Northeastern Political Science Association

Of Hobbes and Hospitality in Diderot's Supplement to the "Voyage of Bougainville" Author(s): Jimmy Casas Klausen Reviewed work(s): Source: Polity, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Apr., 2005), pp. 167-192 Published by: Palgrave Macmillan Journals Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3877117 . Accessed: 23/02/2012 16:35
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Polity * Volume 37, Number 2 * April 2005 ? 2005 NortheasternPolitical Science Association 0032-3497/05 $30.00 www.palgrave-journals.com/polity

in Diderot's Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville

Jimmy Casas Klausen
University of California, Berkeley The Enlightenment philosophe Diderot'sSupplement to the Voyage of Bougainvilleoffersrich possibilitiesfor theorizingrelationsamong nations and encounters and relatedtexts, among mutually foreignpeoples. In the Supplement Diderottakes hospitality as the paradigmatic standardfor all humansociability he uses practicesof hospitality as the standpointfrom which to Consequently, criticize Frenchcolonization French of inhabited land. Diderot presents "Hobbist" colonial in thefigure whosehospitable of theFrench practices explorer Bougainville, did not preventhim from violatinga host/guest receptionby native Tahitians relationshipin claiming Tahitifor the French crown. Startingfrom Diderot's of Bougainville into to Hobbes,this essay puts Diderotian comparison hospitality reliefthrough an extendedcontrast betweenit and Hobbesian anarchy Polity(2005) 37, 167-192.doi:10.1057/palgrave.polity.2300013 Keywords Hobbes, Thomas;Diderot,Denis; imperialism; Enlightenment;hospitality of California at the University Jimmy Casas Klausen is a doctoralcandidate at Berkeley and is currently The his thesis, "Primitives Accumulating: finishing Alien Encounters of Rousseau& Diderot." His workspans the fieldsof political and postcolonialtheory.He thought,interstate politicaltheory,anthropology, next a projecton HugoGrotius, plans to undertake roguepower and the sea. Weep,wretchednativesof Tahiti, weep. Butlet it be forthe comingand not the leavingof these ambitious,wicked men. of Bougainville -Denis Diderot,Supplement to the Voyage No one ever speaks of Diderotian international relationstheoryas one might do of Hobbesian,Grotian, or Kantiantheories.Forthis no one likelywill weep and Denis Diderotleast of all. It is, however,the contention of this essay that Diderot'sSupplement to the Voyageof Bougainvilleoffers rich possibilitiesfor relationsamong "nations:' and specificallyfortheoriesthatwould pay theorizing heed to the texture of encounters among peoples. Diderot composed his

Of Hobbes and Hospitality

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Supplement as a means, in part, of coming to terms with the place of France in a geopolitical order after the Treatyof Paris of 1763, and with the ramifications of the successful circumnavigation of the earth by Louis-Antoine de Bougainville between 1766 and 1769. However, although the narrativeof the Supplement may focus on relations between a group of seafaring Frenchmen and the natives of Tahiti, the Supplement does not confine itself to an analysis of pre-Revolutionary French imperialism. Rather, by criticizing Bougainville and his crew of international "Hobbism," Diderot explores the ethics and politics governing colonization. The Supplement is written as a set of dialogues nested around one monologue, a structure that permits Diderot to employ a number of voices and registers to pay homage to, to satirize, and to parrot the views of French lumidres and English political theorists of the previous century. Effectively,then, Diderot rendered the text a ventriloquist's stage for a variety of arguments of Enlightenment political theory-notably the Baron de Montesquieu's multiplex theory of the constitution of political societies by geography, history, and culture, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's more thoroughgoing critical reconstruction of polities based on the capacities inherent in human perfectibility-but while the Supplement is proof and fruit of indebtedness in the history of political thought, it would be unfair to see Diderot as a purely derivative thinker.' Certain ideas can be found more directly or systematically stated in The Spirit of the Laws or the First or Second Discourse, but Diderot quite explicitly differs from their authors by assuming that humans are not only sociable, but actively seek to render assistance to others. Hence, especially as attempts to theorize hospitality and the reception of foreigners by nation-states have risen to prominence in recent years,2 Diderot's analyses of hospitality deserve fresh attention because, while he never systematically explicates a theory of interpersonal and international sociability, he does straightforwardly structure hospitality as an encounter among peoples and, uniquely, takes hospitality's model of encounter as paradigmatic of human sociability and, therefore, of politics. This neither Montesquieu nor Rousseau does. Thus, Diderot's text contributes acute insights to discussions of foreigners,
1. Neither the Supplement nor the draft text on which it is based (which I discuss below) was published during Diderot's lifetime. While this fact may raise methodological questions of intention and reception, I leave them aside as peripheral to the scope of this essay Moreover,the scholarly debate on whether Diderot contributes anything original to the canon of political theory has been ongoing since at least the 1930s; for a succinct summary, refer to Ira O. Wade, The Structureand Form of the French Enlightenment, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 1:390-405. 2. For example, Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001); Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Peter Sahlins, UnnaturallyFrench:Foreign Citizens in the Old Regime and After (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2004); Alain Montandon, Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2000). ed.,L'hospitaliteau XVIIIeSiecle (Clermont-Ferrand:

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hospitality, immigrant settlement, and cosmopolitanism that differ from conclusions based in Montesquieu's and Rousseau's works. Diderot comes to his conclusions about the proper relations among peoples by opposing neither colonization nor the appropriation of private property per se.3 Rather, the Supplement tests the limits of colonization and appropriation by taking these for granted as political practices among nations, but Diderot exerts pressure on their presuppositions and consequences in order to distill a set of ethicopolitical principles, based in laws of nature, by which colonization and the recognition of property as private can properly take place. By appending I mean to emphasize not only the means by which colonization and "properly," the privatizationof property can be said to be appropriate,seemly or aboveboard vis-d-vis others, but also the preconditions which make their existence qua colonization and private property (rather than, say, martial conquest and communal use) possible in the first instance. In the Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville and ancillary texts, the means by which Diderot tests the practices of colonization and private property are his presentation of hospitality, that is, the reception of strangers, as paradigmatic of human natural sociability As he conceives it, "hospitalityis one of the surest indices of the instinct and destination of man for sociability. Arising from natural commiseration, hospitality was general at first. It was nearly the only link among nations."4 By according a primary place to hospitable attitudes as a natural instinct among humans, Diderot explicitly sets his political theory in opposition to the vision of an international state of war that he could glean from Hobbes's Leviathan. Far from being evidently analogous, the effects of Hobbes's interpersonal and international states of war ramify quite differently,5 particularly with respect to the practice of hospitality. In Hobbes's state of nature, mutually benevolent sociability among individual human beings is not natural in the sense of original and instinctual. However, understanding from experience or by reason the horrors of war, individuals seek peace, but the only stable and credible interpersonal peace worthy of the name can occur only after they covenant to

3. Pace Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World:Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c. 1500-c.1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), Chapter 6; Sankar Muthu, Enlightenmentagainst Empire (Princeton, NJ and Oxford:Princeton UniversityPress, 2003), Chapters 2-3. Both argue emphatically that Diderot opposed colonialism. 4. Diderot, Contributionsd I'Histoiredes deux Indes, Oeuvres (Politique), ed. LaurentVersini (Paris: Editions Robert Laffont, 1994), III: 684-85 (paragraph break suppressed). This and all subsequent translations of texts from French editions, unless otherwise noted, are my own. 5. David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations: From Thucydides to the Present (Oxford and New York:Oxford University Press, 1998), Chapter 7; MarkA. Heller, "TheUse and Abuse of Hobbes: The State of Nature in International Relations,"Polity 13 (Fall 1980): 21-32; Murray Forsyth, "Thomas Hobbes and the external relations of states,"BritishJournal of InternationalStudies 5 (1979): 196-209.

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establish an authority that could later guarantee, by threat of force, sociable relations such as tacit covenants of hospitality Although Diderot does not discuss hospitality as a "covenant:'tacit or express, he does imply that being a host presupposes that the party hosted will practice a form of gratitude that involves the respectful recognition of what is the host's property and of how much of that property is granted for the guest's use and for what length of time. Making it the object of his FourthLaw of Nature, Hobbes, too, recognizes the importance of gratitude in the search for a stable peace, but outside of a commonwealth such laws of nature can at best remain only prudential rather than imperative. Moreover, Hobbes's giving occurs of selfinterest, "[f]or no man giveth, but with intention of Good to himselfe ..." And the call for gratitude, too, can be trumped by self-interest when a recipient perceives that gratitude would oblige him to the giver in an untoward or selfendangering way. In short, according to Leviathan, only a leviathan would make hospitality possible among persons by coercing donors and recipients, guests and hosts, to deem one another trustworthy (Gift-giving and hospitality both involve the transfer-permanent in the former case and temporary in the latterof a claim over a good. This shared structure invites an occasional elision between them.) While, of course, hospitality among peoples cannot take place without hospitality among persons, Diderot's accusation of international "Hobbism" nonetheless turns on Hobbes's inability to imagine relations among nations that do not operate as do those ties one might find in a den of brigands: that is, never fully trustworthy, always able to be trumped by temporary personal advantage or subjective judgments about other parties' infringements, and therefore, according to Hobbes, not binding ties at all. As the latter puts it, "Covenantsof mutuall trust, Due to where there is a feare of not performance on either part . .. are invalid."6 the absoluteness of the power that Hobbes would accord the sovereign, no sovereign could covenant with another without compromising its very status as an independent authority, without being in some sense conquered-for, a sovereign lacking "an absolute Libertie, to doe what it shall judge . . . most conducing to their [the Commonwealth's members] benefit" does not quite exercise sovereignty any longer.7'To subject a group of smaller leviathans to a bigger one is to render those smaller leviathans void qua sovereigns, although those dependencies' subjection to a higher authority makes their own mutual interrelations possible. However, in the absence of an overarching effective covenant among nations, the trustworthiness of one nation to another can never
6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, rev.student ed., ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [1651]), 105, 100 (cf. 96, 102). 7. Hobbes, Leviathan, 149; cf. 90, 244, 352, 396. Heller is unique in stressing this point in "The Use and Abuse of Hobbes"

Jimmy Casas Klausen 171

be mutual and full. Any people that would thus render hospitality unto another would be irrationallyfritteringaway its goods and should expect neither gratitude nor reciprocity from its guests. The need for trustworthiness, though, is more urgent interpersonally than internationally.Individual humans may perish without others' aid and so will renounce for survival's sake the absoluteness of their liberty; sovereigns do not, by definition, need other sovereigns to survive and compromise sovereignty in giving up liberty. To all of this, Diderot would respond: tant pis, too bad, such are the risks of attempting to overcome human misery, and natural sociability-as human instinct and end-demands ties like hospitality among peoples, even if such ties can be abused. And hospitality, one must note, is a particularly fragile relation, easily abused because of the seeming enormity of the trust required on the part of hosts and guests, who have no context for trust. (Even as concerns the familiar rather than strange host or guest, can one ever really guarantee that one's trustworthiness is not being built up steadily to be later betrayed as part of a confidence game? This question always skulks about in Hobbes's reservations about giving, gratitude, and mutuality in the state of nature.) The conception of "politics" in Diderot's oeuvre does not by any means condone abuses of human sociability; rather it takes root in the present and constant risk of those abuses. Diderot would have us theorize politics on the basis of the extreme case-that is, the limit case presented by the risk and abuse of the sociability that makes political life possible at all. By contrast, Hobbes constitutes politics in the Leviathan by evacuating interpersonal relations of risk by recourse to the external mechanism of a leviathan. Diderot's Supplement provides a seemingly extreme advocacy of mutual trust among strangers as against Hobbes's contention that such relations amount to irrational and therefore invalid ties. One can only ever enjoy hospitality,trust, and mutual social ties by leaving oneself open to othersliars, thieves, or sinners though those others may be-this is Hobbes's fear and Diderot's hope. Whereas Hobbes saw no law and no hospitality without a solid, though coerced, external guarantee of trustworthiness, Diderot saw the conditions for trust, law, and property-as well as the outer limits of principled colonization-in that risky form of human sociability called hospitality. and it is the charge To arrive at hospitality,though, Diderot starts at "Hobbism," of international Hobbism volleyed by Diderot at Bougainville that provides the grounds for the extended comparison between the political theories of Diderot and Hobbes at the core of this essay So what might Diderot have intended by derogatorily using Hobbes's name to name something? And how might this "Hobbism"bear any relation to a theory of international relations extrapolated from Hobbes's Leviathan? The notion that Bougainville "enforces" "Hobbism ... from nation to nation" originally appears in Diderot's unpublished "Compte rendu du Voyage autour du

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monde."This compte rendu gives an assessment of Bougainville's account of his world tour in 1766-1769, Voyage autour du monde par la fregate du Roi La Boudeuse et la flu^te LEtoile(1771).8 In a concluding apostrophe of the "Compte rendu,"Diderot pleads, Ah! Monsieur de Bougainville, move your ship away from the shores of these innocent and fortunate Tahitians. ... You take possession of their country, as if it did not belong to them.... You are the stronger, and what does that mean? You cry out against social Hobbism and enforce it from nation to nation. Deal with them, take their produce [denrees], bring them yours, but do not put them in chains.9 This accusation of "Hobbism," although it lurks in the prehistory of the Supplement to the Voyage of Bougainville, does not show up there in so many words. The "Compte rendu" consists of two parts, a review and an emotional apostrophe, each of distinct literary tone and register. The more straightforward assessment of the man Bougainville, his maritime achievement, and his published account thereof provides-often verbatim-the material for a dialogue between A and B, two well-read personages of the Age of Reason, in the first section of Diderot's Supplement. Diderot's triste apostrophe to Bougainville ends up being voiced by a Tahitian elder at the seashore in the Supplement'ssecond section, "The Old Man's Farewell" Again, Diderot recycles almost verbatim the contents of this apostrophe, but he drops the mention of international Hobbism, since a native of recently "discovered"Tahiticould not credibly have known what Hobbism signified.1o What makes Bougainville Hobbist is not so much his circumnavigation of the earth, but that for which the circumnavigation was symptom: a desperate ambition to take new possessions to replace those that France had ceded to Britainafter the Seven Years'War.France had long ago established armed trading outposts overseas, but an ignoble defeat in the Seven Years' War drastically severed its global reach. The Treaty of Paris of November 1763 was quite punishing for France in that its "Most Christian King" had to cede to his "BrittanickMajesty"all of Canada, holdings east of the Mississippi River except New Orleans, and other possessions in Africa and the Caribbean. The postbellum
8. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde par la fregate du roi La Boudeuse et la flidteL toile (N.p.: Folio-Gallimard,1982), 31. 9. Denis Diderot, "Compte rendu du Voyage autour du monde'" Oeuvres completes, ed. Herbert Dieckmann et al. (Paris: Editions Hermann, 1975-1995), 12: 509-19; 514-15 qtd. 10. Five sections-the two just described, two subsequent sections that stage a French/Tahitian dialogue, and a closing dialogue between A and B-comprise the Supplement in full. For a brief formalistic discussion of the complete text, see Herbert Dieckmann, Introduction, Diderot's Supplement au Voyage du Bougainville (Geneva: Droz, 1955), cxxxiv-cxxxvii.

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balance sheet proved disastrous-indeed, disgraceful-for France's global aspirations. Nothing could restore French losses, Canada above all. Hence, daring and compensatory national achievements-viz., new colonies-would be in order after 1763. Enter, then, Louis-Antoine de Bougainville, man of the moment. "Several regions of America were found by the courageous royal subjects of your ancestors," he humbly recalls in the address to Louis XV that prefaces Voyage autour du monde. That statement described the order of things before the Peace of Paris, but Bougainville then alludes to the status quo postbellum when he continues, ... Different causes as much interior as exterior have since appeared to suspend the taste and activity of the nation in this regard. YOUR MAJESTY would profit from the leisure of the peace to procure by way of geography knowledge useful to humanity Under your auspices, SIRE, we have entered into your service; trials of all sorts awaited us at each step, [but] patience and zeal were not lacking of us. Discovery and geography,then; knowledge and conquest: Bougainville wanted to mark off his achievement as more enlightened than those of conquistadors or explorers of bygone days by bringing his voyage in line with a more scientific age." Nevertheless, the imperialistic history of voyages of discovery did not by any means disappear in light of these enlightened pretensions-in the compte rendu's apostrophe and the Supplement, Diderot would address this unshed past of expropriation. Long before departing for the South Pacific, and mere months after the Peace of Paris in 1763, Bougainville captained several missions to the Malouines (called the Falklands by England), where he wanted to set up a small settlement to serve as a base of operations for French vessels leaving for austral regions by way of Tierradel Fuego. In late 1763, Bougainville took possession of the island group in the name of the King of France. Serving in part to answer the cession of France's past colonies to England as well as the latter'sbid for maritime preeminence, the Malouines turned out to be a vexed possession from the start. Although officially allied with France, Spain worried that a base so near South America might disturb its colonies there, while England was already making competing claims to the islands. At the urging of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Bougainville negotiated their sale to Madrid in late 1766. This accomplished, he then made

11. Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde, 34.

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final preparations and set sail for his famous circumnavigation, the first ever successfully undertaken in service of the French throne. All in all, Bougainville zealously promoted the global maritime cause of the French nation: the Seven Years' War seemed to prove to him that much was at stake geopolitically in the ability to lay legitimate claim to newly discovered territory in the name of the King of France. Although the "Judgment of Bougainville's Voyage" sheds favorable light on Bougainville, he nevertheless stands for an anxious-indeed, pathologicalpostbellum project of imperial expansion in the compte rendu's apostrophe and in "The Old Man's Farewell."Consequently, the explorer's association with that form of intra-Europeannational competitiveness dependent upon the conquest of inhabited overseas territory is what furnishes "Hobbism"its derogatory force for Diderot in 1771. Based on an elision of "Bougainville"and "Hobbes,"Diderot's references to the former's"tak[ing] possession of [the Tahitians'] country" and of the Frenchmen's being "stronger"mean to recall the latter's description of an anarchic state of nature, specifically a state of war among nations wherein the mightier will tend to reign for howsoever long.12 The anarchy and inequality that Diderot describes in the "Compte rendu" is not interpersonal, not the "social Hobbism"that Bougainville had ostensibly been known to "cryout against'," but international ("from nation to nation"). Crucial to any exploration of Hobbesian anarchy, the interpersonal/international distinction (which, to be sure, cannot always be maintained with absolute rigor) goes to the heart of what sets "The Old Man's Farewell" apart from other sections of the Supplement. (Because the critique of international Hobbism by way of hospitality is confined to this section, I focus on it almost exclusively.) This second section, the Supplement's only monologue, is positively jeremiadic in its evocations of repentance and quasi-divine vengeance: "Weep,wretched natives of Tahiti,weep. But let it be for the coming and not the leaving of these ambitious, wicked men. One day you will know them better. One day they will come back, bearing in one hand the piece of wood you see in that man's belt [a crucifix], and, in the other, the sword hanging by the side of that one, to enslave you, slaughter you, or make you captive to their follies and vices.. "

12. Diderot, "Hobbisme,"excerpted in Political Writings,ed. and trans. John Hope Mason & Robert Wokler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 27-29. See also Leland Thielemann, "Diderot and Hobbes,"DiderotStudies II (1952): 221-278, esp. 228, 236-39. Cf.Jacques Proust, "LaContribution de Diderot A l'Encyclope'die et les theories du droit natural:'Annales Historiquesde la Revolution Frangaise 35 (1963): 257-86, esp. 277-78.

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Then turning to Bougainville, he continued, 'And you, leader of the ruffians who obey you, pull your ship away swiftly from these shores. . . . Go away leave, and may the seas that spared you on your voyage absolve us of their guilt and avenge us by swallowing you up before your return."13 Some recent Diderot commentators, reacting to previous schools of criticism that saw in the Supplement an eloquent noble savagery coupled with a straightforward condemnation of European civilization, dismiss the bitter monologue of "TheOld Man's Farewell" as articulating the ethnocentric lack of openness-indeed the stifling and self-destructive traditionalism-of Tahitian society Complementarily, the Supplement's other sections have been lauded as models for cultural exchange, social adaptation, or a dialogical critique of society because they are presented as dialogues, a literary genre often characterized by formal equality between representative positions and an openness among the fictional participants (and the reader) to new positions.14 Such arguments are mistaken in that they privilege the formal equality of dialogue, that is, they privilege the text's other sections, at the expense of the critique of European geopolitics in "The Old Man's Farewell" Exploring the differences between Hobbes's interpersonal and international anarchies, respectively, "social Hobbism" and "Hobbism . . . from nation to nation," will actually show how this lauded interpersonal dialogic equality occurs against the background of inequality between peoples. Hobbes argues in the thirteenth chapter of Leviathan that "Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind" that each individual at base shares the same abilities and ends. In its essentials, Diderot agrees with Hobbes's assessment of the basic human equality in faculties (if not in fact). The Supplement's conversations te7e d tete (i.e., the literary form of every section but "The Old Man's Farewell") bear this out: they are for all intents and purposes practices of mutuality,reciprocity, and equality, but they can only be imagined as such by isolating them from the wider context of the superiority of French force in taking advantage of Tahitian openness and ultimately conquering Tahiti. Despite a basic agreement, Diderot's and Hobbes's political theories diverge on the ramifications of the fundamental equality of human faculties-the former believes that it results in natural sociability, while the latter comes to antithetical conclusions-and what results is that Hobbes and Diderot wend quite separate paths through property and
13. Denis Diderot, Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville, rpt. in Political Writings, 41, 42, 45. Hereafter, page references to this text will appear parenthetically in the body of the essay 14. Dena Goodman, Criticismin Action: EnlightenmentExperiments in Political Writing,(Ithaca, NY: Cornell UniversityPress, 1989), Chapters 6-8. Cf. Wilda Anderson, Diderots Dream (Baltimore, MD:Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1990), Chapter4; Claudia Moscovici, "AnEthics of CulturalExchange: Diderot's Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville,"CLIO30.3 (2001): 289-307.

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relations among peoples. The outrageous fortunes of Tahitian hospitality will indicate the extent of Diderot's and Hobbes's theoretical schism. Hobbes makes three inter-related determinations based on the equality of human faculties. First, that it leads to quarrel. The natural equality of faculties among humans is such that there consequently "ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our Ends. And therefore if any two men desire the same thing which neverthelesse they cannot both enjoy they become enemies; and in the way to their end (which is principally their owne conservation, and sometimes their delectation only), endeavour to destroy, or subdue one an other."Hence, "in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrell. First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly,Glory. .. The first,maketh men invade for Gain; the second, for Safety; and the third, for Reputation."As Hobbes reconstructs the natural state, natural equality among individuals implies that each one shares an equal hope of gain; this in turn implies competition and therefore a climate of general insecurity (Diffidence) and sporadic aggrandizement (Glory). Bellicosity thus being natural to insecure men, the state of nature-that is, "duringthe time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe"-is a state of war. Hence, the second determination from the general equality of faculties is that, by hook or by crook, individuals will practice temporary forms of sociability for the sake of survival. Actual inequalities of body or mind that might lead to an individual's being destroyed or subdued are easily overcome "bysecret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger." Prudence dictates that one consent (which here is the same as being coerced under the duress of a general climate of hostility) to ally oneself with others to avoid violent death. Such alliances among "auxiliariesof war" (a phrase from De Cive) would likely last only so long as the specific threat were present since, as only Hobbes could couch it, "men have no pleasure, (but on the contrary a great deale of griefe) in keeping company, where there is no power able to over-awe them all11"'5 Thus, the final determination, the equality of faculties that drives individuals into a state of war and into ephemeral defensive alliances (or perhaps offensive ones-the distinction loses rigor in Hobbesian anarchy) also renders each equally able to submit to a power that can "over-awe" all individuals equally According to Hobbes, covenants and alliances for peace and survival simply do not last among equals because as equals they tend to militate against evaluations and enforcement by their own peers. Hobbesian individuals trust the judgment and punishment of infringements only to an awesome superior. Hobbes constructed his state of nature from a number of sources-historical, scientific, philosophical, psychological-but some of the sources that he thought
15. Hobbes, Leviathan, 86, 87, 88. Boucher (Political Theories of InternationalRelations, Chapter 7) and Forsyth ("Hobbes and the external relations of states") stress the importance of "auxiliaries of war"

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would most keenly punctuate his analysis were proto-ethnological: travelers' and colonists' descriptions of savages. "It may peradventure be thought',"Hobbes explains to those who might accuse him of fancy, that there was never such a time, nor condition of warre as this; and I believe it was never generally so, over all the world: but there are many places, where they live so now. For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small Families, the concord whereof dependeth on naturall lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before.'6 Here finally was something that Diderot could work with: ethnological description. Diderot was not himself a builder of grandiose rational systems, and he indeed criticized it in Hobbes: "He had the fault of systematic thinkers, that is, of generalising from particular facts and skilfully bending them to fit his hypothesis."'7 It was through empirically based analyses from history and travelogues that Diderot could critically situate Hobbes's construction of a state of nature and counterpose his own. Contra Hobbes's American "brutish" savages, then, the Supplement brings such a project to fruition based on Bougainville's description of Tahitian hospitable savages. According to speaker B's understanding, Bougainville had already contradicted much that Hobbes had asserted about savage inhabitants of a state of nature: "the cruelty among [savages] which has sometimes been observed is apparently due only to their daily need to defend themselves against wild beasts. The savage is innocent and gentle whenever his peace and security are left undisturbed. All wars spring from conflicting claims to the same property"(39). The old man supports B's statement: "We are innocent, we are content, and you can only spoil that happiness. We follow the pure instincts of nature, and you have tried to erase its impression from our hearts. Here, everything belongs to everyone, and you have preached I can't tell what distinction between 'yours'and 'mine"'(42). In these two statements, Diderot approaches Hobbes on property and interpersonal anarchy obliquely, accepting some premises and modifying or rejecting others. While Diderot would agree that a notion of stable private property can only come with society, he differs from Hobbes on three accounts. First,society does not necessarily presume the institution of private property, that is, property defined by exclusive use. In addition to being a place where "everythingbelongs to everyone,"Tahiti represents a society governed by hospitality and covenants of
16. Hobbes, Leviathan, 89 (emphasis added). 17. Diderot, "Hobbisme,"27. Diderot was himself somewhat guilty of such "bending"of facts insofar as he willfully ignores Bougainville's mention of class hierarchies in Tahiti which somewhat mars the picture of natural plenty, communalism, and polygamy See Bougainville, Voyage autour du monde, 267.

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mutual and collective interest. Second, Diderot agreed, though in a perverse way, with Hobbes's statement that, prior to the erection of a coercive power to define law and obligation, "all men have Right to all things."However, whereas Hobbes pursued one conclusion from the lack of a right to proprietary recognition by others-namely the fact of tenuous possession where "no Mine and Thine [be] distinct; but onely that to be every mans, that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it"18--Diderot concluded from the Tahitian case that a society could actually successfully practice stable communal right and mutually established use without positive laws.19Third, Diderot seems to suggest that, except for the cause of protecting one's liberty,wars and quarrel occur subsequent to property rather than anterior to it. This last point, about war's being anterior to property, may sound like Rousseau's infamous statement in the Second Discourse that the "firstperson who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society,"whose act prompted "many crimes, wars, murders, . . . miseries and horrors."20 Because, however, Diderot argues from natural sociability and Rousseau argues from natural asociality, the marking of private property is always already a declaration of war for Rousseau but always presupposes an invitation to hospitality for Diderot. Starting like Hobbes from the assertion of a natural equality of faculty,Diderot comes to quite separate conclusions about natural sociability (rather than interpersonal anarchy) and property.Before I launch furtherinto a consideration of the disparate elements of Diderot's argument-he is so opposed to Hobbes's esprit de systime that he almost never assembles an identifiable structure-let me outline preliminarily the underlying logic that takes us from equality of faculties to property via human sociability and that distinguishes Diderot's position on the state of nature from others. As one may recall, Diderot posits that human from natural commissociability arises "from natural commiseration." ('"Arising eration, hospitality was general at first.")As equally miserable (com-miserating) beings, equal in their individually weak faculties of body and mind, humans seek each other out for mutual succor, and the fact that they do so naturally and originarily comprises Diderot's direct response to "Hobbist"encounters in the state of nature. Original hospitality sets the Supplement's answer to Hobbes's

18. Hobbes, Leviathan, 101, 90. B 19. "Nothing there was deemed evil by sentiment or law apart from what was evil by nature,"' recounts (66). The co-terminous relation between law and nature would obtain among men only, perhaps. Especially as concerns their sexuality, women are excluded from communal right by being made the objects of it. 20. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Originand Foundations of InequalityAmong Men, rpt. in Roger D. Masters,ed., The Firstand Second Discourses, trans. Roger Mastersand Judith R. Masters (New York:St Martin'sPress, 1964), 141-42.

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Leviathan apart from Montesquieu's and Rousseau's. Montesquieu, for one, sees not hospitality in the state of nature but fear and mutual avoidance: A man in the state of nature . . . . would at first feel only his weakness; his timidity would be extreme: and as for evidence, if it is needed on this point, savages have been found in forests; everything makes them tremble, everything makes them flee. In this state, each feels himself inferior; he scarcely feels himself an equal. Such men would not seek to attack one another, and peace would be the first natural law. Eventually, though, "the marks of mutual fear would soon persuade them to approach one another," and soon heterosexual union and "desire to live in society" would follow.21At one point in his Essay on the Origin of Languages, Rousseau adopts a similar schema of savages' initial fear of other humans, soon tamed by the experienced repetition of encounters, but he earlier stresses that the "natural effect of the first needs was to separate men, not to unite them:"22 Emphatic about "primitive"humans' self-sufficiency, independence, and asociality, Rousseau posits that cooperative practices of sociability arise only out of temporary necessity and are therefore occasional and incidental,23 not the instinct and end that Diderot later posits when he writes, "man alone and on his own could do nothing to preserve himself. So he had to unite and associate with his fellows, to make common use of their strength and intelligence. . . . Such is the origin, advantage and aim of society".24 Arguing, against other French readers of Hobbes, for an instinct of sociability whose paradigmatic form is hospitality, Diderot derives a notion of property that would come into being as soon as any two humans encountered each other. For Hobbes, property comes into being with society, but the only society worthy of the name is one where there is a superior power to trump private, personal judgments. We can infer from Diderot's presentation of naturalsociability that any encounter between humans-including "bandits in the depths of their caves"constitutes a society, and therefore property will exist at every such encounter within or without a government. For Diderot, each person's right to property
21. Montesquieu, The Spiritof the Laws, trans. and ed. Anne M. Cohler et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 6, 7. 22. Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses ... and Essay on the Origin of Languages, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Harper & Row, 1986), 246-47, 245. 23. Discourse on the Origin and Foundation of Inequality (ed. Masters), 126, 145, 151, 156, 219-20, 226. 24. Diderot, extract from Histoire des Deux Indes, rpt. in Political Writings, 169-214; 198 qtd. Hereafter, references to this English translation will be cited internally

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would thus be based originally in natural law rather than in any positive law created by a leviathan. Any one person's (e.g., the host's) offering or withholding objects to another person (the guest) is a bid to both the mutual recognition of personhood and the relational recognition of the bounds of each person's property The risk of abuse or willed misrecognition of those bids inheres in sociability rather than being indicative of anarchy. The potential state of war forms part of Diderot's concept of human sociability rather than existing exterior to it, and the radical encounter between peoples utterly alien to one another as implied by international hospitality dramatizes sociability as its inherent risks of abuse. Hence, war comes after and against not only natural sociability but also the mutual recognitions of property that derive from it. In other words, nature in Tahiti,and among savages in general, is peaceful, not competitive. When savages do resort to violence, they do so against beasts or, in the exceptional case, against those beastly humans who would aggressively threaten their security The supposedly "civilized"Europeans, though, are another matter. Diderot had already called them Hobbist, alluding to Hobbes's interpretation of the international scene: "in all times, Kings, and Persons of Soveraigne authority,because of their Independancy, are in continuall jealousies ... having their weapons pointing, and their eyes fixed on one another.., which is a posture of War."25 In the Supplement Diderot refutes, as he claims Bougainville had been known to do, the notion that a Hobbesian state of war obtained locally among individual human beings ("social Hobbism"), but in having accused Bougainville of international Hobbism in the compte rendu, Diderot admits the descriptive historical value of Hobbes's version of the martial state of nature on the international scale.26 France, after all, has proven with its Seven Years' War and Bougainville's very presence in Tahitithat it will quarrel from both Glory and Competition, for conquest of discovered territory is, especially when it is inhabited, but such quarrel by other means. The Tahitian elder, knowing nothing of how Tahiti was a mere pawn in European nations' struggles for ascendancy-not knowing, that is, the extent to which Tahiti has been in medias res, in the middle of the thing or in the midst of the action--can only express complete bewilderment: "So this land is yours? Why?Because you set foot on it! If a Tahitianshould one day land on your shores and engrave on one of your stones or on the bark of one of your trees, This land belongs to the people of Tahiti,what would you think then?" (42). Diderot often resorts to describing the Tahitians as "innocent:' because they are unaffected by those European machinations called Glory and Competition. They express no
25. Hobbes, Leviathan, 90. 26. As does Rousseau on occasion: see Richard Tuck, The Rights of Warand Peace: Political Thought and the International Orderfrom Grotiusto Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 197-207.

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interest in pursuing what other nations would consider the Glory of conquering others; nor do they want to participate in a high stakes Competition to expand their territory whose risk and possible result might be their consignment to a subordinate status in someone else's global hegemony. They are innocent because they have heretofore remained content. "Everythingthat we need and is good for us we already possess," the Tahitian elder sagely confirms, " ... .Do not fill our heads with your factitious needs and illusory virtues" (43). Even the third cause of quarrel, Diffidence, the elder explicitly shuns: "Oh fellow Tahitians, oh my friends! There is one way to avert a dreadful fate, but I would rather die than counsel you to take it. Let them leave, and let them live." Although lacking all confidence about these and future Frenchmen's motives, indeed, certain that someday Tahitians "will be subject to them, as corrupt, vile and miserable as they are" (42), the old man will not advise preemptive violence for the same reason that Hobbes believed such violence probable: natural equality. Addressing again Bougainville and his men, the elder declaims: We are free, but into our earth you have now staked your title to our future servitude. You are neither a god nor a demon. Who are you, then, to make them slaves? .... You are not a slave, you would rather die than be one, and yet you wish to make slaves of us. Do you suppose, then, that a Tahitiancannot defend his own liberty and die for it as well? This inhabitant of Tahiti, whom you wish to ensnare like an animal, is your brother. You are both children of Nature. What right do you have over him that he does not have over you? You came; did we attack you? Have we plundered your ship? Did we seize you and expose you to the arrows of our enemies? Did we harness you to work with our animals in the fields? We respected our own image in you. (42-43) For the old man, Hobbes's equality "in the faculties of body, and mind" actually interdicts rather than invites a challenge to the "equality of hope in the attaining of our Ends" As children of nature, equal in faculties of strength and intelligence if not in fact,27 the Tahitian presumption-contra Hobbes--is against aggression in the natural state and, more radically, against the automatic assumption that these sea voyagers' ends must oppose or mutually exclude the natives'. Nevertheless, Diderot's formulation does not preclude an understanding of just war, for the Tahitian elder reveals that his people have enemies against whom they die, if necessary, in defending their liberty. However, while the elder regards contemptuously the French claim to Tahiti, in the absence of manifest attempts at enslavement or extermination, potential Tahitian diffidence does not result in preemptive violence. Instead, these savages
27. The old man calls the Frenchsailors "stronger" in termsof force, not in physicalrobustness (42;cf. 43).

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cleave to an ideal of hospitality,and their ostensibly uncompromising practice of it prevents them from disrespecting their own image in these French voyagers. The Tahitians never attacked but, rather, extravagantly welcomed these visitors who came in gigantic wooden hulls. When Bougainville's ship neared the shore of Tahitia great mass of hollowedout trees was launched on the water. In an instant, his vessel was encircled; wherever he turned his gaze he witnessed demonstrations of surprise and goodwill. Food was thrown to him, arms were outstretched. .... Witness in your mind's eye this spectacle of hospitality,and tell me what you think of the human race. (46) Speaker B, whose words these are, supposes of course that one will think only highly and nobly of the human race based on the Tahitians'display. They had no context either to deem trustworthyor to distrust the strangers who appeared over the horizon. They could not guarantee that these visitors would not rape, pillage, and slaughter them. In fact, the French did some of each. Hence, the high and noble thoughts of humans' addressing their fellows as worthy of equal right occur only against the background of loss. This description of hospitality comes directly after the old man's jeremiad, so by the time the reader imagines the spectacle of hospitality,he or she will have known that Bougainville's party,in order to enforce the distinction between mine and thine, did attack-ignobly-and thus chose not to give the benefit of their diffidence to the other: "TheTahitianwho ran to meet you, to greet you, who welcomed you crying, 'tal'b,friend, friend', you killed. .... He offered you his fruits, his wife, his daughter, his hut, and you killed him for a handful of beads which he took without asking" (44). In this contrast between private appropriation and hospitality lies the coup de grace of "The Old Man's Farewell,"for Diderot herein explores terrain nearly absent in Hobbes's martial state of nature. As we shall soon remark, Diderot develops a tripartitetheory of colonialism, one element of which veritably turns on the question of hospitality,for to conquer is more than anything to be a shockingly bad guest. Here in the Supplement, Diderot emphasizes the continuities and discontinuities between private property and hospitality-that is, the potential abuses of the latter and its transmogrification by the French into the former-by figuringthe problem through the bodies of Tahitian women. Hence, the elder transforms "possession" into an accusation by pairing it with "victim":" . . . you were invited; you joined us. We spread before you the abundance of our country. When you desired young girls, all (except those not yet entitled to show their face and breasts) were placed before you completely naked by their mothers. That was how you took possession of the tender victim of our obligations as hosts" (45). What Diderot brings into

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representation by making women's bodies the objects of hospitality is not just an ostensibly fair clash between hospitality and property (announced by the slaughter of the generous Tahitian attracted by beads), but rather the taking advantage of a hospitality-inspired society by one governed by private appropriation. As I mentioned above, even Hobbes realized (in his Fourth Law of Nature) that hospitality and gift-givingcall, prudentially at least, for gratitude on the part of the recipient or guest. (Hobbes did not, however, believe that property could pre-exist civil society, so it is not really quite clear what gift-giving would entail without the ability to transfer tacit title expressly from "mine" to "thine") As the Supplement would have it, though, to abuse generous hospitality by taking advantage of it is not just to show a lack of gratitude but, worse, to corrupt hospitality with "mine" and "thine,"with the exclusiveness of private property claims. The French, endowed with the ancient King Midas'saffliction, turn what they touch into private property rather than gold. "Our daughters and our wives belong to us all. You shared that privilege with us . . . You have butchered one another for them, and they have come back stained with your blood" (42). Generous and hospitable, Tahitian women become objects of property. Like England, France, and Spain over the Malouines/Falklands, then, Bougainville's men dispute private claims to Tahitian women-temporary claims, to be sure, since none of the French actually remains at Tahiti, but no less exclusive for that reason. In writing their property deeds in blood, the French commit the most shockingly improper category confusion between land, "which cannot feel or think or desire or will; which one takes or leaves, keeps or sells, without it suffering or complaining,' and a person, "which does have freedom, will, desire; which has the ability to give itself up or hold itself back forever;which complains and suffers; and which can never be an article of exchange unless its characteris

and violenceis done to its nature" forgotten (50, emphasisadded).

Of course, by dramatizing the conquest of Tahiti as the victimization of Tahitianwomen, Diderot too permits some category confusion. As Diderot would have it, natural right, inviolable in principle, is realized in tandem with the laws of hospitality when the object of the host-guest relation is land. While Diderot does not himself entertain an extended theorization of the relations between host and guest, he does, nevertheless, implicitly draw upon a discernible phenomenology of the hospitality relation that in turn informs his critique of improper European colonization. Hospitality always involves the transfer from one person to another usufruct (by definition, temporary) of a good. One of the goods that for Diderot serves as an absolute limit case to hospitality is another's habitation. (The other absolute limit case for hospitality, which I will not discuss here, is the human body Hospitality stands in extreme tension with natural right when the object of the relation is a person, treated precisely as if lacking in "freedom,

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will, desire."28)The exceptionality of inhabited land becomes clear when the guest unilaterally and abusively alters the conditions of hospitality along the dimension either of temporality or of degree of exclusivity. Hospitality need not involve the transfer of a temporary right of use that is exclusive of others. A host may, for example, ask that two guests share a bed. If usufruct is granted exclusively, however, and for an indefiniteperiod of time, then hospitality borders on gift-giving,in which the title of possession is recognized, at least tacitly by the involved parties, to have changed in perpetuity. Hosts often give things to their guests that effectively imply exclusive transfers in perpetuity since the transferred objects either get consumed (like a repast), or are straightforwardgifts. Aside from the cases of comestibles or token gifts, though, an indefinite period of transfer still remains ultimately temporary. In sum, the distinction between hospitality and gift-givingachieves a certain acuity when the property over which rights are transferred is the site of reception (land, habitations, even the human body). Hospitality takes place at a fixed site, at least with respect to the link between guest and host. It could occur between two ships' captains at sea, for example, but one fixed and present person-who would become the host-would still be receiving an arriving and becomingpresent other-who would become a guest and who, in becoming such, would bring the entire set of relations into being. In other words, the host will have received the guest as if he or she were a gift; the guest gives the host the gift of her or his (temporary) presence, which is what gives presence to the host qua host. Hence, Jacques Derrida has provocatively maintained that the guest becomes the host of the host, that is, the host of the hospitality relation itself.29 The guest's gift of her or his presence at the site of reception cannot, however, be a gift in perpetuity lest the guest no longer be guest strictlyspeaking but holder of some other status. Hospitality as such thus presupposes that the guest will eventually absent himself or herself qua guest from the site of reception, to which he or she enjoys only temporary right. When this absenting does not happen, that is, when the guest effectively takes possession of the site of hospitality itself by taking the unilateral initiative to make the hospitality his or hers in perpetuity, then he or she becomes a guest forever,which is to say, nevermore a guest. If the host's perpetuation of the hospitality relation turns into gift-givingor a cession of title, a guest's abusive perpetuation of the hospitality relation is bald theft not only of the object of property in question but, more crucially, of hospitality itself and the attempt at sociability. In the Supplement, the French rob the Tahitians of the
28. The contradictions between Diderot's sexual egalitarianism and the Supplement's patriarchal presentation of women's sexuality are so complex as to warrant another essay entirely In this limit case, Diderot's commitment to natural right conflicts most obviously with practices of hospitality 29. Jacques Derrida, De I'hospitalite/ Anne Dufourmantelleinvite Jacques Derrida d repondre (Paris: 1997), 111. Calmann-LUvy,

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gift they had originally given the latter merely by having arrived and having become present to render the Tahitians hosts. By claiming Tahiti for France, the French rob the Tahitians of hospitality by robbing them of the gift of the Frenchmen's own absolutely temporary presence as guests. In brief, to take advantage of hospitality is to turn the temporary extension of a claim into an exclusive right of possession. To abuse hospitality in such a way is, indeed, to end the hospitality relation itself. French imperial primitive accumulation occurs not as simple appropriation but as an expropriation from a host and therefore via an offense against the (natural) law of hospitality. The corruption of practices of hospitality by certain dimensions of private property serves as a mordant indictment in itself of European conquest, but Diderot also tells much more through the fate of his Tahitian women. The Supplement dramatizes not just that Tahiti is besieged by-in medias res-an international Hobbesian state of nature centered on European states, but it demonstrates how Hobbes's state of nature gets implanted into Diderot's state of nature precisely in

the momentof the creationof "artificial mocks man."Indeed, the Supplement

Hobbes's notion of the Leviathan as an artificial man by suggesting not that it puts an end to an external state of war among persons but ratherthat it introduces war internally into personhood: Once upon a time there was a natural man; inside him was introduced an artificial man, and within his breast there then broke out a continual war, lasting the whole of his life. Sometimes the natural man is stronger,sometimes he is laid low by artificial, moral man; in either case the miserable monster is racked, torn, tortured, stretched on the wheel, constantly groaning, ceaselessly wretched, whether moved to delirium by a false striving for glory or bowed down and battered by misbegotten shame. (71-72) Morally speaking, at least, human life became "solitary,pore, nasty, brutish and short" after the advent of the artificial man; it was not already miserable in that fantastic age before only to be ameliorated by the Leviathan. This is all to say that Diderot gives the lie to Hobbes by suggesting that the latter's state of nature is already a state of civilization and not at all natural (in the sense of originary), especially if it better describes relations among peoples rather than "particular men ... in a condition of warre one against another."30 Rousseau had already made such a reproof of Hobbes in the Second Discourse and supplanted it with his own more natural state of nature, where savage man was "without war and without liaisons, with no need of his fellow-men, likewise with no desire to harm
30. Hobbes,Leviathan, of PossessiveIndividualism: 90. Cf. C.B.Macpherson, ThePoliticalTheory
Hobbes to Locke (Oxford and New York:Oxford University Press, 1962), 19-46, 68-69.

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However, Diderot's state of nature-what one gleans of it from his representation of Tahiti-differs from both Hobbes's and Rousseau's in that his savages are neither bellicose nor asocial and isolated; rather,they "carriedwithin them a seed of sociability which tended continually to be developed": hospitality, which promotes the survival of individuals and of the species (205). Now, one must note emphatically that Diderot does not by any means oppose the institution of property. Elsewhere in his political writings, he argues that individuals must enjoy "the sacred and imprescriptible right of property,"by which sovereign political authority may be constrained (179). The Supplement merely contrasts property with hospitality rather than suggests that the latter preclude a version of the former. Indeed, as by now should be clear, a notion of property, even private property, conditions the very possibility of hospitality insofar as hospitality presupposes authorized usufruct of a good. That condition of possibility also can destroy hospitality by absorbing it-by accumulating its goods. When the attitude of expropriator, instead of that of guest, confronts the host, then property becomes the condition of hospitality's own annihilation. In his adieux, the Tahitian elder would already foresuffer this history of imperial primitive accumulation. Comprehending in the Supplement the stakes of imperialism for those nonEuropeans caught in medias res, Diderot was careful to enumerate in a contribution to Abbe Raynal'sHistoryof the Two Indies the various conditions, as dictated by "reason and that would render colonization permissible qua equity," colonization. (For Diderot it is not a question of proscribing it altogether but of its taking place properly, without expropriation.) As Diderot sees it, precisely because all humans are naturallyequal in right, the degree to which a territoryis populated must govern how a foreign party may interact with its host or would-be neighboring society Diderot counsels three principal approaches, according to whether "the country is deserted, or it is partlydeserted and partly inhabited, or it is fully inhabited."32 The firstcase is simple: it may be appropriated legitimately by those who make the "firstwell-attested discovery" (175, 176). The third case also ought to be simple, although the Supplement suggested how it could succumb to subversion: "Ifit is fully inhabited I can lay legitimate claim only to the hospitality and assistance which one man owes another."If hospitality is not forthcoming or the natives receive their visitors with hostility, Diderot asserts that the latter may seize by force that which they require for survival. However, if the natives do fulfill
them."31 31. Rousseau, Discourse on the Originand Foundations of Inequality 137. Even sex, so important to Tahitian hospitality remains a merely animal appetite in Rousseau's state of nature. As Hobbes had conceived it in his comment about American savages' "naturalllust:' sexual attraction does not issue forth any exogamous social ties. Indeed, war and incest are the social relations of his savage America. 32. Richard Tuck identifies precursors to this view in Thomas More'sUtopia and in the jurisprudence of Alberico Gentili, but he does not mention Diderot. See Tuck'sThe Rights of Warand Peace, Chapter 1.

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their obligations as hosts, and if "I [qua guest] demand more, [then] I become a thief and a murderer"All of that seems clear enough, but Diderot pursues the analysis of guest versus settler-colonist further to clinch the point that they never do necessarily coincide: "Let us suppose that I have been accepted. I have become acquainted with the country's laws and moeurs. They suit me. I want to settle there. ffl am allowed to do so, it is a favour done to me, and a refusal cannot offend me" (175, emphasis added). In Diderot's geopolitical order, when the country is fully inhabited, that is, when the society and the land that it inhabits cannot support an influx of people either technically (in terms of its division of labor) or ecologically33 then the right of foreigners extends only to (ultimately temporary) subsistence, or rather to the hospitality that would provide it. Conversely settlement by foreigners in inhabited regions is a favor, governed a priori by hospitality, and never a right. The natural right to the ownership of land resides with those who already occupy and use it. In the case of colonization when the land is partly inhabited and partly deserted, Diderot resolves problems that Hobbes left fatally unspecified. "Ifthe country is partly deserted and partly occupied:' Diderot begins, "then the deserted part is mine. Through my labour I can take possession of it" If necessary, one can exert legitimate force: "The existing inhabitant would be a barbarian if he suddenly came and tore down my hut, destroyed my plantations and plundered my fields. I could resist his incursion by force." Such defensive violence resonates with Hobbes's analysis, but as I explain below, though, Hobbes proves somewhat equivocal about the limits of both violence and possession among encountering peoples, while Diderot keenly wants to specify what can be taken and defended as exclusive dominion: "I can extend my domain up to the borders of his [the existing inhabitant's] land." However, "The forests, rivers and sea-shore are common to us both, unless their exclusive use was necessary to his livelihood. The only other thing he can demand of me is that I should be a peaceful neighbour and that my settlement should in no way threaten him" (175-76). Note, first, that the attitude inspiring potential colonization has changed here, and, further, that Diderot has transposed that attitude with each principle. If hospitality and reciprocal guest-graciousness appropriately configure potential settlement in fully peopled places, and discovery (accompanied by appropriation) is a legitimate principle for completely uninhabited places only, then neighborliness would properly rule where habitation remains partial. And what neighborliness means here, what its peace depends upon, is the clear delineation
33. Orou articulates criteria for judging a society's sufficiency as follows: "Hasthe land of your birth more people than it can feed? In that case your ways are neither worse nor better than ours. Can it feed more than it has? In that case our ways are better than yours" (48).

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of boundaries of mine, yours, and ours together as concerns matters of livelihood. Private dominion, the right of use exclusive of others, conditions neighborliness, but more interestingly, neighborliness also may entail the (re-)institution of designated commons, so lately unfashionable in post-feudal Europe. By contrast with Diderot's conditions and qualifications of colonization, Hobbes remains conflicted about colonization's relation to violence and appropriation. The reason for this contrast again originates in their divergent conclusions from fundamental equality of faculties of body and mind-Hobbes's mutual hostility and Diderot's universal hospitality. As consistent with the arguments about the tenuousness of possession in the state of nature, property only really comes into existence with a sovereign power to awe individuals into a mutual renunciation of quarrel. Hence, colonies-in the sense of relatively stable settlements of landed property-cannot maintain themselves, either internally or externally, in the absence of a commonwealth that can secure and guide them. Hobbes thus describes colonies at one point in Leviathan as the "Procreation,or Children of a Common-wealth": "numbers of men sent out from the Commonwealth under a Conductor, or Governour, to inhabit a Forraign Country, either formerly voyd of Inhabitants, or made voyd then, by warre."Problematically,too much turns on the insertion and location in this passage of "then,"for, on the question of these foreign countries' being void or having been (violently) made void of native inhabitants, Hobbes states something possibly contrary later. Discussing the necessity of laws to prevent idleness in able-bodied masterless men, he asserts: The multitude of poor, and yet strong people still encreasing, they are to be transplanted into Countries not sufficiently inhabited: where neverthelesse, they are not to exterminate those they find there; but constrain them to inhabit closer together, and not range a great deal of ground, to snatch what they find; but to court each little Plot with art and labour, to give them their sustenance in due season. And when all the world is overchargd with Inhabitants,then the last remedy of all is Warre;which provideth for every man, by Victory, or Death. If the country is void of other humans, Hobbes sees no need for offensive violence. When the country is not void, then does the "then" mean that war arises, in such a case at such a time, as an option to make it void for new settlement? Perhaps, but it is worth asking how war's "makingvoid" occurs. Even for Hobbes, who so keenly wanted to fix the significations of things, "warre"can take on expansive meaning: "the nature of War," let us recall, "consisteth not in actuall fighting, but in the known disposition thereto" The second passage on colonies suggests, then, that "warre"might work to make a country void in two

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ways: by extermination, as when the world teems with inhabitants, or as the means to compel natives by threat of thuggish force "to inhabit closer together." Space itself would qualify as one of those "things needfull for the maintenance, and motion of the whole Body" of the commonwealth, so its denial by others through alternate means such as exchange would be cause for "just Warre."34 Internally ordered by the leviathan, like the members of the mother-commonwealth, but erring into the wilderness of international anarchy under its aegis, Hobbes's colonies simultaneously serve as shocktroops and suffer as the most exposed flank in that final war for living space. Significantly,uniquely, although colonization is still foundationallya matter for Diderot of enjoying exclusive use of a plot of land, that is, private property, he reorients the question of prior inhabitance away from the related question of how use can become exclusive (what conditions signify exclusivity) and toward the question of how an encounter among peoples ought to occur if it takes place. By coming back to property through hospitality and neighborliness, Diderot was therefore able to entertain a variety of discernments about livelihood that Hobbes could not. Diderot's qualification regarding "forests, rivers, and sea-shore" as common to colonist and native "unless their exclusive use was necessary to [the latter's] livelihood" recognizes that livelihood may be practiced by means other than agriculture. In realizing this, Diderot did not erect as universal a standard of efficiency in the use of land that was actually tied to a particular form of livelihood. The "artand labour,"as Hobbes puts it, of some forms of livelihood, such as hunting, does not occur sedentarily but actually requires that one "range a great deal of ground." The result of Diderot's making the attitude toward an other primary is that when he does return to the secondary concern of the conditions of exclusivity,he does so with plural standards for the signification of property use, and livelihood. Property in some form would remain the end, in the sense of prior inspiring aim, but it could not come first. One had to return to property through the politics of hospitality or neighborliness, if one encountered others with established usages and forms of livelihood-and equality of right demands one to presume that others do have such established usages and forms. Diderot's conception of politics takes root in the harrowing difficulty of negotiating the role that privacy would play in the encounters with others that attend natural human sociability. While sociability is necessary for the mutual recognitions that property requires, and while property conditions the possibility of hospitality and neighborliness,
34. Hobbes, Leviathan, 101, 125 (on property); 175, 239 (colonies); 88-89 (definition of war); 171 (just war). Cf. Paolo Pasqualucci, "Hobbes and the Myth of 'Final War"'(1990), rpt. in Great Political Thinkers:Hobbes, ed. John Dunn and Ian Harris(Cheltenham and Lyme:Edward ElgarPublishing, 1997), III:272-282. Pasqualucci does not consider Hobbes's elastic definition of war or the conditions for just war.

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the specific forms that property would assume depend upon the outcome of hospitality and neighborliness. The risk always remains that property will pervert those very relations, like hospitality and neighborliness, in which it is presupposed; and that, consequently, hospitality and neighborliness as such will never take place. Neighborliness and hospitality per se succeed only in the absence of the divisive, defensive order of private property In their most radical and proper sense, hospitality and neighborliness are social relations that incite the recognition of property by an excess of public relations across boundaries of mine and thine: Every people is justified in providing for its present and future safety If I set up a stockade, amass weapons, and put up fortifications, a people's deputies would be wise if they came and said to me: 'Are you our friend? Are you our enemy? If a friend, what is the purpose of all these preparations for war? If an enemy, you will understand why we destroy them' And the nation will be sensible if it immediately gets rid of a well-founded fear. (176) The attempt to exclude others (potential neighbors or guests) from one's property by walling it off as intentionally beyond friendly relation already undermines the mutual recognition that makes property possible as a social relation in the first instance. The best defense and method for a people's security is not the defensive posture of Hobbes's "weapons pointing, . . . eyes fixed on one another"35 but rather the friendly openness of human sociability. These principles of colonization put the Tahitian elder's censure of the behavior of Bougainville's men into fuller perspective. His farewell reveals that something is lacking in a version of colonization that approaches women as if they were land, and all lands as if they were uninhabited ("virgin,'as it is called). In response to Bougainville and the imperial order he emblematizes, Diderot offers an alternate vision of encounter, one that complicates what counts as colonization and how "expropriation"gets signified. Insofaras Diderot places the emphasis in his analysis of colonization on the various ethical postures available to a foreigner and a native, his writings transcend the more narrow constructions of colonizer/colonized, which effectively declare an ethical transgression but cannot detail even retrospectively the rights or obligations obtaining for both parties. Without human sociability-without one human's having been open to and having hosted another-there cannot have been language or law, not to mention property or peoples. Hospitality,insofar as it posits a law of sociability prior to all positive, practical iterations of law, grounded Diderot's critique of European acts
35. Hobbes, Leviathan, 90.

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of conquest in an ethics of radical encounter. The consequences of a Diderotian emphasis on hospitality for a law of peoples are enormous. By arguing that there exists a law of hospitality to which all people or peoples encountering one another are beholden, Diderot effectively makes three points. First, no people is in a position of exteriority to law, as a Hobbesian "realist"perspective would suggest about the relations among states. (For Hobbesian states-which do not, let us recall, have a power above them which can enforce decrees that promote commodious interrelations-the laws of nature are only prudential, not binding.) In other words, no people legitimately forms a law unto itself from which it could exempt itself in its relations with other peoples: there is no such Archimedian point with respect to law; there are no true outlaws-not human ones anyway. Second, imposing one's own standards of positive law (that one presumably obeys) on an other people in an encounter with them is tantamount to conquest and therefore an abuse of proper human sociability. And, third, as legitimate critique of law demands a position of interioritywith respect to it, being the guest in a hospitality relation is the minimum of interiority needed for legitimate critique of the host's positive law, but that critique must occur by way of natural law (for guests who will remain guests) or immanently by way of the host's own positive law (for those guests who no longer remain guests because invited to stay with the host, or who were never guests in the first place, as in the case of socalled "guest"workers). Diderot considered an outsider's imposition of his or her own particular, positive law on a people as among the worst excesses: "thatpeople could expel and kill me if I seized women, children and property; if I infringed its civil liberty; if I restricted its religious opinions; ifI claimed to give it laws; if I wished to make it my slave. Then I would be only one more wild animal in its vicinity, and no more pity would be due to me than to a tiger"(176, emphasis added). The performance of such acts relegates one not merely to outlaw status vis-d-vislocal standards but also utterly beneath the ken of right humanity Diderot's indignation makes sense through his commitment to seeing the laws of hospitality as the natural laws governing human sociability which exist prior to and outside of any positive law. It is the laws of hospitality-the proper recognition due a host by the guest, and vice versa, within the hospitality relation-that the French have transgressed. Hence, the French have violated not only local positive law but, more fundamentally, natural law, which governs hospitality and makes it possible. This is to imply that hospitality entails not only recognizing and respecting the temporary transfer of titles of use over objects of property but-as much as possible-a more fundamental recognition and respect for the established local languages and laws that constitute the host's conditions of property as animated in the hospitality relation. While the guest may be a stranger not only to the place of the host but also to the host's language of right, the guest's fundamental

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ignorance does not excuse her or him from attempting to respect the host's laws. It is the over-facile resignation to the outlaw's position that Diderot wanted to discourage in the Supplement. Such a critique is what he aims at when-in a seeming capitulation to reformism or, worse, conformism-he writes in closing: "We must speak out against senseless laws until they're reformed and, in the meanwhile, abide by them. Anyone who on the strength of his own personal authority violates a bad law thereby authorises everyone else to violate the good. ... Let'sfollow the good chaplain's example and be monks in France and savages in Tahiti" (74). To assume private authority in the face of established laws and moeurs is to become less than human, that "wild animal" who knows nothing of sociability and the politikon zoon. Hospitality among nations entails that foreigners will not only abide by the mandates of hospitality but also, since these in turn presuppose that the guest will submit to the general expectations of a host, respect the host's established local moeurs and laws as these constitute the parameters of each instance of hospitality.The guest's willed ignorance or active disobedience of the host's laws and moeurs puts that guest in violation of natural and positive laws, not above or outside of them.