d’Holbach Paul-Henri-Dietrich, Baron (1723– 89), French philosopher, a leading materialist and prolific contributor to the Encyclopedia. He was born in the Rhenish Palatinate, settled in France at an early age, and read law at Leiden. After inheriting an uncle’s wealth and title, he became a solicitor at the Paris ‘Parlement’ and a regular host of philosophical dinners attended by the Encyclopedists and visitors of renown (Gibbon, Hume, Smith, Sterne, Priestley, Beccaria, Franklin). Knowledgeable in chemistry and mineralogy and fluent in several languages, he translated German scientific works and English anti-Christian pamphlets into French.
Basically, d’Holbach was a synthetic thinker, powerful though not original, who systematized and radicalized Diderot’s naturalism. Also drawing on Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Buffon, Helvétius, and La Mettrie, his treatises were so irreligious and anticlerical that they were published abroad anonymously or pseudonymously: Christianity Unveiled (1756), The Sacred Contagion (1768), Critical History of Jesus (1770), The Social System (1773), and Universal Moral (1776). His masterpiece, the System of Nature (1770), a ‘Lucretian’ compendium of eighteenth-century materialism, even shocked Voltaire. D’Holbach derived everything from matter and motion, and upheld universal necessity. The self-sustaining laws of nature are normative. Material reality is therefore contrasted to metaphysical delusion, self-interest to alienation, and earthly happiness to otherworldly optimism. More vindictive than Toland’s, d’Holbach’s unmitigated critique of Christianity anticipated Feuerbach, Strauss, Marx, and Nietzsche. He discredited supernatural revelation, theism, deism, and pantheism as mythological, censured Christian virtues as unnatural, branded piety as fanatical, and stigmatized clerical ignorance, immorality, and despotism. Assuming that science liberates man from religious hegemony, he advocated sensory and experimental knowledge. Believing that society and education form man, he unfolded a mechanistic anthropology, a eudaimonistic morality, and a secular, utilitarian social and political program.
See also ENCYCLOPEDIA , PHILOSOPHY OF MIN. J.-L.S.
