[T]o speak of human matters, I believe that if Sparta was once very flourishing, it was not because of the goodness of each of its laws in particular (seeing that many of them were very strange, and even contrary to sound morals), but because, having been invented by a single man, they all tended to the same end.--Descartes, Discourse on Method, Second Part.
I quote the passage above not to emphasize that Descartes has a fondness for despotism. He does have a fondness for a kind of enlightened despotism (as is clear from a statement just before where he praises town-planning in those "regular districts that an engineer lays out on a plain according to his own imagination"). Rather, what is striking about his praise of Sparta is not so much his positive reason (Sparta was a durable state because it's laws have a kind of internal consistency by aiming at the same end (that is, military survival)). Rather he explicitly rejects (a) the idea that Sparta's laws themselves were good and (b) the idea that they promoted good norms or customs. In fact, he comes very close to suggesting that in order to promote political flourishing any consistent aim of the legal order will do.
In context Descartes rejects (i) a republican interpretation of the flourishing of Sparta. He is also rejecting the idea that (ii) a flourishing legal order requires virtuous citizens--the laws of Sparta promote behavior "contrary to sound morals." That is to say, citizens need not be especially Christian. This (that is i-ii), deflates the previous, somewhat enigmatic sentence:"it is certain that the condition of the true religion, whose precepts were made by God alone, must be incomparably better ruled than all others." For, while it seems that indeed (iii) a city ruled by true religion would be best, that is not what obtains in human affairs ("[T]o speak of human matters") nor necessary for human flourishing. In the very same paragraph, Descartes also rejects (iv) a political order based on bottom-up trial and error in which civilization and law "gradually" develop as an instrument in social problem-solving. (He prefers fewer laws, which will produce more uniformity and beauty.)
What (i)-(iv) have in common are that they all involve highly moralized (albeit conflicting) conceptions of the political-legal order. This rejection of the political as either a Christian or moralized enterprise is also hinted at his willingness to allow that perhaps there are "as many sensible people among the Persians or the Chinese as among ourselves." This must have been quite unsettling to his Christian readers.*
While he explicitly echoes "pagan" Stoicism (or even Cynicism), even Descartes's rejection of revolution turns out to be rather pragmatic: he prefer to modify his "desires rather than the order of the world" because in the latter success is (as Machiavelli also emphasizes in the Prince) a matter of "fortune."
Above I suggested that Descartes has some fondness for what we might term enlightened despotism; the more general stance is accommodation to existing power: his first maxim is "to obey the laws and customs of my country" whatever these are. Now, one might think that the next sentence exhibits a more principled stance: [A] "constantly retaining the religion in which God gave me the grace to be instructed since my childhood." But the point of this adherence to taught religion is not any claim about its truth; neither is it articulated in terms of suspicious religious innovation. I suspect that the function of this stance ([A]) is to avoid calling needless attention to ones religious ideas at all. They are a private affair. Given that Descartes is aware that he has become an intellectual celebrity (recall), a conversion (say from French Catholicism to the Protestantism of his new homeland, Holland) would be a very public affair. This would go against the whole point: within existing society and the existing political order, the scientific philosopher, who has a privileged method, should quietly and boringly fit in, and (echoing More and Bacon) receive funds in order to do socially useful (especially medical) research. The founding text of modern epistemology also contains a sadly durable political philosophy.
*In fact, there is a more general criticism of European socities: he complains about the "corruption of our customs" such that "there are few people who are willing to say everything that they believe." (This might well be a criticism of Galileo's persecution by the Inquisition, but it could also be broader.)
**I thank my bachelor students in my Early Modern Political Theory course at Ghent for helpful discussion.
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