Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709–1785)

Famous French utopian socialist thinker, historian and Enlightenment thinker in the 18th century.

Mably was born in 1709 in Grenoble, France, into a noble family. After graduating from the Jesuit College in Lyon, Mably served as a priest and abbot at the Seminary of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, and later as the secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of France. In 1746, he resigned from public service and specialized in academic research. He successively published Concerning the Rights and Duties of the Citizen (1758), On Legal System or Principles of Law (1776), and other polemical utopian socialist works. Starting from the state of nature, he held that men are born equal, while private ownership destroys people’s natural equality and is the root cause of social inequality and all evils, that a society based on private property does not conform to the natural order and human reason, and that only public property in the means of production conforms to the natural nature of man. Therefore, the existing society of private property should be changed into a “perfect republic”, where “all are rich, all poor, all equal, all free, all brothers”. In this republic, there is community of property, labor for all, all are brothers; people are motivated not by selfish desire but by virtue; violence and civil war are important means for changing existing society; the republic introduces a representative system of government, and the supreme power of the state belongs to the people. Engels highly praised Mably and considered his thought as “immediately [sic] communistic theories”; but, he opposed the improvement of people’s conditions of material life and advocated “a communis[t], ascetic [life], denouncing all the pleasures of life, Spartan”, which is tinged with utopian egalitarian socialism and a strong asceticism.