SOURCE: Clark, Henry C. “La Rochefoucauld and the Social Bases of Aristocratic Ethics.” History of European Ideas 8, no. 1 (1987): 61-76.

In the following essay, Clark claims that La Rochefoucauld's ideas are universal in nature and do not betray his aristocratic background. The critic goes on to explore the relationship between social participation and moral observation in the Maximes.

One of the paradoxes in the career of the Duke of La Rochefoucauld (1613-80) consists in the almost complete absence of any overt evidence of social particularity in his literary work. In practice, he was acutely protective of every privilege pertaining to his imagined place in the social hierarchy of seventeenth-century France, even more than most of his fellow peers. But in his classic work, the Maximes, he was scrupulously abstract and universal in scope—rarely alluding even to the three general orders of society, much less to the sorts of...