Silvana Greco Moses Dobruska and the Invention of Social Philosophy

# Silvana Greco Moses Dobruska and the Invention of Social Philosophy

Utopia, Judaism, and Heresy under the French Revolution

This publication was financed in part by the open access fund for monographs and edited volumes of the Freie Universität Berlin.

The revision of the English text was supported by the Fondazione Palazzo Bondoni Pastorio.

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To Giulio, "Doch alles, was uns anrührt, dich und mich, nimmt uns zusammen wie ein Bogenstrich".

# Acknowledgements

My gratitude goes, first of all, to my husband Giulio, who supported me with so much love during my research, often cumbersome, on Moses Dobruska and his Philosophie sociale.

I am deeply grateful to the scholars who have followed my work with interest and precious indications: Prof. Dr. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg (Technische Universität Dresden), Prof. Dr. Stephan Moebius (Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz), Prof. Dr. Shmuel Feiner (Bar Ilan University, Tel Aviv), Prof. Dr. Maurice Kriegel (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris), Prof. Dr. Giuseppe Veltri (Universität Hamburg), Prof. Dr. Marita Rampazi (University of Pavia) and Prof. Dr. Raphael Ebgi (Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele). I am thankful to Dr. Emma Bolton for her revision of the English.

Finally, my heartfelt thanks go to my students at the Freie Universität Berlin, who have followed my lectures on the sociology of culture and Judaismwith great attention. Their enthusiasm has prompted me to work in depth on the history of the beginnings of sociology. Among them: Patrizia Dell'Acqua, Barbara Ergenzinger, Susanne Gaertner, Elena Medvedev, Anne-Lise Moll-Jenzen, Andrea Raschemann, Henricke Richter.

This publication was enabled by co-funding for open access monographs and anthologies from Freie Universität Berlin.

# Contents

# Acknowledgements VII

# 1 Introduction 1

# 2 Moses Dobruska: Rise and Fall of an Alternative Hero 20

# 3 The Philosophie Sociale of 1793: A New Thought 30

# 4 Man and Society 81

# 5 Democracy, Aristocracy, or Monarchy? Representative Democracy 114

# 6 Happiness 127

# 7 Reception and Influence of the Philosophie Sociale 144

Appendix 1: Glossary of the Universal Constitution 187

Appendix 2: The Seventy Principles of the Universal Constitution 193

Appendix 3: The German Draft of the Philosophie Sociale 203

Bibliography 207

Index of Names 217

Index of Concepts 223

# 1 Introduction

# 1.1 The Purposes of the Present Study and Its New Perspectives

This study proposes, for the first time, an in-depth analysis of the Philosophie sociale, published in Paris at the end of June 1793 by Moses Dobruska1 (1753–1794). Dobruska was a businessman, scholar, and social philosopher, born into a Jewish family in Moravia, who converted to Catholicism, gained wide recognition at the Habsburg court in Vienna, and then emigrated to France to join the French Revolution. Dobruska, who took on the name Junius Frey during his Parisian sojourn, barely survived his book. Accused of conspiring on behalf of foreign powers, he was guillotined on April 5, 1794, at the height of Terror, on the same day that Georges Jacques Danton was also on the gallows.

When it appeared, the Philosophie sociale aroused considerable interest and was read and appreciated by none other than Immanuel Kant. One of the theses of the present research is that the book had some other famous readers, who for various reasons omitted to mention among their sources the work of an author who had died tragically, an outsider of dubious reputation. A blanket of silence, which has lasted until today. It is true that Gershom Scholem, the great kabbalah scholar, dedicated a brilliant bibliographic profile to Moses Dobruska at the end of the 1970s2 But in accordance with his interests, linked to esoteric and Jewish history, Scholem concentrated on the sectarian environment from which Dobruska came, and on his Masonic activity. Only a few lines in Scholem are dedicated to the Philosophie sociale, and the work remained unexplored until now. And it is to the rediscovery of this dense work, sometimes written in a complex way, but full of intuitions and brilliant anticipations of sociological and philosophical-social thought, that I will devote myself in the following pages.3

1 Throughout the present study I will use the form 'Dobruska', which appears in contemporary documents, and not 'Dobrushka', which is modern and artificial, although now widely used. See, for example, the title page of the booklet of Arcadian poems published by our author in his early years: Moses Dobruska, Die zwo Amaryllen, ein Schäferspiel in einem Auszuge (Prag: Wolfgang Gerle, 1774).

2 Gershom Scholem, La vie de Moses Dobruska, alias Franz Thomas von Schönfeld alias Junius Frey (Paris: Gallimard, 1981). The book is based on a lecture given by Scholem in Paris in May 1979. See below, 7. 4.

3 Despite the fact that this is a very important field, the history of sociological thought is still open to investigation. Reflecting on the historical course of the discipline, and especially on its eighteenth-century beginnings, as well as having an intrinsic interest, allows us to better understand

The Philosophie sociale develops a highly articulated way of thinking aboutsocial reality, about the understanding of human beings, who live in society and interact with their fellow human beings, and about their needs and ambitions. The ultimate aspiration of human beings is – according to Dobruska – the achievement of happiness.

The text is a theoretical elaboration through which our author distils seventy "principles", or laws of cause and effect, on which to base the "first part" of a Universal Constitution.4 These principles represent the social philosophical basis for the body of rules on which the new democratic society, which is to be born from the ashes of the absolute monarchy, will have to stand. The "second part" of the Universal Constitution will be the application of these principles by the people, i.e. by the elected representatives in the assemblies, as well as by the legislative power. Dobruska is convinced that if legislation is based on these principles and applied in accordance with them, the new social structure will finally overcome the sufferings and distortions of the past and move towards coveted happiness.5

As I shall demonstrate later on, the constitutional perspective of the Philosophie sociale did not fail to exert its own influence on the French political system in the troubled period of Terror. The provisional Constitution decreed by the National Convention on December 4, 1793, proposed by the lawyer Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne (1756–1819), is also based on ideas expressed by Dobruska.

the genesis and content of the current sociological work. See, on this subject, the important observations of Christian Dayé, Stephan Moebius, "Einleitung," In Soziologiegeschichte. Wege und Ziele, eds. Christian Dayé and Stephan Moebius (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2015), 7–13; Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, "Die Unverzichtbarkeit historischer Selbstreflexion der Soziologie," In ibidem, 431–464. Among the most important books on the history of sociology see Raymond Aron, Les étapes de la pensée sociologique. Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Pareto, Weber (Paris: Gallimard, 1967); Lewis A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought. Ideas in Historical and Social Context, 2 nd ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Publishers, 1977) (I ed. 1971); Franco Ferrarotti, Lineamenti di storia del pensiero sociologico (Roma: Donzelli, 2002); Alberto Izzo, Storia del pensiero sociologico (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005). As regards, in particular, the history of the discipline in Germany, see Stephan Moebius, René König und die "Kölner Schule". Eine soziologiegeschichtliche Annäherung (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2015); Stephan Moebius, "Die Geschichte der Soziologie im Spiegel der Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (KZfSS)," Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Sonderheft 56 (2017): 3–44; Handbuch Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Soziologie, eds. Stephan. Moebius, Andrea Ploder, Nicole Holzhauser and Oliver Römer, 3 vols. (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2017–2019).

4 [Moses Dobruska alias Junius Frey], Philosophie sociale, dédiée au peuple françois par un Citoyen de la Section de la République Françoise, ci-devant du Roule [hencefort Philosophie sociale] (Paris: Froullé, 1793), 53.

5 Dobruska, Philosophie sociale, 235–236.

Despite these echoes, important and so far neglected, Dobruska's book cannot be reduced to a mere draft for a Universal Constitution, drawn up in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ancien Régime, nor to a simplistic political philosophy, as has recently been claimed.

The central nucleus of the work is in fact social reality, seen in its full extent and problematic nature, distinct from both the political and the moral spheres. This knowledge of social reality, which is as scientific as possible, is approached by Moses Dobruska from two different angles and methodologies, which are closely connected and intertwined.

According to the first perspective, which can be seen as anticipating today's contemporary sociology, he intends to describe and analyze social phenomena according to laws of cause and effect, following in the same path as natural sciences such as physics, chemistry, or mathematics. As we will see, Dobruska's ambition for science clashes with the still rudimentary character of his social analysis.

The second angle, which refers instead to "social philosophy", serves a dual purpose. On the one hand, Dobruska conducts a close criticism of the previous social order, through an analysis of the "pathological" phenomena of the Ancien Régime – the mélanges monstreux, to put it in the words of the book. On the other hand, the philosophical-social perspective is taken to be the tool to build a new order, which allows the achievement of happiness.

In short, we have a descriptive or sociological dimension, as well as an evaluative and normative one, which we could define more properly as philosophical-social. They are two levels, which I distinguish here for clarity, and which nevertheless, in Dobruska's social thought, appear closely interlinked.

It is also evident that the Philosophie sociale represents the beginning of a new strain of thought, which still seeks its own interpretative categories, and which formulates concepts and methods in a rough and experimental way.

Moreover, until the mid-nineteenth century, sociology and social philosophy were not separated into two different disciplines, neither in France nor Germany. Both mainly investigate the social sphere, which is clearly distinct from both the political and the moral and legal spheres.

Only in the twentieth century have some authors preferred to emphasize differences and boundaries. According to this approach, the vocation of sociology is to describe and analyze social phenomena as scientifically as possible, through an empirical methodology very similar to that of natural sciences such as physics, chemistry or mathematics.6 The aim is to understand people's behaviors and their

6 For a distinction between social philosophy and sociology and their specificity, see Axel Honneth, ed., Pathologien des Sozialen. Die Aufgaben der Sozialphilosophie (Frankfurt: Fischer,

### 4 1 Introduction

social interactions as they are, rather than as they should be. In short, from such a perspective, sociology has a non-judgmental attitude, in Max Weber's (1864–1920) sense.7

Unlike sociology, social philosophy, seen as a branch of practical philosophy,8 is instead evaluative and normative. It is not content with a mere description of the 'social fact', 9 as Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) would say, but also assesses it ethically. As Axel Honneth points out, this presupposes that the social philosopher has in mind a social ideal, which he compares with existing reality in order to formulate a critical judgment on the social structure that he examines.10

It is obvious that there can be a very fruitful dialogue between social philosophy and sociology. If social philosophy, with its critical vocation, points the finger at "social pathologies", sociology can analyze these same dysfunctions with great effectiveness, thanks to the sophisticated empirical tools at its disposal.

In turn, the results of sociological research can represent an important stimulus for philosophical-conceptual reflection. However, this kind of fruitful interaction between the two disciplines has become [too] infrequent in recent years, one might say for an excess of empiricism which increasingly characterizes the social sciences, including sociology.

Although seen by some with suspicion, due to its alleged lack of scientificity, social philosophy does not seem, to many, an anachronistic knowledge that has now been overtaken by the empirical method of the social sciences. Norbert Leser, for example, pointed out that the relationship between philosophy and science, and in particular between social philosophy and sociology, should not be considered as a dichotomy in which the two approaches are mutually exclusive. Instead, it should be conceived as a dialogue of mutual exchange, which enriches both

1994); Rahel Jaeggi and Robin Celikates, Sozialphilosophie. Eine Einführung (München: Beck, 2017).

7 Max Weber, "Der Sinn der 'Wertfreiheit' der soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften," Logos 7 (1917): 40–88. Others, on the other hand, have rightly pointed out that sociology also has a fundamental vocation of social criticism, which does not conflict with its scientific nature. See, for instance, eds., Stephan Moebius, and Gerhard Schäfer, eds., Soziologie als Gesellschaftskritik. Wider den Verlust einer aktuellen Tradition (Hamburg: VSA, 2006).

8 Social philosophy is today generally understood as "that branch of philosophy, which deals with social issues and questions the form of social practices and institutions as well as the forms of life in society" (Jaeggi, Celikates, Sozialphilosophie, 1).

9 Emile Durkheim, Les règles de la méthode sociologique (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1895), 175: "les faits sociaux sont des choses et doivent être traités comme tells." See also below, 3. 6.

10 Honneth, "Pathologien des Sozialen. Tradition und Aktualität der Sozialphilosophie," in Die Aufgaben der Sozialphilosophie, 50.

disciplines. Although they are partly in competition with each other, the two branches of social reflection are also complementary. They need each other to progress.11

If we take historical development into account and compare the situation in two major European countries, France and Germany, we see that social philosophy and sociology have had very different processes of institutionalization in the academic field. If, in France, social philosophy plays a marginal role compared to other philosophical disciplines, in Germany it has had, since the nineteenth century, a place of greater importance. In the German intellectual world, social philosophy has gained its own role among other philosophical disciplines, distancing itself from both moral and political philosophy, and has engaged productively in dialogue with the social science closest to it, sociology, for a long time.

If I have dwelt a little at length on the relations between the two disciplines in a diachronic perspective, it is because I believe that the case of the Philosophie sociale, so early and, so far, little understood, should be studied with the awareness of subsequent developments, but also without projecting these developments backwards in an anachronistic manner. Dobruska is, so to speak, "upstream": he antedates the origins of a distinction of methods and qualifying contents that would be affirmed only after him and, I believe, thanks to his insights, even if they were not explicitly recognized by the later scholars of the social sphere.

It is in this perspective that I will outline below the two souls of the social Philosophie sociale, the sociological and the philosophical-social, with the caveat that what is distinct here in a clear way is united in the dense textual texture of the work.

# 1.2 Moses Dobruska, or the Sociologist Ante Litteram

In Moses Dobruska's book, theoretical reflections and empirical observations on social phenomena emerge, which we can term as sociological.

These sociological reflections on human nature and society allow Moses Dobruska to define the principles or rules of conduct for the Universal Constitution. They are the key concepts of a social science which was gaining ground in France at the time, and which only a few decades later would take its name, in the work of Auguste Comte, first of "social physics" and then of "sociology".

Although the introduction of the term "sociology", understood as the scientific discourse on society, is in this sense attributed to Comte, recent studies have

11 Norbert Leser, Sozialphilosophie. Grundlagen des Studiums (Wien: Böhlau, 1997), 29–30.

shown that Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836) coined the neologism "sociologie" as early as 1780,12 in a note which remained, however, unpublished.

Precisely because of his fundamental role in promoting the definition and the very name of the discipline, Auguste Comte is commonly considered the founding father of sociology.13 The philosopher and sociologist Raymond Aron (1905–1983), according to whom the first theorist of sociology must be considered Charles-Louis Montesquieu (1689–1755), detached himself from this prevailing opinion with good arguments. It is worth mentioning Aron's theoretical passage because, mutatis mutandis, it will serve as a starting point for our evaluation of Dobruska:

It is fashionable nowadays to regard Charles de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, as a precursor of sociology, which is justified if the founder is the man (in this case, Auguste Comte) who invented the term. On the other hand, if the sociologist is to be defined by the peculiar aims which I have suggested, then Montesquieu was much more of a sociologist than Auguste Comte. The philosophical interpretation of sociology present in The Spirit of the Laws is much more "modern" than the same interpretation in the writings of Auguste Comte. This does not necessarily mean that Montesquieu was superior to Auguste Comte; but it does mean that I do not consider Montesquieu a precursor of sociology, but rather one of its great theorists.14

14 Raymond Aron, Les étapes de la pensée sociologique. Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Pareto, Weber, (Paris: Gallimard,1967), 27: [Il peut paraître surprenant de commencer une histoire de la pensé sociologique par l'étude de Montesquieu. En France, on le considère généralement comme un précurseur de la sociologie et on attribue à Auguste Comte le mérite de l'avoir fondée – à juste titre si le fondateur est celui qui a créé le terme. Mais si le sociologue se définit par une intention spécifique, connaître scientifiquement le social en tant que tel, Montesquieu, est alors, selon moi, tout autant un sociologue qu'Auguste Comte. L'interprétation de la sociologie, implicite dans L'Esprit des lois, est, en effet, plus 'moderne' à certains égards que celle d'Auguste Comte. Ce qui ne prouve pas que Montesquieu ait raison contre Auguste Comte, mais seulement que Montesquieu n'est pas à mes yeux un précurseur, mais un des doctrinaires de la sociologie]. Idem, Main Currents in Sociologcal Thought: Volume

12 Until recent years, the authorship of the term sociology "understood as the science of observation of social phenomena" was universally attributed to Auguste Comte: see for instance Giovanni Busino, "Pavane pour l'histoire de la sociologie," Revue européenne des sciences sociales 31 (1993): 95. Jacques Guilhaumou, "Sieyès et le non-dit de la sociologie. Du mot à la chose," Revue d'histoire des sciences humaines (2006): 117–134, has revealed that the first to use the term was Sieyès, almost fifty years before Auguste Comte. The word sociologie emerges in an unpublished manuscript (shelfmark 284 AP 3 d.l. of the Sieyès archives, preserved in the Archives Nationales in Paris). For Sieyès, the object of sociology are social customs.

13 Cf. Lewis A. Coser, Masters of Sociological Thought. Ideas in Historical and Social Context, 2nd ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Publishers, 1977)(I ed. 1971), 3: "The new social science that Comte sought to establish he first called 'social physics'; later when he thought that the term had been stolen from him by the Belgian social statistician, Adolphe Quetelet, he coined the word 'sociology', a hybrid term compounded of Latin and Greek parts".

Aron's argument seems to me to be well founded. It is the intention to understand social reality in a scientific way that makes Montesquieu a founder of sociology.15 On the basis of the same principle, that is, in accordance with methodological intentionality, we can also see in Moses Dobruska an initiator of sociological thought. As I will demonstrate in the following pages, the Philosophie sociale lies between Montesquieu on the one hand and Henri Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte on the other. This intermediate collocation between these authors is not only chronological, but also pertains to the development of conceptual tools.

On the one hand, Dobruska draws inspiration from Montesquieu's writings, especially from The Spirit of the Laws,16 which he knows well.17

On the other hand, both Saint-Simon and Comte take a lot of cues from the Philosophie sociale, without ever mentioning it. More than one concept which was theorized for the first time by Dobruska can be found in the writings of the two authors, who, as is well known, were united for some time by a relationship of close collaboration. These loans will be discussed in more detail in the last chapter, where I deal with the posthumous fortunes, or perhaps misfortunes, of Dobruska's thought. For now, it is enough to say that both Saint-Simon's and Comte's social theories appear in a different perspective, if read in the light of the Philosophie sociale.

The central contribution of Dobruska's sociological thinking concerns five thematic areas: i) the need for a scientific discipline that deals with social issues; ii) social change and the evolution of social organizations; iii) the individual and society; iv) the social, cultural, and political determinants of happiness; v) models of government and the recruitment of public officials.

One. Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, De Toqueville: The Sociologistis and the Revolution of 1848 (London and New York: Routledge, 2019).

15 It should be remembered that in addition to the well-known founding fathers of sociology on which there is a wealth of literature – including Montesquieu, Comte, Marx, Spencer Durkheim, de Tocqueville, Durkheim, Simmel, Weber, Pareto, Mannheim, and now also Dobruska – there are founding mothers as well. Think, for example, of, Harriet Martineau, Jenny P. d'Héricourt, Beatrice Webb, Jane Adams, Marianne Weber, Mathilde Vaetering, Frieda Wunderlich, Dorothy Swaine Thomas, Marie Jahoda. For further information on the founders of sociology, see Claudia Honegger and Theresa Wobbe, eds., Frauen in der Soziologie (München: Beck, 1998).

16 L'Esprit des lois was published for the first time, without indication of the author's name in Geneva by the bookseller-publisher Jacques Barillot during the last ten days of October 1748; see Domenico Felice, "Nota al testo," in Tutte le opere (1721–1754) by Charles-Louis de Montesquieu facing French text, ed, Idem, (Milano: Bompiani 2014), 885.

17 Several times in his work Dobruska mentions Montesquieu, with whom he dialogues and criticizes. See Philosophie sociale, 14, 199, 213–215 (here he refers in particular to The Spirit of the Laws).

# 1.2.1 The Need for a Scientific Discipline Concerning Social Reality

The first reflection, which we find at the beginning of the Philosophie sociale, concerns the need for a scientific discipline concerning social reality. Dobruska intends to build a new field of study, using the same methodology of natural sciences such as physics, chemistry, and mathematics, to investigate first social reality or "social art", as he calls it, and only later the political system and its institutions.

Inspired by Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, and pervaded by an eighteenth-century optimism, he is convinced that social reality can be "known" through an empirical descriptive method, based on observation. In short, he firmly believes that it is possible to arrive at the formulation of laws, expressed in terms of cause and effect, that explain the behavior and social interactions between the members of a society.

In addition to this profession of faith in causality, he uses two other methodologies. On the one hand, he uses a comparative approach, i.e. he observes and compares different societies in order to better identify the single cause or the multiple reasons that have determined a specific social phenomenon. On the other hand, he uses a historical analysis of certain phenomena in order to explain which causes have been decisive for the evolution of a society over time.

# 1.2.2 Theories of Social Change and the Development of Societal Organizations

The second important sociological contribution that Dobruska has left us concerns the theory of social change. As a member of the Jacobin élite and witness to an important phase of the French Revolution, he wonders what social and cultural processes can explain the collapse of the social order of the Ancien Régime. How will it be possible to rebuild a new society, one that is democratic and that makes its citizens happy? How have social organizations evolved over time, since ancient times, and what forms of thought support and justify the social order?

To answer these questions, Dobruska formulates two important hypotheses: on the one hand, the theory of social disorganization and reorganization, and on the other, the theory of the historical development of social organizations and their systems of thought, which have justified the constituted social order.

According to the first theorization, radical change, which leads to the transformation of a social organization based on a specific order to another, inspired by different principles, is only possible if there are two phases: the first is that of "social disorganization", in which the order is deconstructed and dismantled. The second phase is that of "social reorganization", in which the structure of society is reconstructed on new cultural bases.

The Philosophie sociale, however, goes beyond the observation, albeit theoretically new and influential, of the dynamics of deconstruction and reconstruction of society. One of the questions the book tries to answer concerns the "deep causes" of change, both disorganization and reorganization.

According to Dobruska, the reasons for the collapse of the Ancien Régime are both social, political and cultural. In the Philosophie sociale, these elements of decay and disintegration are called mélanges monstreux, "monstrous mixtures": the great oppression exercised against the rest of the population by certain social groups, such as the nobles and the clergy, the lack of freedom for the individual and the lack of recognition of individuals as citizens with equal rights. The decisive impulse to radical change came from the savants, i.e. the philosophes, who enlightened the people with their thoughts; they showed the social abuses and abuses of power, and the lack of freedom in which the majority lived under the absolutist monarchy.

The great thinker, who tried in every way with his own writings to awaken consciences during the Ancien Régime, was Jean-Jacques Rousseau: first with his Address on the Origin of Inequality (1754) and then with his celebrated Social Contract (1762):

Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they. How did this change come about? I do not know. What can make it legitimate? That question I think I can answer.18

Dobruska praises and pays tribute to Rousseau as "the one who provoked and determined the French Revolution". 19

Once "the old order of things has been disorganized"20 we need to reorganize it. And once again, what causes the change is the intersection of social and cultural factors, so that the savants are attributed a role as fundamental as that of disorganization. The specific recipients of the Philosophie sociale are les gens de bien, those who, free from superstitions, love knowledge and strive to follow the path of truth. Their task is to show the new values – universal citizenship, equal rights, freedom – so that we can arrive at the Constitution, which the

18 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social. Ou, Principes du droit politique (Amsterdam: Chez Marc-Michel Rey, 1762), I. 1. 3. See also below, 3.12. Idem, The Social Contract, and Discourses, introduction by George Douglas Howard Cole (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd, 1910), 5.

19 Dobruska, Philosophie sociale, 5: [Donc, en rendant à Rousseau l'hommage que nous devons à celui qui a provoqué et déterminé la Révolution françoise].

20 Ibidem, 27.

legislators must adopt. The prerequisite of the Universal Constitution is a common intellectual space, based on the principles that arise from a deep knowledge of human beings and society.

The second theorization of social change, elaborated by Dobruska, concerns the development of social organizations from ancient times to the present day. It is a theory that partly recalls what Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) had written in his Scienza nuova of 1725,21 although with differences in focus and approach. Dobruska associates different systems of thought with the phases of the development of humanity, each of which supports and justifies its respective social order. In the first phase, the social order is marked by a theological system of thought. Sovereigns are considered to be representatives of the gods, and society is entrusted to theocratic governments. Theological power is closely linked to political power. This first phase is followed by a second, in which the constituted order is governed by a system of thought of a metaphysical nature. Humanity then evolved, until it reached the last phase, which Dobruska considers revolutionary, and still in progress as he writes, based on the scientific knowledge of nature and physics.

We will see in the final chapter how this scheme influenced first the thought of Saint-Simon, and then that of Auguste Comte.

One cannot fail to notice how the theories on social change, elaborated by Dobruska, highlight cultural factors (systems of thought, ideas, values, and beliefs) and social factors above all as factors of change, almost completely leaving aside economic ones. This lack of attention to economic determinants reflects not only his class appurtenance but also the wider revolutionary cultural context.

Cultural change must undoubtedly be considered an important factor in the French Revolution. It is an independent variable, alongside the economic and social variables, and not a dependent variable, caused by social unrest and economic transformation. As the historian Patrice Higonnet rightly pointed out, the revolutionary élite, and in particular the Jacobin faction, was made up both of bourgeoisie, often professionals and mostly lawyers, and of nobles, such as La Fayette (1757–1834), Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), Condorcet (1743–1794), and Barras (1755–1829),22 to name but a few, and certainly not of farmers or the poor. Let us remember that Dobruska himself had managed to achieve, before reaching Paris, a striking social climb. Thanks to his conversion, he had obtained the title of nobility, which had opened the doors of the Habsburg court to him.

21 See below, 7. 3. 3.

22 Patrice Higonnet, "Sociability, Social Structure, and the French Revolution," Social Research 56 (1989), 116.

Many members of the revolutionary élite lived in economic comfort – if not in luxury – and were certainly not motivated in the first instance by material needs and the hope for an improvement in their socio-economic conditions. They were driven to fight for a radical transformation of the Ancien Régime by the abuses of power and the privileges of the ruling classes – the aristocracy and the clergy. Important triggers of the Revolution were the lack of individual freedom of expression – for example, the limitations on religious freedom (think of the discrimination, in France, against Jews and Protestants) – and the lack of recognition of equality of all before the law.

#### 1.2.3 Theories of Man in Society and Social Interactions

The third important sociological contribution of the Philosophie sociale concerns the analysis both of the man who lives in society with his fellow human beings, and of society as a whole.

The analysis of the individual in society from which Dobruska initially departs, and from which he then detaches himself, must be understood within the broader conceptual framework of naturalistic legal philosophy, which found expression in Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws. Dobruska distinguishes between a man who lives in the "state of nature" and one who lives in the "state of culture or society". The state of nature is conceived in line with most naturalistic legal thinkers as a pre-social condition, not historically and geographically determined.

In opposition to Hobbes,23 and in consonance with Montesquieu, Dobruska believes that, in the state of nature (im Naturzustand24), man is not belligerent and in constant conflict with his fellow men. Rather, in this natural state, men are free, autonomous, and able to look after their own self-preservation without the help of others. They don't care about relationships with others, because they don't need them for their livelihood. In further opposition to Hobbes, Dobruska argues that men in the state of nature have different skills and abilities, and thus agrees with the diversity postulated by Montesquieu25 and the physical inequality in which Rousseau also believed.26

23 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Crooke, 1651), 61. See below, 4.2.

24 When available, I'll refer to the German terms used by Dobruska in the first draft of his Philosophie sociale. See below Appendix 3.

25 Aron, Les étapes de la pensée sociologique, 81. See also below, 4. 2.

26 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inégalité parmi les hommes (Amsterdam: Chez Marc-Michel Rey, 1755), 1–2.

Although they differ in their abilities, men enjoy the most perfect equality in natural rights, the same access to resources; they are not subject to abuse of power as far has no one enjoys special privileges.

Like Hobbes and Rousseau, Dobruska believes that a social contract is required to join society. With the transition to the state of culture, men lose their autonomy and their ability to self-preserve themselves, and therefore become dependent on other members of society for their livelihood.

The drive to sign the social contract does not derive, as for Hobbes, from the need to tame the social conflict and to guarantee the stability of the State. Rather, it originates, in the negative, from the lack of self-sufficiency of the individual in the state of culture and, in the positive, from the opportunity to develop one's own material and intellectual abilities, until reaching the highest perfection.

Dobruska makes a clear departure from an atomistic conception of men, which considers them as rational actors who maximize their preferences and advantages thanks to rational calculations. This is the approach of utilitarian economic thought of the late eighteenth century – think for example of Smith and Bentham.

He develops a sociological conception instead, which starts from the individual (methodological individualism) and from his multiple needs, his desires, and his ability to perfect himself (micro level of analysis).

At the same time, Dobruska believes that man is inserted in social bonds, which he needs both for his own survival (level of meso analysis), and that he should also be embedded in the broader cultural and social context (levels of macro analysis).

From these premises, he elaborates an interesting theory of the importance of the reciprocity of bonds, which we know will become a central theme in the sociological thought from the nineteenth century up to the present day. For Dobruska, reciprocity performs important functions for social organization: it guarantees the preservation of both the individual and social self, it allows the satisfaction of the multiple needs (besoins multiplies) of individuals, it represents an antidote to the immorality of the individual and that of the State, and it makes social cohesion and stability possible in a society over time.

Although Dobruska starts from the assumption that the individual is able to act in the social context in which he lives and can pursue his own goals, related to his personal development and the achievement of happiness, he clearly theorizes how the behaviors and daily habits of individual actors are influenced by the socio-cultural context in which they are "socialized", as we would say today. He shows how, in societies regulated by different legislators and by different systems of values and standards, behaviors, customs, and lifestyles are completely different. Dobruska gives us the example of people born and raised in a predominantly Muslim society. As far as sexuality and culinary habits are concerned, such individuals have different lifestyles than those born in a predominantly Christian society. The former love polygamy and are not allowed to drink alcoholic beverages, while Christians are required to practice monogamy but can enjoy the delicacies of wine.

If, on the one hand, society binds the social action of the individual through its "legislator" and its normative corpus, on the other hand society itself supports and allows the development of the intellectual faculties of its members (their perfectibilité) through the "social treasure" (trésor social).

The sociological thought that Dobruska elaborates in the Philosophie sociale underlines in a very articulated way the interactions and the mutual influences between the individual actor (moi individuel) and society (moi social).

### 1.2.4 Theories About Happiness and Its Cultural, Social, and Political Determinants

The fourth area of sociological reflection concerns happiness, a theme that impassioned the philosophes and men (and women) of letters of the eighteenth century. Dobruska never defines happiness in general, because he assumes that individuals are different and have different desires and goals – those who are more materialistic will aim to increase their economic wealth, those who are driven by spiritual satisfaction will be content with a more modest lifestyle. As a good liberal, he does not think that defining the happiness to which everyone should aspire is the task of society, let alone of the State. As a good sociologist, however, he highlights both the political, legal, and cultural determinants of happiness and the barriers that prevent both the individual and society from reaching it.

At the political level, happiness is made possible by democratic regimes, based on the freedom of rights for all citizens. Despotic regimes, in contrast, do not guarantee the right to equality and freedom, and are characterized by the abuse of power by one social group over others.

Legal factors that promote happiness also allow the application and realization of the Universal Constitution.

Education is a crucial element among the cultural determinants that increase the state of well-being of individuals; false morality, which distances itself from the fundamental principles of the Universal Constitution, instead prevents wellbeing.

Finally, Dobruska does not deny that there is a link between happiness and economic and social resources. He does not believe, like Montesquieu, that the achievement of happiness is a subjective factor, to be found in the convictions and attitudes of the soul. Philosophie sociale supports a hedonistic and materialistic view of life. Material riches and luxury are anything but condemnable, since they increase the pleasant sensations of life. Dobruska also does not argue that a fair redistribution of economic resources can increase happiness. On the contrary, it could represent an obstacle to everyone's drive to improve their living conditions.

# 1.2.5 Political Sociology: Citizens, Governance Models, and Recruitment of Civil Servants

In the Philosophie sociale we also find a political sociology, focused on models of government and recruitment of public employees.

Dobruska distinguishes between society and the State but, unlike Hobbes, does not believe that society is subordinate and marginalized in relation to the State. As I have already pointed out, Dobruska starts with an analysis of society, and then considers which political system is best suited to ensuring the happiness of its citizens.

According to the Philosophie sociale, only the representative democratic state is suitable for this purpose, whatever the size of its territory. In this regard, Dobruska criticized Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had argued in the Social Contract of 1762 that democracy was onlysuited to small states.27

Dobruska's thesis, in support of representative democracy, is articulated. First of all, it is only in a democracy that all members of society are also citizens with equal rights. Moreover, representative democracy is the only regime that allows individuals to be given a portion of "food equal to their needs", so that they achieve the desired welfare.

Finally, since the general well-being of a State is the sum of happiness of individual citizens, representative democracy brings universal happiness to its fullest possible fulfillment.

The second theory, which we could define as political sociology, concerns the role of education in training citizens and in making it possible to recruit public officials. The educational process ensures that only the most deserving and capable can be chosen, that is, those who have understood the principles of the Universal Constitution not only with rationality but also with their feelings. Dobruska, who agrees with Montesquieu on this, believes that this educational process

27 Dobruska, Philosophie sociale, 25.

should begin in the family, courtesy of parents who are themselves already educated in the principles of the Constitution.28 The Constitution itself is, in the Philosophie sociale, the primary source of social education.

# 1.3 Moses Dobruska, or the Social Philosopher Ante Litteram

Together with sociological thought, Moses Dobruska elaborates an acute philosophical-social thought. As we shall see, some of the qualifying points of the Philosophie sociale partly anticipate social philosophy, especially German social philosophy, up until the present day.29

How does Moses Dobruska's social philosophy fit into the cultural and intellectual context of the eighteenth century? Which thinkers have most influenced his work? Finally, what are the salient features of the Dobruskian approach? These are the questions I want to answer in the continuation of this chapter.

Let us recall how the term "social philosophy" was used for the first time, not by Thomas Hobbes as some have argued, but by an abbot, Jean-Baptiste Durosoy (1726–1804), who in 1783 published a work entitled Philosophie sociale ou essai sur les devoirs de l'homme et du citoyen. 30 Beyond the title, rather than a real "social philosophy", Durosoy's work proposes a practical moral philosophy, consisting of a copious collection of ethical-moral precepts to be able to live "well" in society (without this good being specified).

It is therefore with Dobruska that social philosophy, in the modern sense, makes its entrance into the intellectual debate. The philosophical-social approach of our author can be summarized in four fundamental elements.

The first characteristic, which more clearly intersects with his "sociological thinking", 31 concerns the focus on the social, on life in society, and on social relationships. In short, it is a specific choice of field, which differs from reflections centered on the State or on ethics.

The second characteristic concerns the theorization of the social and political phenomena that led to the collapse of the absolute monarchy of Louis XVI

28 Ibidem, 214.

29 See Franck Fischbach, Manifeste pour une philosophie sociale (Paris: La Decouverte, 2009).

30 Jean-Baptiste Durosoy, Philosophie sociale ou essai sur les devoirs de l'homme et du citoyen (Paris: C.P. Berton, 1783). See below, 3. 2.

31 See Silvana Greco. "Soziologie des Judentums in Deutschland. Markante Felder, Perspektiven und Methoden," in Ein halbes Jahrhundert deutscher Forschung und Lehre über das Judentum in Deutschland, ed. Andreas Lenhardt. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017),147–148.

and its social disorganization. This is not a neutral description, but rather a critical assessment of the dysfunctionality and injustice of the Ancien Régime.

These are serious social questions, or mélanges monstreux, in the language of the Philosophie sociale,32 conceptually similar to what the social philosopher Axel Honneth calls "social pathologies". The causes of these dysfunctions are, for Dobruska, the division of men into different social classes and the lack of recognition of citizenship for members of certain social groups, tyranny, disregard for the common good and, finally, the lack of freedom.

Dobruska makes very clear value judgments, having in mind a better ethical and regulatory model for the future democratic society. The hypothesis from which he starts is that human beings are the bearer of many needs and have the desire to develop their intellectual and material faculties. This can only happen in a society in which everyone is a citizen and enjoys the same rights, primarily freedom. It is precisely because of this lack of freedom and the abuse of power that social philosophies view the previous order so negatively.

If, as a sociologist, Dobruska knows how to define and circumscribe these critical points, we owe the evaluative judgment, built on the basis of a more equitable and functional "must be", to the social philosopher within him.

After having identified "all that was wrong" in Louis XVI's regime of absolute monarchy, Dobruska's social philosophy – and here we come to the third characteristic, the normative and teleological one – defines the social and political conditions necessary to overcome social disorganization and achieve happiness. These range from the separation of religious and political power to the establishment of a representative democratic society based on the "Universal Constitution" which guarantees all citizens the same rights.

Finally, the last feature of Dobruska's social philosophy is the ability to define which recipients to turn to – to identify those who can share the worldview expressed in the Philosophie sociale, who can understand the principles that govern social life, and who know how to begin a process of change in society. The Philosophie sociale is aimed at two different recipients: on the one hand, a collective recipient, namely the French people, and on the other, the so-called "decent people" (les gens de bien). As a good social philosopher, Dobruska needs to recruit intellectual and civil forces for social change.

32 Durosoy, Philosophie sociale ou essai sur les devoirs de l'homme et du citoyen, 40.

# 1.4 The Structure of the Present Study

Having illustrated the objectives of the Philosophie sociale and its two "souls" – the sociological one and the other more properly philosophical-social – I will now outline the structure of the present study.

The first chapter is dedicated to the intricate, adventurous, surprising biographical journey of Moses Dobruska, the son of a wealthy and cultured Jew named Solomon Dobruska and Schöndl of Prossnitz, a beautiful, clever, and charismatic woman, who was close to the heretical sect of the Sabbatians. Moses was born on July 12, 1753 in Brno, Moravia, the second-born of twelve children. After leaving Moravia, he married in Prague in 1773, and became a father the following year. Although he was a well-educated man and had already published some poems and essays, both in Hebrew and in German, he was also ambitious and enterprising. To overcome the many restrictions to which Jews were subjected in the Habsburg kingdom, in 1775 he converted to Catholicism, with the name Franz Thomas Schönfeld. The conversion was followed by a license of nobility, granted by Maria Theresa, and a considerable social climb, which took him to the imperial court of Vienna, with which he also entered into fruitful business contracts. The reign of Joseph II marks the moment of his greatest ascent, while the succession of Leopold II marked the beginning of a decline, if not a serious misfortune. Perhaps because of problems related to his position in Vienna, as well as ideological reasons, Moses arrived in Strasbourg in 1792 where he began to participate with passion in the political life of revolutionary France. In June of the same year he moved to Paris. As a convinced Jacobin, he began to write feverishly his great work, the Philosophie sociale, which he published in June 1793. Accused of conspiring against the Revolution, he was arrested in November. On April 5 of the following year, his revolutionary fervor and his action "to do good" came to a dramatic end: he was guillotined together with his brother, Emmanuel, and Danton.

The second chapter will go into the Philosophie sociale of Moses Dobruska, alias Junius Frey. I will first survey the aims, structure, and recipients of the book. I will then outline the theoretical framework of Dobruska's thought and analyze in detail his important ideas on social change – the theory of social disorganization and reorganization – to arrive at the Universal Constitution, the essence and form of which I will outline.

In the third chapter we will see how Moses Dobruska conceives man, after he has left the state of nature and has achieved, by virtue of the social contract, the state of culture or society. The Philosophie sociale starts from the individual, seen as a dynamic being in continuous evolution, able to develop his own material and intellectual faculties until reaching perfection. At the same time, Dobruska demonstrates how deeply rooted the individual is in his socio-cultural context, how influenced he is by the system of norms and values in force in that environment, and how much he also needs the other members of society for survival. I will highlight the different forms of social interaction – from selfishness to reciprocity – that characterize this state of fluid participation by the individual in the lives of his fellow human beings. The chapter will continue with the Dobruskian reflection on society and its rights and duties towards citizens.

In the fourth chapter I will focus on the different political regimes outlined in the Philosophie sociale: aristocracy, monarchy, and democracy. According to Dobruska, only representative democracy can guarantee happiness for citizens. The role and functioning of the three powers which for Dobruska, drawing from Montesquieu, uphold a democracy – legislative, executive and judicial power – will be examined in greater depth. In conclusion, the recruitment of civil servants and their education in constitutional principles will be studied.

In the fifth chapter I will focus on the ultimate goal of the new democratic society outlined in the Philosophie sociale: individual happiness and the happiness of society as a whole. With a fine analysis, anticipating sociology, Dobruska highlights which economic, social, cultural and legal factors allow the achievement of the state of happiness and which instead hinder it.

In the sixth chapter I will outline the reception of the Philosophie sociale by contemporaries of Dobruska and up to the present day. In particular, I will show how the work was read by François Chabot (1756–1794), Jacobin parliamentarian and friend and brother-in-law of Dobruska (he married his sister Léopoldine), and by the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), for whom Dobruska had deep admiration. I will also mention the rather tranchant judgment of Maximilien de Robespierre (1758–1794), the main protagonist of Terror, and the indirect use of Dobruska's ideas by the German philosopher Johann August Eberhard (1739–1809), a critic of Kant.

I will show the influence of the Philosophie sociale on the work of Henri de Saint-Simon (1760–1825) and on that of Auguste Comte, considered the "father" of sociology. In particular, I will highlight the significant impact that Dobruska's thought had on the young Comte – from the theory of social disorganizationreorganization to the law of the three stages of human progress. The biographicalintellectual profile that Gershom Scholem has traced of Dobruska, and specifically the part that directly concerns the Philosophie sociale, 33 will then be briefly discussed, concluding with occasional references to Dobruska in the sociological and philosophical research of the twenty-first century.

33 Scholem, Du Frankisme au jacobinisme. See below, 7. 4.

A chapter summarizing the work carried out and the new perspectives resulting from it will follow. The Philosophie sociale is by no means a mere draft Constitution, but a pioneering essay on sociology and social philosophy. From Dobruska's ideas, widely used between the late eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth century without giving credit to the author, come some key concepts of social disciplines, as we know them today. An enthusiastic and unfortunate initiator, and sometimes a brilliant theorist, Moses Dobruska deserves a role of his own in the history of social thought.

# 2 Moses Dobruska: Rise and Fall of an Alternative Hero

# 2.1 The First Years: From Brno to Vienna

Throughout his life, Moses Dobruska took on a number of different names. Each change of name corresponded to a transformation, even an abrupt one, in his environment and social status. Born on July 12, 1753 into a Jewish family based in Brno,34 Moravia, Moses was educated in the Hebrew language. Of course, he also learned Yiddish, which was used at the time among Ashkenazi Jews in everyday life. His parents, Solomon and Schöndl, née Hirschel, enjoyed considerable economic prosperity, and allowed him to have a private teacher. A relatively unusual case among the Moravian Jews of the time, he also received a good education in European languages and literatures. He began to write poems in German very early, and even published his first literary attempt at the age of twenty, after which many more compositions followed. His first collection of verses, Etliche Gedichte zur Probe, was judged quite harshly by the learned reviewer Johann Enrich Biester, but Moses eventually made a name for himself gained a reputation among German literati, with some of his poems still being included in anthologies as late as 1812.35

In 1775, Moses published the Sefer sha'ashua', a commentary in Hebrew on the first part of Sefer Behinat 'olam by Jedaiah ben Abraham Bedersi (1270–1340).36 In this work, he quotes extensively from rabbinic and philosophic literature and repeatedly quotes Moses Mendelssohn. The Sefer sha'ashua' is dedicated, with

34 The first to settle in Brno, from his native town Dobruška, in northeastern Bohemia, was Jacob Moyses, the grandfather of our Moses. On him see Bruno Mauritz Trapp, "Dobruschka – Schönfeld – Frey," [Brünner] Tagesbote, (January 16 1928): 5; Josef Karniel, "Jüdischer Pseudomessianismus und deutsche Kultur. Der Weg der frankistichen Familie Dobruschka-Schönfeld im Zeitalter der Aufklärung," in Gegenseitige Einflüsse deutscher und jüdischer Kultur von der Epoche der Aufklärung bis zu Weimarer Republik, ed. by Walter Grab (Tel Aviv: Nateev-Printing and Publ. Enterprises, 1982): 33–34; Dušan Uhlíř, "Juden in Mähren und das Mährische Zentrum des Frankismus im ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert," Aufklärung, Vormärz, Revolution 4 (1999): 46–47.

35 Ladislaus Leopold Pfest, Die Jahreszeiten. Eine Liederlese für Freunde der Natur (Salzburg: Salzburg: Mayr'schen, 1812), 460 (Der Winterabend).

36 The Italian Hebraist Giovanni Bernardo De Rossi, who quotes the booklet by Dobruska in his Dizionario storico degli autori ebrei e delle loro opere, 3 vols. (Parma: Stamperia Reale, 1802), vol . 1, 167: "Mosè Dobruski stampò nel 1775 in Praga una nuova esposizione del I capitolo [of the Behinat 'olam] col titolo di Libro delle Delizie".

high praise, to Hayyim Popper of Bresnitz, or Joachim Popper, later ennobled as Edler von Popper.37 Such an enthusiastic dedication was motivated by the fact that Dobruska had married Popper's stepdaughter Elke (Elkele) Joß on May 20, 1773. Popper was a wealthy merchant and banker, and his adopted daughter Elke was "probably the best Jewish match in the Czech lands". 38

Soon, however, the young couple, who had in the meantime moved to Prague, converted to Christianity, together with their little daughter Maria Anna on December 17, 1775, in St. Vitus Cathedral. As Popper, who opposed the baptism, decided to withdraw the donations he had made to Elke, a lawsuit followed, which went on for quite a long time. In 1778, Moses and his wife signed an agreement in which they renounced any further claim, having been satisfactorily compensated.39 This was the first fundamental break in the life of Moses Dobruska, which allowed him to leave the Jewish environment in which he was born and to begin a long, fruitful social ascent. It must be said that Moses' mother, Schöndl, certainly belonged to the sect of the Sabbatians, a heretical movement that had developed in the mid-seventeenth century around the pseudo-messiah Sabbatai Zevi. In 1666, Zevi was forced to convert to Islam by the Ottoman sultan. However, despite this conversion, which was justified in cabbalistic terms, the Sabbatians, in opposition to rabbinical orthodoxy, honored Zevi as the true messiah and believed in his reincarnation.40 Schöndl was a cousin of Jacob Frank, a protagonist of Sabbatianism in the eighteenth century, who presented himself as the messianic heir of Zevi. The documents of the time attest to the commitment of Moses' mother to support the cause of the Sabbatians,41 and it is likely that her husband, Solomon, also shared Sabbatian views. In Sabbatian circles, at the confessional margins of Judaism, conversion, more or less instrumental, was very frequent. As early as 1764, Moses' eldest

37 Popper was the first Jew to be ennobled by the Austrian Emperor, 1790, without having converted to Christianity. See Samuel Kraus, Joachim Edler von Popper. Ein Zeit- und Lebensbild aus der Geschichte der Juden in Böhmen (Wien: Selbstverlag, 1926).

38 Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude. Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 195.

39 Samuel Krauss, Joachim Edler von Popper, 76–77.

40 For a masterly study of Sabbatianism see Gershom. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi. The mystical Messiah (Princeton-London: Routledge 1973) (Heb. ed. 1957).

41 I have dwelt on these documentary aspects in my article Heresy, "Apostasy, and the Beginnings of Social Philosophy. Moses Dobruska reconsidered," Materia giudaica 20–21 (2015–2016): 439–464.

brother Carl, born in 1751, left home against the will of his parents.42 He then took baptism, entered the military service, and became an officer in the Imperial army. Carl was also the first Dobruska to adopt the name Schönfeld. His example influenced his brothers and sisters: on November 17, 1775, two younger brothers of his, Blumele and Gerson, were baptized in the Vienna Cathedral of Saint Stephen, in a lavish ceremony. Blumele, aged sixteenth, was named Theresia Maria Josepha and Gerson, who was eighteen, became Joseph Carl.

Three further brothers – Jacob Naftali, Josef and David43 – went to the baptismal font a few hours before Moses, in a separate ceremony. Within a couple of months, six members of the younger generation had abandoned Judaism. Thanks to Carl's efforts, the young converts, including Moses, obtained a license of nobility from Maria Theresa.44

While Carl had been crucial in obtaining the collective ennoblement, Moses, now Franz Thomas Schönfeld, had also contributed to the reputation of the family. Among other things, heproduced a German translation of the Exercices de l'âme, a book of devotion written in French by the Jesuit Denis-Xavier Clément (1706–1771) and first published in 1758.45 Dobruska's translation, the only translation of the text into German, opens with a dedication to Maria Theresa, and a short preface, signed "Schönfeld". 46

During the first years following his conversion, Dobruska managed to be appointed at the Garellian library in Vienna and even worked as a censor for books, first in Prague and then in Vienna.47 He was also actively involved as an entrepreneur in various fields: tobacco manufacture, army supplies, banking. He did invest in his own name, but mostly he did so in partnership, his best partner being his mother Schöndl. The Austrian National Archives in Vienna

42 According to his own report in his request of ennoblement to Empress Maria Theresa dated October 17, 1777: "nachdem [ich] als ein Knab von 14. Jahren aus eigenem Trieb meine Eltern verlassen, und das Licht des wahren Glaubens angenommen . . . ", quoted by Susanne Wölfle-Fischer, Junius Frey (1753–1794). Jude, Aristokrat und Revolutionär (Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang, 1997), 45.

43 They were called Maximilian Friedrich, Leopold Prokop, and Emanuel Neopomuk, respectively.

44 Joseph, Maximilian, Leopold, Emanuel, and Maria Theresia.

45 Denis-Xavier Clément, Exercices de l'âme pour se disposer aux sacrements de pénitence et d'eucharistie (Paris: Guerin, 1758).

46 Seelenübungen zur Vorbereitung zu den Sakramenten der Buße und des heiligen Abendmahls, Wien 1778 (a copy of the book is preserved at the Austrian National Library in Vienna: see Greco, Heresy, Apostasy, and the Beginnings of Social Philosophy, 449–450.

47 Wölfle-Fischer, Junius Frey, 77.

preserve several business proposals Dobruska addressed to the administration and to the Court, some of which were rejected while a few were approved. It is clear that our Dobruska/Schönfeld was highly regarded within the most powerful circles of the Habsburg court.

# 2.2 Freemason in Vienna (and around Europe)

The social rise of Dobruska, and his inclusion in the elitist circles of imperial Vienna was certainly helped by his commitment to Freemasonry, which he entered while he still young, probably immediately after his conversion to Catholicism. Maria Theresa had initially opposed the Masonic phenomenon and had forced the closure of the Vienna Lodge in 1745. In the following decades, however, Freemasonry had gradually gained influence and established itself as an important social and cultural factor.48 In 1781, the Bavarian nobleman Hans Heinrich von Ecker and Eckhofen founded the order of the "Asian brothers", and Dobruska played an important role in shaping its Kabbalistic-esoteric background. Jacob Katz and Gershom Scholem have meticulously compiled the scattered evidence of Dobruska's involvement, a task made more difficult by the use of multiple secret names. It seems that he began his Masonic activity among the Asian brothers as Scharia, then switched to Nachem, and finally adopted the alias Jacob ben Josef (or Josef ben Jacob). At some point, however, Dobruska withdrew from active membership, while maintaining some kind of "silent" role in the organization.49 Although the reason for this decision

48 See Helmut Reinhalter, Joseph II. und die Freimaurerei im Lichte zeitgenössischer Broschüren (Wien, Köln, Graz: Böhlaus, 1987); Karl Gutkas, Kaiser Joseph II (Wien-Darmstadt: Zsolnay, 1989) 326–329; Andreas Önnerfors, "Freemasonry and Civil Society: Reform of Manners and the Journal für Freymaurer (1784–1786)," in The Enlightenment in Bohemia: Religion, Morality and Multiculturalism, ed. Ivo Cerman, Rita Kruger and Susan Reynolds (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation 2011), 111–128.

49 Jakob Katz, Jews and Freemasons in Europe. 1723–1939 (Cambridge (Mass.): Harward University Press, 1970); Scholem, Du Frankisme au jacobinisme, 27–42. According to Scholem, ibidem, 30, Dobruska is the author of the partial German translation – more precisely an abridged paraphrase – of the Sabbatian kabbalistic work Wa-avo ha-yom el ha-ayin, published in Die Brüder St. Johannis des Evangelisten aus Asien in Europa oder die einzige wahre und ächte Freimaurerei nebst einem Anhange, die Fesslersche Kritische Geschichte der Freimaurerbrüderschaft und ihre Nichtigkeit betreffend (Berlin: Schmidt, 1803), 265–276. For the original Hebrew text see Jonathan Eibeschütz, And I Came this Day unto the Fountain, critically edited and introduced by Pawel Maciejko (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2014) 16–40 (Heb.)

remains uncertain, Dobruska's withdrawal was very timely, as in December 1785 Emperor Joseph II limited by decree both the number of Masonic lodges and their activity, which led to the relocation of the Asian brothers to northern Germany and Denmark. In the following years, Dobruska occasionally played the role of covert adviser, and was in close contact with Ephraim Joseph Hirschfeld, who had inherited leadership in Kabbalistic matters among the Brothers. It is worth mentioning that Hirschfeld accompanied Dobruska to Strasbourg in 1792, as the latter went to Alsace and began to participate in French political life. Here they separated: Hirschfeld returned to Germany while Dobruska moved to Paris.50 We have no other evidence of his relationship to Freemasonry during the last two years of his life. Although he probably also took advantage of his connections with the French capital, he must have done so very covertly.

# 2.3 The Plunge into Revolution

In March 1792, Moses Dobruska arrived in Strasbourg, France, together with his brother Emmanuel and their younger sister Léopoldine. Since Moses was the predominant figure among them, it is to him that we must attribute the abrupt decision to change both place and lifestyle. Perhaps it was a decision influenced by changes at the court of Vienna, after the death of Joseph II on February 20, 1790, and the rise to the throne of his brother, Leopold. It seems that Dobruska lost, at least in part, the favor he enjoyed in the highest circles of the empire, and therefore tried to transfer his economic interests elsewhere, choosing revolutionary France, where it seemed possible, in the excitement of the time, to conduct remunerative speculation and ambitious economic enterprises. It is certain, however,

50 Scholem, Du Frankisme au jacobinisme, 54. On Hirschfeld see also idem, "Ein verschollener jüdischer Mystiker der Aufklärungszeit. Ephraim Josef Hirschfeld," Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 7 (1962): 247–279; Jakob Katz, "Moses Mendelssohn und Ephraim Josef Hirschfeld," Bulletin des Leo Baeck Institutes 28 (1964) : 295–311; Yves Dangers, "Ephraim Josef Hirschfeld et les Frères de l'Asie," Le Symbolisme 375–376 (1966), 41–359; Giuseppe Veltri, Gerold Necker and Patrick Koch, "Die versuchte Wiederaufnahme des jüdischen Freimaurers geheimer Rapport," Judaica 68 (2012): 129–155; Patrick Koch, "Ein verschollener jüdischer Mystiker? Gershom Scholems Nachforschungen zu Ephraim Joseph Hirschfeld," in Gershom Scholem in Deutschland, ed. Gerold Necker, Elke Morlok und Matthias Morgenstern (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 219–242.

that Moses Dobruska had deep revolutionary sympathies, which led him to commit himself, body and soul, to political life, although this would prove disastrous for him in the end. France, which he described in a letter to his friend Voss as a "paradise", 51 would become his tomb.

The question that hovered over him from the beginning of his activities in France concerned his true origin and his "sincere" goals. Doubts were raised quite soon, but it was only in late 1793 that the doubting party took the lead and eventually caused him to be arrested and put to death.

When Moses Dobruska arrived in Strasbourg, the city was plagued by social tensions and libertarian turmoil. Situated at the border between two cultures and traditions, Strasbourg was equally divided between the French-Catholic and German-protestant populations.

Since the beginning of the Revolution, quite a number of intellectuals had flocked from German-speaking countries to Alsace, driven by the dream of liberty. The inner-French and the German immigrants had even taken the lead within the revolutionary movement, pleading for radical views and reforms.

While a pronounced cosmopolitanism thrived within the Strasbourg Jacobinists, the local élite was inclined to oppose the newcomers and to defend its privileges. Head of the moderate party was the mayor of Strasbourg, Philippe-Frédéric de Dietrich. A scion of an old and notable family, Dietrich played a pivotal role in the new political system after having held high offices under the Ancien Régime. A baron by birth and a distinguished scientist in his own right, Dietrich was a friend of General La Fayette.

The radical faction was led by Jean-Charles Laveaux52 and Eulogius Schneider, both of whom arrived from Germany in 1791. Laveaux, a native to France, had lived in Basel and Berlin, and held a chair for French literature in Stuttgart; Schneider had entered the Franciscan order before becoming a preacher at the Court in Stuttgart and a professor at the University in Bonn. In Strasbourg, Laveaux founded the "Courier of Strasbourg", while Schneider directed "Argos oder der Mann mit hundert Augen". Besides being involved in a hectic trade as a journalist, Laveaux was elected president of the Societé des amis de la constitution after the moderate wing had left it in February 1792.53

51 Letter dated Strasbourg, April 8, 1792: cf. Wölfle-Fischer, Junius Frey, 88.

52 Hugh Gough, "Jean-Charles Laveaux (1749–1827). A Political Biography" (PhD. diss., Oxford: University of Oxford, 1974).

53 Daniel Schönpflug, Der Weg in die Terreur. Radikalisierung und Konflikte im Straßburger Jakobinerklub (1790–1795) (München: Oldenbourg, 2002), 114.

It was only natural that Dobruska, imbued with German culture, entered France from its eastern gate in Alsace. What might seem less obvious is the fact that a high-profile businessman like him, who even had been the fixer in some substantial deals involving the Court of Vienna, could support wholeheartedly the radical wing against his wealthy opponents.

Dobruska, or Junius G(ottlob) Frey, as he used to identify himself in Strasbourg, spared no effort in sustaining Laveaux. In April the conflict between the two factions escalated, and Dietrich had Laveaux arrested (April 22, 1792)54 with the charge of sedition. Frey vociferously supported his friend in jail and offered a sizeable amount of money in order to assist him during detention. As Laveaux was freed on May 17,55 our former Austrian baron minted a commemorative medal that he had carefully conceived for the occasion.

But Strasbourg, with its provincial framework, was not enough for our ambitious Moses. It was time to make the great leap, and to aim for the nerve center of the Revolution and of French economic and cultural life. The road to Dobruska now turned decisively towards Paris.

# 2.4 From Jacobin Fervor to the Guillotine

On June 2, 1792, at the end of a meeting of the Strasburg Jacobin club, Dobruska presented a precious sword to prince Carl von Hessen-Rheinfels-Rotenburg (1752–1821), a German noble who served in France as a General during the Revolution.56 Immediately afterward, he left Alsace for Paris, together with Laveaux. On June 10, the latter gave a short speech at the Parisian assembly of the Jacobins, excusing himself for being tired because of the long trip.57 Dobruska also attended this meeting,58 which was chaired by François Chabot (1756–1794), a

58 See "Le Courrier des LXXXIII departemens], Juin 11, 1792 – Léon Kahn, Les Juifs de Paris pendant la révolution, (Paris: Paul Ollendorf, 1899), 25.

54 Gough, Laveaux, 134.

55 Ibidem, 43.

56 Les sociétés politiques de Strasbourg pendant les années 1790 a 1795. Extraits de leurs procès-verbaux publiés par Friedrich Carl Heitz (Strasboug Fréderic-Charles Heitz, 1863), 216 (Juin 2, 1792): "A la clôture de la séance, le citoyen Frey offre au Général patriote un sabre d'honneur de la valeur de cent louis d'or".

57 François A. Aulard, La Société des Jacobins. Recueil de documents pour l'histoire du club des Jacobins de Paris, vol. 3, Juillet 1791 à juin 1792 (Paris: Joaust – Noblet – Quantin, 1892), 674, nr. CCXXXVII (Séance du dimanche 10 juin 1792) : [Laveaux monte à la tribune, au milieu des applaudissements universels, et s'excuse sur la fatigue que lui a fait éprouver le voyage de donner aujourd'hui les détails de son arrestation at de sa délivrance".

politician whose fortune and, later, disgrace, was going to be ominously linked with Dobruska's fate. Our Austrian émigré, now universally known as Monsieur Frey, first rented accommodation in Rue Traversière St. Honoré59 and then moved to a luxurious mansion in Rue d'Anjou-Saint-Honoré, No 19.60 Together with his brother Emmanuel, he took part in the assault on the Tuileries palace on August 10, 179261 and became increasingly involved in the political life of the capital. In late 1792, he began writing his Philosophie sociale, which appeared in print in June 1793 and gained him a reputation as a revolutionary thinker. In summer 1793, a second work by Dobruska was published, under the title Les aventures politiques du père Nicaise. 62 Parallel to his political involvement, Dobruska engaged in intense business activity, which ostensibly brought him substantial profits. He later declared to have invested the sums his wife had sent him from Vienna, while his opponents suspected that he was provided with

59 Among the documents confiscated to Dobruska and now kept at the Archives nationales de France, see the card by Laveaux addressed to "Monsieur S. G. Frey logé prés Madame de la Seïne, Hotel du grand Balcon No 19, rue Traversière St. Honnoré [sic]". It is surely no coincidence that three representatives of the "Departement du Bas Rhin" at the National Convention (Laurent, Louis, Simond) were domiciled at the same address The Political State of Europe for the Year 1793, vol. 3 (London: J.S. Jordan, 1793), 26.

60 Alexandre Tuetey, Répertoire général des sources manuscrites de l'histoire de Paris pendant la Révolution française, 12 vols., (Paris: Imprimerie Nouvelle (Association ouvrière) 1890–1914) vol. 11, 236, No 757; cf. Gustave Bord, La fin de deux légendes. L'affaire Léonard, le baron de Batz (Paris: Daragon 1909), 94; Albert Mathiez, "L'arrestation de Trenck," Annales révolutionnaires 7 (1914), 101–105.

61 Tuetey, Repertoire, vol. 11, 232, No 742 : [18 août 1792 [. . .] Attestation de l'Assemblée générale des fédérés, séante aux Jacobins, constatant qu'Emmanuel – Ernest Frey, cadet, s'est trouvé en personne à l'affaire du 10 août, qu'il s'y est conduit avec bravoure et fermeté, et qu'il a constamment donné des preuves du patriotisme le plus pur]; ibidem, No 743 : same attestation concerning "Sigismond-Gottlob Junius Frey", dated August 20, 1792.

62 [Moses Dobruska alias Junius Frey], Les aventures politiques du père Nicaise, ou l'Antifédéraliste (Paris: l'imp. De J. Grand, 1793) (fol. 1b : [A Paris, CE 20 juillet, l'an deuxième de la République française une et indivisible]. The booklet is anonymous, but is clearly ascribed to Dobruska, alias Frey, by François Chabot, in Gazette nationale ou le Moniteur universel, No 19, October 10, 1793, 75: [Junius Frey, homme de lettres estimable, connu par deux ouvrages très patriotiques, l'Anti-fédéraliste et la Philosophie sociale]. Already on August 4, 1793, Chabot had praised both works by Dobruska, even if the name of the author is not mentioned in the record of Chabot's speech in the Journal des débats et de la correspondance de la Société des Jacobins 464, August 6, 1793, 2 (also in Journal de la Montagne 66, August 6, 1793, 424): see below, 7. 1. 1.

money by the Habsburg government in order to act as an undercover counterrevolutionary agent.63 In fact, a few documents, hitherto unnoticed, prove that, during his stay in Paris, his house in Vienna was forcibly auctioned for unpaid debts.64 Were such losses carefully staged? It seems hard to believe it, even if we already know Dobruska's lack of scruples and his ability in adapting himself to new situations. As had been the case in Strasbourg, where he lavishly spent in order to gain the favor of the Jacobin party, Dobruska kept mixing business affairs and politics, and probably rose through Parisian public life through bribery. The most daring attempt of social ascent he made involved the already mentioned François Chabot, a former Capuchin friar who had become a powerful member of the National Convention. In summer 1793, Dobruska offered to Chabot, who gladly accepted, the hand of his sister Léopoldine, a woman of reputed beauty, together with a remarkably high dowry. Glamorous as it was, the marriage proved fatal for both parties.65 In November 1793, Chabot was accused of

63 Dobruska refers to the money coming from his wife during his trial for conspiracy, in April 1794. See Bulletin du tribunal révolutionnaire s. 4, No 26, 1794, 102: [Mes revenus m'ont été arrêté pendant plusieurs années; mais ma femme, fille adoptive d'un homme opulent, avoit à sa disposition des fonds pour près de deux millions, et m'envoyoit de l'argent à mesure que je lui en demandois, ce qui doit prouver que je n'étois point l'agent de l'empereur, c'est que j'ai été chassé de Berlin comme émissaire de la propagande des jacobins].

64 See Wiener Zeitung, No 589, March 7, 1792, 617: "writ of summons by the Tribunal of Vienna, to which the present domicile of Thomas von Schönfeld is unknown ("das Gericht, dem der Ort seines [i.e. of Schönfeld] Aufenthalts unbekannt [ist]"), regarding a debt of 5,187.10 florins towards "Baptist Malfatti"; ibidem, No 1113, April 25, 1792, 1151, writ of summons by the Tribunal, regarding a debt of 6,000 florins towards "Nathan Adam Arnsteiner"; ibidem, No 2525, September 15, 1792, 2,547: forced sale auction of a house belonging to Schönfeld in Vienna, "Rittergasse zu Erdberg No 25", because of an unpaid debt of 6,000 florins towards "Anton Petziger von Weissenberg". These legal lawsuits seem to have remained unknown to all previous biographers of Dobruska.

65 Chabot announced his marriage to Léopoldine Frey at the meeting of the Société des jacobins on October 5th, 1793 (Gazette nationale ou le Moniteur universel, No 19, October 10, 1793, 75). While in jail, after having been accused of corruption, he gave his own lengthy justification of the marriage in a handwritten memorandum, dated January 26, 1794, published by Albert Mathiez,"Histoire véritable du mariage de François Chabot avec Léopoldine Frey en réponse à toutes les calomnies que l'on a répandues à ce sujet," Annales revolutionnaires 7 (1914), 248–254 (see also Tuetey, Repertoire, vol. 11, 218, No 685). Cf. Ruth Graham, "Les mariages des ecclésiastiques députés à la Convention," Annales historiques de la Révolution française 262 (1985) : 480–499.

corruption while Dobruska was arrested for having corrupted him and for conspiring against the Revolution in favor of foreign powers.66 On April 5, 1794, Moses Dobruska, his brother Emanuel and François Chabot were guillotined in Paris, together with a host of other politicians, the most illustrious among them being Georges Jacques Danton.

66 Moses was arrested, together with his brother, on November 23 1793: Tuetey, Repertoire, vol. 10, p. 187, No 973. For the official act of accusing against the two, dated "8 germinal an II (March 28, 1794), see ibidem, vol. 11, 250, No 822: "Acte d'accusation de Fouquier-Tinville, accusateur public du Tribunal révolutionnaire, contre [. . .] les frères Junius et Emmanuel Frey, beaux-frères de Chabot [. . .] ex-barons étrangers, agents de l'Angleterre et du cabinet de Vienne, masqués du voile du patriotisme, que Chabot prétend avoir été pendus en effigie, afin de faire croire à leur amour pour la Liberté, et malgré la confiscation de leurs biens, trouvant le moyen de donner à leur sœur une dot de 200,000 livres, corrupteurs et conspirateurs, qui ont ourdi leurs trames avec autant d'audace que de scélératesse [. . .] les individus en question prévenus d'avoir cherché à détruire par la corruption le gouvernement républicain, en achetant et trafiquant de l'opinion de Chabot, Basire, Julien de Toulouse, Delaunay d'Angers et Fabre d'Eglantine, en devenant auteurs et complices des manœuvres et intelligences pratiquées à prix convenu pour opérer la suppression et la falsification du décret du 27 vendémiaire concernant la Compagnie des Indes, à l'effet d'y substituer un faux décret, promulgué sous la date du même jour, ce qui est contraire à la loi du 16 ventôse, avec ordre d'écrou de Gusman, d'Espagnac et Frey, frères, en la Conciergerie". On the supposed conspiracy in which the Dobruskas were involved see Albert Mathiez, La révolution et les étrangers. Cosmopolitisme et défense nationale (Paris: Renaissance du Livre, 1918); Arnaud de Lestapis, La 'Conspiration de Batz' (1793–1794) (Paris: Société des études robespierristes, 1969); Michel Benoît, 1793 La République de la tentation. Une affaire de corruption sous la Ière République (Précy-sous-Thil: Éd. de l'Armançon, 2008).

# 3 The Philosophie Sociale of 1793: A New Thought

# 3.1 The Philophie Sociale of 1793

In this second chapter I will delve into the Philosophie sociale, on which Moses Dobruska began to work feverishly, in Paris, towards the end of 1792. In all likelihood, Dobruska wrote the first version of the opus in German. Of this Urauffassung only a few sheets remain: these were among the papers seized from the author at the time of his arrest in November 1793 and were then deposited at the Archives nationales of Paris. The German text, which I am publishing for the first time here in the appendix, and which I will quote where the pages are available, although limited to a small part of the work, is very significant. It shows us how much Dobruska was deeply immersed in the German culture of his time, and how the Philosophie sociale, composed in France and so closely linked to French politics and the Revolution, has a fundamental German intellectual component.

# 3.2 The Title

First and foremost, the title deserves our attention. Although he is not the inventor of the expression "social philosophy", 67 Dobruska certainly has a good claim to be considered the first great promoter of the union between philosophy, the symbol of Enlightenment, and the social sphere. As I already mentioned, Jean-Baptiste Durosoy, a Jesuit from Belfort, in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, had already published a work entitled Philosophie sociale ou essai sur les devoirs de l'homme et du

67 Axel Honneth's statement that Thomas Hobbes coined the term "social philosophy" does not seem to be justified: "Wenn es auch Thomas Hobbes war, der an der Mitte des 17". Pathologien des Sozialen. Die Aufgaben der Sozialphilosophie, ed. Axel Honneth (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1994), 11, which in note – ibidem 63 – refers to Leviathan). In Leviathan Hobbes speaks only of "civil philosophy", in reference to ancient philosophy, from which he distances himself: "and for their moral and civil philosophy, it hath the same or greater absurdities", see Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Crooke, 1651), 455.

citoyen in 1783.68 This book was reprinted several times (1822, 1843) and was also translated into German in 1852.69

The assumption from which Durosoy starts is that the human being was born for society, to be together with his fellow human beings. There are no human beings who live isolated as individual atoms. Not only does man seek the company of his fellow human beings, but he also wants to set a "good example" for them, even though there are people whose way of relating to others does not represent a good example to follow.

Durosoy mentions, among these negative cases, individuals who give themselves to luxury, the corrupt, the spouses who never exchange affection, the fathers who do not take care of their children, etc., as well as those who do not take care of their children. The objective of his social philosophy is to provide a well articulated mapping of duties and rules of conduct to be followed in relation to society and its members. In addition, Durosoy identifies a list of specific

68 Jean-Baptiste Durosoy, Philosophie sociale ou essai sur les devoirs de l'homme et du citoyen (Paris: C.P. Berton, 1783). According to the frontispiece, Durosoy was "abbot, professor of philosophy, doctor and professor of theology, ecclesiastical advisor of his Highness the Prince-Bishop of Basel". Some details about Jean-Baptiste Durosoy in Jean Joseph C. D[escharrères], Essai sur l'histoire littéraire de Belfort et du voisinage (Belfort: J. P. Clerc, 1808), 16–18; Note de la Direction at the foot of the "Vie de Monseigneur Casimir-Fréderic des Baraons de Rathsamhausen", also written by Descharrères, in Revue d'Alsace 10 (1859), 347–348. I drew attention to the antecedent, represented by Durosoy's Philosophie sociale, for the first time in Silvana Greco, Heresy, Apostasy, and the Beginnings of Social Philosophy. Moses Dobruska reconsidered, in "Materia giudaica" 20–21 (2015–2016), pp. 439–464, esp. 14. Franck Fischbach, Manifeste pour une philosophie sociale (Paris: La Decouverte 2009), 19, was not aware of it when he wrote that the expression "social philosophy" was first used by our Dobruska/Frey (see also the German version: Idem, Manifest für eine Sozialphilosophie, transl., Lilian Peter, with an afterword by Thomas Bedorf und Kurt Röttgers (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016), 20. Ibidem, 141 – the two editors of the German edition, correcting Fischbach, cite Durosoy and refer to "recent research" for clarification, without explicitly naming their source: "Das [i.e. the Philosophie sociale of Dobruska / Frey] ist zwar nicht die erste Erwähnung, die erste war eine quasi-rousseauistische "Ethik" des elsässischen Abbé Durosoy, wie jüngere Forschungen ergeben haben").

69 Jean Baptiste Durosoy, Der christliche Weltbürger oder Grundsätze des socialen Lebens ein Versuch über unsere Pflichten als Menschen und Staatsbürger (Münster: Theissing, 1852). Cfr. anche Adolph L. H. Geck, "Die Aufgaben einer Christlichen Gesellschaftslehre als einer Wissenschaftlichen Disziplin," Jahrbuch für christlichen Sozialwissenschaften 11 (1970): 262, which, however, gives, for the original French edition the date 1793, clearly confusing the work of Abbé Durosoy, published in 1783, with that of our Dobruska.

duties that man should follow in the various stages of the cycle of his life in which he assumes different social roles, such as that of spouse and family man.70

In fact, the book by Durosoy doesn't propose a veritable "social philosophy", as Dobruska began to characterize it and as it was later developed from the nineteenth century until today, especially in the German context. What's more, Durosoy's work is an extensive collection of ethical precepts meant to be useful in living "well" in society, without, however, specifying this well-being more clearly.

# 3.3 Purposes and Structure

The Philosophie sociale has three core purposes.

First, Dobruska wants to deepen our knowledge, which he hopes will become scientific in the future, of the individual and society. It is the society of the Ancien Régime, but also the democratic one, still in the making. As he intends it, the future democratic society must aim to achieve the happiness of individuals and the community.71 Only a deep understanding of human nature, of acting in society and of the social structure as a whole, allows us to define concepts such as "individual", "society", "freedom", "equality", etc., and to elaborate, on the basis of them, rules and norms of action, termed "principles" (principes) by Dobruska.

Secondly, the Philosophie sociale intends to propose a philosophical and critical reflection on the society of the Ancien Régime, underlining the "monstrous mixtures" (mélanges monstreux) that must be overcome through a process of "social disorganization". As I already pointed out, in the parlance of today's scientific investigation we could match Dobruska's mélanges to the "social pathologies" of Axel Honneth.72

Thirdly, the book draws up a universal constitution for the French people, which contains seventy principles, to be understood as rules and standards of action, for the formation of a representative democratic society.

70 Durosoy, Philosophie sociale ou essai sur les devoirs de l'homme et du citoyen, 1–6.

71 Dobruska, Philosophie sociale, vi.

72 Honneth, Pathologien des Sozialen, 51: [Was als sozialer Mißstand gilt, liegt demnach nicht einfach auf der Ebene der Verletzung von Gerechtigkeitsgrundsätzen; vielmehr sollen Störungen kritisiert werden, die mit psychischen Krankheiten die Eigenschaft teilen, daß sie die Lebensmöglichkeiten einschränken oder deformieren, die als 'normal' oder 'gesund' vorausgesetzt werden].

 On the other hand, the principles are addressed to society, its property, its rights and duties towards citizens, and the powers of the State, necessary to govern society itself (see Appendix 2).

It will be the task of the representatives of the French people to draw up the body of legislation and define the institutions and their regulations, on the basis of the principles contained in the first part of the Constitution. This process of applying the principles constitutes the second part of the Constitution.

Dobruska himself indicates three parts into which his work is divided.

The first part of the essay is what he calls the "revolutionary" one – at once a critique and a predictable target of criticism:

so that I could establish and build, it was necessary for me to overturn and secure some land on which to erect my building. I could define this first part of my work as the revolutionary part, which will certainly be the subject of more or less philosophical counter-revolutionary criticism.73

The second part focuses on the "essence and form" of the Constitution of the nascent democratic society, after the collapse of the Ancien Régime. Dobruska would like to point out that this part of the reflection is often neglected in philosophical treatises. It is precisely in order to remedy this shortcoming that Philosophie sociale is spreading about the ethical principles and social and institutional practices on which the Constitution must be based.

The third and final part of the work is the constituent one, in which the fundamental themes to be contained in the Universal Constitution and its principles are elaborated.74

This is the succession of the three parts (see Fig. 1): Part One: Research on some of the main themes of social philosophy Part Two: On the essence of a Constitution and its form Part Three: Universal Constitution

73 Dobruska, Philosophie sociale, XII: [La première partie de cet ouvrage est une discussion abrégée de quelques préjugés de cette espèce; car avant de bâtir et de construire, il a fallu que je renversasse et que j'assurasse en quelque sorte le terrein sur lequel je voulois élever mon édifice. Je pourrois nommer cette pre-mière partie, la partie révolutionnaire de mon ouvrage, qui s'attend, à coups sûrs, à des chocs contre-révolutionnaires plus ou moins philosophiques]. 74 Ibidem.

Fig. 1: Frontispiece and Table of Contents of the Philosophie sociale, dédiée au peuple françois (1793).

# 3.4 Recipients of the Philosophie Sociale

As we begin to flip through the book, we can ask ourselves who the recipients are. There is one collective recipient, namely the French people, and one more particular one, namely the so-called "decent people".

The full title of the book is revealing: Philosophie sociale dédiée au peuple françois (Social philosophy dedicated to the French people).

The principal addressees of the work are, however, les gens de bien, i.e. people who are capable of critical thinking, of judging with their own rational faculties, who do not recognize any other authority, in the republic of letters, outside the truth and who are not seduced by superstition or even less by prejudices. This is the tone of the dedication at the beginning of the volume:

I dedicate this work to all good people, exempt from all literary glory, who are not prevented prejudiced,and who are without school superstition. I dedicate it to the tribunal of men, who think and judge for themselves and who do not recognize any authority in the republic of letters outside the truth; and who love the truth for the truth, no matter the book in which they find it; no matter the licenses and vigor with which prejudices are broken down, supported by the powerful protection of great men; for there are profound and erudite prejudices but also superficial prejudices, foolish and vulgar, which seduce and fascinate the heart.75

# 3.5 Distinction Between State and Society

From this synthetic scheme, one can already understand how Dobruska's thought cannot be reduced to a mere "political philosophy" and, in particular, to a simple draft of a Constitution, necessary after the French Revolution, as was until now supported on the basis, I believe, of only a shallow examination of the Philosophie sociale. 76

The fact that this is not just a simple political philosophy can be seen not only from the wealth of topics covered but also from the more general theoretical approach.77

In a broad sense, the object of study of classical political philosophy, from Greek thinkers to, one can say, today, is "political life", as an expression of the dynamics between groups confronting each other to gain power within a community. In a narrower sense, political philosophy deals with so-called "political foundations" which are made up of two types of categories, according to Leo Strauss' acute definition. On the one hand, the "nature of political things", that is, the laws, institutions, actions, decisions, programs, and desires of human beings as political actors. On the other hand, the categories of the second type concern the best or fairest political order.78

Especially in the tenth and sixteenth chapters of the third part, Dobruska reflects on which is the best and most suitable political regime for the society that is emerging from the French Revolution.79 But the primary object of the

75 Dobruska, Philosophie sociale, XI–XII: [J'adresse mon ouvrage à tous les gens de bien, exempts de toute gloriole littéraire, sans prévention et sans superstition scholastique; c'est au tribunal des hommes, qui pensent et qui jugent par eux-mêmes, qui ne reconnoissent aucune autorité dans la république des lettres que la vérité, et qui ne l'aiment que pour elle, n'importe le livre où ils la trouvent, n'importe avec quelle franchise et quelle vigueur on y terrasse des préjugés soutenous de la puissance protection des grands hommes, et devenus chers à l'esprit du siècle; car il y a des préjugés profonds et érudits, qui séduisent et captivent l'esprit, comme il y a des préjugés superficiels, sots et vulgaires, qui séduisent et captivent le cœur].

76 Thomas Bedorf and Kurt Röttgers, "Einleitung," in Einführung in die Sozialphilosophie, by Franck Fischbach (Hagen: FernUniversität in Hagen 2017), 1–12.

77 Rahel Jaeggi and Robin Celikates, Sozialphilosophie. Eine Einführung (München: Beck, 2017), 7–10.

78 Leo Strauss, "On classical political Philosophy," Social Research 12 (1945): 98.

79 Dobruska, Philosophie sociale, 31–235.

Philosophie sociale is society and, consequently, the reorganization of a new democratic society in which citizens can be happy. With the French Revolution there came "social disorganization", and it was therefore necessary to think about "social reorganization", to reflect on how to rebuild a society, and not simply structure a state. Reconstruction and integration is, moreover, one of the recurrent themes of both social philosophy80 and sociological thought.

As noted by Rahel Jaeggi and Robert Celikates, it was precisely with the birth of modernity and the development of capitalism that modern social philosophy and attention to social issues arose. In fact, before the French Revolution, the social order was justified and legitimized as being of a divine nature. The absolute monarchy was the legitimate representative of that order. It is only with the fall of absolutism that man regains a central place in society and places himself as the creator of his own destiny.

But it is not only a different and wider object of study that distinguishes social philosophy from political philosophy. There is, in the former but not in the latter, the desire to carry out "a socio-theoretical and socio-ontological analysis of the structure and dynamics of societal circumstances". 81

This desire for analysis, in which the emphasis is placed on society, on life in society and, in particular, on individuals who live and interact with each other in different social spheres, is grasped from the very beginning of Dobruska's work.

In short, there is a reversal of perspective with respect to political philosophy. It is the analysis and understanding of social reality – from individuals and their interactions to society in general – that determines the content of the Constitution, the principles of its laws, the political institutions necessary for the new society. We do not start from politics to reach society, but vice versa: social interactions determine the political structure. To use a contemporary expression, Dobruska embraces a "bottom up" vision of politics, not a "top down" one.

It is no coincidence that, at the very beginning of the work, Dobruska argues with Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thesis according to which the form of government best suited to a nation is also determined by its territorial dimension.

Dobruska replies that the human being always remains the same, both in a large territory and in a smaller one. As a good liberal, in fact, Dobruska embraces

80 Cf. Alessandro Ferrara, "The Idea of a Social Philosophy," Constellations 9 (2002): 422.

81 Cf. Jaeggi, Celikates, Sozialphilosophie, 11: [eine sozialtheoretische und sozialontologische Analyse der Struktur und Dynamik gesellschaftlicher Verhältnisse].

methodological individualism. It is from the analysis of the individual and from the understanding of the individual understood as a social being and as a citizen (holder of rights) that one must start in order to be able to reorganize society. Political institutions are only instrumental to this broader vision of society.

# 3.6 The Need for a Scientific Reflection on Social Issues

From the very first pages of his work, Dobruska condemns the pre-existing social philosophy. "A science of rulers to betray the governed"82 is no longer acceptable. Now is the time for a radical change in thinking, which should focus primarily on social reality and only secondarily on political institutions. In other words, we must consider the "governed", their needs and their social interaction, if we do not want to "betray" them.

Social philosophy had until then been nothing more than a poor political philosophy. To change, it is necessary to adopt not only new content, but also a different method of investigation.

In its pars destruens, the new social philosophy of Dobruska has the task of understanding and highlighting everything that did not work in the society of the Ancien Régime. In its pars construens, it aims at defining the principles capable of regulating a society in which individuals can be happy.

To achieve this ambitious goal, however, it is necessary to know the nature of human beings: "the general order of nature, the immense system of created beings". 83 Therefore, Dobruska investigates not only the physical and socio-cultural context in which individuals live, as social beings, but also the way in which they interact with each other. But Dobruska does not stop there – he digs deeper into the human soul because he wants to understand its desires, motivations, and ethical and moral demands.

What do men want? How do they behave and how do they interact with each other as individuals and as members of a society? What are their moral abilities? Why are some rich and others poor? What makes man happy and what makes society as a whole happy? How have societies evolved over time?

These are the main questions that Dobruska wants to answer, elaborating a thought that he himself defines as "social art" (art social), of which we see two strands. One is properly philosophical-social, while we can rightly define the second

82 Dobruska, Philosophie sociale, VI: [La science des gouvernans pour tromper les gouvernés].

83 Ibidem, 53 : "l'ordre général de la nature, dans l'immense systême des êtres créés".

strand as sociological. Social art must be rethought, down to its fundamentals, and stripped of the "miserable rags" with which it has covered itself in the past:

I decided to go down from an illusory height, to start studying again, to meditate first of all on definitions, to ask them to nature itself, to go back to that primitive source of social art, to erase from my spirit everything I had read in books, to strip myself of all those miserable rags of a wrong and pedantic politics, of an illusory and destructive social art.84

Proud of his new clothes, which replace the theoretical "rags" of the past, Dobruska's social thinking seeks to understand the motivations of men, their behaviors and the development of society, not as they should be but as they are and as they have been realized historically: social reality must be explained in the same way as the natural world, taking inspiration from the laws and natural principles (that is, laws of cause and effect).

Dobruska's is a fundamental transformation of the "reflection on the social", from the metaphysics that it was, into a true science:85

Social philosophy in the state in which it finds itself cannot yet strictly speaking be called a science [. . .] It was only after the successful demonstration of the equilateral triangle that mathematics rose to the level of science, and to this dignity of a safe and firm march. It is only after the happy discoveries of Galileo, Toricelli [sic] and Stahl, that physics and chemistry began to deserve the name of sciences, which opened a certain way for centuries to come.86

As in mathematics, physics, and chemistry, "social art" must discover the laws of cause and effect of its object of study. It aims to understand that truth that remains hidden from most, which has nothing to do with the opinions of individuals. In other words, Dobruska believes that "the social world, like the natural world, is governed by laws. And the former, like the latter, can be studied

84 Ibidem, VIII: [Je me suis donc déterminé à descendre d'une hauteur illusoire, à commencer à étudier de nouveau, à méditer avant tout sur les définitions, à les demander à la nature ellemême, à remonter à cette source primitive de l'art social, à effacer de mon esprit tout ce que j'avais lu dans les livres, et à me dépouiller de tous ces haillons misérables d'une politique fausse et pédantesque, d'un art social illusoire et destructeur].

85 Ibidem, IV–V.

86 Ibidem, IV–V, XIV: [La philosophie sociale dans l'état où elle se trouve, ne peut pas encore être nommée strictement et proprement une science [. . .] Ce n'est que depuis la première démonstration heureuse du triangle équilatéral, que les mathématiques se sont élévées à la hauteur d'une science, et à cette dignité d'une marche sûre et ferme. Ce n'est que depuis les heureuses découvertes de Galilei, et Toricelli et de Stahl, que la physique et la chymie ont commencé à mériter le nom de sciences, qu'elles ont frayé une route certaine aux siècles avenir].

objectively with the same logic of investigation and the same method". 87 This is a prescient intuition, which anticipates the assumptions of positivist sociology. The study of society finally carried out using scientific methods: this is the social art of Dobruska. In the chapter on the posthumous fortune of the Philosophie sociale, we will see how, from these intuitions, Comte's "social physics" is born.

In order to arrive at the truth to which it aspires, social reflection must follow a "safe path", that is, it must adopt the tools and techniques of the natural sciences, from the formulation of definitions (which today we would call hypotheses) to the questioning of "nature", observing natural facts in order to succeed in arriving at a law, by inductive means, from the particular to the universal.

Dobruska certainly lays rudimentary foundations for what would become known in the literature in the following centuries as the positivist paradigm of the social sciences, namely "the study of social reality using the conceptual apparatus, the techniques of observation and measurement, the instruments of mathematical analysis, the procedures of inference of the natural sciences". 88

We have talked about rudimentary traits of Dobruska's works, and this is a judgment that concerns the lack of in-depth study of the criteria of scientificity. Although Dobruska believes that a scientific approach is necessary to know the social world, he does not devote a single chapter of his work to scientific methodology. In short, his declaration of scientificity is more of a declaration of principle, however brilliant, than an articulation of an adequate scientific methodology.

Having said that, a careful analysis of his Philosophie sociale reveals a methodological path which the author follows to reflect on human behavior and society in a "scientific" way. It is the way he travels in search of the social principles and rules with which to build a democratic society, in which people can be happy.

Reading between the lines we can identify three different methodological approaches, which the sociologists of the nineteenth century would go on to develop in their own writings- think first of Auguste Comte in his Cours de philosophie positive – Dobruska uses an empirical-descriptive method based on observation, a comparative method, and, finally, a historical method.

Dobruska, as a forerunner of the positivists of the nineteenth century, from whom those of the twentieth century would differ,89 implicitly postulates, on

87 Piergiorgio Corbetta, Metodologia e tecnica della ricerca sociale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999), 25.

88 Corbetta, Metodologia e tecnica della ricerca sociale, 24.

89 Ibidem, 23.

an ontological level, a rather simplistic realism, whereby the social world is considered real and knowable in exactly the same way as the natural one.90 Social relations are treated as if they were "things".91

On the epistemological level, however, our author implicitly adheres to the idea, also developed by nineteenth-century positivists, of an objective separation between social reality and the researcher who studies it. The aim is to produce knowledge that takes the form of "laws, based on categories of cause and effect. They exist in the external reality independently from the observers and supervise it ('natural laws'): the task of the social scientist is to "discover them". 92

And here we see how much Dobruska's thought is influenced by Montesquieu and, in particular, his work The Spirit of the Laws. Already Montesquieu seeks to observe social reality and to infer from it laws in the form of cause and effect. He seeks to extract the causes of social phenomena.

To illustrate this, I will cite some initial and clarifying phrases from the preface of The Spirit of the Laws:

I have first of all considered mankind; and the result of my thoughts has been, that, amidst such an infinite diversity of laws and manners, they were not solely conducted by the caprice of fancy. I have laid down the first principles, and have found that the particular cases apply naturally to them; that the histories of all nations are only consequences of them; and that every particular law is connected with another law, or depends on some other of a more general extent.93 [. . .] I have not drawn my principles from my prejudices, but from the nature of things.94

92 Corbetta, Metodologia e tecnica, 27.

94 Ibidem, . 898–899: [Je n'ai point tiré mes principes de mes préjugés, mais de la nature des choses]. Idem, The complete Works of M. de Montesquieu, Volume the First, Dublin: W. Watson, 1777, xxxviii.

90 Loc. cit.

91 It was the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, in the Rules of the sociological method (Les règles de la méthode sociologique), which appeared in 1894 in the Revue philosophique, and in book form the following year (Paris 1895), who stated that the social scientist, in particular the sociologist, should consider social facts as things: "En second lieu, notre méthode est objective. Elle est dominée tout entière par cette idée que les faits sociaux sont des choses et doivent être traités comme telles" (Durkheim, Les règles, 175).

93 [Charles -Louis de] Montesquieu, Tutte le opere 1721–1754, ed., Domenico Felice (Milano: Bompiani, 2014), 896–897: [J'ai d'abord examiné les hommes, et j'ai crû que dans cette infinie diversité de loix et de mœurs, ils n'étoient pas uniquement conduits par leurs fantaisies. J'ai posé les principes, et j'ai vû les cas particuliers s'y plier comme d'eux-mêmes, les histoires de toutes les nations n'en être que les suites, et chaque loi particulière liée avec une autre loi, ou dépendre d'une autre plus générale]. Idem, The complete Works of M. de Montesquieu, Volume the First, Dublin: W. Watson, 1777, xxxvii.

The objective already set by the Montesquieu sociologist is partly taken up and elaborated by Dobruska, who makes use of the observation of social reality in a detached and objective way and then, in an inductive way, inferring from the particular to the general, arrives at the formulation of the law.

Let's look at two examples from his work to better clarify this "scientific procedure".

The first example concerns the law on the morality of the State, elaborated in the fifth chapter of the Philosophie sociale. On this, Dobruska states: "The morality of the State is the consequence of individual morality". 95 Notice how this law has been formulated in terms of cause (individual morality) and effect (the morality of the State).

He himself explains to us in the following how he came to this theory, starting from the observation of the particular and arriving at a generalization. In the philosophical-scientific literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the process is still fundamentally inductive, that is, "the passage from the details to the universal, the process by which from empirical observation, from the identification of regularity and recurrences in the fraction of reality empirically studied, one reaches generalizations or universal laws". 96

Dobruska says:

Let me explain: if an individual has saved another from the clutches of a fierce beast, if he has saved him from the flames, if he has prevented him from being swallowed by the force of a strong wave; finally, if he has preserved his days from any imminent danger. And if society rewards this individual for this particular voluntary act, then this reward represents a moral act of the state society.97

The second example concerns his conceptualization of man. He observes that in nature all men are equal, albeit with different attitudes and abilities. It therefore makes no sense to distinguish between a social man, a political or a civil man, as the absolutist regime of Louis XVI did. In a democratic society, every man must be a citizen. The deepest motivation of every human being is the desire to achieve certain material or intellectual goals, to develop his ingenuity

95 Dobruska, Philosophie sociale, 108: [La moralité d'état est la conséquence de la moralité individuelle].

96 Corbetta, Metodologia e tecnica, 25.

97 Dobruska, Philosophie sociale, 108: [Je m'explique: si un individu en a sauvé volontairement un autre des griffes d'une bête féroce, s'il l'a arraché aux flammes, s'il l'a empêché d'être englouti sous les flots d'une onde courouçée [sic]; enfin, s'il a préservé ses jours de tout autre péril éminent, et que la société récompense cet individu de cet acte de relation volontaire particulière, cette récompense est un acte moral de la société d'état].

and his faculties to the highest levels. "Man" – he says – "is a living being, whose instinct is susceptible to the widest development and the greatest perfection". 98

Although Dobruska aims to use a scientific procedure, the way he conceives of this procedure is still very rudimentary. As is obvious, given his time, he does not use empirical data collection techniques as we know them today, accustomed as we are to questionnaires on representative samples of the population under investigation.

However, Dobruska uses two other methods to obtain "empirical data" on which to base his knowledge of human beings as social beings. On the one hand, he uses comparison of different societies while, on the other hand, he also provides a historical analysis of certain phenomena, i.e. how they have evolved over time.

The comparison used by Dobruska does not draw contrast between the animal level and the level of men, but between different societies in a given historical period. This allows Dobruska the sociologist to better focus on certain social phenomena and arrive at the formulation of certain laws that, as we have seen, are always based on the principle of cause and effect.

As an example, in the chapter on freedom, Dobruska tries to explain why, in societies that develop in the same natural climate, there can be such varied customs regarding the sexual habits of men and women and such varied drinking customs. In societies where the inhabitants are predominantly Christian, men "limit themselves to the pleasure of a single hymen and drink unscrupulous wine, while in societies where the inhabitants are predominantly Muslim, they abandon themselves to polygamy and refrain from this intoxicating liqueur". 99

Dobruska shows that the cause of these differences in sexual and culinary customs in peoples is not due to climatic factors but to two social-cultural and political factors: the type of legislation and the content of the constitution.100

Before the French Revolution, societies, without any distinction between political and religious power, were essentially teleological. The social order was justified by a divine principle.

98 Ibidem, 82: [L'être-homme est un être vivant dont l'instinct est susceptible du développement le plus étendu et de la plus grande perfection].

99 Ibidem, 196: [(. . .) bornant les plaisirs de l'himen à'une seule femme, boit du vin sans scrupule,tandis que l'autre abandonnée à la poligamie la plus voluptueuse, s'abstient de cette liqueur enivrante].

100 Ibidem, 197: [Il n'y a pas sur la terre, une différence entre peuple et peuple; mais bien entre législateur et législateur, entre constitution et constitution].

Therefore, the causes that, for Dobruska, distinguish one people from another, are twofold: on the one hand, the "legislators" – in the aforementioned case of Christianity and Islam, they are Christ and Muhammad – and, on the other hand, their "constitutions" – the Gospels and the Koran. The different populations are thus socialized, one might say in today's sociology, according to different systems of religious beliefs, which affect the behavior and habits of people's daily lives.

We can also see in this case how Dobruska comes to the formulation of a law of cause and effect through an inductive method (from the particular to the general) and a comparison between different societies.

Auguste Comte, in the Cours de philosohie positive, which appeared in 1830– 1842, would later theorize about how much such a method could contribute to the scientific analysis of society, to an understanding of human behavior in the social world. As I will show in the final chapter, it is possible to locate a line of development that, in this and other points, leads from Dobruska to Comte.

In Comte, we will arrive at the:

rational comparison between the different coexisting states of human society on the different earth's surfaces, considered above all in populations fully independent of each other. Nothing is more suitable than such a procedure to characterize precisely the different essential phases of human evolution, which, consequently, can be explored simultaneously.101

Finally, the last methodological approach which Dobruska often uses to formulate his own "sociological" theories in the form of laws is a historical one. This is the observation of societies which have historically followed one another over time.

As an example, consider the concept of equality. According to Dobruska, equality is to be understood as equality of rights, which is the only way to guarantee the true freedom of each individual. It should not be seen as a fair distribution of economic and social resources among the citizens, which for Dobruska would be against nature.

As a demonstration of his theory, he cites a case taken from ancient Greek history, in which the equitable distribution of resources would have failed its objectives. The example concerns Sparta, under the legislator Lycurgus, to

101 Auguste Comte, Physique sociale. Cours de philosophie positive (leçons 46–60) [1840– 1842] (Paris: Hermann, 1975), 146: [ . . . un rapprochement rationnel des divers états coexistants de la société humaine sur les différentes portions de la surface terrestre, envisagés surtout chez des populations pleinement indépendantes les unes des autres. Rien n'est plus propre qu'un tel procédé à caractériser nettement les diverses phases essentielles de l'évolution humaine, dès lors susceptibles d'être simultanément explorées].

whom, according to tradition, we owe legislation that wanted to induce Spartans to austerity and military virtues. In order to achieve his objective, Lycurgus implemented drastic policies aimed at fairly distributing, we would say today, the socio-economic resources among citizens. Amid his interventions – recalls Dobruska – there was the abolition of the use of gold and silver and the introduction of iron coins:

Lycurgus divided the land among his Spartans in equal parts. He destroyed the value of gold and silver, banned Lacedaemonian science and fine arts, wealth and luxury. He limited the clothing and food of the Spartans to the bare minimum.102

According to Dobruska, the fair redistribution of economic resources and the abolition of luxury did not produce what Lycurgus hoped for. The policies of strong redistribution of wealth would in fact have restricted the moral capacities of individual citizens linked to mutual support, bringing a consequent inertia of the material and intellectual appetite of individuals.

The historical comparison allows Dobruska both to grasp similar characteristics between past and present, as in the cited case, and to underline the differences between contemporaneity and past ages, which I will discuss below where I go deeper into the theory of the development of the stages of humanity.103 In this regard, it is worth recalling the historical approach of Montesquieu, in The Spirit of the Laws of 1748:

When I have been obliged to look back into antiquity, I have endeavoured to assume the spirit of the ancients, lest I should consider those things as alike which are really different, and lest I should miss the difference of those which appear to be like.104

# 3.7 The Revolutionary Theory

The first "revolutionary" part of the Philosophie sociale opens with a quote from John Locke (1632–1704): "Blind submission to the feelings of the greatest men

102 Dobruska, Philosophie sociale, 203–204: [Licurgue fit le partage des terres et les divisa entre ses Spartiates par parties égales. Il anéantit la valeur de l'or et de l'argent, il bannît les sciences et les beaux: arts de Lacédémone les richesses et le luxe. Il borna le vêtement et la nourriture des Spartiates au plus étroit nécessaire].

103 See below, 3.10.

104 Montesquieu, Tutte le opere, 896–899: [Quand j'ai été rappellé à l'antiquité, j'ai cherché à en prendre l'esprit, pour ne pas regarder comme semblables des cas réellement différens, et ne pas manquer les différences de ceux qui paroissent semblables], Idem, The complete Works of M. de Montesquieu, Volume the First, (Dublin: W. Watson, 1777), xxxviii.

has arrested the progress of knowledge more than anything else". 105 In reality, these words are not taken directly from the work of the English thinker, but from Pierre Coste's Notice to his own French translation of Locke's 106 Essay on the Human Intellect. In turn, Coste summarizes the autonomy of judgement that Locke himself repeatedly claims, detaching himself from the habit of relying on the auctoritates of the past.107 The reference is not accidental, since Locke is an important source of inspiration for Dobruska. And so is, in particular, the Essay, published for the first time in 1690, in which Locke108 "intended to see how human reason works, so that men can establish among themselves a form of peaceful and free coexistence, a form of coexistence that [. . .] makes it possible for everyone to seek his happiness in this world". 109

If, for Locke, "a desire of Happiness, and an aversion to Misery [. . .] do continue constantly to operate and influence all our Actions", Dobruska's approach is similar: he examines the philosophical, moral and pragmatic foundations that allow us to build a social order in which human beings can be happy.110

After the fall of the absolutist and despotic monarchy of Louis XVI of Bourbon (1754–1793) and the power of the clergy, Dobruska was forced to respond to crucial and urgent philosophical, social, and political questions. On what philosophical basis and on what ethical and moral principles can the French people build a new social order? How is it possible to establish a structure that aims to achieve the happiness of the people and not their oppression? Why is a new society needed and how will it develop? What kind of political regime can guarantee the happiness of citizens? Which legislator is required?

This is precisely the aim of the Philosophie sociale: the construction of a new order, which provides for the establishment of a representative democratic regime. According to Dobruska, civil society within a democratic state can be achieved in three stages.

105 Dobruska, Philosophie sociale, 1: [La soumission aveugle aux sentiments des plus grands hommes, a plus arrêté le progrès des connoissances, qu'aucune autre chose].

106 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (London: the Basset, 1690 [but 1689]). The French translation by Pierre Coste (1688–1747) was first published in Amsterdam in 1770: Essai philosophique concernant l'entendement humain (the passage quoted by Dobruska is on page 1).

107 See e.g. Locke, An Essay, I. 3. 23.

108 It has to be said that Dobruska always misspells this as "Loke".

109 Introduzione, in John Locke, Saggio sull'intelletto umano, eds., Marian and Nicola Abbagnano (Torino: Utet, 1971), 12.

110 Locke, An Essay, I. 3. 3 (Idem, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Peter H. Nidditch, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 67.

In the first stage, it is necessary to deconstruct and break down the old social order, which was the harbinger of so much oppression and unhappiness. Social disorganization is necessary.

In the second stage, it is a question of defining, from a theoretical point of view, the general principles of a Universal Constitution, and I will deal with this in detail later on.

In the third stage, an "explanatory framework" (tableau) will have to be created, i.e. a schematic summary, which will have to be displayed in the national assemblies of the legislative body111 and of the popular sections, and will serve as a basis for the promulgation of laws and for their control.

A prerequisite for the whole process is that democracy must be representative and that there must be a clear separation between the religious and state spheres.