One of the French Revolution's first acts was to attack the Church, and among the passions born of the event the first to be kindled and the last to be extinguished was the irreligious passion. Even after enthusiasm for liberty had vanished and the French were reduced to paying for tranquility with servitude, still they rebelled against religious authority. Napoleon, who had been able to vanquish the Revolution's liberal genius, tried in vain to tame its anti-Christian spirit. Even in our own time we find men who believe they can redeem their servility to the pettiest of officials by their insolence toward God and who, even as they have abandoned all that was freest, noblest, and proudest in the doctrines of the Revolution, still boast of remaining true to its spirit by rejecting religion.

Today, however, it is easy to see that the war on religion was merely an incidental aspect of the great Revolution, a salient yet transitory feature of its physiognomy, a temporary consequence of ideas, passions, and specific circumstances that preceded the Revolution and laid the groundwork for it, rather than of the revolutionary spirit itself.

Eighteenth-century philosophy is rightly regarded as one of the principal causes of the Revolution, and it is true that that philosophy was deeply irreligious. It is essential, however, to note that it consisted of two distinct and separable parts.

Let us now consider the other side of the picture and see how these same Frenchmen, who were alike in so many ways, were nevertheless more isolated from one another than people perhaps anywhere else, and more even than they had ever been previously in France.

It seems quite clear that at the time the feudal system established itself in Europe, what has since come to be called the nobility did not immediately constitute a caste; rather, it originally comprised the foremost men and women in the nation and was thus initially merely an aristocracy. This is not an issue I want to discuss here. Suffice it to say that by the Middle Ages, the nobility had become a caste, by which I mean that birth was its distinguishing characteristic.

The nobility did retain one essential characteristic of an aristocracy, that of being a body of citizens who govern, but birth alone decided those who would stand at the head of this body. Anyone who was not born noble was excluded from this closed and separate class and occupied a position in the state that could be high or low but always remained subordinate.

Wherever the feudal system became established on the European continent, it ended in caste. Only in England did it return to aristocracy.

I have always found it astonishing that a fact that sets England apart from all other modern nations, and which alone can explain the peculiarities of its laws, its spirit, and its history, has not drawn even more attention from philosophers and statesmen than it has, and I am surprised that habit has ultimately made it all but invisible to the English themselves.

The government itself had long labored to instill in the mind of the people any number of ideas that have since been called revolutionary – ideas hostile to the individual and to private rights and friendly to violence.

The king was the first to demonstrate how contemptuous one could be toward the most ancient and apparently well-established institutions. Louis XV shook the monarchy and hastened the Revolution as much by his innovations as by his vices, as much by his energy as by his lethargy. When the people witnessed the downfall and disappearance of the parlement, which was nearly as old as the monarchy itself and previously thought to be as unshakable, they vaguely understood that a time of violence and hazard was approaching, one of those times in which everything becomes possible, when few things are so old as to be respectable or so new that they cannot be tried.

Louis XVI spoke throughout his reign of reforms to be tried. There were few institutions whose imminent ruin his words did not herald, before the Revolution arrived to sweep them all away in fact. After removing some of the worst of these from the law books, he soon put them back. It was as if his intent had been only to uproot, leaving it to others to pull down.

If the reader were to stop reading this book now, he would come away with a highly imperfect image of the government of the Ancien Régime and a poor understanding of the society that made the Revolution.

Having seen citizens so divided and withdrawn into themselves and a monarchical government so extensive and powerful, he might think that the spirit of independence had disappeared along with all public liberties and that all the French were equally acquiescent in their subjection. This was not the case at all, however. The government had already achieved sole and absolute control of all common affairs, but it was still a long way from being the master of every individual.

In the midst of many institutions already prepared for absolute power, liberty lived, but it was a singular sort of liberty, which is difficult to grasp today and which must be examined closely if we wish to understand the good and evil it may have done to us.

While the central government supplanted all local powers and increasingly filled the entire sphere of public authority, certain institutions that it had either allowed to survive or itself created, along with old customs, ancient mores, and even abuses, impeded its movements, sustained a spirit of resistance in the minds of many, and left intact the resolve and firmness in the character of countless individuals.

It is impossible to read the correspondence of an intendant of the Ancien Régime with his superiors and subordinates without being astonished by the way in which the institutional similarity between then and now made the administrators of that time resemble the administrators of today. They seem to link hands across the abyss of the Revolution. I would say the same thing of the people subject to their administration. No better illustration exists of the power of legislation over the minds of men.

Ministers had already conceived the desire to scrutinize personally every detail of the government's action and to monitor everything from Paris. As time went by and the administration perfected its methods, this passion increased. By the end of the eighteenth century, it was impossible to set up a charity workshop in a remote corner of some distant province without attracting the notice of the comptroller general, who would seek personally to monitor all expenditure on the project, draft the regulations governing it, and select its location. If a poorhouse was built, he would want to be apprised of the names of the beggars who turned up and the precise dates at which they entered and left.

In Chapter 1, we examined Adam Smith's resistance in the Moral Sentiments to deducing all moral sentiment from “certain refinements of self-love.” From the opening lines of his treatise, Smith distinguished himself from Mandeville and from other eighteenth-century attempts to “socialize” or “commercialize” Hobbesian assumptions about human nature. Smith rejected not only the claim that men were thoroughly selfish beings, but he also rejected the corollary claim made by many of his contemporaries that any “society” to be found among them was but a by-product of enlightened selfishness. Men were not wholly selfish for Smith but in fact deeply conflicted, ever struggling to negotiate conflicts that emerged in life between their selfish and social appetites. We discovered that Smith identified a certain faculty inside of us that assists us as we adjudicate practical conflicts between our selfish and social tendencies, helping us to resolve them in the direction of sociality. In Chapter 1, I introduced Smith's account of the conflicted self. Here I begin to explore the adjudicating faculty Smith identified. He claimed that “to direct the judgments of this inmate is the great purpose of all systems of morality.” But what was this “inmate”? Where did it come from? How did it work?