The French Revolution in Mind, Part 2

The French Revolution enters American history at the nation’s founding, in its struggles to define itself, and in taking its place among nations. It resides, too, in the American psyche. The subject, of course, could be treated at book length, but here we look at examples that illuminate how suspicion of political ideology has manifested itself in American history up to the culture wars of our day, with ideology always challenged by tradition. 

Although our history is littered with movements, parties, causes, and crusades, a genuinely new American ideology did not assert itself until Progressivism arose (1890-1910) with its collectivism, interventionist approach to government, and opposition to laissez faire capitalism. Progressivism, when contrasted with the Enlightenment ideology of America’s founders, suggests a fundamental divergence that later became stark as Progressive politics evolved into the New Deal. Ideology again asserted itself in the years of the Red Scare—reaction to a “foreign” ideology versus revered American traditions (not a few of them, admittedly, ideological). Again, it ignited during the Cold War standoff with communism, perceived as a deadly anti-American ideological virus, with the banner of tradition waved by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).

Like the American and French revolutions, the communist revolutions of the 20th century followed a playbook of relatively explicit philosophical premises and exalted ideals (descended from 19th century German trascendental idealism often characterized as the “anti-Enlightenment”). Their deterioration, without exception, into dictatorship, the police state, and terror—including imprisonment and execution collectively of hundreds of millions of their citizens—reinforced manyfold the impression left by the French Revolution that shining ideologies and ideals carry the deadly seeds of “extremism,” “fanaticism,” “excess,” “self-destruction.”

 Burke had decried the civilizational destruction  driven by ideas and “ideals” in France. Two centuries later, Kirk called ideology, specifically Marxism, the "negation of prudence" because it imposes abstract principles on complex reality. “The inevitable consequence is fanaticism that rejects compromise and ends in violence.”  

“Unleashed by the French Revolution,” he wrote in Errors  of Ideology, “ideologies have plagued the world for well over 200 years now. They continue to infect. We, the infected. . . . and, it festers and festers.” It matters not, apparently, what moral and political ideals are espoused by a given ideology or even if those ideals fundamentally preclude imposing any ideas on anyone? To sidestep admission that truly revolutionary ideology succeeded brilliantly in America, historians like Daniel J. Boostein and Carl N. Degler advance the thesis that America’s rebellion was not revolutionary but conservative of wealth, class, and the rights of Englishmen. As though to moffify the spirit of Burke such historians argue the the colonists did not “invent” or claim new rights, but rebelled to protect the rights they believed they already possessed under the British constitution and English common law. It is true that argument was made, the intellectual leaders of the Revolution were inspired by the same Enlightenment philosophers that inspired the French. The language in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights was radical, not conservative; and the republican government they fashioned  “cancelled” centuries of European monarchial-aristocratic-church/state tradition.

Editorials may no longer thunder in Philadelphia and Boston, as they did in the 1890s, but the French Revolution resonates today through scholarly thought and public discourse. In academic circles, 1789 remains a wellspring of interpretation and debate. The late French historian François Furet famously declared that “the French Revolution is over”—yet, its legacy continues to animate historiographical feuds 20 years after Furet’s death, “fights over his legacy are as savage as ever.” Scholars still puzzle over the Revolution’s meaning and impact: Furet argued that the “secret of the success of 1789, its message and its lasting influence” lay in its invention of democratic politics as a national ideology, an unprecedented model whose “legacy was to be so widespread.” By that measure, the French Revolution inaugurated modern politics. It is no surprise, then, that many historians consider it—a alongside America’s own founding revolt–the political event of modernity with the longest-lasting influence. From the rise of liberal democracy to the specter of totalitarianism, nearly every modern political idea finds some root or cautionary tale in the French Revolutionary experience.