The political implications of eighteenth-century rationalism were ambiguous and contradictory. On the one hand, the injunction to ground political speculation in universal, incontrovertible principles tended to narrow the range of debate, to relegate divisive conflicts of opinion to private life, and to promote religious tolerance (though at the cost of trivializing public discussion). On the other hand, the same injunction could encourage ambitious programs of social engineering, supposedly founded on principles to which nobody in his right mind could object. Both the cosmopolitan ideal and the hope for a science of politics rested on the assumption that human beings are all alike. "They all have the same vital organs, sensibility, and movement," as Voltaire put it.

The assumption of uniformity sometimes gave rise to sweeping reforms untempered by the slightest doubt about the ability of enlightened legislators to prescribe for all. Armed with a scientific understanding of the requirements for human happiness, philanthropists like Jeremy Bentham did not hesitate to propose a comprehensive reconstruction of political institutions, in which all the errors allowed to accumulate during unenlightened ages past—errors undeservedly dignified as ancestral wisdom—would be ruthlessly swept aside. Bentham's Panopticon, a penitentiary in which every cell could be observed at every moment by custodians stationed in a central tower, embodied in miniature a system of universal surveillance, a union of "benevolence" and rigorous discipline that could serve as a model for the social order as a whole. A state that aimed only to assure the greatest good for the greatest number could not be accused of enforcing uniformity of opinion in the. manner of autocratic regimes. Social discipline became an instrument of popular education, teaching people their real interests, freeing them from inherited superstitions and bad habits, and making it possible for them to lead happy, healthy, productive lives.

The French revolution, far more clearly and dramatically than British utilitarianism, showed that the attempt to remodel society according to abstract principles of justice, to uproot established ways of life and over

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