by Ben Shapiro
This idea is a vestige of the Enlightenment mentality. But it ignores the dark side of the Enlightenment hope. It ignores the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It ignores the fact that the Enlightenment had two strains—one based on Athens and Jerusalem, the other bereft of them. History performed a comparative study in which form of Enlightenment worked best—and the results were clear and convincing.
The Enlightenment straddled two sides of a thin line. On the one side was the American Enlightenment, based on the consummation of a long history of thought stretching back to Athens and Jerusalem, down through Great Britain and the Glorious Revolution, and to the New World; on the other was the European Enlightenment, which rejected Athens and Jerusalem in order to build new worlds beyond discoverable purpose and divine revelation.
The juxtaposition between the American Revolution and the French Revolution demonstrates the contrast between the strains of Enlightenment thinking. The American Revolution, based on Lockean principles regarding the God-given rights of individuals, the value of social virtue, and a state system created to preserve inalienable individual rights, broke sharply with the French Revolution, based on Rousseau’s “general will,” Voltaire’s generalized scorn for traditional virtue, and an optimistic sense of the perfectibility of mankind through the application of virtue-free reason.
The French Revolution was born with a utopian sense of purpose: man would finally be freed of old constraints. Those constraints were not merely political. They were constraints of the soul, chains on human freedom itself. The most obvious chains were those imposed by religion itself, which the French philosophes saw not as the bulwark for Western morality and rationality, but as the chief obstacle to them. It was Denis Diderot, the editor of the famed Encyclopédie, who said that he wished to strangle the last king with the guts of the last priest.1 Once the last priest was dead, then presumably mankind could reach back toward the nature within, and find within himself the capacity for godlike power and wisdom. Nicolas de Condorcet, the French philosopher and early revolutionary, stated that science would rescue man from his flaws, “foresee the progress of humankind, direct it, and accelerate it.”2
Reason without boundaries, combined with natural passion, would soon make for a toxic admixture.
While the United States moved toward the embrace of an Enlightenment based on Locke, Blackstone, Montesquieu and the Bible—the first meeting of the United States Senate occurred on March 4, 1789—the French Revolution moved toward utopian rebuilding. On July 14, 1789, French citizens stormed the Bastille. And they quickly dethroned the kings and the priests. The Cult of Reason became the first official religion of the new France: it worshipped “one God only, Le Peuple,” according to revolutionary Anacharsis Cloots.3 God himself was stripped of His holiness, and reason accorded His place.
Frenchmen were to celebrate the Festival of Reason. That festival saw churches across France transformed into Temples of Reason, with the chief temple being the cathedral at Notre Dame. There, the musicians of the National Guard and Opera performed hymns to Liberty, serving Liberty as a deity; the opening anthem was “Descend, O Liberty, Daughter of Nature.” An inscription “to Philosophy” was placed at the entrance, and the flame of the goddess of Reason was lit on the Greek altar.4 Maximilien Robespierre, who disdained the excesses of festivals of the Cult of Reason, founded a more sober-minded Cult of the Supreme Being, but it was similarly atheistic, and worshipped similar principles; festivals were so well-staged that Jacques-Louis David, the revolutionary artist, scripted “the moment when mothers must smile at their children, the old men at the youths and their grandsons.”5
In March 1794, Robespierre had the leaders of the Cult of Reason executed. In July 1794, Robespierre himself was executed. When Napoleon took power, he reacted to the cults by banning them outright. The end of the rejection of Judeo-Christian churches in favor of secular churches was the guillotine.
The French Revolution also replaced the virtue of the ancients—seeking an objective code for living by investigating the universe using our right reason—with the virtue of the collective, or with radical subjectivism, or both. Robespierre defined virtue in a speech extolling the new French republic: it is “nothing else than love of the patrie and its laws.” To defend that virtue required everything up to and including political violence: “If the driving force of popular government in peacetime is virtue, that of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent.”6 Diderot, a materialist who disdained even Deism, defined virtue in pure terms of moral relativism: “There is only one virtue, justice; one duty, to be happy; one corollary, not to overrate life, and not to fear death.”7 French historian Robert Mauzi writes that Diderot believed that “to be happy is to be oneself; that is, to preserve the truth which is peculiar to our being, and which may choose to express itself through a passion incompatible with virtue.”8
The rejection of Judeo-Christian values and ancient virtue on behalf of the general will was expressed in glowing terms in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, approved by the National Assembly on August 26, 1789. Unlike the Declaration of Independence—a document expressing a collective desire for individual rights—the Declaration of the Rights of Man expresses the belief that man’s place in the universe revolves around his role as part of a larger collective. Every individual right expressed in the French Declaration is curbed by the collective’s right to overrule that individual. So, for example, the French Declaration states, “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.” But the second clause renders the first absolutely meaningless—if men are equal in right, how can their rights be subject to the opinions of a majority?
The answer is obvious. In the French Declaration, rights do not spring from God or preexist government: “The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.” All rights come from the state. All rights therefore belong to the state. This is the Hobbesian Leviathan come to life. While the French Declaration pays homage to the nonaggression principle—it explicitly states that “Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else. . . . These limits can only be determined by law”—such niceties disappear as soon as the document states that “Law is the expression of the general will.” Religious rights are secondary to “the public order established by law.” Freedom of expression is guaranteed . . . except as “shall be defined by law.”9 The collective rules the individual, and the general will trumps the individual will.
The leading philosophical twin lights of the Revolution were Voltaire and Rousseau—although both writers (particularly Voltaire) might well have disdained their legacy. Fully thirteen years after Voltaire’s death, the famed artist Jacques-Louis David organized a procession one hundred thousand strong to usher Voltaire’s disinterred body to the Panthéon—the rechristened church of Sainte-Geneviève, secularized by the revolution. As historian Raymond Jonas writes, “Voltaire’s procession neatly aped the Catholic rituals associated with Corpus Christi—the stops at the Bastille and the Louvre resemble the processional pauses at reposoirs—and even recalled Genevieve’s triumphant procession resulting in the cure of the maladie des ardents.”10
Rousseau was a key influence on Robespierre particularly—Robespierre wrote of him, “Divine man, you have taught me to know myself.”11
It wasn’t until after Robespierre’s execution that Rousseau received the same treatment as Voltaire—but it was glorious indeed. His body was exhumed and then moved from Ermenonville to Paris, his coffin put in public view in the Tuileries and then placed in the Panthéon near Voltaire. A statue of Rousseau came along for the ride, and a copy of The Social Contract was gently cradled on a velvet cushion. All across Paris, his plays were revived, and all across France, similar
processions took place.12
The French Revolution was bloody, vicious, and awful. Tens of thousands of people were murdered by the regime between 1793 and 1794, with another quarter million dead in a civil war over a draft designed to fight foreign invasion. And what followed the French Revolution—the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte—would cast the continent into a new era of upheaval.
Where, exactly, did the French Revolution—born with dreams of liberty, equality, and fraternity—go so wrong? It went wrong because the Enlightenment of the French Revolution rejected the lessons of the past; it saw in the history of the West mere repression and brutality, and longed for a tomorrow full of visions and dreams based on vague notions of human goodness.
The man who best critiqued the French Revolution lived just across the English Channel. His name was Edmund Burke (1729–1797), and he was a member of Parliament sympathetic to the American colonists but utterly opposed to the French Revolution. Burke argued that the French Revolution had failed because it had ignored the lessons of human nature, the morality of Christianity, and the traditions of the past. Written at the outset of the revolution in 1789, Reflections on the Revolution in France became a seminal text for modern-day conservatives, who saw in it a call away from radicalism and toward sensible governance. “The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: We ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risque congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints,”13 Burke wrote. He feared that the revolution had done away with the two foundations of Western civilization: “the spirit of a gentleman, and the spirit of religion.” He warned that the triumph of supposed rationality over tradition and Judeo-Christian values would turn reason into a mere byword to be vulgarized by political forces: “Their liberty is not liberal. Their science is presumptuous ignorance. Their humanity is savage and brutal.”14 And he warned as well that such brutality would extend to seizure of property and life itself.
How did Burke foresee the tragedy? Because he held true to the ancient precepts of Western civilization—Greek telos and Judeo-Christian morality. Philosopher Russell Kirk writes of Burke’s worldview:
Revelation, reason, and an assurance beyond the senses tell us that the Author of our being exists, and that He is omniscient; and man and the state are creations of God’s beneficence. . . . How are we to know God’s mind and will? Through the prejudices and traditions which millennia of human experience with divine means and judgments have implanted in the mind of the species. And what is our purpose in this world? Not to indulge our appetites, but to render obedience to divine ordinance.15
Burke was correct—but the French Revolution had already initiated a cycle of reaction that would continue for the next 156 years. Its slogan, “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” had already proved chimerical a mere five years after Burke’s opus. Yet that creed would provide the impetus for a century and a half of political utopianism and its disastrous aftermath. Liberty would collapse into moral relativism and then tyranny; fraternity would collapse into nationalistic tribalism; equality would collapse into a new caste system, with all-wise rulers in control of the commanding heights.
THE UTOPIA OF NATIONALISM
Revolutionary France, which forcibly conscripted its own citizenry and turned itself into the first modern militarized state, celebrated the nation-state as the apotheosis of the general will. In doing so, the French were merely carrying forward the legacy of Rousseau.
It was the French Revolution that made romantic nationalism a driving force in history. The very definition of citizenship changed in Revolutionary France, from subjects at the beck and call of more powerful actors to citizens with an equal stake in the formation of the general will. But that definition of citizenship quickly devolved into a new form of subject status: in France, citizens owed their rights to the state. As Professor William Rogers Brubaker of Harvard University writes, “The Revolution, in short, invented not only the nation-state but the modern institution and ideology of national citizenship.” Karl Marx (1818–1883) suggested, “The gigantic broom of the French Revolution . . . swept away all these relics . . . thus clearly simultaneously the social soil of its last hindrances to the superstructure of the modern state edifice.” By centralizing power, the Revolution discarded all boundaries between man and the state, and made individuals feel part of a greater whole.16
The new state of France revolutionized war-making. In 1793, as a result of both civil unrest and the decision to make war on Austria, the National Convention instituted the first mass draft in the history of the world. Where joining the military had been a preserve of a certain few, and high-ranking officers had been culled from aristocratic families, the French now substituted mass war-making and a certain level of meritocracy. The levée en masse of August 23, 1793, stated:
From this moment until such time as its enemies shall have been driven from the soil of the Republic, all Frenchmen are in permanent requisition for the services of the armies. The young men shall fight; the married men shall forge arms and transport provisions; the women shall make tents and clothes and shall serve in the hospitals; the children shall turn old lint into linen; the old men shall betake themselves to the public squares in order to arouse the courage of the warriors and preach hatred of kings and the unity of the Republic.17
This radically changed the nature of war—and the perception of both the state as a historical tool and the role of the citizen within the state. Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, the most famous military historian of all time, said that this decree accessed the “passions of the people,” and in doing so showed the world that a united citizenry could stand up in the face of overwhelming military odds. “People at first expected to have to deal only with a seriously weakened French army,” Clausewitz wrote, “but in 1793 a force appeared that beggared all imagination. Suddenly war again became the business of the people . . . the full weight of the nation was thrown into the balance. . . . War, untrammeled by any conventional restraints, had broken loose in all its elemental fury.”18 The French Revolution, then, led not only to the rise of the nation-state and nationalism more broadly, it also opened the door to total war—the end of the distinction between civilian and military, and the willingness to weaponize an entire population toward the ends of governments.
Despite the internal collapse of the French Revolution, the power of the French military never wavered. Napoleon’s coup merely made clear what had already become obvious: military nationalism was the wave of the future, and other states would have to struggle to respond in kind. The nation-state was the tool of progress and of history. And other states would not be long in reacting to the rise of France with similar enthusiasm for nationalism—and more dangerously, enthusiasm for ethnically based, expansionist nationalism.
Now, nationalism on its own can be a powerful force for good. Philosopher Yoram Hazony defends nation-states built on two principles: first, what he terms the “moral minimum required for legitimate government,” which would include “minimum requirements for a life of personal freedom and dignity for all”; second, the “right of national self-determination,” rights accruing to nations “cohesive and strong enough to secure their political independence.” A multiplicity of nation-states can be a guarantee against universal tyranny, and a guarantor of philosophical, legal, and political diversity. It was respect for such diversity that brought about the Peace of Westphalia. American exceptionalism fulfills Hazony’s criteria: the Declaration of Independence and Constitution operate as creedal unifiers, and a shared history and culture operate as the glue holding together the nation.19
But nationalism can also be a force for evil. Nationalism turns toxic when it fails to reach that moral minimum—when it tyrannizes its own citizens, or locks people out based on immutable characteristics. Nationalism turns poisonous when it becomes imperialism—when it suggests that it represents a universalism that can override the legitimate rights of other states, or when it uses national interest
as an excuse for conquest on behalf of a “volk.” Revolutionary France quickly bled over into imperialism. That was no coincidence.
But the rise of Revolutionary France led other nations to embrace its romantic nationalism. In Prussia, Johann Fichte (1762–1814) famously suggested, “Of all modern peoples it is you in whom the seed of human perfection most decidedly lies and to whom the lead in its development is assigned.”20 Perhaps the key philosopher espousing the power of nationalism in history—and one of the most influential philosophers of the century overall—was Georg Hegel (1770–1831). According to Hegel, individuals were defined by “the life of the state”; the state may be created by individuals, but eventually it supersedes them. The state shapes men and civilizations, and those who impose its will are the civil servants, guided by reason—the class of men both made by the state and who work for it. And states, as the embodiment of the rational state of a nation, settle matters between themselves through conflict.21 The individual’s mind is suffused into a zeitgeist—a spirit of the age.
That zeitgeist carries with it the seeds of history—and is brought into being by history itself.
History is the great arbiter of right and wrong, in Hegel’s view. Hegel saw God not in morality or reason but in the progress of history; history moved forward, using and discarding men at will, ushering in the betterment of the world through the clash between thesis and antithesis, which would be eventually brought together in synthesis. War could be a key tool in this process. “Through consciousness (rational) spirit intervenes in the order of the world,” Hegel wrote. “This is spirit’s infinite tool, also bayonets, cannons, and bodies.”22
The nineteenth century’s embrace of the new concept of romantic nationalism offered a purpose without Judeo-Christian values or Greek telos: the nation, spurring forward the progress of history, unified by ethnicity and background, proselytizing with its power. Nationalism also unified the question of individual and collective capacity by suggesting that they were one and the same: your individual identity lay in your identity as a member of the collective. And the collective existed to give you spirit and strength and purpose.
