Who Said This?

The state is a very complicated machine which one can neither assemble nor set in motion without knowing all the pieces. You cannot press nor loosen a single one without disturbing all the others. … All innovations should be gradual, born from need, inspired by a kind of public clamor, or at least in accord with general wishes. To create or destroy suddenly is to corrupt the good and make the evil worse.

See the comments section below for the answer.

2 Responses to Who Said This?

  1. Roderick September 21, 2019 at 10:49 pm #

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    The answer is Denis Diderot.

    I quote this to challenge the view (defended famously by, inter alia, Hayek, and more recently by my friend Anoop Verma) that the philosophes of the French Enlightenment were thinkers who heedlessly wanted to throw out all old institutions and remake society overnight. They weren’t; if anything, they tended to be too conservative.

    And I wonder why those who contrast the French Enlightenment unfavourably with the British one, giving Voltaire grief for advising legislators to “burn your old laws and make new ones,” or Diderot for wanting to see “the last king strangled with the entrails of the last priest” (both of which bons mots look much less radical when read in context), don’t equally give David Hume grief for wishing he could live long enough to see “the churches shut up, and the Clergy sent about their business,” or for advising that we should “run over libraries” and make “havoc,” consigning “to the flames,” as containing “nothing but sophistry and illusion,” any “volume … of divinity or school metaphysics” that contains neither “abstract reasoning concerning quantity” nor “experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence?” It seems like a bit of a double standard.

    For an interesting essay on the conservative, gradualist aspects of Diderot and Voltaire, see: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/76e5/16b9e8184048f1e0fabbabe07fd61d85ecdd.pdf

    And for some very Hayekian sentiments from another French philosophe, see: https://aaeblog.com/2018/01/13/who-said-this-5/

  2. AV September 21, 2019 at 11:08 pm #

    I agree with this viewpoint–which is essentially a conservative notion. But it can be true only in a state that has some good things that are worth preserving. It will not be true for a nation such as the Soviet Union.

    Diderot has made several good statements, but he was also one of the drummer boys of revolution. He and Voltaire had been praying for a revolution since the 1760s — they were lucky that they died before the revolution started or they would have had too face Robespierre’s wrath.

    Also, I think Diderot played a pivotal role in establishing the idea that the 18th century was the Age of Enlightenment. The gains encyclopedia project that he had started created huge amount of buzz and people thought that the ultimate secrets of the universe (including the secret of God) will be revealed in it.

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