
­deviance,” a term whose problematic connotations hardly need to be
pointed out. The fact that perceiving some condition as an illness has the
potential to engender hostility, disgust, and condemnation is an important
reason for theorists of social pathology to be scrupulous in insisting that
societies or institutions, not individuals, are the bearers of the illnesses
their theories diagnose.
Beyond this, the popularity of social Darwinism in the latter decades
of the nineteenth century surely accounts for some of the disfavor into
which the concept of social pathology and the society-as-organism ­analogy
has fallen today. Social Darwinists gave a distinctive ideological twist to
the idea that society is akin to a living organism. For them, this analogy
implied that the key to establishing a science of society lay in ­appropriating
the methods and outlook of the newest advance in biological science:
Darwin’s theory of evolution. Although the founder of this school, Herbert
Spencer, developed his main ideas before the publication of The Origin of
Species, much of the influence social Darwinism enjoyed in subsequent
decades depended on the mistaken perception that he and his followers
were applying the principles of Darwinian science to social life.
Spencer’s social theory is based on the idea that, despite superficial
­differences, biological and social “organisms” are subject to the same laws
of evolutionary development. The details of this theory need not concern
us, apart from the most significant respect in which Spencer’s concep-
tion of the evolutionary process diverges from Darwin’s: in the case of the
social organism, Spencer posits an end-point – a state of “equilibration”
(Spencer 1969: 141) – at which perfect adaptation has been achieved and no
impetus for further development is present. Although this end-state is sup-
posed to be one of social integration in which peaceful, industrial ­activity
becomes society’s chief occupation, it must be preceded by an ongoing
“struggle for existence” among antagonistic social units. Unfortunately,
it was this idea that most captured the imagination of Spencer’s follow-
ers, who elevated it into a full-blooded ideology in support of laissez-faire
social policies they took to serve the “survival of the fittest” (a term coined
by Spencer, not Darwin). Government aid to the poor, state-financed
­education, public health measures, even the regulation of commerce –
all were regarded as misguided attempts to interfere with the natural

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 Disadvantages of the Concept of Social Pathology 9
workings of society,7 which, if left to its own devices, would eliminate the
least “fit” of society’s members (Spencer 1969: 379). (The p ­ seudoscientific
character of social Darwinism is especially visible in its interpretation
of the “­fittest.” Spencer’s most prominent American follower, William
Graham Sumner, took the fittest to be, as one commentator puts it, the
frugal, tax-paying, middle-class man who “went quietly about his business,
­providing for h ­ imself and his family without making demands upon the
state” [Hofstadter 1959: 64].8)
There are also philosophical reasons for avoiding the concept of social
pathology, and they, too, must be acknowledged upfront. The most obvi-
ous of these reasons is ontological: the concept of illness belongs to the
study of animal organisms, and societies – so the objection – are not
­animal organisms nor sufficiently like such organisms that the concept of
illness could be meaningfully applied to them. Of course, that societies
are not animal organisms is plain enough – and recognized by all serious
theorists of social pathology – but this alone does not settle the issue of
whether the two are so dissimilar that categories applicable to the latter
have no value for understanding the former.9 Here, too, it is worth noting
that the figures I rely on here reflect extensively on the differences between
organisms and societies and go to great lengths, if not always successfully,
to do justice to them. The widespread assumption that the entire tradition
of theories of social pathology can be dismissed by the observation that
human societies are not animal organisms betrays either a penchant for
easy philosophizing or an ignorance of how and why such theories have
employed the concept of social illness.
It is instructive that some of the figures mentioned in the Preface –
Machiavelli, Marx, and Habermas, for example – appear unable to dispense
with the idea of social illness even when they generally avoid conceiving
of human society on the model of an organism. Of course, the more one
distances oneself from the organism analogy, the more difficult it becomes
to see why one should employ the idea of social illness at all, especially if
one wants to avoid emptying it of all content by referring to whatever one
disapproves of as “sick” (Sontag 1978: 74). In line with this thought, I will
argue that there are good reasons to employ the concept of social pathology

7 The implications for international relations are no less severe: “Progress of … nature is everywhere
manifested in the subjugation of weaker tribes by stronger ones” (Spencer 1969: 316).
8 For Darwin, fitness could be defined only in terms of success in biological reproduction (making,
perhaps, the sexually “promiscuous” fitter than the chaste).
9 For a nuanced critique of the society-as-organism analogy, see Laitinen and Särkelä (2019).

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 10 Can Societies Be Ill?
and that doing so commits one to thinking of human societies, not exactly
as animal organisms, but as “alive” – as “living” beings – in some nonlit-
eral but still meaningful sense. Or, formulated differently, an important
part of my task is to articulate in which respects societies are like living
organisms (and in which respects they are not), since in the absence of any
such similarities, speaking of sick societies would indeed be empty talk
(Honneth 2014a: 701). Before addressing this issue further (in Chapter 2),
it is important to consider why, despite its disadvantages, the concept of
social pathology has an important role to play in social philosophy.

Advantages of the Concept of Social Pathology

Diagnosing a society as ill involves claiming sometimes more than,
­sometimes something other than, that it is unjust. This gives theories of
social pathology two advantages: First, they can draw our attention to social
phenomena worthy of critique to which theories focused exclusively on
justice are blind; and, second, they have at their disposal critical resources
beyond those employed by most liberal political and social philosophy.
It is not that the category of injustice is always irrelevant to diagnoses of
social pathology but rather that, even when it is relevant, conceiving of
the social deficiencies in question only as injustices underdescribes them.
Consider the example of global warming. It is certainly appropriate to
regard human-caused global warming as an injustice (to future genera-
tions, or to contemporaries who only suffer its effects while others profit
from it). It would be odd, however, to take this as an exhaustive ­description
of the problem. It is hard to avoid the impression that there is something
sick – or perverse, or gravely awry, but in any case something more than
unjust – about social practices for which we are responsible that systemati-
cally thwart fundamental human ends, in this case ends as simple as those
deriving from our biological nature. The appearance of illness becomes
only stronger when one considers that, after becoming aware of global
warming, we continue, and even intensify, the very practices that threaten
our species’ survival.
One way of bringing this issue into focus is to abstract from those to
whom injustice is done – future generations and the global poor – thereby
removing injustice from our picture of why global warming is worthy of
critique. What is left then could be described as a systematic thwarting of
the – in this case, self-preservative – ends of the very agents whose activi-
ties produce global warming or, alternatively, as a systematic ­undermining
of the conditions of those agents’ good and, ultimately, of their very

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 Advantages of the Concept of Social Pathology 11
agency and lives. What makes human-caused global warming a p ­ athology
and not only an injustice is that it is the result of a social dynamic – a
­self-reproducing nexus of collective practices – that, apart from its connec-
tion to injustice, diminishes the good (or impedes the ends) of those who
participate in those practices.10
The first of these points implies that theories of social pathology take
as their object not isolated human actions but ongoing social processes
that constitute a dynamic with a coherent logic and point. This is the
idea behind Max Weber’s distinction between isolated, sporadic acts of
­profit-seeking and “capitalistic enterprise,” the distinguishing feature of
which is that it is a continually repeated series of actions unified by a
specific aim (the maximization of profit) and exhibiting a certain struc-
ture (economic efficiency, as determined by market-oriented calculations
of profitability) (Weber 1992 [1905]: xxxi–xxxii). Social processes such as
these have not only ends; they also exhibit a characteristic logic or dynamic
that may or may not be consciously apprehended by those whose activities
sustain it. For this reason, diagnoses of social pathology rely on a dynamic
understanding of how social processes work (or function) and how they
reproduce or transform themselves over time; in other words, social cri-
tique on this model requires social theory, and the primary objects of such
critique are not individual actions but social practices and institutions. The
social forces behind contemporary global warming, for example, cannot be
understood as the aggregative result of independently undertaken actions
on the part of thoughtless or greedy individuals. Rather, global warming
is the outcome of a system of production and consumption that follows a
logic of its own – bound up with the aim of capitalist accumulation – that
cannot be countered without substantially reforming institutions.
The second point (that, apart from considerations of justice, social
pathologies diminish the good or impede social members’ ends) suggests
that in most cases such disorders are – to employ a familiar but not fully
transparent distinction – failures in realizing the good, broadly construed,
rather than in achieving the right. Examples of such failures include but
are not exhausted by the following phenomena: felt estrangement from

10 One possible response to this aspect of theories of social pathology is to claim that such theories
expand our conception of justice (Honneth 2014b: 3–19). In my view, it is preferable, and truer to
ordinary usage, to retain a relatively narrow concept of justice – bound up with ideas of “mine and
thine” and of what we owe to one another – and to embrace a broader range of (different) ethical
values. Making “justice” mean many things decreases the precision of critique. Hegel appears to
agree: In the context of domestic right he speaks of justice (Gerechtigkeit) only in relation to “the
administration of justice,” which is limited to abstract right and civil society (PhR: §§99A, 214).

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 12 Can Societies Be Ill?
social institutions; having a purely instrumental attitude to one’s social
activity; failing to realize the distinctive goods available through partici-
pation in collective enterprises; missing out on satisfying forms of work
and self-esteem; and embracing values and ends the pursuit of which is
self-undermining or inimical to one’s own good. In general, then, diagnos-
ing a society, practice, or institution as ill involves ascribing to it specific
ends bound up with conceptions of human flourishing that are somewhat
“thicker” than those typically admitted by liberal theories of justice.11
A social theory that makes pathology a part of its critical arsenal relies
on a vision of the social, according to which human societies ­cannot be
­adequately grasped or evaluated without attributing ends to their prac-
tices and institutions that – because connected with ideals of human
­flourishing – are broadly ethical in nature. For this reason the concept of
social pathology is less restricted to “ends set by nature” than is the concept
of illness in the case of merely animal beings;12 a diagnosis of social pathol-
ogy is always in part an ethical critique.
To show that the concept of social pathology can illuminate ­deficiencies
in social life not capturable by discourses confined to the categories of
legitimacy, justice, or moral rightness, it will be helpful to return to
Marx’s critique of capitalism (which is inseparable from an ambitious
­theoretical account of how capitalism works as a system, reproducing
and transforming itself in accordance with its own logic.) Of the types of
critique ­attributable to Marx – that capitalism is alienating, exploitative,
­self-undermining, and that it ultimately fails to develop human productive
forces as well as other practically available forms of society would – only
one has a natural home in contemporary Anglo-American social or politi-
cal philosophy: only the claim that capitalism requires the systematic
exploitation of workers lends itself to reformulation in the language of
justice that contemporary liberalism takes as the central category of social

11 Among liberal political philosophers, Rawls comes closest to grasping some of the phenomena I
understand as social pathologies. In emphasizing the social bases of self-respect; in applying stan-
dards of justice to nonpolitical institutions; in relying on some (“thin”) conception of the human
good; Rawls approximates some of the normative criteria employed by theories of social pathology.
Even so, certain topics important to more comprehensive social theories remain untheorized by
Rawls, for example, how labor should be organized so as to avoid alienation; how certain injustices
are systematically reproduced by ongoing social dynamics; and how the ideals of free citizenship
relate to different values realizable in nonpolitical social spheres.
12 Throughout this book the “merely” in “merely animal” means “only” rather than implying “lower
than.” Of course, the contrast between the merely animal and the human that runs throughout this
book attributes a “higher” form of being to the latter. Nothing in this implies, however, that animals
may be treated “as mere means” to satisfying humans’ needs or desires.

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 Advantages of the Concept of Social Pathology 13
critique. One of the strengths of Marxist theory is that it sheds light on
broadly ethical problems of modern society typically ignored, even today,
by justice-oriented political philosophies, where topics such as alienation,
reification, self-defeating social dynamics, and justice in nonpolitical social
spheres go largely unmentioned. To take only the first example, the prob-
lem with alienated labor is not primarily that it is unjust.13 The problem,
rather, is that the conditions under which such labor is carried out make it
impossible for laborers to realize spiritual goods – recognition, self-esteem,
successful execution of complex tasks, the satisfaction of producing for
others, and so on – that can be had from labor in societies with highly
developed productive forces.
Merely to decry such conditions as unjust not only says too little about
what is problematic about them; it also fails to grasp how they are grounded
in the structure and logic of existing institutions rather than being spo-
radic or contingent. This points to a further respect in which theories of
social pathology go beyond mainstream social and political philosophy: in
addition to employing a broader set of normative standards, such theories
aspire to uncover the social dynamics that explain why the pathologies
they diagnose are more than accidental. One might say that theories of
social pathology aspire to distinguish symptoms from underlying patholo-
gies and that their diagnoses go beyond mere classification to include an
account of the social forces or underlying structural conditions responsible
for producing the symptoms at issue. This explanatory aspiration means
that a diagnosis of pathology typically carries implications about the treat-
ment likely to eradicate or ameliorate the diagnosed condition; for the
social pathologist, as for the physician, diagnosis goes hand in hand with
practical orientation.
Finally, theories of social pathology differ from much (but not all14)
contemporary political philosophy in eschewing a priori justification of
the critical norms they employ, seeking them instead within the social
practices they investigate. This point raises the tricky question of how

13 Durkheim can be read as suggesting that injustice is a necessary condition of alienation, even if the
two are not identical (DLS: 407/403). I suspect, however, that that claim is false.
14 Here, too, Rawls’s theory of justice is closer to the theories I endorse than other examples of
­contemporary political philosophy, insofar as it reconstructs the norms informing an already exist-
ing tradition of political liberalism rather than proceeding foundationally. The device of the original
position can look like an attempt to find a free-standing foundation for standards of justice, but only
if one forgets the role played by reflective equilibrium, which allows features of the original position
to be revised if the results following from it diverge too much from the considered judgments of
actual participants in the practices whose logic is being reconstructed (Rawls 1999: 18–19, 42–5).

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 14 Can Societies Be Ill?
the diagnosis of social pathologies relates to what has come to be called
­immanent critique, as well as – since some notion of contradiction is central
to such critique – to what extent social pathologies involve c­ ontradictions
in the sense in which Hegel and Marx employ that concept. These ques-
tions would be easier to answer if immanent critique and contradiction
were univocal concepts.
The locus classicus of the method of immanent critique is Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit, but, in a different form, it plays a role in his
Philosophy of Right as well: his critique of widespread poverty there, for
example, rests on the idea that basic features of civil society impede its
ability fully to realize the ideals – such as self-reliance and finding mean-
ing in one’s work – that animate its own workings. In Marx the closest
analogue to this form of immanent critique is Capital ’s account of how
the ideals that justify the wage–labor relation and the appropriation
of surplus value – “freedom, equality, property, and Bentham” (Cap.
280/MEGA: XXIII.189) – are necessarily realized only one-sidedly in
capitalism. In both cases, one could speak of contradictions – between
normative aspirations that inform institutional life and the internal
impossibility of fully achieving them – but for Hegel and Marx “con-
tradiction” tends to imply something more as well, namely, an internal
potential for transformation, or the presence of real forces that have
the capacity to resolve the contradiction at issue and, in doing so, pro-
duce a new, “higher” social configuration in place of the old. (This
dimension of “contradiction” has an analogue in the method of imma-
nent critique employed in the Phenomenology, but it is not part of the
Philosophy of Right’s account of poverty.) This conception of contradic-
tion in the social domain finds its clearest expression in Marx’s account
of the “contradictions of material life” – the conflicts between the forces
of ­production and the relations of production – that explain epochal
change in his vision of historical materialism:
No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there
is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never
appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the
womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only
such tasks as it can solve; since … the task itself arises only when the mate-
rial conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of
formation. (MER: 5/MEGA: XIII.9)
Diagnoses of social pathology, as I conceive of them here, depend on a
form of immanent critique but do not necessarily regard pathologies as con-
tradictions in this sense: uncovering a pathology in social life does not imply

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 Advantages of the Concept of Social Pathology 15
the presence of forces that will or could resolve the relevant d ­ ysfunction and
lead to radical transformation “at a higher level.” In other words, the meta-
physical commitments of theories of social p ­ athology are more modest (and
realistic) than views of history that e­ mphasize ­contradiction-based progress,
and this in two ways: in rejecting the idea that dysfunctions carry within
themselves the resources for overcoming them, and in denying that only
radical transformation – revolution rather than reform – is genuine progress.
In both respects theories of social ­pathology are closer to the diagnosis of
medical illness than to “dialectical” social critique, for they presume nothing
about the likelihood or potential for overcoming the illnesses they diagnose.
Thus, illness in its social form, like physiological pathology, is sometimes
cured; it sometimes leads to change or death; and sometimes it merely per-
sists indefinitely. On this point, the view of social pathology I defend here
is closer to the p ­ ositions of Rousseau and Durkheim than to Marx’s or
Hegel’s. The ­metaphysical modesty of such a view may be disappointing,
but it also avoids the ­embarrassment of predicting social ­transformations
that never come about.15 (At the same time, f­orward-looking critical social
theories ought to attempt the kind of analysis Marx ­provides in Capital of
real social and material d ­ evelopments that might have the potential to rem-
edy contemporary dysfunctions and to transform the social world in ways
that make their recurrence less likely; although such analyses are important
for guiding political action, they ­cannot be regarded as predictive or deter-
minable with the precision of natural science.)

There is another aspect of the uncovering of social contradictions that, at

least for Marx, has implications for the form social progress must take:
Capital ’s method of uncovering the “contradictory movement of capitalist
society” – primarily in its account of the periodic cycles of capitalism that
culminate in “universal crisis” – is said to be “revolutionary in its essence”
(Cap.: 103/MEGA: XXIII.27–28). In other words, social contradictions
in the sense at issue here are taken to apply not to superficial features of
societies but to their deep structure,16 which means that resolving those
­contradictions is closer to killing off the extant social “organism” than
to curing it.17 In this respect – in insisting on the revolutionary character

15 The views expressed in this paragraph are heavily indebted to comments made by an anonymous
reader of an earlier version of this chapter.
16 I take these points from another anonymous reader of the book’s manuscript.
17 One could ask whether the contradictions in modes of knowing uncovered by Hegel’s Phenomenology
are revolutionary in a similar sense. Although they pertain to the deep structure of the modes of
knowing considered, resolving their contradictions always involves incorporating elements of the

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 16 Can Societies Be Ill?
of social critique and of the political actions implied by it – Marx fits
less comfortably into the social pathology tradition than other figures
­covered in this book. Nevertheless, as I argue in Chapters 3 and 4, both
the ­language and concepts of social pathology critique figure prominently
in Capital ’s accounts of the nature of capitalist production and its inher-
ent defects.
In any case, drawing too close an analogy between physiological and
social illness can make diagnosis of the latter appear more conservative
than it need be. Normally we take cures of physiological illness to aim at
restoring the sick organism to its previous healthy state without transform-
ing it or giving it new powers. If the same were always true of ­diagnoses
of social pathologies, they would indeed be inherently conservative in
an objectionable sense. Yet no major theorist of social pathology takes
the concept to be restricted in this way – certainly not Durkheim, who,
because of being associated (unfairly) with sociological functionalism,18 has
seemed to many the social pathologist most vulnerable to this charge. No
doubt this difference between biological and social “organisms” can also
be traced back to ontological differences between what Hegel calls spirit
and mere life, especially to the intrinsically historical character of spiritual
beings due to their self-conscious nature.19
While restoring society to a previous state of health is in principle a pos-
sible aim of theories of social pathology, it in fact plays little, if any, role
in the theories I take most seriously here. Instead, there is a general pre-
sumption in these theories that remedying social pathologies requires real
change that typically falls short of “revolution” but does not for that reason
amount to “mere reform” that leaves the underlying causes of dysfunctions
unaddressed. Like medical approaches to disease, which distinguish symp-
toms from underlying causes, theories of social pathology are not opposed
to grasping social problems “at their root,” but they do not assume that
an adequate response to such problems requires complete extraction of the
roots in question. A satisfactory response to poverty or economic i­ nequality
might involve abolishing the market economy and replacing it with pro-
duction organized on a different basis, but it might also be remedied by
substantial changes to the market economy, including revised conceptions

earlier stage rather than wiping the slate clean and beginning from scratch. Is this revolution or
(substantive) reform?
18 See my discussion of sociological functionalism in Chapter 2.
19 I leave this thought undeveloped here, though resources for exploring it further can be found in
Chapter 12 and, in more elaborated form, in Brandom (2007: 127–9).

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 Advantages of the Concept of Social Pathology 17
of property and of the rights belonging to its o­ wners,20 that should not be
dismissed as “mere reform.” In truth, we do not (yet) know whether in
this case revolution or reform is required. For his part, Durkheim calls his
vision of the social order that has overcome the pathologies of m ­ odernity
“socialism,” and the fact that Marx does not use the term in this way
should not prevent us from entertaining the possibility that Durkheim’s
socialism might represent real growth and substantial change – something
beyond “mere reform.”
Finally, it is important to forestall a further possible misunderstanding
regarding the sort of immanent critique theories of social pathology rely on
that may have its source in the circumstance that the locus classicus of this
method is Hegel’s Phenomenology rather than his social philosophy.21 The
source of this potential confusion is that the object of inquiry in that text is
not real social formations but configurations of consciousness (or modes of
knowing), the contradictions of which consist in mismatches between the
norms for knowledge espoused in those configurations and what subjects
who subscribe to those norms actually do when they attempt to know the
world in accordance with them. This aspect of the Phenomenology might
suggest that immanent social critique always involves revealing how con-
sciously held norms of social members fail to be realized in the society
they inhabit. On this issue, the form of critique employed by theories of
social pathology is more like the immanent critique one might ascribe to
­medical diagnoses of illness, where “immanent” means not “internal to a
form of consciousness” but immanent to the form of life of the relevant
species (Thompson 2008: 81). In the case of physiological illnesses the
defect picked out by “immanent critique” involves (but is not exhausted
by) dysfunctions defined relative to the species’ normal functioning.22
Obviously, such diagnoses do not appeal to consciously held norms but
to standards of the well-functioning of the species. As we shall see in later
chapters, in the social domain consciously held norms play an important
role in constituting social reality, and a systematic failure to realize such
norms is relevant to, but not exhaustive of, diagnoses of social pathology.
The more fundamental thought underlying immanent social critique is

20 Using concepts of “social,” “public,” and “partial” ownership, Thomas Piketty proposes changes of
this sort as a response to the massive inequalities in contemporary Western societies (Piketty 2020:
493–8, 508–10, 611, 972–5, 989–90). Rawls’s alternative to capitalism, property-owning democracy,
might also be regarded as a proposal of this type (Rawls 2001: 135–40, 158–62).
21 For an extended discussion of immanent critique, see Jaeggi (2019: 190–214).
22 According to Michael Thompson, what I am calling normal functioning is defined relative to an
animal’s “form or kind and the natural history that pertains to it” (Thompson 2008: 81).

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 18 Can Societies Be Ill?
that social life is made up of goal-directed practices informed by internal
criteria for their own success. In this respect social life bears a resemblance
to the processes of animal life – the circulation of blood, the digestion of
food, the production of sweat – with the difference that in the former,
practice-immanent norms are in part (but not always) consciously known
and followed by the humans whose activities constitute the practices in
question. In other words, the standards enabling the social pathologist to
diagnose dysfunctionality in social life are already present – and therefore
already partially realized – in the institutions under investigation, even
if many questions remain concerning how the specific functions carried
out in social life are to be determined. On this conception, even Marx’s
account of the recurrent crises of capitalism counts as a form of immanent
critique, insofar as they impede the function (or work against the “point”)
of economic cooperation.
An implication of this feature of social life is that the projects of
­understanding and critique are more interdependent for the social
pathologist than they are normally taken to be in contemporary moral
and political philosophy. In some form the interdependence, and there-
fore inseparability, of the two projects is a dominant theme in much
of post-Kantian European philosophy – in Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche,
Freud, and Durkheim, for example – but it is not found only there. It is
also ­present in the best social theories outside this tradition – in Adam
Smith, who predated the tradition, and in Max Weber, who, although a
member of it, did his best in his methodological reflections (but, to his
credit, not always in his empirical studies) to embrace as his “official”
normative position a rigorous, neo-Kantian version of the separation of
fact and value.
Let us consider how these issues play out in Smith’s social theory.
Nothing distinguishes The Wealth of Nations more from the social
and political philosophy of Smith’s contemporary Rousseau than this
­methodological point. The normative logic of the Social Contract begins
with an abstract, relatively a priori account of the basic interests all
humans share and proceeds from there to deduce the fundamental prin-
ciples of legitimate political association that allegedly apply at all times
and places (SC: I.6.v). The contrast to Smith is even more apparent
in Rousseau’s Discourse on Political Economy, which, like The Wealth
of Nations, discusses trade, the division of labor, and the proper bal-
ance between commerce and agriculture but does so from the same a
priori normative perspective that guides the Social Contract. This is evi-
dent in the Discourse’s opening ­paragraph, where political economy is

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 Advantages of the Concept of Social Pathology 19
defined as the science dealing with the wise administration of a state
­(PE: 3/OC: 241), after which it proceeds as though the rudiments of
sound ­economic policy could be derived directly from the principles of
the Social Contract, assuming that both ­follow from a single normative
principle, that of the general will.
Smith’s treatment of commercial society could hardly be more ­different.
In fact, it is an example of social theory that engages in what Hegel calls
“comprehending what is.” In this context comprehending involves under-
standing both how an existing economic system, “commercial society,”
works and how its functioning nonaccidentally realizes certain ends that
for this reason can be thought of as inscribed in that system itself, even if
some of them may not be immediately apparent to its participants. Smith’s
first aim, in other words, is to understand how a part of the existing social
world actually functions rather than to evaluate it from an a priori norma-
tive perspective or to construct superior institutions from scratch. That
is, Smith takes as his object an already existing economic system and asks
not how it ought to function but how it (or an appropriately idealized
version of it) in fact does: Which factors determine the prices of commodi-
ties and the wages of labor? How do increases in the rate of profit affect
the various classes of society and the economy as a whole? What is the
source of a nation’s wealth? Finding systematic answers to these questions
enables Smith to see the good realized by commercial society, which turns
out to consist, as it does for Hegel, in some combination of well-being
and freedom. The latter value is not imposed on commercial society by
Smith’s own normative commitments. Rather, freedom, conceived in a
certain way, is intrinsic to the functioning of commercial society, insofar
as the latter relies on the normative status of laborers as free beings who,
independently of others’ wills, enter into wage-labor contracts with their
employers, without which production in commercial society would not
take place. Smith’s defense of the free-market economy derives not from
a priori arguments about which institutions are ideally suited to human
beings given their essential nature or interests23 but from a comprehensive
account of how actual institutions function and of what they can accom-
plish under favorable but realistic conditions. Similarly, his prescriptions
for commercial society are limited to measures that would fine-tune an

23 I do not deny that Smith has a normative conception of human nature, but it plays less of a role in
justifying the market economy than his analysis of how commercial society works and of its system-
atic consequences for human freedom and well-being.

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 20 Can Societies Be Ill?
already functioning system rather than replace what exists with a more
perfect, wholly invented ideal.

Examples of Social Pathology: Rousseau

An illustration of some of the claims made above about the concept of
social pathology can be found in a passage from Rousseau’s Discourse on
Political Economy, which, along with his Discourse on Inequality, is a found-
ing text of the modern tradition of social pathology critique:
A time may come when citizens, no longer seeing themselves as having an
interest in the common cause, cease being the defenders of the fatherland,
and the magistrates prefer to command mercenaries rather than free men,
if only in order … to use the former to better subjugate the latter. Such
was the state of Rome at the end of the republic and under the emperors;
for all the victories of the first Romans … had been won by courageous
citizens who were ready to shed their blood for the fatherland when neces-
sary, but who never sold it. Marius was the first … to dishonor the legions
by introducing … mercenaries into them. The tyrants, having become the
enemies of the peoples whose happiness was their responsibility, established
standing armies, in appearance to contain foreigners, and in fact to oppress
the local population. In order to raise these armies, tillers had to be taken
off the land; the shortage of them lowered the quality of the produce; and
the armies’ upkeep introduced taxes that raised its price. This first disorder
caused the people to grumble: In order to repress them, the number of
troops had to be increased, and, in turn, the misery; and the more despair
increased, the greater the need to increase it still more in order to avoid its
consequences. On the other hand, those mercenaries, whose worth could be
judged by the price at which they sold themselves …, despising the laws …
and their brothers whose bread they ate, believed it brought them more
honor to be Caesar’s henchmen than the defenders of Rome, and … they
held the dagger raised over their fellow citizens, ready to slaughter at the
first signal. (PE: 28–9/OC: 268–9)
This tale contains several elements relevant to social pathology in
i­mperial Rome. One is that citizens fail to “see themselves as having an
interest in the common cause,” implying a lack of the civic unity char-
acteristic of a well-functioning society. This deficiency – the absence of
solidarity among citizens – manifests itself in their failure to recognize a
convergence among their interests and those of fellow citizens. As described
here, this failure is said to reside in how citizens perceive themselves and
their relation to society. This itself might be taken as an indication of social
pathology, but in this case the problem is deeper, for the absence of civic

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 Examples of Social Pathology: Rousseau 21
unity is not merely a matter of false consciousness. Rather, the p ­ erceptions
of citizens track something real, namely, that their society is divided
into ­factions – ­citizens, magistrates, paid henchmen – whose members,
because of these divisions, pursue interests so opposed that consensus on
what is best for all becomes impossible: The magistrates are interested in
­subjugating the citizens; the latter are interested in having enough to eat
and in avoiding subjugation; and the mercenaries are interested only in the
money they receive for defending Rome.
It is important that this problem is not merely one of injustice, for
example, the citizens being subjugated by their rulers. Rather, it is that
something like a tear in the social fabric makes healthy social life impos-
sible. Civic unity is important for Rousseau because it is necessary if
individuals are to be “morally free” qua citizens (SC: I.8.iii). There is
an important difference between being subjugated by others and being
unfree in the sense of being obligated to obey laws that one does not
endorse or see as expressing one’s will. Although both forms of unfree-
dom are problematic, it is the latter – a forerunner of what Hegel calls
alienation – that is at issue here. In Rousseau’s tale the inability of citizens
to regard laws as proceeding from their own wills might well be bound
up with the fact that those laws produce their own subjugation, but there
could also be instances where the absence of civic unity is not due to
­injustice – for example, when a society is basically just but individuals
do not identify with it because their institutions fail to foster in them the
values or ­self-conceptions necessary for doing so, or where divergences
among interests pose insurmountable obstacles to the formation of a
general will without those divergences depending on injustice.24 In such
cases, too, the absence of civic unity would constitute an ethical defi-
ciency that has its source in nonaccidental social conditions; it would be,
in other words, a social pathology.
A second element of Rousseau’s tale pointing to social pathology is
the magistrates’ hiring of mercenaries or, more broadly, the inappropri-
ate introduction of money into social relations. We should not saddle
Rousseau with the view that it is bad for social relations of any kind to
be mediated by money; a more plausible claim is that certain types of
social relations are ruined once money comes to serve as their organiz-
ing principle. One of Rousseau’s complaints is that individuals who carry
out the duties of citizens only because they are paid to do so are easily

24 This may be true for Smith of the three “ranks” that compose commercial society.

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 22 Can Societies Be Ill?
manipulated by those in power in ways that undermine the proper ends
of political life. (Mercenaries let themselves be used to subjugate citizens
rather than to secure their freedom and promote their good.) A further
point is that “citizens for hire” tend to assume an instrumental attitude to
their associates and to their own social activity. Adopting a purely instru-
mental ­attitude to what we do, and to those with whom we do it, may be
consistent with acting freely (voluntarily), but when this attitude extends
to much of what we do, the result is estrangement from others and from
our own activities. Again, the idea is not that it is always inappropriate to
relate to others as a self-interested calculator of gain but rather that there
are types of social activity in which cooperation mediated by money is
incompatible with the kinds of bonds and cooperation that constitute the
very point of those activities. Here, again, the problem is not injustice but
the failure of individuals to realize certain goods in principle available to
them as social members.
Rousseau’s characterization of the hiring of mercenaries as dishonoring
the legions suggests a further respect in which his description of Rome is
relevant to an account of social pathology, namely, in its depiction of what
has come to be called, by interpreters of Axel Honneth’s work, ­pathologies
of misrecognition.25 This aspect of Rousseau’s tale points to a specific
good, social recognition, that plays an important role in many accounts of
social pathology and serves to illustrate one of the ethical deficiencies such
accounts are concerned with. At the same time, Rousseau’s ­description
of the consequences of the hiring of mercenaries brings out a more for-
mal point about what can make a social problem, loosely conceived, a
pathology. For his treatment of misrecognition does more than establish
that large numbers of Romans failed to find recognition from their fellow
­citizens; it also diagnoses a pathology of misrecognition, insofar as it reveals
the dynamic underlying those recognitive failures, enabling us to under-
stand the social forces that perpetuate them.
The import of Rousseau’s remark that the legions were dishonored when
money replaced civic allegiance as the reason to serve the fatherland is that
this event, itself a form of misrecognition (of those who had served in the
legions out of conviction and attachment), undermined other relations of
recognition in society, generating a self-perpetuating system of recogni-
tion gone awry. One aspect of Rousseau’s account concerns the effect the
hiring of mercenaries had on their self-conceptions and their sense of their

25 For Rousseau’s versions of this idea, see Neuhouser (2010: chs. 2–4).

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 Examples of Social Pathology: Rousseau 23
own worth: the mercenaries judged their own value only “by the price at
which they sold themselves.” This point is familiar to members of ­societies
in which the market plays a dominant role: when money becomes the
main principle around which social relations are organized, individuals are
subject to a nearly irresistible tendency to judge their own worth in terms
of the monetary value the market places on them and their services. One
problem with this is that prices determined by supply and demand are
ethically arbitrary. In the same way that a market responds not to need but
to effective demand – production is organized not by what humans need
in order to live a good life but according to what those with the greatest
resources desire – it is accidental whether the measure of worth employed
by the market tracks the characteristics that make for good societies and
individuals.
Closely related is the fact that markets measure value according to a
quantitative, one-dimensional metric: price expressed in terms of money.
This encourages social members to value themselves quantitatively rather
than qualitatively, less for the intrinsic merits of their qualities and achieve-
ments than for the (numerically measured) extent to which they happen to
be in demand by those with the resources to purchase their services. This,
too, could be described as alienation from who one is and what one does.
In such circumstances we tend to value our socially beneficial qualities
not because they contribute to a human good but because they serve to
increase our value as determined by the price we command on the mar-
ket. Moreover, measuring one’s worth by a quantitative metric makes it
harder to satisfy the desire to have value in one’s own eyes and others’.
In contrast to qualitatively defined ideals – being a good nurse or parent
or citizen – measuring one’s worth quantitatively admits of no natural
stopping point in the quest for confirmation of one’s value. Money prices
can in principle always be improved on, and once this way of measuring
one’s worth has been internalized, satisfaction tends to become thin and
unstable – there is no reason not to seek ever larger sums of what one seeks
and hence no reason to place bounds on what Hegel calls a dynamic of
“bad infinity.”
Rousseau’s tale also suggests that a distorted sense of where one’s own
value lies translates into a distorted picture of the value of others; a faulty
evaluation of self goes hand in hand with the misrecognition of others.
As Rousseau puts the point, once the hired security forces began to judge
their own worth by the price at which they sold themselves – once they
“believed it brought them more honor to be Caesar’s henchmen than the
defenders of Rome” – they also lost respect for the state, its laws, and

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 24 Can Societies Be Ill?
their fellow citizens. The most vivid sign of this is that losing respect for
­others allowed them to hold “the dagger over their fellow citizens, ready to
slaughter at the first signal.” Yet this misrecognition is but a consequence
of a more fundamental one: the fact that the magistrates no longer cared
about the happiness of their subjects and, in “preferring to command
­mercenaries rather than free men,” ceased to recognize their subjects as
citizens, whose fundamental right is to remain free from the arbitrary wills
of others.
This account of pathologies of misrecognition in imperial Rome points
to an idea that frequently underlies diagnoses of social pathology, that of
a self-perpetuating dynamic that makes a bad situation worse and, once
­initiated, is extremely difficult to break. This idea cannot be illustrated
more clearly than Rousseau himself does in describing another ­pathological
dynamic in which Rome found itself caught up:
In order to raise … armies, tillers had to be taken off the land; the ­shortage
of them lowered the quality of the produce; and the armies’ upkeep intro-
duced taxes that raised its price. This first disorder caused the people to
grumble: In order to repress them, the number of troops had to be increased,
and, in turn, the misery; and the more despair increased, the greater the
need to increase it still more.
The idea of a self-perpetuating dynamic represents another way in which a
diagnosis of social pathology goes beyond merely uncovering social problems
and how grasping certain phenomena as pathologies can provide a better
understanding of social reality than theoretically less ambitious alternatives,
in this case because doing so reveals the social forces at work that explain
the persistence of the social ill in question. In Rousseau’s example, the cycle
of increasing poverty, taxation, inflation, and militarization makes it hard
to avoid the impression that the society described, beyond the respects in
which it is unjust, is internally dysfunctional in a way reminiscent of certain
physiological illnesses. Apart from the diagnosis of impaired functioning,
the idea of a s­elf-perpetuating social dynamic points to another respect in
which the analogy of illness seems not to be out of place in social theory: to
locate the source of dysfunction in a social dynamic is to regard society as
something like an autonomous, “living” system of forces, where one func-
tion affects and is affected by others and where their interaction acquires a
life of its own not directly dependent on the will or consciousness of those
whose activity constitutes those forces.
A similar point about dynamics can be seen in Marx’s treatment of what
is now called structural unemployment. Merely establishing that capitalist
societies exhibit high rates of unemployment, and that they have done so for

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 Examples of Social Pathology: Rousseau 25
a long time, falls short of locating a social pathology. Marx’s analysis of the
industrial reserve army, in contrast, diagnoses a pathology of unemployment
because it shows how the phenomenon is required by the capitalist system
itself, which is to say, it shows how capitalist accumulation necessarily pro-
duces (and reproduces) unemployment and, moreover, how doing so serves
the interest of the dominant, surplus value-appropriating class. Understood
in this way, unemployment is more than merely a social problem; it points
to a pathology because it is the nonaccidental result of an ongoing dynamic,
a remedy for which requires a realignment of social structure and a transfor-
mation of institutions, rather than piecemeal attempts to stimulate a lagging
economy or to provide welfare aid to those who cannot find work.

Before concluding this chapter, I want to point out two significant

­disanalogies between animal and social illness. The first is relevant to social
ontology because it marks a fundamental distinction between the kinds
of being characteristic of animal and social “organisms.” I first develop
this point in Chapter 6 in conjunction with Rousseau’s claim that human
­societies, in contrast to products of nature, are artificial, or humanmade.
The point underlying this claim is that human societies are normatively
constituted entities whose workings depend on the agency, including some
sort of “acceptance” of social norms, of their human members. Moreover,
because the functioning of social institutions depends on the (free) agency
of their participants, there is an important sense in which the continued
existence of institutions, as well as potential transformations of them, is
“up to them,” that is, up to those whose activities and attitudes sustain
them. In contrast to the life-sustaining components of animal organisms,
it is in principle within the capacity of human social members to transform
at least parts of the social world they inherit from previous generations.
This means that the diagnosis of social pathologies contains a moment of
critique lacking in the diagnosis of animal illness. Although even the latter
involves revealing defects of a certain sort – the sick organism falls short of
the standards of well-functioning appropriate to its species – in the ­former
case diagnosis implies criticism of a more robust sort. It is ­appropriate to
speak here of critique, and not merely diagnosis, first, because the diagnosis
at issue is reflexive, carried out both on and by the very same being, much
like in Kant’s critiques reason is both the subject and object of ­critical
inquiry; and, second, because diagnoses of social pathology ascribe to their
objects a kind of responsibility (to be explained in Chapter 6) and imply a
practical imperative addressed to the human wills on which the illness of
those objects depends.

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 26 Can Societies Be Ill?
It is important, however, to distinguish the critique involved in
­ iagnoses of social pathology from moral critique,26 if the latter is taken
d
to involve ascriptions of moral blame or praise for individually imputable
actions. Although diagnoses of social pathology typically invoke e­thical
standards beyond that of efficient functioning narrowly understood,
appealing to some understanding of the human good, this does not mean
that the ­critiques delivered by such diagnoses imply moral culpability.
(This point is exemplified by Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality, which
offers an ethical critique of modern society and yet, while regarding soci-
ety and its ills as humanmade, does not ascribe moral culpability to those
whose free actions, unintentionally and without foresight, produced the
ills in ­question.) The main reason that diagnoses of social pathology do
not imply moral culpability is that although the dysfunctions character-
istic of them involve failures to realize the good, such failures result from
social dynamics the persistence of which is independent of the intentions
of specific individuals; ascribing blame for them to individuals is therefore
highly problematic.
Even if it were possible to apportion moral responsibility for social
pathologies, it is unclear what relevance moral critique would have to
the main aims of critical social theories, namely, to understand, evalu-
ate, and, when appropriate, indicate directions for transforming social life.
One might put this point by saying that, whereas the attribution of moral
blame is largely backward looking – concerned to establish whose actions
are causally responsible for a certain state of affairs and, when appropriate,
to attach moral blame to those responsible – theories of social pathology
are forward looking in attributing responsibility to social actors (in the
sense of: “It is up to us to transform the world our actions maintain”).
Such theories ask not: “Whose actions created our condition, and what
good or evil intentions do they express?” but instead: “How are existing
institutions bad for us, what social forces maintain them, and how can
we collectively transform them?” Theories of social pathology can criticize
institutions for being unjust and for being less good than they can be,
giving us reasons to seek alternatives, but figuring out whom to blame for
those institutions is not a principal concern.
To take the classic Marxist example: the “moral capitalist” who
comes to regard the wage–labor relation as unjust and therefore refuses
to participate further in the system – perhaps even giving away his

26 I am indebted to Macalester Bell for raising this question.

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 Examples of Social Pathology: Rousseau 27
accumulated capital for relief of the unemployed – may be in some
way morally ­laudable, but his actions, because they do nothing to alter
the systematic injustice that motivated his withdrawal from the system,
remain irrelevant from the perspective of social theory. Or ­consider
cruel or environmentally harmful agricultural practices (which, the
social theorist will remind us, became pervasive only after family farms
were ruined by entities ruled by the logic of “agribusiness”). While
there might be room somewhere for finding individuals morally guilty
of inhumanely enclosing livestock or of overusing chemical fertilizers,
doing so is of little concern to social theory. Apart from the fact that
the agents of such practices are largely corporate entities rather than
individuals, whatever moral badness those practices contain does not
explain why they exist (and persist). Again, understanding, ­evaluating,
and transforming social practices depends not on assigning moral
responsibility but on understanding the social forces and c­ onditions –
the logic of capitalist accumulation but also the absurd, manipulated
“­preferences” and habits of consumers – crucial to explaining why the
agents involved act as they do.
The other disanalogy between animal and social illness poses a more
significant challenge to my project since it can appear to cast doubt on
the wisdom of attempting to rehabilitate the concept of social pathol-
ogy. This issue came to my attention in discussions of that concept with
nonacademics, when the question frequently arose, “Have there ever been
human societies that were not sick?” This initially startling question, to
which the answer is immediately obvious, reminded me of the greatest of
all diagnosticians of cultural pathologies, Nietzsche, and of his haunting
remark – a fitting epigram for Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality – that
“the human being is more sick, more uncertain, more changeable, and
more unsettled than any other animal; of this there is no doubt – the
human being is the sick animal” (GM: III.13). The import of Nietzsche’s
remark is twofold. First, it raises the possibility that no human reality –
and hence no human society – can be completely void of illness, so that to
wish illness out of the social world is to wish away its humanness. Second,
the context of Nietzsche’s remark suggests that it is precisely this tendency
to fall ill that not only makes human existence “interesting” (GM: I.6)
but also creates the conditions that make possible great spiritual health
(GM: II.20). Taking these points seriously appears to render the social
pathologist’s aspirations doomed to failure, naïve about the conditions of
the human good, and, worst of all, inimical to the optimal development
of the human species.

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Other documents randomly have
different content
Pressing upwards through the continual struggles, amid the
phantoms and shadows of the earlier centuries, the chosen spirits of
humanity had at last emerged upon a height, where, as in the light
of unclouded morning, the whole world seemed spread out before
and behind them, heaven itself within their reach, the gods
themselves their fellows. In the general material prosperity out of
which the fine flower of Italian civilisation in the Quattrocento had
sprung, as in the cultured and artistic joy of life which was its
highest expression, Milan, led by Lodovico Sforza, held a foremost
place. Whatever may have been his secret motives, this prince
exerted himself ceaselessly to conceive and carry out projects of
enduring benefit to the country. Summoning the greatest brains in
Italy to his service, he set on foot immense hydraulic works, by
means of which wildernesses were converted into fruitful tracts, and
new ways opened for the passage of merchandise and general
traffic. He widened his father’s famous canal, the Naviglio
Martesana, and the Naviglio encircling the city, employing the
inventive genius of Leonardo da Vinci, to overcome the difficulty of
the different levels by a system of locks, still existing in Milan to this
day. He joined these canals with the ancient channel between Milan
and Pavia, thus forming a navigable waterway between the Adda
and the Ticino. Large districts hitherto unfertile owed their after
prosperity to this enlightened ruler. He fostered agriculture, founding
model farms and introducing improved breeds of cattle and horses.
His pleasaunces and orchards round the Castello at Milan, and his
country palaces and villas were so beautiful and fruitful that they
were called earthly paradises. After a brief half century of the Sforza
rule, the Duchy of Milan was become a vast garden, supporting an
enormous population of hardworking peasants. Commerce flourished
more than ever, every way being opened to it by wise and
considerate measures. In the higher branches of industry the Moro’s
vitalising interest and enthusiasm was as effective. His splendid
patronage of art and letters made this city of prosperous traders the
richest centre in Italy of the æsthetic culture of the Renaissance.
Attracted by his liberality and large ideas, the rarest genius of the
age was at his command. Bramante of Urbino spent many years at
Milan, building cupolaed temples and colonnaded palaces, and
transforming the old mediæval city of the Visconti into the fair
Renaissance vision of the Moro’s desire. For Lodovico and for Milan,
Leonardo da Vinci did his greatest works. Perugino painted for the
Moro the splendid Madonna with the Archangels, now in the National
Gallery, and in the stimulating atmosphere a number of native artists
of considerable distinction sprang up. Lodovico equally favoured men
of letters and scientific inquirers. He invited them to Milan, and gave
them great rewards, and did his utmost by grants and personal care
to raise the University of Pavia and the schools founded at Milan by
Galeazzo to a flourishing condition.

CANAL, VIA SAN MARCO

But the merits of the Moro’s government were obscured to the

people by his tyrannic methods. The peasants, groaning under the
oppression of forced labour and of heavy and unjustly distributed
taxation, were too preoccupied by their immediate grievances to
care for the rich harvest which would ensue some day from the
sacrifice of their sweat and their scanty gains. In their belief the
Prince sought only self-glorification and the increase of the already
fabulous ducal treasure. Their simple lamentations sound in the
pages of the chroniclers like a dull threatening undertone in that
wonderful symphony of rich and various instruments which the life
of the Milanese Court was at this time.

CANONICA OF ST. AMBROGIO

One of the worst characteristics of a tyrant was, however,

conspicuously absent in Lodovico Sforza. He was not cruel.
Galeazzo’s horrible ways of enforcing the law no longer prevailed.
The gallows vanished; fragments of quartered traitors adorned the
gates no more, and such pains as justice or policy necessitated were
administered out of the sight and, if possible, knowledge of the
Moro. Even Guicciardini describes the Moro as mild and merciful. The
sight of bodily suffering hurt his fastidious delicacy, his love of fair
and seemly appearance, his fine sensibilities. His shrinking from
blood was perhaps a sign of what may explain much that seems
dark in his history—fear; of the decadence which fatally awaits races
risen too swiftly to greatness. However that may be, his mildness did
not win the hearts of the people for a sovereign who addressed
them from behind the protection of iron bars and never admitted
them to free and friendly audience. An ever-widening gulf divided
their lives of elemental want and passion from the exquisite
existence of subtle and various delight within the impassable walls of
the Castello. It was for the Moro, we remember, that Leonardo
sketched the plans of an ideal city, with an upper system of streets
in which the sovereign and his chosen society of nobles and
courtiers might pass, uncontaminated by the breath and odour of
the multitudes below.
To the princes of the Quattrocento the people were but the
necessary foundation of existence, ‘the mud on which proud man is
built.’ And how incomparable was the fair fabric, so based, and
composed of all the rarest elements of life. The story of the Moro’s
Court is well-known to English readers. The joyous figures that
peopled it are familiar to us, and the gorgeous pageants, the
processions of princes and potentates and fair ladies, the
stupendous display of wealth and beauty, the tourneys, feasts and
dances, are tales oft told in biography and romance. In 1489 the
long arranged marriage of the young Duke with Isabella of Aragon,
granddaughter of King Ferrante of Naples, was celebrated with
extraordinary pomp, and two years later the festivities were renewed
for the double nuptials of the Regent himself with Beatrice da Este,
daughter of the Duke of Ferrara, and of her brother Alfonso, heir-
apparent of Ferrara, with Anna Sforza, sister of Gian Galeazzo. All
these splendours were far overpassed, however, in 1493, when the
Moro’s diplomacy was rewarded by an imperial alliance for the House
of Sforza, and Bianca Maria, the Duke’s remaining sister, rode forth
from the Castello in a chariot of gold to her marriage with the
Emperor Maximilian. The imagination reels with the descriptions of
the rich robes and jewels, the pavilions and triumphal arches, the
garlands, the blazoned hangings, the allegorical masques, the noise
of music and of applauding crowds on these occasions. One would
feel that Milan must have suffered an intolerable surfeit of colour
and delight, did we not know that the gorgeous riot was shaped into
symmetry and order by the supreme decorative taste of the Italian
Quattrocento. All the beautiful neo-pagan conceits, the new vision of
the gods of Olympus granted to that age, inspired these brief
spectacles. Leonardo—Bramante—fashioned those gorgeous edifices
of an hour, built up that wonderful seeming, ephemeral as the
glories which it celebrated, and stayed those passing moments for
ever in the history of the world.
Though it was the desire to outdo every other princely Mæcenas
which impelled Lodovico to bid highest for the services of great
artists and scholars, it was not merely his liberality which held such a
man as Leonardo at Milan, but rather his large appreciation, his
sympathy with great and original ideas, his rare wisdom in leaving
genius free to work in its own way. He had this, moreover, in
common with that unique among the sons of the Italian
Renaissance, that he, too, was a far seeker and the designer of
things never to be finished. Leonardo came to Milan about 1483.
There exists a copy, apparently in his own handwriting, of a letter
recommending himself to the Moro, in which he enumerates all his
qualifications for employment, beginning with his skill in the
invention of military engines, and ending with his capacity to carry
out any work in sculpture or painting as well as any other man, be
he who he may. Vasari tells us that on his arrival in Milan he offered
Lodovico a silver lute which he had fashioned himself in the form of
a horse’s head, and in such a manner that in beauty and sonority of
tone it surpassed every other instrument at the Court, and that the
prince quickly became enamoured of his admirable gifts and
conversation. The more intimate knowledge of the man revealed in
his own notebooks has, however, changed the traditional picture of
Leonardo as a fine courtier and brilliant wit and conversationalist,
the centre of attraction at the Court, enjoying great revenues from
the Moro and dissipating them in splendid living. We see him,
instead, secluded with his pupils in the pleasant home which
Lodovico gave him on the outskirts of the city, beside the Castello
gardens, poring over some problem of construction or hydrostatics,
striving to create a flying-machine or other novel engine. Or passing
rapidly, according to his mood, from modelling the great horse to his
painting in the refectory of Sta. Maria della Grazie, or tracing the
exquisite contours of those beautiful favourites of the Moro, Cecilia
Gallerani and her successor, Lucrezia Crivelli, mocked and allured in
each shadowy face by that inscrutable smile of woman in which the
secret of life seemed to hide itself. He evidently cared little to mingle
with the social life of the Court, where perhaps he was neither able
nor willing to express to a circle, alive to intellectual interests but
enslaved by pedantry and charlatanism, those occult thoughts which
even in his writings he hid in left-handed hieroglyphics. Yet he must
have been a familiar presence in the palace, where he was
constantly summoned for some work which to us seems strangely
disproportioned to his genius—the arrangement of the water-supply
for the Duchess’s bath, the designing of triumphal arches for a
wedding pageant, or the costumes and accessories of some
spectacular joust. Whatever it was, he did it with the interest of one
for whom there is no great nor small, and for whom a moment as
much as countless centuries holds eternity, and little things and big
manifest alike the divine law of necessity.
Leonardo’s figure overshadows for us all others of Lodovico il Moro’s
Milan. There were many others besides him, however, of highest
reputation at the time in the chosen circle of the Court. The Moro, in
his care for the intellectual improvement of his subjects, imported
poets from Tuscany to teach them the art of composing sonnets.
Ancient prejudice against all things Lombard withheld many of
Leonardo’s countrymen from accepting the Sforza’s offers of honours
and emoluments. But the sunshine of Court favour, come whence it
might, was greedily accepted by the Florentine Bernardo Bellincione,
whose gift for stringing together appropriate and flattering verses
secured him the position of Court poet for many years at Milan. Nor
could any small local passion restrain that bare-boned vagabond
genius, Antonio Camelli—called il Pistoia after his native city—from
quenching his perennial famine at the ducal table. But though he
played the fool to amuse his patrons, il Pistoia was of much rarer
stuff than Bellincione. Behind his cloak of buffoonery the tragedy of
a serious and prophetic spirit hid itself, and a fine satire inspired the
sallies of his fantastic muse. An irrepressible sonneteer, he poured
forth streams of verse at Milan. A number of his sonnets allude to
the politics of the day, and are of great interest.
These professors of poesy were very successful in propagating their
art in Milan. Francesco Tanzi, one of the many versifiers at Court,
declared that after the example of Bellincione, Milan was full of
sonnets, and all the rivers and canals ran with the water of
Parnassus. The poetic frenzy had invaded the whole of society, so
that every young knight who desired the favour of ladies and princes
had needs be skilled in making rhymes and improvising to the music
of his lute. A flourishing school of poetry rewarded the Moro’s
patronage and encouragement, and its most distinguished graduates
were young nobles of the first rank—Gaspare Visconte, of the same
stock as the old ducal House, and Antonio di Campo Fregoso, of a
famous Genoese House. A singer of older and still higher repute in
the ducal circle was that mirror of the graceful and cultured chivalry
of the day, Niccolò da Correggio, who as the son of Beatrice da Este,
wife of Tristan Sforza, was constantly at Milan, in devoted
attendance upon his cousin, the younger Beatrice da Este.
Marchesino Stanza, Girolamo Tuttavilla, Galeazzo di San Severino,
Galeotto di Caretto, a lettered noble and chronicler of Montferrato,
all swelled the tuneful choir. The Moro himself is said to have
included sonnet-making among his myriad activities. Around these
distinguished figures hovered a host of lyrists of various rank and
accomplishment, both natives and pilgrims attracted from afar to this
now famous shrine of the Muses. Men of other occupations added
their voices in moments of leisure. Among these was Bramante,
who, in the intervals of his labours as architect, engineer, painter
and master of revels, competed eagerly for the laurel wreath.
The chief theme of their song, and the object of the gallant
adoration and service of all, was the younger Beatrice da Este, who
at fifteen came to Milan to be the Moro’s bride. To this child of
tuneful Ferrara, trained from childhood upwards in all the æsthetic
traditions of its famous Court, an atmosphere of poetry, music and
art was as natural as the air she breathed. With that full and eager
vitality which she shared with her father, Duke Ercole, and her sister,
Isabella of Mantua, she sought all beautiful and joyous things. In the
Court of her rich and indulgent lord she could satisfy every desire.
For the rich equipment of her person and her surroundings she had
the rarest talent at her command. Leonardo da Vinci devised curious
girdles for her. That finest of goldsmiths, Caradosso, carved the
beautiful gems which she wore, and spent his most delicate
workmanship on pax or reliquary for her oratory. To create her
presentment in marble she could choose a Gian Cristoforo Romano,
most cultured and graceful of young sculptors. Her love of sweet
melody was fed by the crowd of skilled musicians who frequented
this Court, where their art was traditionally welcome. Besides the
Flemish priest Cordier, and the other ultramontane singers of Duke
Galeazzo’s celebrated choir, there were here the viol player, Jacopo
di San Secondo—the Apollo of Raphael’s Parnassus—whose strains
were able to soothe the Moro in moments of fever and pain,
Atalante Migliorotti, the friend and companion of Leonardo, and
others numberless, nameless to us now. An incomparable craftsman,
Lorenzo di Pavia, made instruments for her of purest tone, in cases
of ivory and ebony most exquisitely worked. She played herself upon
these, and had a sweet voice. Many a time with her devoted knight,
Galeazzo di San Severino, model of all fashionable graces, and
himself an accomplished singer, and her favourite Daino, most
musical and delightful of fools, she and her ladies would make
harmonious concert. As became a daughter of Este, Beatrice
extended a princely patronage to scholarship and serious literature.
Her secretary, the learned Vincenzo Calmeta, tells us that she
engaged men suitably gifted to read aloud to her the Divina
Commedia and the works of other Italian poets. She would give
serious attention to literary debates, such as the lively poetic
contention we read of between Bramante and Gaspare Visconte, on
the respective merits of Dante and Petrarca.
Such encounters of sharp-sworded wit, so much in vogue at that
time, were conducted at Milan with less pedantry and self-conceit
than in Courts ruled by more strictly humanistic traditions. A
freedom, gaiety and freshness animated the intellectual atmosphere
here. The Moro’s extraordinary activity of mind and wide interests,
Beatrice’s ardour, and capacity for enjoyment, fired all around them.
The Duchess’s eagerness for culture was tempered by her love of
sport and outdoor life. Her hawks and her hounds were a primary
passion in this Ferrarese princess, and many a fair morning was
passed in adventurous chase of the wild creatures in her husband’s
vast hunting demesnes. She was a splendid horsewoman, and had
unbounded courage. The lively sports in which she indulged with her
ladies and cavaliers were not always of a refined order. The gaiety of
the fifteenth century was ministered to by jests and practical jokes
of incredible coarseness, and by all the obscenities of the allowed
fools and monstrosities of nature who capered in grotesquely
brilliant garb round every Renaissance princess. Yet into this full life
the Duchess herself carried a redeeming innocence. In spite of her
free intercourse with the young nobles, no lightest shadow ever
rested on her fair fame.
The society in which she passed her bright, pure existence had,
however, but lately had Galeazzo Maria for leader and example, and
had forgotten all moral restrictions. When Beatrice came first to
Milan she found her husband’s mistress, the beautiful poetess Cecilia
Gallerani, installed in the palace itself. The whole of Milan was rotten
beneath its fine vestures and its art and learning. Wealth and luxury
had encouraged the love of pleasure natural in the people, and the
ideal of freedom in thought and manners, the search for novel
experience and sensation, the worship of the new old gods, born of
the revived knowledge of antiquity, had induced immorality and
corruption more than elsewhere in this city where voluptuous tastes
were not restrained, as in the Florentines, by natural temperance.
Everywhere in the midst of the joyous revels lust and evil passions
were heaping up sins ready for the retribution to come. Corio, an
eyewitness of these times, preludes his story of the great
catastrophe by a vivid picture, adorned by the fashionable pagan
conceits, of Milanese life during these years before the fatal 1495,
when it seemed to the city and its Lord that everything was more
firmly established in peace than ever before. No one thought of
other than accumulating riches. Pomps and pleasures ruled the
hours. The Court of our princes was splendid exceedingly, full of new
fashions, dresses and delights. Nevertheless, at this time virtue was
so much lauded on every side that Minerva had set up great rivalry
with Venus, and each sought to make her school the most brilliant.
To that of Cupid came the most beautiful youths. Fathers yielded to
it their daughters, husbands their wives, brothers their sisters, and
so thoughtlessly did they thus flock to the amorous hall that it was
reckoned a stupendous thing by those who had understanding.
Minerva, she too, sought with all her might to adorn her gentle
Academy. Wherefore that glorious and most illustrious Prince
Lodovico Sforza had called into his pay—as far as from the uttermost
parts of Europe—men most excellent in knowledge and art. Here
was the learning of Greece, here Latin verse and prose flourished
resplendently, here were the poetic Muses; hither the masters of the
sculptor’s art and those foremost in painting had gathered from
distant countries, and here songs and sweet sounds of every kind
and such dulcet harmonies were heard, that they seemed to have
descended from Heaven itself upon this excelling Court.
We who know the after days of Milan watch the golden hours gliding
by towards the darkness ahead, and the glory centring round the
two doomed figures of Lodovico and Beatrice is pregnant for us with
tragedy and grief. Corio continues with a description of these
princes, in this so vain felicity, passing their time in divers pleasures,
and speaks of the magnificent jousts and tournaments and military
shows, and of the homage paid by the poets to the Moro as Lord
both of war and peace. Yet, he adds, with all this glory, pomp and
wealth, which seemed as though nothing could be added to it,
Lodovico, not content, or unaware of his felicity, must needs reach
higher still, that his fall might be the greater. And the chronicler,
preparing himself to compose the cruel and unheard-of tale, fears
that compassion will not suffer him to arrive at the piteous end
without tears.
The Moro’s power was in fact unstably based. His was the right of
natural ability to rule. But beside him the lawful sovereign had grown
to manhood during these years. Gian Galeazzo Sforza—the engaging
little boy reading Cicero in Bramantino’s fresco, now in the Wallace
Collection—showed with advancing years little desire or capacity to
govern. Amiable, weakly, and self-indulgent, he was perfectly
content to leave the power to his uncle, for whom he had a love and
admiration which are a touching element in the relationship of the
two men—usurper and legitimate prince. Had they only been
concerned, the Moro’s peculiar difficulties might never have arisen.
He seems to have regarded himself sincerely at first as the
vicegerent of his nephew. Dum vivis tutus et laetus vivo. Gaude, fili,
protector tuus ero semper. These words, in the mouth of nephew
and uncle, are the motto on a miniatured page in the History of
Francesco Sforza, by Gio. Simonetta, printed in 1490. The picture
shows Lodovico and Gian Galeazzo kneeling on the edge of a lake; in
the midst of the water a ship with a youth in it and a Moor at the
helm, and in the background a mulberry-tree (moro) spreading wide
branches. This allegory—one of many such that we read of—may
have expressed some real affection as well as self-exaltation in
Lodovico, though after-events give it a strange irony.
But the respective marriages of the two princes introduced another
element into the situation. Beatrice da Este was not only the joyous
spirit of festival and sport and all artistic delight, but a woman of
strong character and intelligence. She quickly gained influence over
her husband, and asserted herself in State affairs. The very
narrowness of her youth and sex gave her power over the complex
and wide-minded Moro, who adored her spirit and courage, and
yielded to her as his great sire Francesco had yielded to Bianca
Maria. Beatrice wanted the semblance as well as the substance of
sovereignty, and the birth of her son, in 1492, added the new
ambition of a mother to her desire. Isabella of Aragon, on her side,
had a royal spirit; her soul swelled with rage and offended pride
when the regent showed no intention of relinquishing the
government to her husband. In vain she urged Gian Galeazzo to
assume his rights; her exhortations only passed straight from the
confiding boy into Lodovico’s ears. Her sense of wrong was further
exasperated by Beatrice, who usurped the homage and consequence
which should have been Isabella’s as consort of the sovereign. The
rivalry between the princesses began very soon after Beatrice’s
appearance on the scene, and that playful boxing-match of which we
read, in which the Duchess of Bari knocked down her of Milan, was
the symbol of a contest which involved fatal issues reaching far
beyond the two women themselves.
Influenced by his wife’s ambition, and the birth of his son—also
perhaps by the impossibility, when the hour came, of relinquishing
the sweets of power and sacrificing his vast projects and the fruits of
his past incessant labours to the claim of mere primogeniture
represented by the feeble and already failing Gian Galeazzo—
Lodovico was evidently scheming, after 1490, to make himself Duke
of Milan. From the time of the Moro’s marriage the ceremonial
homage which had been paid till then to the young Duke was
gradually lessened. The tutelage which had been proper in his
boyhood was now used to emphasize his incapacity. No single office
or dignity was at his disposal. Ministers of State, captains of
fortresses, generals and magistrates, all were appointed by
Lodovico. At no point did his subjects come into contact with their
real sovereign. He was dependent for all supplies upon the Moro,
who kept absolute control of the immense Sforza treasure. The birth
of his heir was but scantily celebrated, while that of Lodovico’s a
little later was made the occasion of the most pompous rejoicings.
The halls of the sovereigns in the Corte Ducale were gradually
deserted, while Lodovico and Beatrice’s apartments in the Rocchetta
were thronged. The self-seeking courtiers knew well where their
devotion was most profitably placed. Besides, it was melancholy in
the chambers of a sickly prince and a sad princess ever brooding
over her wrongs. The two appeared less and less in public, and
finally retired altogether to the Castle of Pavia, and their pathetic
figures were almost forgotten on the joyous stage of Milanese life.
But they existed—a constant menace to the Moro, a weapon for his
thousand enemies in the State, and for jealous Italy outside.
Isabella’s piteous complaints to her grandfather, whom she implored
to right her husband, inflamed the long-standing Aragonese hatred
of the Sforza. The other powers—Venice, baulked in her greed of
conquest by the strong hand of the Moro, and ever nervous for the
cities which she had wrested from Milan in Filippo Maria’s time; Pope
Alexander VI., who allowed no gratitude to the Sforza, although
through Cardinal Ascanio they had been the means of his election,
to interfere with his schemes for a new Borgian Italy; Florence,
politically and commercially jealous of the Lombard State—all would
have gladly seen the Moro overthrown and Milan depressed.
During these years of peace and of expansion for Milan, the
suspicious fear with which the disproportionate prosperity of one
power was always regarded by the rest of Italy had concentrated
itself upon Lodovico Sforza. His extraordinary success and untiring
activity, his powers of intrigue, his ability and resource, were the
theme of every tongue. The extravagant adulations of his Court
poets were repeated and unwillingly credited throughout Italy. With
the vast wealth of Milan at his command what might he not do? Fear
of Milan was an old habit. Was it she that should give Italy a master
after all? Was this dark prince, mysteriously potent, to be the
destroyer of her liberty at last?
Had men looked more closely into the monster of their imagination,
they might have perceived that it was not Lodovico’s ambition that
was most to be apprehended. The fatal situation which now
developed seems to have been the product of two opposing fears.
The Moro’s faith in himself and in his good fortune was a superstition
which supported itself upon the lying prophecies of the astrologer
ever at his side, and was at the mercy of every ill omen. His
intrigues were often the devices of a man on the defensive, rather
than the confident moves of a conqueror. To give a colour of
justification to his now almost complete usurpation, he set casuists
to work and evolved a specious doctrine, pronouncing himself lawful
successor of his father, as the first son born to Francesco after he
became Duke of Milan. By means of this argument, and the better
persuasion of an enormous gift of gold, he obtained from the
Emperor Maximilian the promise of the investiture of the Duchy, an
obsolete legality which neither Francesco or Galeazzo had troubled
to obtain in confirmation of the right won by the sword. These
devices, however, aroused only derision and scandal in his own
country, nor could they quiet his own uneasy mind. He felt Italy
against him and was afraid. His particular dread of the House of
Aragon never slept. Though old King Ferrante urged with pathetic
sincerity the maintenance of the league which had preserved the
peace of Italy for so many fortunate years, he might at any moment
be succeeded by Alfonso of Calabria, who did not disguise his hatred
of the Moro and his longing to right his daughter and son-in-law.
Lorenzo de’ Medici had died in 1491, and peace was already
threatened by the injudicious policy of his son Piero. The
covetousness of Venice, the faithless selfishness of the Pope,
completed a situation of general peril, which might easily beget a
great combination to crush Lodovico and reinstate Gian Galeazzo, to
be followed by a scramble for the States which all knew the young
Duke incapable of governing.
The Moro resolved to anticipate the blow. With fatal confidence in
his power to control the force which he was evoking, he opened the
gate which it was Milan’s sacred duty to keep shut against the
foreigner. He invited Charles VIII. of France to lead an army into
Italy against the Princes of Aragon, and to recover the Kingdom of
Naples for the House of Anjou.
Lodovico’s act did not perhaps at the time wear the magnitude of
guilt which subsequent events gave it. Italy was so disunited, so
lacking in any general principle of patriotism that her various tyrants
had not scrupled to appeal at times to France or the Empire in their
needs. Men were used to sporadic attempts of the Princes of Anjou
to overthrow the Aragonese dynasty in Naples. But now that the
Angevin claims were vested in the King of France, such attempts
must be more perilous for Italy. Naples was not the only State to
which France had pretensions. Louis of Orleans—next in succession
to the throne of France after the sickly Charles and his infant son—
claimed the Duchy of Milan itself through his ancestress Valentina
Visconte. The success of the French enterprise in Naples could
scarcely fail to be followed by a vindication of this other claim.
Nothing but that strange and fatal belief in himself, which not only
inspired Lodovico but had infected his contemporaries, could have
blinded the Moro to the madness of his proceedings and induced
Venice, Florence and the Pope to abet his projects at first by forming
a new league with him and abandoning Naples to its fate. There was
some strange glamour about this remarkable man which deluded his
own generation. The Renaissance spirit felt itself represented and
fulfilled in him. Its boundless confidence in human possibilities was
exemplified by the reputation of almost superhuman powers with
which it invested Lodovico Sforza. God in Heaven and the Moro on
earth, so dared il Pistoia to sing, and the prince to hear. The tragic
fall which awaited this exaltation is a part of the inward as well as
outward history of an age when pride built so high, only to be
smitten with incompleteness. Strangest of all, perhaps, was the self-
deception of Lodovico himself, shown by the persistence in him,
throughout his hopeless captivity, of this superstitious faith, after it
had utterly failed him in the crisis of his life, so that in his last
moments, in his prison at Loches, he could attribute his overthrow to
nothing less than the direct intervention of God, to punish him for
his sins, since only the sudden might of destiny, he said, could have
subverted the counsels of human wisdom.
In inviting Charles, Lodovico doubtless thought to produce a
temporary diversion, which should weaken Naples and produce a
political upheaval, amid which he should be able to secure the ducal
throne, and once seated in it, readjust by adroit diplomacy, the
balance of power in the peninsula after the retirement of the invader
in due course. But he had left out of account the respective
conditions of France and Italy—the pent-up military fury in the noble
classes in the first country, which raged for an outlet, the fatal
weakness of disunion in the second, and the enervation which peace
and unparalleled prosperity had produced in its people. He may have
hoped to achieve his ends by the mere threat of French invasion,
and counted on the indecision of the young king and his own subtle
craft to keep the matter from going any further. Charles, however,
whose weak head swam with the flatteries of venal councillors, and
with romantic ideas imbibed from the tales of the Paladins, was
easily persuaded to undertake the conquest of Naples as a
preliminary step to the redemption of Christendom from the Turk.
But the preparations for the expedition were very dilatory, and more
than two years passed before they were completed. During this time
of suspense Italy was full of doubts and fears. Lodovico’s allies
began to hesitate, and there were daily shiftings of policy in the
various States, now in favour of Naples, now of France, all actuated
by self-interest, which guided them finally in this crisis of their
country’s fate to a despicable neutrality, waiting upon events. The
Moro’s own policy was shifting and tortuous, even displaying at
times an anxiety—little credited by his neighbours—to save Naples
from the catastrophe which he himself was bringing upon her.
Already he was working for a reaction against the French in the
event of their success in Italy. But his advances to the opposite party
won for him only the distrust of his friends, and in France many
warned Charles of the folly of relying upon this man, homme sans
foy, s’il voyoit son profit pour la rompre, as Commines pronounces
him.
Meanwhile, careless apparently of the future, Italy continued her
wild dance of pleasure. In Milan, gaiety and licence reigned
supreme. Yet there are many signs that a sense of sin and of a
reckoning at hand had begun to awaken. The sonnets of il Pistoia
grew grave with prophecies to laughing Italy of the much weeping
which time would soon draw from her, and of the shortness of the
hours between her and her immense, irreparable sorrow. The
superstitious Moro himself must have been shaken by the blind friar
who is said to have appeared in the Piazza of Milan at the time of his
negotiations with the French King, crying—Prince, show him not the
way, else thou wilt repent it. From Florence came the echo of
Savonarola’s annunciation, Gladius Domini super terram cito et
velociter. More poignant still to ears that could hear was the
tremulous voice of the octogenarian King of Naples, warning Pope
and Moro, again and again, of the peril clear to the terrible prevision
of the dying—He who will may begin a war, but stop it, no!
But the voices cried in the wilderness. King Ferrante’s was spent by
death early in 1494, and in the following autumn Charles appeared
at last at the head of a splendid host, and was welcomed with
immense pomp and revelry by Lodovico and Beatrice at Pavia. There
in the Castle the young Duke lay dying. The King visited him, and
the piteous spectacle roused the sympathy of the monarch and his
followers, for whom the person of legitimate sovereignty had a
sacredness unfelt by the Italians. Charles was, however, much
embarrassed by the Duchess Isabella, who besought him to have
mercy on her father, the King of Naples. She had better have prayed
for herself, who was still a young and fair lady, observes Commines.
The invaders passed on, finding their path cleared before them, and
their progress already an assured triumph. Their cruelty when they
had first entered the country had terrified all inclination to oppose
them out of the Italians. Piero de’ Medici’s shameful surrender,
Florence’s welcome, the inactivity of the Pope, the speedy fall of
Naples, all the details of the pitiful story are well-known. Charles had
not gone far when Gian Galeazzo died. The cruel report at once
arose, and was widely believed by both French and Italians, that
Lodovico had had him poisoned, and the Moro’s memory has come
down to our day loaded with this detestable sin. Modern inquiry has,
however, shown how little foundation there is for the charge,
disproving the preliminary accusations against Lodovico of starving
and ill-treating the ducal couple, and making it clear that Gian
Galeazzo was surrounded by physicians and carefully tended. It is
evident that Lodovico’s temperament was incapable of such a crime
—that he would have been repelled by the mere idea of murdering
this nephew whom he had brought up, and who loved him with a
pathetic fidelity to the last. Gian Galeazzo’s longing on his death-bed
for the uncle, who was far away, riding in splendour beside the
French King, his touching questions to one of Lodovico’s gentlemen
whether he thought his Excellency the Moro li volesse bene—loved
him, Gian Galeazzo—and whether he seemed sorry that he was ill,
go far to dissipate the cruel suspicion. Nevertheless, the young
Duke’s death relieved Lodovico’s conscience of its last scruple with
regard to the Dukedom. He hastened back to Milan and had himself
invested with the ducal mantle, cap and sceptre, in the midst of a
stupendous pomp.
Meanwhile, the success of the French was producing the result
anticipated by the Moro. Venice, awaking to the danger which the
terrible prestige of the conqueror’s arms meant for all Italy, was
ready to listen to Lodovico’s proposals for a remedy. The invaders
were now to add to their experience of Italian pusillanimity an
acquaintance with the craft which had superseded brute courage in
this advanced nation. Scarcely had the French King turned his back
on Lombardy, when the Venetian ambassadors were treating with
the new Duke of Milan for an alliance against him. A few months
later, Charles and his knights, sick with the Southern delights of their
newly-conquered realm, and longing like homesick children for
France, found their return barred by a powerful coalition of their late
ally with Venice, the Emperor, the King of Spain, and nearly all the
minor States of Italy. The story of their homeward march, more like
a flight, need not be repeated here. At the approach of the French to
his dominions, the faithless Lodovico trembled in his palace, in spite
of the mighty host of allies which was awaiting them, while his
people, beside themselves with fear of the cruel Northerners, and
exasperated by the grievous taxation imposed upon them to oppose
this evil which the Moro had himself provoked, murmured against
him as the murderer of Gian Galeazzo, and the oppressor of the
widowed Duchess and her son. Lodovico well knew that he could not
lean upon his subjects in adversity. But the battle of Fornuovo
(1495) relieved Lombardy of all fear of the French for the time,
though the Italians let slip their chance of annihilating the hungry
and enfeebled enemy, and crushing the Northern terror for ever. The
irresistible conqueror of a year back, having with miraculous good
fortune escaped with the best part of his troops to Asti, was
compelled to negotiate for peace with Milan and Venice. At the
meetings of the Duke and the Venetian Ambassadors with the
representatives of Charles, Lodovico was accompanied by his young
wife, who took part in all the discussions, and astonished everybody
by her intelligence and wisdom. All through this critical period of the
French invasion, Beatrice was the true helpmeet of her husband,
sustaining by her courage and will his more sensitive temperament
under the fears and doubts which assailed it.
Peace at last concluded, the French finally made their way home,
leaving so weak a hold on Naples that the Aragonese quickly
reinstated themselves. In the universal joy at the disappearance of
the invaders it appeared to all that the Moro had saved Italy. His
prestige, of late clouded, was now more brilliant than ever. Securely
seated on the ducal throne, strong in the new alliance in which his
initiative had bound Italy, he seemed indeed to have succeeded in all
his calculations and schemes. Those seeds of future danger—the
fatal knowledge of Italy’s weakness, which the French had acquired,
the declaration of the Duke of Orleans, that he should return to
conquer his rightful heritage of Milan—were unheeded. In his new
exaltation the Moro vaunted himself the child of fortune, and
believed himself to be, as astrologers, poets, courtiers, ambassadors
told him, arbiter of the destinies of Italy, and incarnation of almost
divine wisdom and prudence. He put his trust more and more in
destiny, and prompted by his venal astrologer, Ambrogio da Rosate,
thought to read in the stars his triumph. As if blinded by the gods in
preparation for the sacrifice, he passed all bounds in his arrogance.
The old jealousy and distrust of his fellow-sovereigns now revived
with new force. His jester’s vainglorious trumpeting—the Pope is my
chaplain, Venice my treasurer, the Emperor my chamberlain, and the
King of France my courier, was repeated in every city of Europe, as
if Lodovico himself had seriously spoken it. The many guests at the
Castello of Milan told everywhere of the painting on the walls there,
depicting Italy as a queen, and the Moro, with a scoppetta—his
personal emblem—brushing the dust from her robes, whereon were
inscribed the different Italian cities. These boasts of exaggerated
self-confidence rankled in his contemporaries. But while they hated
him, they feared him too. More than ever now all Italy waited upon
his motions.

LODOVICO IL MORO, BY
BOLTRAFFIO (TRIVULZIO
COLLECTION)

To face p. 176.] [Anderson,

Rome
The months that followed the conclusion of peace with Charles were
joyous beyond compare. In the summer of this year (1496) the Duke
and Duchess had a meeting with the Emperor, and returned loaded
with honours, which added a new lustre to Lodovico’s fame.
Suddenly, at the height of his fortune, Fate struck her first blow at
the Moro. Beatrice died (1497).
The golden days of Milan changed all at once to gloom. Silence shut
down upon the dancing and sweet music. The Duke, to whom even
his children and State seemed no longer worth living for, sat for nine
days in a darkened chamber alone, refusing all comfort, while in Sta.
Maria delle Grazie the monks chanted incessant masses for
Beatrice’s soul. The Moro was overwhelmed. He who had ever lived
happy, now began to feel great anguish, says the Venetian Sanuti.
The fabric of his dreams had crashed upon him. What were
kingdoms to him without that clear-sighted and dauntless spirit at
his side? Not only was his strong affection rent, but his profound
faith in his good fortune was awfully shaken. As if the evil augury
had to declare itself unmistakably, on the night of Beatrice’s death a
large part of the walls of the vast pleasaunce which he had created
round the Castello fell with a great crash, ruined by no storm or
wind, or agency perceptible to human sense. From this moment, so
much is man’s destiny affected by his own spirits, all Lodovico’s
misfortunes began. He entered on that downward course which was
to drag so much to ruin with it—and to the husband’s loss of the
blessing of this Beatrice, the poet of the Italian Renaissance ascribes
not only the fall of Moro, Sforza, and Visconte Snake together, but
the captivity of Italy.
‘Beatrice bea, vivendo, il suo consorte,
E lo lascia infelice alla sua morte.
Anzi tutta Italia, che con lei
Fia trionfante e senza lei, captiva.’[3]

3. Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, canto xlii.

The gate which the Moro had thought to shut so easily upon the
departed stranger was once more ajar. A second French expedition
threatened Italy, and Milan in particular. Early in 1497, the great
captain Gian Giacomo Trivulzio, head of the party in Milan hostile to
the Sforza, and a bitter personal foe of the Moro, who had
abandoned his country and was high in the French service, made a
raid into the ducal dominions. At the same time his partisans stirred
up the discontent of the people, and inspired their volatile minds
with desire for a change of masters. And soon the League began to
show its internal weakness. The interests of the two chief parties in
it were fatally opposed. Venice found her designs on Pisa thwarted
by Lodovico and in her rage began to ponder the advantages of
making friends with the French. Out of the struggle for Naples now
renewed between the French garrison and the Aragonese she might
by a prudent policy, when both combatants were exhausted, secure
the sea-kingdom of the South, and might not a second descent of
the French King, lasting long enough to overthrow the Sforza and no
more, put rich Lombardy at last within her reach? With such hopes
the grave senators flattered their ambition and forgot their faith to
Italy. The Pope, for his own interests, had turned his back on the
Sforza, and was parleying with the common foe, while in Florence
the Frate and the people still looked to Charles for the establishment
of the Kingdom of God on earth and the restitution of Pisa.
The King, however, swayed by opposite counsels, let the months go
by, and the Moro, with desperate trust in his own statesmanship, still
hoped to save his Dukedom. In spite of his anxieties and
embarrassments, his unconquerable instinct of order maintained the
fair aspect of his dominions. But on the great artistic projects of his
triumphant days an arresting spell was laid. The resources of the
State were exhausted in war and defensive preparations. The people
were already taxed to rebellion, and no supplies were forthcoming
for his painters and sculptors. Leonardo asked in vain for the bronze
for casting the statue of Francesco Sforza. The clay model, raised in
front of the Castello in 1493, on the occasion of Bianca Maria’s
marriage with Maximilian, had remained there since, and it seemed
more and more likely that this high thought of prince and artist
combined would never take on any but an ephemeral form.
The brief, uneasy quiet was broken by a stroke of fate. Charles VIII.
died suddenly (1498), and was succeeded by the Duke of Orleans.
Louis XII. had no sooner ascended the throne than he announced
his immediate intention of invading Milan.
Once more put to the trial, Italy proved again unfaithful to herself.
And the pity of it was that the fault lay in her long-rooted political
conditions, not in the will of the people. The sentiment of patriotism
was strong in the country, and bon italiano was the current
expression for one who hated and opposed the French. Yet it could
not avail to overcome the conflict of interests among the different
States, which was, after all, the blind continuous struggle of the
national instinct, whether represented for the moment by Republic,
hereditary tyrant or military usurper, towards the creation of a single
and united kingdom. This time Venice was the arbiter of the
situation. Answering the Moro’s piteous and self-humiliating appeals
for help and protection only by cruel taunts of perfidy, the Republic
concluded an alliance with the French (1498).
The Moro’s old disloyalties were now repaid to him tenfold. He
looked round him in vain for a friend. The reward of usurpers and
short tyrannic dynasties based on force, not love, met him in an
alienated people, who refused to endure hardship or make sacrifices
to save him, but looked instead to any change of government as
desirable. His armies, composed chiefly of foreigners, were
undisciplined and rebellious, serving only for pay. They were badly
generaled by the Duke’s favourites. Lodovico, with all his ability, had
little judgment in his choice of servants. He was led by his affections,
which betrayed him. Chief among his trusted officers were the San
Severini brothers—the Conte di Caiazzo, Galeazzo, famous champion
of the tourney-lists, and the Moro’s son-in-law, and the gruff
Gaspare, better known as Fracasso. They were the sons of Roberto
di San Severino, but Lodovico had kept them always beside him and
heaped honours and places upon them. Galeazzo, the prime
favourite, had the chief command of his army. Francesco Bernardino
Visconte, Antonio Maria Pallavicino, Antonio Trivulzio and the rest, all
were alike unprepared in heart to sacrifice themselves for the
sovereign in whose sunshine they had warmed themselves. The
slight tie that bound together the various elements of the State
could not endure against fear, ambition, greed and hereditary hate.
The situation was further aggravated by the arrogance and exactions
of the ducal favourites which excited the rage of the people and
increased Lodovico’s unpopularity.
Events moved rapidly. In March 1499 the treaty between France,
Venice and the Pope was publicly proclaimed. Louis was to conquer
Milan, and Venice, as the price of assistance, was to share the spoils.
Florence was nominally the Moro’s ally, but had neither means nor
will to help him now. Naples was too weak to count, and Lodovico’s
one friend, the unstable and spendthrift Maximilian, gave only empty
promises. The Duke was left to make his desperate defence alone.
In spite of his energetic preparations the presage of doom lay heavy
on his soul, and affected all around him. He believed that Fortune,
once his friend, was now contrary, and that God was angry with him.
In June the French army arrived in Asti, and immediately invaded
the ducal territories. Every obstacle fell before them. Treachery and
fear delivered castles and cities one after another into their hands.
The Conte di Caiazzo made secret terms with them, and withdrew
his troops from action. The rapid progress of the invaders brought
them soon to the strong city of Alessandria, in which Galeazzo di San
Severino and the main Milanese army lay to check their advance
upon the capital itself. Here they met a promise of resistance, but
the place had not been besieged many days when for some
extraordinary and unexplained reason it was delivered to them.
Some say that Galeazzo was seized with despair, others that he was
deceived by a forged order to retire. Anyhow, one morning before
daybreak he stole out with a few other nobles and galloped to Milan,
and his army, when they found their general gone, incontinently fled
in all directions.
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