Tradition

Epicureanism

4th century BC to 2nd century AD, revived 17th century

That the world is atoms and void with no providence in it, that the point of life is freedom from disturbance, and that justice is a contract of mutual advantage rather than a cosmic order.

Epicureanism is the ancient school most consistently misrepresented by its opponents, and the one whose political theory turned out to be the most modern.

Its physics is atomist, taken from Democritus: nothing exists but atoms and void, the soul is material and disperses at death, and the gods, if they exist, take no interest in us. From this comes the therapeutic aim. Fear of the gods and fear of death are the two great sources of human misery, and both rest on mistakes about nature. Remove them and what remains is achievable: ataraxia, freedom from disturbance. The pleasure Epicurus recommended was this absence of pain, not indulgence; he lived on bread and water and thought a cup of wine an occasion.

The politics is contractual and deflationary. Justice is not written into the cosmos and is not owed to the gods. It is an agreement neither to harm nor be harmed, entered into because it is useful, and binding only while it remains so. That makes Epicurus a genuine ancestor of the social contract, and one who dispenses with the natural-law scaffolding the Stoics supplied. His advice was to live unnoticed and stay out of public life, which is a political position rather than an absence of one.

Lucretius turned the doctrine into Latin verse in De Rerum Natura, and the poem's rediscovery in 1417 put materialism back into European circulation. Gassendi Christianized it, Hobbes absorbed the physics, and the utilitarians took the calculus of pleasure and pain and made it a public standard rather than a private discipline.

Lineage

Descends from

Greek Philosophy6th to 4th century BC
The atomism is Democritus and the ethical question is the Socratic one, answered by removing rather than by perfecting the desires.

Gave rise to

MaterialismAncient to present
Atoms, void, a material soul and gods indifferent to human affairs: the modern materialists took the whole apparatus, and Gassendi reintroduced it by name.
Social Contract Theory17th-18th century, revived 20th century
Justice as an agreement neither to harm nor be harmed, entered into for mutual advantage and binding only while useful, is the contract without the natural law.
Utilitarianism18th-19th century
The calculus of pleasure and pain is Epicurean; what changes is that Bentham makes it a public standard for legislation instead of a private discipline.

Thinkers2

Thinker

Epicurus

341–270 BCE

Founder of the Garden, who built an ethics of tranquillity on an atomic physics designed to remove fear of the gods and of death from political and private life.

Thinker

Lucretius

99–55 BCE

The Roman poet whose De Rerum Natura carried Epicurean atomism into Latin, and whose rediscovery in 1417 put a godless material universe back into European thought.

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