John Laurens and Jean-Jacques Rousseau
“Although I cannot say that John, in Switzerland, met François Voltaire, who lived near Geneva, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was Swiss-born, I suspect he may have read their works or at least encountered their followers. Whatever the source, John Laurens returned to America from Europe in April 1777 possessed with a remarkably broad mind.”
– Slaves in the Family, by Edward Ball
Why did John Laurens have the beliefs he did about the distribution of wealth? It’s something I wonder about a lot. My best guess for a while was simply that Laurens felt guilty about having so much when others had so little. And that still may be party or completely true. But I want to talk about another possibility in this post: that Laurens’s beliefs about wealth equalization were inspired by the Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
For background: Rousseau was an enlightenment philosopher with fairly unique beliefs about wealth. He wrote, “no citizen should be so rich that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is compelled to sell himself.” He believed that a government should seek to bring about freedom and equality, and that the will of the people was most important. His preferred form of government was a direct democracy.
(Note that I am by no means an expert on Rousseau, but I have done some research on his philosophy for this post. If anyone wants to add or correct, feel free to do so.)
Rousseau argued that wealth inequality and a society in which one was constantly trying to have more than others was a recipe for unhappiness and conflict.
In the book Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War of Independence, the author Alan Gilbert stresses that Laurens’s abolitionist beliefs were inspired by Rousseau:
“In 1771, fifteen years after Rousseau published Du Contrat Social (The Social Contract), John Laurens had studied law in Geneva. In courts, debate clubs, and taverns, he was surrounded by advocates, with varying levels of comprehension, of the Rousseauian view. But Laurens really did understand it.”
Not only was Rousseau born in Geneva, but his beliefs were apparently still popular there. Alan Gilbert also states:
“If the people retained their ‘virtues,’ Laurens insisted, America ‘will abound with great characters.’ Trade with the mother country, and riches, however, could destroy this possibility. It would lead to what republicans called a corruption of the common good, the domination of government by the wealthy, and its use against the poor: Americans ‘would have advanced to a corrupt state with no intermediate maturity.’
Emulating Rousseau, Laurens would ‘never regret poverty and the loss of trade if there can be established, either with or without Great Britain, a government that will conduce to the good of the whole.’”
Rousseau had a lot of beliefs that lined up with Laurens, and it is certainly worth noting that only after Laurens went to Geneva (and therefore, after he was exposed to Rousseauian philosophy) did Laurens vocalize abolitionist and wealth-equalization views.
Part of Rousseau’s philosophy around wealth was that wealth equalization was bad in part because it made people unhappy. This belief is echoed in a letter from John Laurens to Francis Kinloch: “a Happiness which Riches cannot give, results to the Individual, and Strength and Grandeur are ensur’d to the State, I agree with you that it is required in the Government to which I give the preference…”
And speaking of this letter, guess who Laurens specifically names in it? None other than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He tells Kinloch,
“these Rewards I grant you are not calculated to enrich the Individual and introduce all the odious and destructive Consequences of Riches_ but they are fully satisfactory to a Virtuous Mind_ surely no virtuous philosophic Mind will take Offence that the useful industrious part of the Community, should have their persons and properties equally protected with those of the most enlighten’d Men_ nor think it unreasonable, that they should choose Men whom they judge worthy of the important Trust of Governing_ I will not repeat here the Maxims respecting Government, which have been established by a Sidney, a Locke, a Rousseau, and which strike Unison with the Sentiments of every manly Breast_”
I post about how this letter has a lot of wealth-equality beliefs here, and I don’t think it is a coincidence that Laurens names Rousseau after his declaration of “the odious and destructive Consequences of Riches.”
Though I don’t think there is a way to prove that Laurens’s remarkably enlightened beliefs about the distribution of wealth came from Rousseau, it seems like the most likely explanation.
If this is true, it also offers more insight to Laurens’s beliefs about government as a whole, and how Laurens might have influenced the American republic.