R. Steuckers: Naar een nieuwe gouden eeuw?

Naar een nieuwe gouden eeuw?

Interventie van Robert Steuckers 

Colloquium van de Studiegenootschap "Erkenbrand"

Rotterdam, 14 oktober 2017

Als we wensen terug te keren naar een gouden tijdperk, d. w. z. naar een gouden tijdperk dat in overeenstemming met onze echten “roots” is en dat zeker geen product van een soort sociaal engineering is, een gouden tijdperk dus dat wel een terugkeer naar bronnen betekent zonder tegelijkertijd een afkeer van wetenschappelijke of technische vooruitgang te zijn, en niet enkel op militair vlak, dan is deze terugkeer naar een gouden tijdperk een vorm van archeofuturisme waarbij de toekomst van onze volkeren door eeuwige en vaste waarden wordt bepaald. Een terugkeer naar een gouden tijdperk betekent weer leven te geven aan waarden die zeker in de Astijd der geschiedenis aanwezig waren of die nog eerder in een verder verleden de geest van onze voorouders hebben bepaald.

Men kan die waarden “traditie” noemen of niet, ze zijn wel de bakermat van onze beschaving die veel dieper wortelen dan de pseudo-waarden van een flauwe of pervers geworden Verlichting. En als wij de Verlichting beschouwen als een geestelijk voertuig van perversiteit, bedoelen we het huidige progressivisme dat werkt als een instrumentarium dat één enkel doel heeft: de oeroude waarden en de waarden van de Astijd der geschiedenis uit te schakelen. De uitschakeling van deze waarden belet ons een toekomst te hebben, want wie geen waarden meer in zich draagt loopt oriënteringsloos in de wereld rond en verliest zijn politieke “Gestaltungskraft”.

Om Arthur Moeller van den Bruck te parafraseren die dit in de jaren 20 van de vorige eeuw schreef; dat het liberalisme na een paar decennia de volkeren doodt die volgens zijn regels hun leven hebben bepaald. Vandaag, met een hernieuwde woordenschat, ben ik van mening dat ieder ultra-gesimplificeerde ideologie, die beweert de Verlichting als inspiratiebron te hebben, de “Gestaltungskraft” van de volkeren in de kiem smoort. Frankrijk, Engeland, gedeeltelijk de Verenigde Staten en voornamelijk het verwesterse Duitsland zijn vandaag de voorbeelden van zo’n dramatische “involutie”.

De Verenigde Staten en Duitsland mogen wel een uitstekende technische ontwikkeling hebben vertoond of nog altijd vertonen; of, beter gezegd, bezitten deze beide mogendheden vanaf het einde van de 19^de eeuw een hoog technisch niveau, er zijn echter talrijke aanwijzingen die wijzen op een volledige verloedering van hun samenlevingen. In Duitsland gebeurt dat door de toepassing van een bewuste strategie, de zogenoemde strategie van de “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”, waardoor het verleden systematisch wordt beschreven en beschouwd als de bron van het absolute kwaad en dat geldt niet uitsluitend voor het nationaal-socialistisch verleden. Dit proces speelt in op de eigen nationale zelfwaardering en induceert een totale aanvaarding van alle mogelijke politieke of sociale praktijken die de samenleving definitief kelderen, waarbij de vluchtelingenpolitiek van mevrouw Merkel het summum betekent, een summum dat de buurlanden uit de Visegrad-Groep niet bereid zijn klakkeloos te accepteren.

In Frankrijk ziet men een aftakeling van de vroeger heilige sterke staat, die De Gaulle nog wou handhaven. Eric Zemmour heeft onlangs de geschiedenis van de “Franse zelfmoord” (le “Suicide français”) op een voortreffelijke manier geschetst. Daarbij mag nog gezegd worden dat een boek uit de vroege jaren 80 een perfide rol heeft gespeeld in het ontstaan van een eigen Franse “Vergangenheitsbewältigung”: dat boek heeft als titel “L’idéologie française” en werd neergepend door de beroemde Bernard-Henri Lévy. In dat boek worden alle niet-liberale en/of alle niet sociaal-democratische politieke strekkingen als fascistisch bestempeld, inclusief sommige belangrijke aspecten van het archaïstisch Franse communisme, van het gaullisme in het algemeen, en zelfs van het christelijke personalisme van een aarzelende ideoloog zoals Emmanuel Mounier. Juist in het boek van Lévy vinden we alle instrumenten van wat een Nederlander, namelijk de Frankrijk-specialist Luk de Middelaar, heel correct als “politicide” heeft omgeschreven.

In naoorlogs Duitsland werd de Verlichting als de filosofische strekking beschouwd die de Duitsers en de andere Europeanen immuun moest maken tegen het politieke kwaad. Jürgen Habermas zou dus heel snel de theoreticus par excellence worden van deze nieuwe West-Duitse Verlichting die het kwade verleden moest uitwissen.

Maar de gevulgariseerde Habermasiaanse Verlichting, toegepast door ijverige journalisten en feuilletonisten, is maar een “deelverlichting” voor eenieder die de culturele geschiedenis van de 18^de eeuw nauwkeurig heeft bestudeerd. De wereld is inderdaad niet zo simpel als de heer Habermas en zijn schare volgelingen het wensen. De “political correctness” werkt dus op basis van een afgeroffelde en geknoeide interpretatie van wat eigenlijk in haar verscheidene aspecten de Verlichting was.

De Verlichting volgens de “Frankfurter Schule” en volgens haar “Musterschüler” Habermas, is misschien wel een min of meer legitieme erflating van de 18^de eeuwse Verlichting, maar er zijn ook andere en vruchtbaardere onderdelen van de historische Verlichting. De huidige politiek correcte Verlichting is enkel een slechte combinatie van “blueprints”, om de uitdrukking van de Engelsman Edmund Burke over te nemen, toen hij de bloedige uitspattingen van de Franse revolutie beschreef. Burke is inderdaad geen obscurantist of een aanhanger van een oubollige scholastiek. Hij bekritiseert de Franse revolutie, omdat die een valse interpretatie van de rechten van de mens suggereert. Er zijn dus andere mogelijkheden om de rechten van de mens te interpreteren, eerst en vooral omdat het Ancien Régime geen juridisch woestijn was en omdat de concrete gemeenschappen wel goed geprofileerde rechten hadden.

Later ontstond er in de Keltisch-sprekende randgebieden van het Verenigd Koninkrijk en in het bijzonder in de Ierse Republiek een andere manier om aan de burgers rechten te garanderen zonder de verlichte geest van emancipatie te negeren en ook zonder de Keltische roots van Ierland te loochenen. Na de Tweede Wereldoorlog, hebben Ierse juristen en ministers, volgens het VN-boekje over de mensenrechten en volgens hun eigen Pankeltische ideologie, de Franse Republiek laten veroordelen nadat ze het onterecht veroordelen of vermoorden van Bretoense militanten had verdedigd. En, opgelet, deze Ierse minister McBride was de voorzitter van Amnesty International en werd later Nobelprijs winnaar in 1974. De Republiek, die Lévy beschouwt als een stelsel dat het summum van politieke correctheid zou belichamen, werd destijds veroordeeld wegens schending van de mensenrechten!

Verder, omdat wij het hier over een gouden tijdperk hebben, bestaat er ook zoiets dat jammer genoeg in vergetelheid is geraakt in continentaal Europa: de Verlichting volgens Johann Gottfried Herder, die gelukkig een soort bescheiden comeback kent in de Altright beweging in de Angelsaksische wereld.  

Volgens Herder, als belichaming van de Duitse 18^de eeuwse Verlichting, moeten wij twee principes respecteren en als leidende beginsels steeds gebruiken: “Sapere aude” (Durf te weten) en “Gnôthi seauton” (Ken jezelf). Er bestaat geen echte Verlichting, volgens deze Evangelische dominee uit Riga in het huidige Letland, zonder deze beide principes te vereren. Zou een filosofisch-politieke strekking beweren dat ze “verlicht” is zonder dat ze aanneemt dat men over de “Schablonen” of de gemeenplaatsen durft denken, die momenteel heersen en de samenleving tot een gevaarlijke stilstand leiden, dan is zulk een Verlichting geen reële en efficiënte Verlichting, maar een instrument om een dwingelandij op te leggen. Een volk moet dus zichzelf kennen, terug naar de oeroudste bronnen keren om werkelijk weer vrij te worden. Er bestaat geen vrijheid als er geen geheugen meer bestaat. Werken aan het opwaken van het slapende geheugen betekent aldus de allereerste stap naar de herovering van de vrijheid, en uiteindelijk van de capaciteit, vrij en nuttig te handelen op internationaal niveau. Herder vraagt ons dus om terug naar de bronnen van onze eigen cultuur te keren zonder de perverse wil om deze “roots” uit te wissen.

Een gouden tijdperk kan alleen in de Europese samenleving terugkeren als de politieke instellingen van de valse en oppervlakkige Verlichting en van de politieke correctheid door een nieuwe en krachtige Verlichting volgens de denkwegen van Herder wordt vervangen. Heidegger zou juist hetzelfde zeggen, maar wel in andere woorden: voor de filosoof van het Zwarte Woud en het “Schwabenland”, was de Europese beschaving slachtoffer van “het onkruid van de Westerse metafysiek”, welk onkruid opgeruimd moest worden, waarmee “een nieuwe dageraad kon ontstaan”. De woordenschat, die Heidegger gebruikte, is ongelofelijk moeilijk voor de gewone leek. De Amerikaanse docent filosofie Matthew B. Crawford schetst op een korte en bondige manier de bedoeling van Heidegger: voor Crawford van de Virginia University is de “Westerse metafysiek” van de Duitse filosoof eenvoudigweg de pseudo-verlichte janboel van Locke & Co, dus de Engelse of Franse Verlichting, die geen contact met de werkelijkheid meer heeft of beter gezegd geen contact met het concrete wil hebben. Er bestaan dus twee “Verlichtingen”, de organische van Herder en de abstracte van de anderen, die de werkelijkheid en het werkelijke verleden van de volkeren weigeren.

In dit perspectief stelt Crawford vast, dat iedere samenleving, die onder de invloed van de officiële interpretatie van de Verlichting blijft stagneren, gedoemd is af te takelen en uiteindelijk te sterven. Daarom nam hij ooit afscheid van zijn katheder en ging een garage voor Harley-Davidson motorfietsen openen, om heel reëel de geur van olie, benzine en leder te genieten, om naar de muziek van het gereedschap op metaal te kunnen luisteren. Uiteraard hebben wij hier met een voor een docent filosofie zeldzame terugkeer naar het concrete van doen. Op politiek, maar ook op economisch en sociaal vlak betekent het, dat wij de wereldvreemdheid van het huidige systeem in al zijn facetten hardnekkig moeten verwerpen. Daar ligt inderdaad onze hoofdopdracht. Eigenlijk heet dat vechten om het concrete te redden, wat ook uiteindelijk de bedoeling van Heidegger in alle aspecten van zijn reusachtig filosofisch werk was. 

Dat betekent niet noodzakelijk een rage om een nieuw totalitair stelsel te promoten, wat misschien voor een tijdje de wens van Heidegger was, maar zeker en vast de wil om de vrijheid van de burgers en volkeren te redden tegen een systeem dat een werkelijke dwangbuis aan het worden is. Naast Heidegger, die in Duitsland was gebleven, is er ook in het wereldje der filosofen zijn vroegere studente en maîtresse Hannah Arendt, die meer bepaalt in haar nieuwe Amerikaanse vaderland voor de vrijheid heeft gepleit tegen de banaliteit van onze Westerse liberale samenlevingen en van het Sovjetcommunisme. En inderdaad, na de val van het communisme in Rusland en Oost-Europa, heeft de Verlichting van Habermas en zijn volgelingen tot een absolute beperking van de burgerlijke vrijheden in West-Europa geleid, heel eenvoudig omdat in de ogen van de machthebbers in bijna alle Europese staten niets meer MAG bestaan, dat vroeger een ruggengraat aan ieder welke samenleving gaf. In naam van een abstracte en wereldvreemde vrijheidsnotie worden de wortels van iedere samenleving afgekapt, waarmee men de verbintenis tussen identiteit en vrijheid negeert.

Er bestond in de 18^de eeuw een nog andere Verlichting, een derde Verlichting, namelijk de Verlichting van de “verlichte despoten”, die hun landen hebben gemoderniseerd op alle praktische vlakken, zonder tegelijkertijd de traditionele waarden van hun volkeren te vernietigen. Voor de “verlichte despoten”, zoals Frederik van Pruisen, Maria-Theresa of Jozef II van Oostenrijk, Catharina II van Rusland of Karel III van Spanje, betekende Verlichting de technische modernisering van hun land, het bouwen van straten en kanalen, een moderne stedenbouw, een efficiënt corps van bekwame ingenieurs in hun legers, etc. De allereerste functie van een staat is inderdaad zulke werkzaamheden mogelijk te maken en het leger steeds paraat te houden voor iedere dreiging, volgens het Latijnse motto “Si vis pacem, para bellum”.

Dit brengt ons weer naar onze huidige dagen: iedereen in deze zaal is zich wel bewust dat zelfs ieder onschuldige en ongevaarlijke poging onze identiteit te verdedigen door de wakende honden in het medialandschap als fout kan worden beschouwd, met het welbekende risico naar een bruin hoekje verbannen te worden. Maar onze tijdgenoten zijn zich minder van een ander dodelijk gevaar bewust: de aftakeling van industriebranches overal in Europa, dankzij het verfoeilijke neoliberale principe van delocalisatie, waarbij men moet weten dat het neoliberalisme de gekste gedaanteverwisseling van de heersende Verlichting is. Delocaliseren betekent juist de erfenis van de “verlichte despoten” te verloochenen, ofwel de ideeën van een geniale 19^de-eeuwse economist en ingenieur zoals Friedrich List. (wiens principes nu uitsluitend door China worden uitgebaat, wat het succes van Beijing klaar en duidelijk kan uitleggen) De Gaulle, die Clausewitz als jonge gevangene officier in Ingolstadt gedurende de 1^ste wereldoorlog volledig had doorgelezen, was een aanhanger van deze twee concrete Pruisische denkers. Hij trachtte in de jaren 60 van de vorige eeuw hun principes in Frankrijk te realiseren. Het is dit “verlicht” werk dat stap voor stap werd vernield, volgens Zemmour, zodra Pompidou aan de macht kwam: het heel recente verkoop van het hoogtechnologisch bedrijf Alstom door Macron aan Amerikaanse, Duitse, Italiaanse consortiums betekent bijna het einde van het proces: Frankrijk ligt nu bloot en kan niet meer beweren dat het nog een grootmacht is. De Gaulle draait zich om in zijn graf, in het afgelegen dorpje Colombey-les-deux-églises.

Dus de valse, heersende Verlichting eist bloeddorstig twee slachtoffers: de identiteit als geestelijke erfenis, die totaal uitgewist moet worden en de economisch-industriële structuur van ieder land, zij het van een grootmacht of een kleinere mogendheid, die vernield dient te worden. Deze ideologie is dus werkelijk gevaarlijk op alle vlakken en dient zo gauw mogelijk en definitief opzijgelegd te worden. De zogenaamde “liberal democracies” riskeren vroeg of laat een langzame dood als dat van een kanker- of Alzheimerpatiënt, terwijl de “illiberal democracies” à la Poetin of à la Orban, of op Poolse wijze, of het confuciaans Chinees systeem, stilaan en stilzwijgend de overhand krijgen en harmonieus bloeien op sociaal en economisch vlak. De totale amnesie en de totale ontwapening, die de Lockistische Verlichting van ons eist, verzekert ons van maar één lot: het uitsterven in schande, armoede en verloedering.

Het geneesmiddel is heel duidelijk en laat zich in één toverwoord samenvatten, “archeofuturisme”, door Guillaume Faye ooit uitgedokterd: d. w. z. de troeven te bundelen die bestaan uit de bronnen die Herder eenmaal zong, de organisatie van de staat volgens Clausewitz, de organisatie van de economie en het bouwen van infrastructuren zoals List het preconiseerde. 

Crawford, de professor-garagehouder, stelt een nog veel langere lijst van gevaren vast, die voortvloeien uit wat hij het Engelse verlichte “Lockisme” noemt. Deze versie van de Verlichting heeft een wereldvreemde houding tegenover de geschiedenis en de algemene werkelijkheid laten ontstaan, wat Heidegger later, volgens Crawford, de “Westerse metafysiek” zal noemen. In de ogen van de eremiet van Todtnauberg betekent deze metafysiek een afkeer van de werkelijke en organische feiten, van het leven tout court, ten gunste van droge en onvruchtbare abstracties die de wereld en de organisch gegroeide samenlevingen en staten naar een zekere implosie en een zekere dood brengen.

In de zogenaamde “Nieuw Rechtse” kringen nam de kritiek van de Verlichting in een eerste stap de gedaante van een kritiek op de nieuwe ideologie van de “mensenrechten”, die onder President Carter vanaf 1976 ontstond om de betrekkingen met de Sovjetunie te vermoeilijken en de Olympische Spelen in Moskou te kelderen. De nieuwe diplomatie van de mensenrechten, die toen ontstond, werd terecht als breuk met de klassieke diplomatie en de realpolitik van Kissinger beschouwd. Om deze nieuwe ideologie in de internationale betrekkingen te promoten werd er een regelrecht, metapolitiek offensief gevoerd, met alle middelen van de ervaren Amerikaanse soft power. Er werden instrumenten in de heksenkeukens van de geheime diensten ontworpen, die aan ieder nationale context aangepast werden: in Frankrijk en voor de Franstalige omgeving was het instrument de zogenaamde “nouvelle philosophie” met figuren zoals Bernard-Henri Lévy en André Glucksmann. Vanaf het einde van de jaren 70 zijn de grof geknutselde standpunten van voornamelijk Lévy altijd overeengekomen met de geopolitieke doelen van de Verenigde Staten, tot en met de gruwelijke dood van Kolonel Khadafi in Libië en zijn huidige steun aan de Koerden in Irak en Syrië.

Tegenover deze enorme middelen van de soft power, had Nieuw Rechts weinig kans om gehoor te krijgen. En de argumenten van zijn sprekers, alhoewel in het algemeen juist, waren tamelijk zwak op filosofisch vlak, even zwak kan ik nu zeggen als degenen van Lévy zelf. De toestand heeft zich sinds enkele jaren gewijzigd: de geknutselde ideologie van de mensenrechten en van de pseudo-diplomatie op internationaal niveau, die ze begeleiden en die tot een lange reeks rampzalige resultaten hebben geleid, ondergaan nu scherpe kritiek vanuit alle mogelijke ideologische hoeken. Twee Brusselse professoren, trouwens van de linkse Universiteit van Brussel, Justine Lacroix en Jean-Yves Pranchère, hebben het oude dossier van de mensenrechten klaar en duidelijk samengevat. De ideologie van de mensenrechten wordt steeds gebruikt om geërfde instellingen of zelfs rechten te kelderen, zoals Burke het onmiddellijk na de uitroeping ervan bij het begin van de Franse Revolutie kon observeren. Burke was een figuur van het Britse conservatisme. Later werd deze ideologie ook door linkse en liberale krachten bekritiseerd. Jeremy Bentham en Auguste Comte beschouwden ze als een hindernis voor het “algemeen belang”; Marx vond dat ze de kern van de burgerlijke ideologie waren en dus ook een hindernis, maar ditmaal tegen de emancipatie van de brede massa’s. Wij kunnen vandaag de dag deze ideologie evenwel als een instrument van een buiten-Europese mogendheid bekritiseren, maar ook als een instrument van de algemene subversiviteit die zowel geërfde instellingen als traditionele volkse rechten uitwissen wil. Deze ideologie heeft ook geen maatschappelijk nut meer, daar men ermee geen enkel probleem kan oplossen en zich er alleen maar nieuwe onoplosbare toestanden creëren. Dus zijn alle mogelijke kritieken op de mensenrechten nuttig om een breed front te laten ontstaan tegen de politieke correctheid, waarbij de eerste stap altijd de wil moet zijn, de rechten, de samenlevingen en de economie terug in hun organische en historische omgeving te brengen.

Voor Crawford leiden de subversieve Verlichting à la Locke en haar talrijke avataren naar de hedendaagse ziekte, die in het bijzonder kinderen en jongeren treft: het verlies van de “capaciteit, steeds aandachtig te zijn” of wat Duitse pedagogen zoals Christoph Türcke de “Aufmerksamkeitsdefizitkultur” noemen. Onze jonge tijdgenoten zijn dus de laatste slachtoffers van een lang proces, die twee, drie eeuwen geleden, zijn aanvang kende. Maar dit is ook het einde van het subversieve en “involutieve” proces, dat ons naar een “Kali Yuga” heeft geleid. De mythologie vertelt ons dat na de Kali Yuga een nieuwe gouden tijdperk zal beginnen.

In de donkere tijden voor dit nieuwe gouden tijdperk, dus in de tijden die wij nu beleven, is de eerste taak van degenen die zich van deze verloedering bewust zijn, hyperaandachtig te zijn en te blijven. Als de Verlichting à la Locke of de “Westerse metaphysiek” ons de concrete wereld als een verdoemenis beschreef, die niet waardig was de aandacht van de filosoof of de intellectueel aan te trekken, als deze Verlichting de realiteit als een miserabele hoop onwaardige spullen zag, als de ideologie van de mensenrechten de geschiedenis en de realisaties van onze voorouders ook als onwaardig of zelfs als crimineel beschouwde, wil de Verlichting à la Herder juist het tegendeel. De volkse/organische Verlichting van Herder wil juist aandacht besteden aan “roots” en bronnen, aan geschiedenis, literatuur en volkse tradities. De echte politieke en strategische doelen, die de “verlichte despoten” en de aanhangers van Friedrich List in hun respectievelijke staten en samenlevingen ontplooien, eisen van de politieke verantwoordelijken een constante aandacht voor de fysieke werkelijkheden van hun landen, om ze te beheren of om ze zo te “gestalten” dat ze nuttig worden voor de volkeren die erin leven. Terug te keren naar een gouden tijdperk betekent dus afscheid te nemen van alle ideologieën, die de aandachtcapaciteit van de successieve generaties heeft vernietigd, tot de catastrofe die wij nu beleven.

Maar als de wil de aandacht op het concrete terug te vestigen een langdurig proces is, zal er toch noodzakelijk een tijd voor de kairos moeten komen. Kairos is de Griekse god voor de sterke tijd, terwijl Chronos de god is van de meetbare tijd, van de saaie chronologie, van wat Heidegger de “Alltäglichkeit” noemde. De Nederlandse Joke Hermsen heeft drie jaar geleden een boek over de kairos geschreven: de sterke tijd, die hij mythisch belichaamt, is de tijd van de beslissing, van de conservatief-revolutionaire “Entscheidung” (bij Heidegger, Schmitt en Jünger), waar geschiedenis wordt gemaakt. Kairos is de god van “het goede moment”, wanneer kansrijke volkskapiteinen het lot, het “Schicksal”, letterlijk vastpakken. Kairos is een jonge god met een bosje haar op zijn voorhoofd. Dat bosje moet de gelukkige, die het lot zal bedwingen, vastpakken. Een daad die moeilijk is, ook niet door eenvoudige berekening te voorzien is, maar als het gebeurt worden nieuwe tijden geboren en kan een nieuw gouden tijdperk gestart worden. Omdat nieuwe “Anfänge” leiden de taak is van de authentieke mens, volgens Heidegger en Arendt.

Misschien is er hier iemand die vroeg of later het bosje haar van Kairos zal vastpakken. Daarom heb ik dat hier Diets willen maken.

Ik dank jullie voor jullie aandacht.

Montesquieu van twaalf kanten belicht

Boekrecensie

Door Paul Muys

Ex: http://www.doorbraak.be

Montesquieu van twaalf kanten belicht

Andreas Kinneging, Paul De Hert, Maarten Colette (red.)

Een vaak geciteerde denker waar toch veel misverstanden over bestaan

De wakkerste geesten onder u kennen baron de Montesquieu wel een beetje: de scheiding der machten, indertijd op school het obligate fragment uit de Lettres Persanes (Comment peut-on être Persan?) maar daar houdt het meestal bij op. Nu is er dit stevig gedocumenteerde werk waarin deze filosoof, voorloper van de Verlichting en grondlegger van de sociologie, vanuit diverse invalshoeken wordt bekeken.

Het onderwerp scheiding der machten is actueler dan ooit, nu dat kostbare beginsel weer moet worden verdedigd tegen de her en der dreigende sharia. In zijn hoofdwerk, De l’Esprit des Lois (Over de geest van de wetten) staat het bewuste principe centraal, net zoals dat van de checks and balances (zoiets als controles en waarborgen). Veelal getypeerd als een liberaal geeft Montesquieu in De l’Esprit aan dat hij na rijp beraad kiest voor een gematigde regering, gematigd door middel van de scheiding van de wetgevende, uitvoerende en rechterlijke macht. Liefst dan nog een regering waarin de adel een belangrijke rol vervult. Die machtenscheiding en de checks and balances liggen aan de basis van de Amerikaanse constitutie en die van een pak andere democratische landen, zonder die adel dan.

Ook al is Montesquieu zelf edelman, dat hij zo’n belangrijke rol toekent aan deze stand kan verbazen. Nog verbazender is het voor de leek dat hij een bewonderaar is van de staatsvorm zoals het middeleeuwse Frankrijk die kende. Dat heeft alles te maken met de evolutie die de monarchie onder de Franse koningen doormaakt: van een gematigd koningschap, getemperd door de tussenmacht van de adel, evolueert zij naar absolutisme en zelfs despotisme. Het is een impliciete kritiek op Lodewijk XIV (L’état, c’est moi).

Macht en tegenmacht. Machtsdeling voorkomt machtsmisbruik. Montesquieu is geen Verlichtingsdenker, hij is niet per se tegen de monarchie, noch tegen de republiek overigens, al vreest hij dat die laatste minder doelmatig zal zijn dan in de Romeinse oudheid. Evenmin heeft hij bezwaar tegen de standen, op voorwaarde dat ook zij gecontroleerd worden door een tegenmacht. Precies omdat het Engeland van na de Glorious Revolution dit in de praktijk brengt, geeft Montesquieu het als voorbeeld. Het tweekamerstelsel (Hoger en Lagerhuis), waarbij elke kamer een sociaal verschillende samenstelling heeft, verhindert dat de adel zich kan bevoordelen. ‘Essentieel is’, zo betoogt co-auteur Lukas van den Berge, ‘dat de dragers van de drie machten geen van alle een primaat opeisen. In plaats daarvan dienen zij zich elk afzonderlijk te voegen naar een onderling evenwicht waaraan zij zich niet kunnen onttrekken zonder de politieke vrijheid om zeep te helpen.’

Vrijheid is voor Montesquieu niet zozeer de mogelijkheid tot politieke participatie of zelfbestuur – wat wij in de 21ste eeuw voetstoots aannemen – ze zit veeleer in de bescherming van de privésfeer. Annelien de Dijn betoogt: ‘Vrijheid is niet de macht van het volk, maar de innerlijke vrede die ontstaat uit het besef dat men veiligheid geniet.’ Dit kan onder vele verschillende regeringsvormen, op voorwaarde dat machtsmisbruik geen kans krijgt. Overheden hebben zich niet te bemoeien met zaken die mensen als persoon treffen, en niet als burger. Wanneer zij de dominante gewoonten en overtuigingen krenken, voelen mensen zich aangetast in hun vrijheid en ervaren dit als tirannie, zo schrijft Montesquieu in zijn commentaar op de mislukte poging van tsaar Peter de Grote om mannen bij wet te verbieden hun baard te laten groeien. Hij beveelt de tsaar andere methoden aan om zijn doel te bereiken. Paul De Hert: ‘Montesquieu pleit niet voor het recht om een baard te dragen. Zijn sociologische methode leert ons niet wat vrijheid zou moeten zijn, wel hoe vrijheid in een gegeven context ervaren wordt, of juist niet.’ Wat zou de observateur Montesquieu trouwens van het dragen van hoofddoeken in scholen en openbare diensten gedacht hebben?

Montesquieu zet zijn lezers vaak op het verkeerde been. Allicht verwijst de kwalificatie ‘enigmatisch’ in de titel hiernaar. Zo lezen we in de bijdrage van Jean-Marc Piret dat Montesquieu best kan leven met cliëntelisme, het uitdelen van postjes, waarbij de uitvoerende macht steun zoekt tegen de wetgevende kamers in. Wie geen voordelen uit die hoek hoeft te verwachten, zal dan weer zijn hoop op één van beide kamers stellen. Risico is daarbij dat teleurstelling mensen kan doen overlopen naar de tegenpartij. Schaamteloos opportunisme ? Volgens Montesquieu, die zich geen illusies maakt over hoe het er in de politiek toegaat, is dit juist een teken van de ‘pluralistische vitaliteit van de maatschappij’.

Op zijn reizen stelt Montesquieu de achteruitgang vast van de Zeven Provinciën en van de republieken Venetië en Genua. Valt in Italië vooral corruptie op, in het achttiende-eeuwse Holland ziet hij alleen verval en kille zakelijkheid, sinds het land zich moest verweren tegen de invasie van Lodewijk XIV in 1672. De ooit zo bloeiende, creatieve koopmansstaat ziet zich verplicht een ruïneuze oorlog te voeren, die van de Hollanders een kil, berekenend, gesloten volk maakt, niet langer in staat tot grootse, creatieve daden. Het geweld is bovendien de grootste vijand van de eros, de humaniserende liefde zoals die groeide en bloeide ‘in het mediterrane land van wijn en olijven’, in Knidos in de Griekse oudheid (Le Temple de Gnide is een erotisch gedicht van Montesquieu naamloos uitgegeven in Amsterdam). Van de eros gesproken: Montesquieu is volgens een van de auteurs van dit boek, Ringo Ossewaarde, een liberaal ‘in de zin dat hij voor politieke en burgerlijke vrijheid staat, voor constitutionalisme, humanisme, tolerantie, matiging, internationalisme en machtsdeling en hij een afkeer heeft van absolutisme. Al deze aspecten zijn echter voor hem slechts voorwaarden voor een erotisch bestaan, voor humanisering, verfijning en verheffing.’

Als kind van zijn tijd kan Montesquieu bezwaarlijk een Europees federalist zijn, maar hij bepleit de humanisering van de verhouding tussen staten en bevolkingen en hecht daarbij veel belang aan vrijhandel en het machtsevenwicht tussen onderling afhankelijke staten. Dit kan een einde maken aan de permanente confrontatie, en de burger beschermen tegen misbruik van gezag, betoogt Frederik Dhondt in zijn bijdrage.

Zo biedt dit boek menig verrassend inzicht, waarop ik hier niet kan ingaan. Ook kan de lezer nader kennismaken met de fameuze Perzische Brieven, anoniem verschenen roman in briefvorm, een puntige satire op het absolutistische Frankrijk, die ook voor de hedendaagse lezer een eyeopener kan zijn. Montesquieu toont zich hier en elders een helder waarnemer, niet beïnvloed door modedenken, niet geneigd mee te huilen met de goegemeente, kritisch over de katholieke clerus, fel tegen de inquisitie en verwoed tegenstander van de slavernij.

Ten slotte: De l’Esprit kan niet begrepen worden zonder er de klimaattheorie van de auteur bij te betrekken. Het klimaat is voor Montesquieu en veel van zijn tijdgenoten namelijk de belangrijkste van alle invloeden op het leven van de mens. Maar diezelfde mens kan naar de overtuiging van de Franse denker door oordeelkundig handelen de invloed van het klimaat bijsturen, zo troost Patrick Stouthuysen de mogelijk verontruste lezer.

Beoordeling : * * * *

Titel boek : Montesquieu. Enigmatisch observateur

Subtitel boek :

Auteur : Maarten Colette, Frederik Dhondt, Annelien de Dijn, Paul De Hert, Michel Huysseune, Andreas Kinneging, Paul Pelckmans, Ringo Ossewaarde, Jean-Marc Piret, Alexander Roose, Patrick Stouthuysen, Lukas van den Berge

Uitgever : Uitgeverij Vrijdag, Antwerpen

Aantal pagina's : 353

Prijs : 29.99 €

ISBN nummer : 978 94 6001 472 7

Uitgavejaar : 2016

The Enlightenment from a New Right Perspective

The Enlightenment from a New Right Perspective

 

By Domitius Corbulo

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

“When Kant philosophizes, say on ethical ideas, he maintains the validity of his theses for men of all times and places. He does not say this in so many words, for, for himself and his readers, it is something that goes without saying. In his aesthetics he formulates the principles, not of Phidias’s art, of Rembrandt’s art, but of Art generally. But what he poses as necessary forms of thought are in reality only necessary forms of Western thought.” — Oswald Spengler 

“Humanity exists in its greatest perfection in the white race.” — Immanuel Kant

Every one either praises or blames the Enlightenment for the enshrinement of equality and cosmopolitanism as the moral pillars of our times. This is wrong. Enlightenment thinkers were racists who believe that only white Europeans could be fully rational, good citizens, and true cosmopolitans.

Leftists have brought attention to some racist beliefs among Enlightenment thinkers, but they have not successfully shown that racism was an integral part of Enlightenment philosophy, and their intention has been to denigrate the Enlightenment for representing the parochial values of European males. I argue here that they were the first to introduce a scientific conception of human nature structured by racial classifications. This conception culminated in Immanuel Kant’s anthropological justification of the superior/inferior classification of “races of men” and his “critical” argument that only European peoples were capable of becoming rational and free legislators of their own actions. The Enlightenment is a celebration of white reason and morality; therefore, it belongs to the New Right.

In an essay ^[2] in the New York Times (February 10, 2013), Justin Smith, another leftist with a grand title, Professeur des Universités, Département d’Histoire et Philosophie des Sciences, Université Paris Diderot – Paris VII, contrasted the intellectual “legacy” of Anton Wilhelm Amo, a West African student and former slave who defended a philosophy dissertation at the University of Halle in Saxony in 1734, with the “fundamentally racist” legacy of Enlightenment thinkers. Smith observed that a dedicatory letter was attached to Amo’s dissertation from the rector of the University of Wittenberg, Johannes Kraus, praising the “natural genius” of Africa and its “inestimable contribution to the knowledge of human affairs.” Smith juxtaposed Kraus’s broad-mindedness to the prevailing Enlightenment view “lazily echoed by Hume, Kant, and so many contemporaries” according to which Africans were naturally inferior to whites and beyond the pale of modernity.

Smith questioned “the supposedly universal aspiration to liberty, equality and fraternity” of Enlightenment thought. These values were “only ever conceived” for a European people deemed to be superior and therefore more equal than non-whites. He cited Hume: “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men to be naturally inferior to the whites.” He also cited Kant’s dismissal of a report of something intelligent that had once been uttered by an African: “this fellow was quite black from head to toe, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.” Smith asserted that it was counter-Enlightenment thinkers, such as Johann Herder, who would formulate anti-racist views in favor of human diversity. In the rest of his essay, Smith pondered why Westerners today “have chosen to stick with categories inherited from the century of the so-called Enlightenment” even though “since the mid-20th century no mainstream scientist has considered race a biologically significant category; no scientist believes any longer that ‘negroid,’ ‘caucasoid,’ and so on represent real natural kinds.” We should stop using labels that merely capture “something as trivial as skin color” and instead appreciate the legacy of Amo as much as that of any other European in a colorblind manner.

Smith’s article, which brought some 370 comments, a number from Steve Sailer, was challenged a few days later by Kenan Malik, ardent defender of the Enlightenment, in his blog Pandaemonium ^[3]. Malik’s argument that Enlightenment thinkers “were largely hostile to the idea of racial categorization” represents the general consensus on this question. Malik is an Indian-born English citizen, regular broadcaster at BBC, and noted writer for The Guardian, Financial Times, The Independent, Sunday Times, New Statesman, Prospect, TLS, The Times Higher Education Supplement, and other venues. Once a Marxist, Malik is today a firm defender of the “universalist ideas of the Enlightenment,” freedom of speech, secularism, and scientific rationalism. He is best known for his strong opposition to multiculturalism.

Yet this staunch opponent of multiculturalism is a stauncher advocate of open door policies on immigration ^[4]. In one of his TV documentaries, tellingly titled Let ‘Em All In (2005), he demanded that Britain’s borders be opened to the world without restrictions. In response to a report published during the post-Olympic euphoria in Britain, “The Melting Pot Generation: How Britain became more relaxed about race ^[5],” he wrote: “news that those of mixed ethnicity are among the fastest-growing groups in the population is clearly to be welcomed ^[6].” He added that much work remains to be done “to change social perceptions of race.”

This work includes fighting against any immigration objection even from someone like David Goodhart, director of the left think tank Demos, whose just released book, The British Dream ^[7], modestly made the observation that immigration is eroding traditional identities and creating an England “increasingly full of mysterious and unfamiliar worlds.” In his review (The Independent ^[8], April 19, 2013) Malik insisted that not enough was being done to wear down the traditional identities of everyone including the native British. The solution is more immigration coupled with acculturation to the universal values of the Enlightenment. “I am hostile to multiculturalism not because I worry about immigration but because I welcome it.” The citizens of Britain must be asked to give up their ethnic and cultural individuality and make themselves into universal beings with rights equal to every newcomer.

It is essential, then, for Malik to disassociate the Enlightenment with any racist undertones. This may not seem difficult since the Enlightenment has consistently come to be seen — by all political ideologies from Left to Right — as the source of freedom, equality, and rationality against the “unreasonable and unnatural” prejudices of particular cultural groups. Malik acknowledges that in recent years some (he mentions George Mosse, Emmanuel Chuckwude Eze, and David Theo Goldberg) have blamed Enlightenment thinkers for articulating the modern idea of race and projecting a view of Europe as both culturally and racially superior. By and large, however, Malik manages (superficially speaking) to win the day arguing that the racist statements one encounters in some Enlightenment thinkers were marginally related to their overall philosophies.

A number of thinkers within the mainstream of the Enlightenment . . . dabbled with ideas of innate differences between human groups . . . Yet, with one or two exceptions, they did so only diffidently or in passing.

The botanist Carolus Linnaeus exhibited the cultural prejudices of his time when he described Europeans as “serious, very smart, inventive” and Africans as “impassive, lazy, ruled by caprice.” But let’s us not forget, Malik reasons, that Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae “is one of the landmarks of scientific thought,” the first “distinctly modern” classification of plants and animals, and of humans in rational and empirical terms as part of the natural order. The implication is that Linnaeus could not have offered a scientific classification of nature while seriously believing in racial differences. Science and race are incompatible.

Soon the more progressive ideas of Johann Blumenbach came; he complained about the prejudices of Linnaeus’ categories and called for a more objective differentiation between human groups based on skull shape and size. It is true that out of Blumenbach’s five-fold taxonomy (Caucasians, Mongolians, Ethiopians, Americans and Malays) the categories of race later emerged. But Malik insists that “it was in the 19th, not 18th, century that a racial view of the world took hold in Europe.”

Malik mentions Jonathan Israel’s argument that there were two Enlightenments, a mainstream one coming from Kant, Locke, Voltaire and Hume, and a radical one coming from “lesser known figures such as d’Holbach, Diderot, Condorcet and Spinoza.” This latter group pushed the ideas of reason, universality, and democracy “to their logical conclusion,” nurturing a radical egalitarianism extending across class, gender, and race. But, in a rather confusing way and possibly because he could not find any discussions of race in the radical group to back up his argument, Malik relies on the mainstream group. He cites David Hume: “It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the acts of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains the same in its principles and operations.” And George-Louis Buffon, the French naturalist: “Every circumstance concurs in proving that mankind is not composed of species essentially different from each other.” While Enlightenment thinkers asked why there was so much cultural variety across the globe, Malik explains, “the answer was rarely that human groups were racially distinct . . . environmental differences and accidents of history had shaped societies in different ways.” Remedying these differences and contingencies was what the Enlightenment was about; as Diderot wrote, “everywhere a people should be educated, free, and virtuous.”

Malik’s essay is pedestrian, somewhat disorganized, but in tune with the established literature, and therefore seen by the public as a compilation of truisms against marginal complaints about racism in the Enlightenment. Almost all the books on the Enlightenment have either ignored this issue or addressed it as a peripheral theme. The emphasis has been, rather, on the Enlightenment’s promotion of universal values for the peoples of the world. Let me offer some examples. Leonard Krieger’s King and Philosopher, 1689–1789 (1970) highlights the way the Enlightenment produced “works in which the universal principles of reason were invoked to order vast reaches of the human experience,” Rousseau’s “anthropological history of the human species,” Hume’s “quest for uniform principles of human nature,” “the various tendencies of the philosophes’ thinking — skepticism, rationalism, humanism, and materialism” (152-207). Peter Gay’s The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (1966) is altogether about how “the men of the Enlightenment united on . . . a program of secularism, humanity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom . . . In 1784, when the Enlightenment had done most of its work, Kant defined it as man’s emergence from his self-imposed tutelage, and offered as its motto: Dare to know” (3). Norman Hampson’s The Enlightenment (1968) spends more time on the proponents of modern classifications of nature, particularly Buffon’s Natural History, but makes no mention of racial classifications or arguments opposing any notion of a common humanity.

Recent books are hardly different. Louis Dupre’s The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (2004), traces our current critically progressive attitudes back to the Enlightenment “ideal of human emancipation.” Dupré argues (from a perspective influenced by Jurgen Habermas) that the original project of the Enlightenment is linked to “emancipatory action” today (335). Gertrude Himmelfarb’s The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (2004), offers a neoconservative perspective of the British and the American “Enlightenments” contrasted to the more radical ideas of human perfectibility and the equality of mankind found in the French philosophes. She brings up Jefferson’s hope that in the future whites would “blend together, intermix” and become one people with the Indians (221). She quotes Madison on the “unnatural traffic” of slavery and its possible termination, and also Jefferson’s proposal that the slaves should be freed and sent abroad to colonize other lands as “free and independent people.” She implies that Jefferson thought that sending blacks abroad was the most humane solution given the “deep-rooted prejudices of whites and the memories of blacks of the injuries they had sustained” (224).

Dorinda Outram’s, The Enlightenment (1995) brings up directly the way Enlightenment thinkers responded to their encounters with very different cultures in an age characterized by extraordinary expeditions throughout the globe. She notes there “was no consensus in the Enlightenment on the definition of the races of man,” but, in a rather conjectural manner, maintains that “the idea of a universal human subject . . . could not be reconciled with seeing Negroes as inferior.” Buffon, we are safely informed, “argued that the human race was a unity.” Linnaeus divided humanity into different classificatory groups, but did so as members of the same human race, although he “was unsure whether pigmies qualified for membership of the human race.” Turgot and Condorcet believed that “human beings, by virtue of their common humanity, would all possess reason, and would gradually discard irrational superstitions” (55-8). Outram’s conclusion on this topic is typical: “The Enlightenment was trying to conceive a universal human subject, one possessed of rationality,” accordingly, it cannot be seen as a movement that stood against racial divisions (74). Roy Porter, in his exhaustively documented and opulent narrative, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (2000), dedicates less than one page of his 600+ page book to discourses on “racial differentiation.” He mentions Lord Kames as “one of many who wrestled with the evidence of human variety . . . hinting that blacks might be related to orang-utans and similar great apes.” Apart from this quaint passage, there is only this: “debate was heated and unresolved, and there was no single Enlightenment party line” (357).

In my essay, “Enlightenment and Global History ^[9],” I mentioned a number of other books which view the Enlightenment as a European phenomenon and, for this reason, have been the subject of criticism by current multicultural historians who feel that this movement needs to be seen as global in origins. I defended the Eurocentrism of these books while suggesting that their view of the Enlightenment as an acclamation of universal values (comprehensible and extendable outside the European ethnic homeland) was itself accountable for the idea that its origins must not be restricted to Europe. Multicultural historians have merely carried to their logical conclusion the allegedly universal ideals of the Enlightenment. The standard interpretations of Tzvetan Todorov’s In Defence of the Enlightenment (2009), Stephen Bronner’s Reclaiming the Enlightenment (2004), and Robert Louden’s, The World We Want: How and Why the Ideals of the Enlightenment Still Eludes Us (2007), equally neglect the intense interest Enlightenment thinkers showed in the division of humanity into races. They similarly pretend that, insomuch as these thinkers spoke of “reason,” “humanity,” and “equality,” they were thinking outside or above the European experience and intellectual ancestry.

What about Justin Smith, or, since he has not published in this field, the left liberal authors on this topic? There is not that much; the two best known sources are two anthologies of writings on race, namely, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (1997), edited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze; and The Idea of Race (2000), edited by Robert Bernasconi and Tommy Lott. Eze’s book gathers into a short book the most provocative writings on race by some Enlightenment thinkers (Hume, Linnaeus, Kant, Buffon, Blumenbach, Jefferson and Cuvier). This anthology, valuable as it is, is intended for effect, to show how offensively racist these thinkers were. Eze does not disprove the commonly accepted idea that Enlightenment thinkers were proponents of a universal ethos (although, as we will see below, Eze does offer elsewhere a rather acute analysis of Kant’s racism). Bernasconi’s The Idea of Race is mostly a collection of nineteenth and 20th century writings, with short excerpts from Francois Bernier, Voltaire, Kant, and Blumenbach. The books that Malik mentions (see above) which connect the Enlightenment to racism are also insufficient: George Mosse’s Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (1985) is just another book about European anti-Semitism, which directs culpability to the Enlightenment for carrying classifications and measurements of racial groups. David Goldberg’s Racist Culture (1993) is a study of the normalization of racialized discourses in the modern West in the 20th century.

There are, as we will see later, other publications which address in varying ways this topic, but, on the whole, the Enlightenment is normally seen as the most critical epoch in “mankind’s march” towards universal brotherhood. The leftist discussion of racist statements relies on the universal principles of the Enlightenment. Its goal is to uncover and challenge any idea among 18th century thinkers standing in the way of a future universal civilization. Leftist critics enjoy “exposing” white European males as racists and thereby re-appropriate the Enlightenment as their own from a cultural Marxist perspective. But what if we were to approach the racism and universalism of the Enlightenment from a New Right perspective that acknowledges straightaway the particular origins of the Enlightenment in a continent founded by Indo-European ^[10] speakers?

This would involve denying the automatic assumption that the ideas of the philosophes were articulated by mankind and commonly true for every culture. How can the ideas of the Enlightenment be seen as universal, representing the essence of humanity, if they were expressed only by European men? The Enlightenment is a product of Europe alone, and this fact alone contradicts its universality. Enlightenment thinkers are themselves to blame for this dilemma expressing their ideas as if “for men of all times and places.” Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), writing at the same time as Kant, did question the notion of a cosmopolitan world based on generic human values. He saw in the world the greatest possible variety of historical humans in different regions of the earth, in time and space. He formulated arguments against racial rankings not by questioning their scientific merits as much as their reduction of the diversity of humans to one matrix of measurement and judgment. It was illusory to postulate a universal philosophy for humanity in which the national character of peoples would disappear and each human on earth would “love each other and every one . . . being all equally polite, well-mannered and even-tempered . . . all philanthropic citizens of the world.”[1] Contrary to some interpretations, Herder was not rejecting the Enlightenment but subjecting it to critical evaluation from his own cosmopolitan education in the history and customs of the peoples of the earth. “Herder was among the men of the Enlightenment who were critical in their search for self-understanding; in short, he was part of the self-enlightening Enlightenment.”[2] He proposed a different universalism based on the actual variety and unique historical experiences and trajectories of each people (Volk). Every people had their own particular language, religion, songs, gestures, legends and customs. There was no common humanity but a division of peoples into language and ethnic groups. Each people were capable of achieving education and progress in its own way from its own cultural sources.

From this standpoint, the Enlightenment should be seen as an expression of a specific people, Europeans, made up of various nationalities but nevertheless in habitants of a common civilization who were actually conceiving the possibility of becoming good citizens of Europe at large. In the words of Edward Gibbon, Enlightenment philosophers were enlarging their views beyond their respective native countries “to consider Europe as a great republic, whose various inhabitants have attained almost the same level of politeness and cultivation” (in Gay, 13).

Beyond Herder, we also need to acknowledge that the Enlightenment inaugurated the study of race from a rational, empirical, and secular perspective consistent with its own principles. No one has been willing to admit this because this entire debate has been marred by the irrational, anti-Enlightenment dogma that race is a construct and that the postulation of a common humanity amounts to a view of human nature without racial distinctions. Contrary to Roy Porter, there was a party line, or, to be more precise, a consistently racial approach among Enlightenment thinkers. The same philosophes who announced that human nature was uniform everywhere, and united mankind as a subject capable of enlightenment, argued “in text after text . . . in the works of Hume, Diderot, Montesquieu, Kant, and many lesser lights” that men “are not uniform but are divided up into sexes, races, national characters . . . and many other categories” (Garret 2006). But because we have been approaching Enlightenment racism under the tutelage of our current belief that race is “a social myth” and that any division of mankind into races is based on malevolent “presumptions unsupported by available evidence ^[11],” we have failed to appreciate that this subject was part and parcel of what the philosophes meant by “enlightenment.” Why it is so difficult to accept the possibility that 18th century talk about “human nature” and the “unity of mankind” was less a political program for a universal civilization than a scientific program for the study of man in a way that was systematic in intent and universal in scope? It is quite legitimate, from a scientific point, to treat humans everywhere as uniformly constituted members of the same species while recognizing their racial and cultural variety across the world. Women were considered to be intrinsically different from men at the same time that they were considered to be human.

Not being an expert on the Enlightenment I found recently a book chapter titled “Human Nature” by Aaron Garrett in a two volume work, The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy ^[12] (2006). There is a section in this chapter dealing with “race and natural character”; it is short, 20 pages in a 1400 page work, but it is nevertheless well researched with close to 80 footnotes of mostly primary sources. One learns from these few pages that “in text after text” Enlightenment thinkers proposed a hierarchical view of the races. Mind you, Garrett is stereotypically liberal and thus writes of “the 18th century’s dubious contributions to the discussion of race,” startled by “the virulent denigrations of blacks . . . found in the works of Franklin, Raynal, Voltaire, Forster, and many others.” He also playacts the racial ideas of these works as if they were inconsistent with the scientific method, and makes the very unscientific error of assuming that there was an “apparent contradiction” with the Enlightenment’s notion of a hierarchy of races and its “vigorous attacks on the slave trade in the name of humanity.”

Just because most Enlightenment thinkers rejected polygenecism and asserted the fundamental (species) equality of humankind, it does not mean that they could not believe consistently in the hierarchical nature of the human races. There were polygenecists like Charles White who argued that blacks formed a race different from whites, and Voltaire who took some pleasure lampooning the vanity of the unity of mankind. But the prevailing view was that all races were members of the same human species, as all humans were capable of creating fertile offspring. Buffon, Cornelius de Pauw, Linnaeus, Blumenbach, Kant and others endorsed this view, and yet they distinctly ranked whites above other races.

Liberals have deliberately employed this view on the species unity of humanity in order to separate, misleadingly, the Enlightenment from any racial connotations. But Linnaeus did rank the races in their behavioral proclivities; and Buffon did argue that all the races descended from an original pair of whites, and that American Indians and Africans were degraded by their respective environmental habitats. De Pauw did say that Africans had been enfeebled in their intelligence and “disfigured” by their environment. Samuel Soemmering did conclude that blacks were intellectually inferior; Peter Camper and John Hunter did rank races in terms of their facial physiognomy. Blumenbach did emphasize the symmetrical balance of Caucasian skull features as the “most perfect.” Nevertheless, in accordance with the evidence collected at the time, all these scholars asserted the fundamental unity of mankind, monogenism, or the idea that all races have a common origin.

Garrett, seemingly unable to accept his own “in text after text” observation, repeats the standard line that Buffon’s and Blumenbach’s view, for example, on “the unity and structural similarity of races” precluded a racial conception. He generally evades racist phrases and arguments from Enlightenment thinkers, such as this one from Blumenbach: “I have allotted the first place to the Caucasian because this stock displays the most beautiful race of men” (Eze, 1997: 79). He makes no mention or almost ignores a number of other racialists ^[13]: Locke, Georges Cuvier, Johann Winckelmann, Diderot, Maupertuis, and Montesquieu. In the case of Kant, he says it would be “absurd” to take some “isolated remarks” he made about race as if they stood for his whole work. Kant “distinguish between character, temperament, and race in order to avoid biological determinism” for the sake of the “moral potential of the human race as a whole.”

Actually, Kant, the greatest thinker of the Enlightenment, “produced the most profound raciological thought of the 18th century.” These words come from Earl W. Count’s book This is Race, cited by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze in what is a rather good analysis of Kant’s racism showing that it was not marginal but deeply embedded in his philosophy. Eze’s analysis comes in a chapter, “The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology ^[14]” (1997). We learn that Kant elaborated his racial thinking in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View ^[15] (1798); he introduced anthropology as a branch of study to the German universities together with the study of geography, and that through his career Kant offered 72 courses in Anthropology and/or Geography, more than in logic, metaphysics and moral philosophy. Although various scholars have shown interest in Kant’s anthropology, they have neglected its relation to Kant’s “pure philosophy.”

For Kant, anthropology and geography were inseparable; geography was the study of the natural conditions of the earth and of man’s physical attributes and location as part of this earth; whereas anthropology was the study of man’s soul, his psychological and moral character, as exhibited in different places on earth. In his geography Kant addressed racial classifications on the basis of physical traits such as skin color; in his anthropology he studied the internal structures of human psychology and the manner in which these internal attributes conditioned humans as moral and rational beings.

Kant believed that human beings were different from other natural beings in their capacity for consciousness and agency. Humans were naturally capable of experiencing themselves as self-reflecting egos capable of acting morally on the basis of their own self-generated norms (beyond the determinism which conditioned all other beings in the universe). It is part of our internal human nature to think and will as persons with moral agency. This uniquely human attribute is what allows humans to transcend the dictates of nature insofar as they are able to articulate norms as commandments for their own actions freed from unconscious physical contingencies and particular customs. As rational beings, humans are capable of creating a realm of ends, and these ends are a priori principles derived not from the study of geography and anthropology but from the internal structures of the mind, transcendental reason. What Kant means by “critical reason” is the ability of humans through the use of their minds to subject everything (bodily desires, empirical reality, and customs) to the judgments of values generated by the mind, such that the mind (reason) is the author of its own moral actions.

However, it was Kant’s estimation that his geographical and anthropological studies gave his moral philosophy an empirical grounding. This grounding consisted in the acquisition of knowledge about human beings “throughout the world,” to use Kant’s words, “from the point of view of the variety of their natural properties and the differences in that feature of the human which is moral in character.”[3] ^[16] Kant was the first thinker to sketch out a geographical and psychological (or anthropological) classification of humans. He classified humans naturally and racially into white (European), yellow (Asians), black (Africans) and red (American Indians). He also classified them psychologically and morally in terms of the mores, customs and aesthetic feelings held collectively by each of the races. Non-Europeans held unreflective mores and customs devoid of critical examination “because these people,” in the words of Eze, “lack the capacity for development of ‘character,’ and they lack character presumably because they lack adequate self-consciousness and rational will.” Within Kant’s psychological classification, non-Europeans “appear to be incapable of moral maturity because they lack ‘talent,’ which is a ‘gift’ of nature.” Eze quotes Kant: “the difference in natural gifts between various nations cannot be completely explained by means of causal [external, physical, climatic] causes but rather must lie in the [moral] nature of man.” The differences among races are permanent and transcend environmental factors. “The race of the American cannot be educated. It has no motivating force; for it lacks affect and passion . . . They hardly speak, do not caress each other, care about nothing and are lazy.” “The race of the Negroes . . .  is completely the opposite of the Americans; they are full of affect and passion, very lively, talkative and vain. They can be educated but only as servants . . . ” The Hindus “have a strong degree of passivity and all look like philosophers. They thus can be educated to the highest degree but only in the arts and not in the sciences. They can never arise to the level of abstract concepts . . . The Hindus always stay the way they are, they can never advance, although they began their education much earlier.”

Eze then explains that for Kant only “white” Europeans are educable and capable of progress in the arts and sciences. They are the “ideal model of universal humanity.” In other words, only the European exhibits the distinctly human capacity to behave as a rational creature in terms of “what he himself is willing to make himself” through his own ends. He is the only moral character consciously free to choose his own ends over and above the determinism of external nature and of unreflectively held customs. Eze, a Nigerian born academic, obviously criticizes Kant’s racism, citing and analyzing additional passages, including ones in which Kant states that non-Europeans lack “true” aesthetic feelings. He claims that Kant transcendentally hypostasized his concept of race simply on the basis of his belief that skin color by itself stands for the presence or absence of the natural ‘gift’ of talent and moral ‘character’. He says that Kant’s sources of information on non-European customs were travel books and stories he heard in Konigsberg, which was a bustling international seaport. Yet, this does not mean that he was simply “recycling ethnic stereotypes and prejudices.” Kant was, in Eze’s estimation, seriously proposing an anthropological and a geographical knowledge of the world as the empirical presupposition of his critical philosophy.

With the publication of this paper (and others in recent times) it has become ever harder to designate Kant’s thinking on race as marginal. Thomas Hill and Bernard Boxill dedicated a chapter, “Kant and Race ^[17],” to Eze’s paper in which they not only accepted that Kant expressed racist beliefs, but also that Eze was successful “in showing that Kant saw his racial theory as a serious philosophical project.” But Hill and Boxill counter that Kant’s philosophy should not be seen to be inherently “infected with racism . . . provided it is suitably supplemented with realistic awareness of the facts about racism and purged from association with certain false empirical beliefs.” These two liberals, however, think they have no obligation to provide their readers with one single fact proving that the races are equal. They don’t even mention a source in their favor such as Stephen J. Gould ^[18]. They take it as a given that no one has seriously challenged the liberal view of race but indeed assume that such a challenge would be racist ipso facto and therefore empirically unacceptable. They then excuse Kant on grounds that the evidence available in his time supported his claims; but that it would be racist today to make his claims for one would be “culpable” of neglecting the evidence that now disproves racial classifications. What evidence ^[19]?

They then argue that “racist attitudes are incompatible with Kant’s basic principle of respect for humanity in each person,” and in this vein refer to Kant’s denunciation, in his words, of the “wars, famine, insurrection, treachery and the whole litany of evils” which afflicted the peoples of the world who experience the “great injustice of the European powers in their conquests.” But why do liberals always assume that claims about racial differences constitute a call for the conquest and enslavement of non-whites? They forget the 100 million killed in Russia and China, or, conversely, the fact that most Enlightenment racists were opponents of the slave trade. The bottom logic of the Hill-Boxill counterargument is that Kant’s critical philosophy was/is intrinsically incompatible with any racial hierarchies which violate the principles of human freedom and dignity, even if his racism was deeply embedded in his philosophy. But it is not; and may well be the other way around; Kant’s belief in human perfectibility, the complete development of moral agency and rational freedom, may be seen as intrinsically in favor of a hierarchical way of thinking in terms of which race is the standard bearer of the ideal of a free and rational humanity.

It is quite revealing that an expert like Garrett, and the standard interpreters of the Enlightenment generally, including your highness Doctor Habermas, would ignore Kant’s anthropology. A recent essay by Stuart Elden, “Reassessing Kant’s geography ^[20]” (2009), examines the state of this debate, noting that Kant’s geography and anthropology are still glaringly neglected in most newer works on Kant. One reason for this, Elden believes, “is that philosophers have, by and large, not known what to make of the works.” I would specify that they don’t know what to make of Kant’s racism in light of the widely accepted view that he was a liberal progenitor of human equality and cosmopolitanism. Even Elden does not know what to make of this racism, though he brings attention to some recent efforts to incorporate fully Kant’s anthropology/geography into his overall philosophy, works by Robert Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics (2000); John Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (2002), and Holly Wilson, Kant’s Pragmatic Anthropology (2006). Elden pairs off these standard (pro-Enlightenment, pro-Kant) works against the writings of leftist critics who have shown less misgivings designating Kant a racist. All of these works (leftists as well) are tainted by their unenlightened acceptance of human equality and universalism. They cannot come to terms with a Kant who proposed a critical philosophy only for the European race.

There is no space here for details; some of the main points these authors make are: Kant’s anthropology and geography lectures were part of Kant’s critical philosophy, “devoted to trying to enlighten his students more about the people and world around them in order that they might live (pragmatically as well as morally) better lives” (Louden, p. 65). The aim of these lectures, says Wilson, on the cultures and geography of the world was “to civilize young students to become ‘citizens of the world’” (p. 8). Kant was a humane teacher who cared for his students and expected them to become cognizant of the world and in this way acquire prudence and wisdom. “Kant explicitly argues that the anthropology is a type of cosmopolitan philosophy,” writes Wilson, intended to educate students to develop their rational powers so they could think for themselves and thus be free to actualize their full human potentiality (5, 115). This sounds very pleasant yet based on the infantile notion that knowledge of the world and cosmopolitanism, wisdom and prudence, are incompatible with a racial understanding. To the contrary, if Kant’s racial observations were consistent with the available evidence at the time, and if masses of new evidence have accumulated since validating his views, then a critical and worldly philosophy would require us to show understanding towards Kant’s racism, which does not mean one has to accept the subjective impressionistic descriptions Kant uses. Hiding from students the research of Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn, Charles Murray, Arthur Jensen, among others, would negate their ability to become free enlightened thinkers.

Elden brings the writings of Bernasconi and David Harvey, agreeing with them that Kant played “a crucial role in establishing the term ‘race’ as the currency within which discussions of human variety would be conducted in the 19th century.” He agrees too that Kant’s racism is “deeply problematic” to his cosmopolitanism, and that earlier responses by Kantians to swept aside his racism as “irrelevant” or “not to be taken seriously” are inadequate. Elden thinks however that scholars like Louden and Wilson have risen to the leftist challenge. But what we get from Louden is the same supposition that Kant’s philosophy can be made to meet the requirements of humanitarianism and egalitarianism simply by discarding the racist components. This constitutes a confounding of the actual Enlightenment (and the authentic Kant) with our current cultural Marxist wish to create a progressive global civilization. Louden even makes the rather doleful argument that Kant’s monogenetic view of the races, the idea that all humans originated from a common ancestor, “help us reach our collective destiny.” Kant’s monogenetic view is not an adequate way to show that he believed in a common humanity. The monogenetic view is not only consistent with the eventual differentiation of this common species into unequal races due to migration to different environments, but it is also the case that Kant specifically rejected Buffon’s claim that racial differences could be reversed with the eventual adaptation of “inferior” races to climates and environments that would induce “superior” traits; Kant insisted that the differences among races were fixed and irreversible regardless of future adaptations to different environmental settings. Louden’s additional defense of Kant by noting that he believed that all members of the human species can cultivate, civilize, and moralize themselves does not invalidate Kant’s view that whites are the model of a universal humanity.

So many otherwise intelligent scholars have willfully misled themselves into believing that Enlightenment thinkers were promoters of egalitarianism and a race-less cosmopolitan public sphere. We do live in a time of major deceptions at the highest levels of Western intellectual culture. We are continually reminded that the central idea in Kant’s conception of enlightenment is that of “submitting all claims to authority to the free examination of reason.”[4] ^[21] Yet the very ideals of the Enlightenment have been misused to preclude anyone from examining freely and rationally the question of race differences even to the point that admirers of the Enlightenment have been engaged in a ubiquitous campaign to hide, twist beyond clarity, and confound what Enlightenment thinkers themselves said about such differences. White nationalists should no longer accept the standard interpretation of the Enlightenment. They should embrace the Enlightenment and Kant as their own.

Notes

[1] Gurutz Jáuregui Bereciartu, Decline of the Nation State (1986), p. 26.

[2] Hans Adler and Ernest Menze, Eds. “Introduction,” in On World History, Johan Gottfried Herder: An Anthology (1997): p. 5

[3] These words are cited in Stuart Elden’s “Reassessing Kant’s geography,” Journal of Historical Geography (2009), a paper I discuss later.

[4] Perpetual Peace. Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal, eds. Johan Bohman and Mathias Lutz Bachman. The MIT Press, 1997.

 

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URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/05/the-enlightenment-from-a-new-right-perspective/

 

URLs in this post:

[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Kant_Portrait.jpeg

[2] essay: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/why-has-race-survived/

[3] Pandaemonium: http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2013/02/13/on-the-enlightenments-race-problem/

[4] open door policies on immigration: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenan_Malik

[5] The Melting Pot Generation: How Britain became more relaxed about race: http://www.britishfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/The-melting-pot-generation.pdf

[6] welcomed: http://www.britishfuture.org/blog/mixed-britain-will-the-census-results-change-the-way-we-think-and-talk-about-race/

[7] The British Dream: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1843548054/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=6738&creativeASIN=1843548054&linkCode=as2&tag=kenanmalikcom-21

[8] The Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-british-dream-by-david-goodhart-8578883.html

[9] Enlightenment and Global History: http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/04/enlightenment-and-global-history/

[10] Indo-European: http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2012/12/where-is-the-historical-west-part-1-of-5/

[11] presumptions unsupported by available evidence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

[12] The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy: http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-History-Eighteenth-Century-Philosophy-Haakonssen/dp/0521418542

[13] other racialists: http://www.quodlibet.net/articles/foutz-racism.shtml

[14] The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology: http://books.google.ca/books?id=moH_07971gwC&pg=PA200&lpg=PA200&dq=%E2%80%9CThe+Color+of+Reason:+The+Idea+of+%E2%80%98Race%E2%80%99+in+Kant%E2%80%99s+Anthropology%E2%80%9D&source=bl&ots=Q9-oKv3Wks&sig=QDcpHumNboU6TrfmWYfZCdjPyss&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rHSOUbebCNWz4AP87YCwDA&sqi=2&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9CThe%20Color%20of%20Reason%3A%20The%20Idea%20of%20%E2%80%98Race%E2%80%99%20in%20Kant%E2%80%99s%20Anthropology%E2%80%9D&f=false

[15] Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View: http://books.google.ca/books/about/Kant_Anthropology_from_a_Pragmatic_Point.html?id=MuS6WI_7xeYC&redir_esc=y

[16] [3]: http://www.counter-currents.comfile:///C:/Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/F9Q4VNXE/The%20Enlightenment%20from%20a%20New%20Right%20Perspective%20(1).rtf#_ftn3

[17] Kant and Race: http://www.faculty.umb.edu/lawrence_blum/courses/465_11/readings/Race_and_Racism.pdf

[18] Stephen J. Gould: http://menghusblog.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/stephen-jay-gould-myth-and-fraud/

[19] What evidence: http://www.jehsmith.com/philosophy/2008/09/phil-498629-rac.html

[20] Reassessing Kant’s geography: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305748808000613

[21] [4]: http://www.counter-currents.comfile:///C:/Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.IE5/F9Q4VNXE/The%20Enlightenment%20from%20a%20New%20Right%20Perspective%20(1).rtf#_ftn4

 

Augustin Cochin on the French Revolution

From Salon to Guillotine
Augustin Cochin on the French Revolution

By F. Roger Devlin

Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com/

Augustin Cochin
Organizing the Revolution: Selections From Augustin Cochin ^[2]
Translated by Nancy Derr Polin with a Preface by Claude Polin
Rockford, Ill.: Chronicles Press, 2007

The Rockford Institute’s publication of Organizing the Revolution marks the first appearance in our language of an historian whose insights apply not only to the French Revolution but to much of modern politics as well.

Augustin Cochin (1876–1916) was born into a family that had distinguished itself for three generations in the antiliberal “Social Catholicism” movement. He studied at the Ecole des Chartes and began to specialize in the study of the Revolution in 1903. Drafted in 1914 and wounded four times, he continued his researches during periods of convalescence. But he always requested to be returned to the front, where he was killed on July 8, 1916 at the age of thirty-nine.

Cochin was a philosophical historian in an era peculiarly unable to appreciate that rare talent. He was trained in the supposedly “scientific” methods of research formalized in his day under the influence of positivism, and was in fact an irreproachably patient and thorough investigator of primary archives. Yet he never succumbed to the prevailing notion that facts and documents would tell their own story in the absence of a human historian’s empathy and imagination. He always bore in mind that the goal of historical research was a distinctive type of understanding.

Both his archival and his interpretive labors were dedicated to elucidating the development of Jacobinism, in which he (rightly) saw the central, defining feature of the French Revolution. François Furet wrote: “his approach to the problem of Jacobinism is so original that it has been either not understood or buried, or both.”[1]

Most of his work appeared only posthumously. His one finished book is a detailed study of the first phase of the Revolution as it played out in Brittany: it was published in 1925 by his collaborator Charles Charpentier. He had also prepared (with Charpentier) a complete collection of the decrees of the revolutionary government (August 23, 1793–July 27, 1794). His mother arranged for the publication of two volumes of theoretical writings: The Philosophical Societies and Modern Democracy (1921), a collection of lectures and articles; and The Revolution and Free Thought (1924), an unfinished work of interpretation. These met with reviews ranging from the hostile to the uncomprehending to the dismissive.

“Revisionist” historian François Furet led a revival of interest in Cochin during the late 1970s, making him the subject of a long and appreciative chapter in his important study Interpreting the French Revolution and putting him on a par with Tocqueville. Cochin’s two volumes of theoretical writings were reprinted shortly thereafter by Copernic, a French publisher associated with GRECE and the “nouvelle droit.”

The book under review consists of selections in English from these volumes. The editor and translator may be said to have succeeded in their announced aim: “to present his unfinished writings in a clear and coherent form.”

Between the death of the pioneering antirevolutionary historian Hippolyte Taine in 1893 and the rise of “revisionism” in the 1960s, study of the French Revolution was dominated by a series of Jacobin sympathizers: Aulard, Mathiez, Lefevre, Soboul. During the years Cochin was producing his work, much public attention was directed to polemical exchanges between Aulard, a devotee of Danton, and his former student Mathiez, who had become a disciple of Robespierre. Both men remained largely oblivious to the vast ocean of assumptions they shared.

Cochin published a critique of Aulard and his methods in 1909; an abridged version of this piece is included in the volume under review. Aulard’s principal theme was that the revolutionary government had been driven to act as it did by circumstance:

This argument [writes Cochin] tends to prove that the ideas and sentiments of the men of ’93 had nothing abnormal in themselves, and if their deeds shock us it is because we forget their perils, the circumstances; [and that] any man with common sense and a heart would have acted as they did in their place. Aulard allows this apology to include even the very last acts of the Terror. Thus we see that the Prussian invasion caused the massacre of the priests of the Abbey, the victories of la Rochejacquelein [in the Vendée uprising] caused the Girondins to be guillotined, [etc.]. In short, to read Aulard, the Revolutionary government appears a mere makeshift rudder in a storm, “a wartime expedient.” (p. 49)

Aulard had been strongly influenced by positivism, and believed that the most accurate historiography would result from staying as close as possible to documents of the period; he is said to have conducted more extensive archival research than any previous historian of the Revolution. But Cochin questioned whether such a return to the sources would necessarily produce truer history:

Mr. Aulard’s sources—minutes of meetings, official reports, newspapers, patriotic pamphlets—are written by patriots [i.e., revolutionaries], and mostly for the public. He was to find the argument of defense highlighted throughout these documents. In his hands he had a ready-made history of the Revolution, presenting—beside each of the acts of “the people,” from the September massacres to the law of Prairial—a ready-made explanation. And it is this history he has written. (p. 65)

In fact, says Cochin, justification in terms of “public safety” or “self- defense” is an intrinsic characteristic of democratic governance, and quite independent of circumstance:

When the acts of a popular power attain a certain degree of arbitrariness and become oppressive, they are always presented as acts of self-defense and public safety. Public safety is the necessary fiction in democracy, as divine right is under an authoritarian regime. [The argument for defense] appeared with democracy itself. As early as July 28, 1789 [i.e., two weeks after the storming of the Bastille] one of the leaders of the party of freedom proposed to establish a search committee, later called “general safety,” that would be able to violate the privacy of letters and lock people up without hearing their defense. (pp. 62–63)

(Americans of the “War on Terror” era, take note.)

But in fact, says Cochin, the appeal to defense is nearly everywhere a post facto rationalization rather than a real motive:

Why were the priests persecuted at Auch? Because they were plotting, claims the “public voice.” Why were they not persecuted in Chartes? Because they behaved well there.

How often can we not turn this argument around?

Why did the people in Auch (the Jacobins, who controlled publicity) say the priests were plotting? Because the people (the Jacobins) were persecuting them. Why did no one say so in Chartes? Because they were left alone there.

In 1794 put a true Jacobin in Caen, and a moderate in Arras, and you could be sure by the next day that the aristocracy of Caen, peaceable up till then, would have “raised their haughty heads,” and in Arras they would go home. (p. 67)

In other words, Aulard’s “objective” method of staying close to contemporary documents does not scrape off a superfluous layer of interpretation and put us directly in touch with raw fact—it merely takes the self-understanding of the revolutionaries at face value, surely the most naïve style of interpretation imaginable. Cochin concludes his critique of Aulard with a backhanded compliment, calling him “a master of Jacobin orthodoxy. With him we are sure we have the ‘patriotic’ version. And for this reason his work will no doubt remain useful and consulted” (p. 74). Cochin could not have foreseen that the reading public would be subjected to another half century of the same thing, fitted out with ever more “original documentary research” and flavored with ever increasing doses of Marxism.

But rather than attending further to these methodological squabbles, let us consider how Cochin can help us understand the French Revolution and the “progressive” politics it continues to inspire.

It has always been easy for critics to rehearse the Revolution’s atrocities: the prison massacres, the suppression of the Vendée, the Law of Suspects, noyades and guillotines. The greatest atrocities of the 1790s from a strictly humanitarian point of view, however, occurred in Poland, and some of these were actually counter-revolutionary reprisals. The perennial fascination of the French Revolution lies not so much in the extent of its cruelties and injustices, which the Caligulas and Genghis Khans of history may occasionally have equaled, but in the sense that revolutionary tyranny was something different in kind, something uncanny and unprecedented. Tocqueville wrote of

something special about the sickness of the French Revolution which I sense without being able to describe. My spirit flags from the effort to gain a clear picture of this object and to find the means of describing it fairly. Independently of everything that is comprehensible in the French Revolution there is something that remains inexplicable.

Part of the weird quality of the Revolution was that it claimed, unlike Genghis and his ilk, to be massacring in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity. But a deeper mystery which has fascinated even its enemies is the contrast between its vast size and force and the negligible ability of its apparent “leaders” to unleash or control it: the men do not measure up to the events. For Joseph de Maistre the explanation could only be the direct working of Divine Providence; none but the Almighty could have brought about so great a cataclysm by means of such contemptible characters. For Augustin Barruel it was proof of a vast, hidden conspiracy (his ideas have a good claim to constitute the world’s original “conspiracy theory”). Taine invoked a “Jacobin psychology” compounded of abstraction, fanaticism, and opportunism.

Cochin found all these notions of his antirevolutionary predecessors unsatisfying. Though Catholic by religion and family background, he quite properly never appeals to Divine Providence in his scholarly work to explain events (p. 71). He also saw that the revolutionaries were too fanatical and disciplined to be mere conspirators bent on plunder (pp. 56–58; 121–122; 154). Nor is an appeal to the psychology of the individual Jacobin useful as an explanation of the Revolution: this psychology is itself precisely what the historian must try to explain (pp. 60–61).

Cochin viewed Jacobinism not primarily as an ideology but as a form of society with its own inherent rules and constraints independent of the desires and intentions of its members. This central intuition—the importance of attending to the social formation in which revolutionary ideology and practice were elaborated as much as to ideology, events, or leaders themselves—distinguishes his work from all previous writing on the Revolution and was the guiding principle of his archival research. He even saw himself as a sociologist, and had an interest in Durkheim unusual for someone of his Catholic traditionalist background.

The term he employs for the type of association he is interested in is société de pensée, literally “thought-society,” but commonly translated “philosophical society.” He defines it as “an association founded without any other object than to elicit through discussion, to set by vote, to spread by correspondence—in a word, merely to express—the common opinion of its members. It is the organ of [public] opinion reduced to its function as an organ” (p. 139).

It is no trivial circumstance when such societies proliferate through the length and breadth of a large kingdom. Speaking generally, men are either born into associations (e.g., families, villages, nations) or form them in order to accomplish practical ends (e.g., trade unions, schools, armies). Why were associations of mere opinion thriving so luxuriously in France on the eve of the Revolution? Cochin does not really attempt to explain the origin of the phenomenon he analyzes, but a brief historical review may at least clarify for my readers the setting in which these unusual societies emerged.

About the middle of the seventeenth century, during the minority of Louis XIV, the French nobility staged a clumsy and disorganized revolt in an attempt to reverse the long decline of their political fortunes. At one point, the ten year old King had to flee for his life. When he came of age, Louis put a high priority upon ensuring that such a thing could never happen again. The means he chose was to buy the nobility off. They were relieved of the obligations traditionally connected with their ancestral estates and encouraged to reside in Versailles under his watchful eye; yet they retained full exemption from the ruinous taxation that he inflicted upon the rest of the kingdom. This succeeded in heading off further revolt, but also established a permanent, sizeable class of persons with a great deal of wealth, no social function, and nothing much to do with themselves.

The salon became the central institution of French life. Men and women of leisure met for gossip, dalliance, witty badinage, personal (not political) intrigue, and discussion of the latest books and plays and the events of the day. Refinement of taste and the social graces reached an unusual pitch. It was this cultivated leisure class which provided both setting and audience for the literary works of the grand siècle.

The common social currency of the age was talk: outside Jewish yeshivas, the world had probably never beheld a society with a higher ratio of talk to action. A small deed, such as Montgolfier’s ascent in a hot air balloon, could provide matter for three years of self-contented chatter in the salons.

Versailles was the epicenter of this world; Paris imitated Versailles; larger provincial cities imitated Paris. Eventually there was no town left in the realm without persons ambitious of imitating the manners of the Court and devoted to cultivating and discussing whatever had passed out of fashion in the capital two years earlier. Families of the rising middle class, as soon as they had means to enjoy a bit of leisure, aspired to become a part of salon society.

Toward the middle of the eighteenth century a shift in both subject matter and tone came over this world of elegant discourse. The traditional saloniste gave way to the philosophe, an armchair statesman who, despite his lack of real responsibilities, focused on public affairs and took himself and his talk with extreme seriousness. In Cochin’s words: “mockery replaced gaiety, and politics pleasure; the game became a career, the festivity a ceremony, the clique the Republic of Letters” (p. 38). Excluding men of leisure from participation in public life, as Louis XIV and his successors had done, failed to extinguish ambition from their hearts. Perhaps in part by way of compensation, the philosophes gradually

created an ideal republic alongside and in the image of the real one, with its own constitution, its magistrates, its common people, its honors and its battles. There they studied the same problems—political, economic, etc.—and there they discussed agriculture, art, ethics, law, etc. There they debated the issues of the day and judged the officeholders. In short, this little State was the exact image of the larger one with only one difference—it was not real. Its citizens had neither direct interest nor responsible involvement in the affairs they discussed. Their decrees were only wishes, their battles conversations, their studies games. It was the city of thought. That was its essential characteristic, the one both initiates and outsiders forgot first, because it went without saying. (pp. 123–24)

Part of the point of a philosophical society was this very seclusion from reality. Men from various walks of life—clergymen, officers, bankers—could forget their daily concerns and normal social identities to converse as equals in an imaginary world of “free thought”: free, that is, from attachments, obligations, responsibilities, and any possibility of failure.

In the years leading up to the Revolution, countless such organizations vied for followers and influence: Amis Réunis, Philalèthes, Chevaliers Bienfaisants, Amis de la Verité, several species of Freemasons, academies, literary and patriotic societies, schools, cultural associations and even agricultural societies—all barely dissimulating the same utopian political spirit (“philosophy”) behind official pretenses of knowledge, charity, or pleasure. They “were all more or less connected to one another and associated with those in Paris. Constant debates, elections, delegations, correspondence, and intrigue took place in their midst, and a veritable public life developed through them” (p. 124).

Because of the speculative character of the whole enterprise, the philosophes’ ideas could not be verified through action. Consequently, the societies developed criteria of their own, independent of the standards of validity that applied in the world outside:

Whereas in the real world the arbiter of any notion is practical testing and its goal what it actually achieves, in this world the arbiter is the opinion of others and its aim their approval. That is real which others see, that true which they say, that good of which they approve. Thus the natural order is reversed: opinion here is the cause and not, as in real life, the effect. (p. 39)

Many matters of deepest concern to ordinary men naturally got left out of discussion: “You know how difficult it is in mere conversation to mention faith or feeling,” remarks Cochin (p. 40; cf. p. 145). The long chains of reasoning at once complex and systematic which mark genuine philosophy—and are produced by the stubborn and usually solitary labors of exceptional men—also have no chance of success in a society of philosophes (p. 143). Instead, a premium gets placed on what can be easily expressed and communicated, which produces a lowest-common-denominator effect (p. 141).

The philosophes made a virtue of viewing the world surrounding them objectively and disinterestedly. Cochin finds an important clue to this mentality in a stock character of eighteenth-century literature: the “ingenuous man.” Montesquieu invented him as a vehicle for satire in the Persian Letters: an emissary from the King of Persia sending witty letters home describing the queer customs of Frenchmen. The idea caught on and eventually became a new ideal for every enlightened mind to aspire to. Cochin calls it “philosophical savagery”:

Imagine an eighteenth-century Frenchman who possesses all the material attainments of the civilization of his time—cultivation, education, knowledge, and taste—but without any of the real well-springs, the instincts and beliefs that have created and breathed life into all this, that have given their reason for these customs and their use for these resources. Drop him into this world of which he possesses everything except the essential, the spirit, and he will see and know everything but understand nothing. Everything shocks him. Everything appears illogical and ridiculous to him. It is even by this incomprehension that intelligence is measured among savages. (p. 43; cf. p. 148)

In other words, the eighteenth-century philosophes were the original “deracinated intellectuals.” They rejected as “superstitions” and “prejudices” the core beliefs and practices of the surrounding society, the end result of a long process of refining and testing by men through countless generations of practical endeavor. In effect, they created in France what a contributor to this journal has termed a “culture of critique”—an intellectual milieu marked by hostility to the life of the nation in which its participants were living. (It would be difficult, however, to argue a significant sociobiological basis in the French version.)

This gradual withdrawal from the real world is what historians refer to as the development of the Enlightenment. Cochin calls it an “automatic purging” or “fermentation.” It is not a rational progression like the stages in an argument, however much the philosophes may have spoken of their devotion to “Reason”; it is a mechanical process which consists of “eliminating the real world in the mind instead of reducing the unintelligible in the object” (p. 42). Each stage produces a more rarified doctrine and human type, just as each elevation on a mountain slope produces its own kind of vegetation. The end result is the world’s original “herd of independent minds,” a phenomenon which would have horrified even men such as Montesquieu and Voltaire who had characterized the first societies.

It is interesting to note that, like our own multiculturalists, many of the philosophes attempted to compensate for their estrangement from the living traditions of French civilization by a fascination with foreign laws and customs. Cochin aptly compares civilization to a living plant which slowly grows “in the bedrock of experience under the rays of faith,” and likens this sort of philosophe to a child mindlessly plucking the blossoms from every plant he comes across in order to decorate his own sandbox (pp. 43–44).

Accompanying the natural “fermentation” of enlightened doctrine, a process of selection also occurs in the membership of the societies. Certain men are simply more suited to the sort of empty talking that goes on there:

young men because of their age; men of law, letters or discourse because of their profession; the skeptics because of their convictions; the vain because of their temperament; the superficial because of their [poor] education. These people take to it and profit by it, for it leads to a career that the world here below does not offer them, a world in which their deficiencies become strengths. On the other hand, true, sincere minds with a penchant for the concrete, for efficacy rather than opinion, find themselves disoriented and gradually drift away. (pp. 40–41)

In a word, the glib drive out the wise.

The societies gradually acquired an openly partisan character: whoever agreed with their views, however stupid, was considered “enlightened.” By 1776, d’Alembert acknowledged this frankly, writing to Frederick the Great: “We are doing what we can to fill the vacant positions in the Académie française in the manner of the banquet of the master of the household in the Gospel: with the crippled and lame men of literature” (p. 35). Mediocrities such as Mably, Helvétius, d’Holbach, Condorcet, and Raynal, whose works Cochin calls “deserts of insipid prose” were accounted ornaments of their age. The philosophical societies functioned like hired clappers making a success of a bad play (p. 46).

On the other hand, all who did not belong to the “philosophical” party were subjected to a “dry terror”:

Prior to the bloody Terror of ’93, in the Republic of Letters there was, from 1765 to 1780, a dry terror of which the Encyclopedia was the Committee of Public Safety and d’Alembert was the Robespierre. It mowed down reputations as the other chopped off heads: its guillotine was defamation, “infamy” as it was then called: The term, originating with Voltaire [écrasez l’infâme!], was used in the provincial societies with legal precision. “To brand with infamy” was a well-defined operation consisting of investigation, discussion, judgment, and finally execution, which meant the public sentence of “contempt.” (p. 36; cf. p. 123)

Having said something of the thought and behavioral tendencies of the philosophes, let us turn to the manner in which their societies were constituted—which, as we have noted, Cochin considered the essential point. We shall find that they possess in effect two constitutions. One is the original and ostensible arrangement, which our author characterizes as “the democratic principle itself, in its principle and purity” (p. 137). But another pattern of governance gradually takes shape within them, hidden from most of the members themselves. This second, unacknowledged constitution is what allows the societies to operate effectively, even as it contradicts the original “democratic” ideal.

The ostensible form of the philosophical society is direct democracy. All members are free and equal; no one is forced to yield to anyone else; no one speaks on behalf of anyone else; everyone’s will is accomplished. Rousseau developed the principles of such a society in his Social Contract. He was less concerned with the glaringly obvious practical difficulties of such an arrangement than with the question of legitimacy. He did not ask: “How could perfect democracy function and endure in the real word?” but rather: “What must a society whose aim is the common good do to be founded lawfully?”

Accordingly, Rousseau spoke dismissively of the representative institutions of Britain, so admired by Montesquieu and Voltaire. The British, he said, are free only when casting their ballots; during the entire time between elections there are as enslaved as the subjects of the Great Turk. Sovereignty by its very nature cannot be delegated, he declared; the People, to whom it rightfully belongs, must exercise it both directly and continuously. From this notion of a free and egalitarian society acting in concert emerges a new conception of law not as a fixed principle but as the general will of the members at a given moment.

Rousseau explicitly states that the general will does not mean the will of the majority as determined by vote; voting he speaks of slightingly as an “empirical means.” The general will must be unanimous. If the merely “empirical” wills of men are in conflict, then the general will—their “true” will—must lie hidden somewhere. Where is it to be found? Who will determine what it is, and how?

At this critical point in the argument, where explicitness and clarity are most indispensable, Rousseau turns coy and vague: the general will is “in conformity with principles”; it “only exists virtually in the conscience or imagination of ‘free men,’ ‘patriots.’” Cochin calls this “the idea of a legitimate people—very similar to that of a legitimate prince. For the regime’s doctrinaires, the people is an ideal being” (p. 158).

There is a strand of thought about the French Revolution that might be called the “Ideas-Have-Consequences School.” It casts Rousseau in the role of a mastermind who elaborated all the ideas that less important men such as Robespierre merely carried out. Such is not Cochin’s position. In his view, the analogies between the speculations of the Social Contract and Revolutionary practice arise not from one having caused or inspired the other, but from both being based upon the philosophical societies.

Rousseau’s model, in other words, was neither Rome nor Sparta nor Geneva nor any phantom of his own “idyllic imagination”—he was describing, in a somewhat idealized form, the philosophical societies of his day. He treated these recent and unusual social formations as the archetype of all legitimate human association (cf. pp. 127, 155). As such a description—but not as a blueprint for the Terror—the Social Contract may be profitably read by students of the Revolution.

Indeed, if we look closely at the nature and purpose of a philosophical society, some of Rousseau’s most extravagant assertions become intelligible and even plausible. Consider unanimity, for example. The society is, let us recall, “an association founded to elicit through discussion [and] set by vote the common opinion of its members.” In other words, rather than coming together because they agree upon anything, the philosophes come together precisely in order to reach agreement, to resolve upon some common opinion. The society values union itself more highly than any objective principle of union. Hence, they might reasonably think of themselves as an organization free of disagreement.

Due to its unreal character, furthermore, a philosophical society is not torn by conflicts of interest. It demands no sacrifice—nor even effort—from its members. So they can all afford to be entirely “public spirited.” Corruption—the misuse of a public trust for private ends—is a constant danger in any real polity. But since the society’s speculations are not of this world, each philosophe is an “Incorruptible”:

One takes no personal interest in theory. So long as there is an ideal to define rather than a task to accomplish, personal interest, selfishness, is out of the question. [This accounts for] the democrats’ surprising faith in the virtue of mankind. Any philosophical society is a society of virtuous, generous people subordinating political motives to the general good. We have turned our back on the real world. But ignoring the world does not mean conquering it. (p. 155)

(This pattern of thinking explains why leftists even today are wont to contrast their own “idealism” with the “selfish” activities of businessmen guided by the profit motive.)

We have already mentioned that the more glib or assiduous attendees of a philosophical society naturally begin exercising an informal ascendancy over other members: in the course of time, this evolves into a standing but unacknowledged system of oligarchic governance:

Out of one hundred registered members, fewer than five are active, and these are the masters of the society. [This group] is composed of the most enthusiastic and least scrupulous members. They are the ones who choose the new members, appoint the board of directors, make the motions, guide the voting. Every time the society meets, these people have met in the morning, contacted their friends, established their plan, given their orders, stirred up the unenthusiastic, brought pressure to bear upon the reticent. They have subdued the board, removed the troublemakers, set the agenda and the date. Of course, discussion is free, but the risk in this freedom minimal and the “sovereign’s” opposition little to be feared. The “general will” is free—like a locomotive on its tracks. (pp. 172–73)

 Cochin draws here upon James Bryce’s American Commonwealth and Moisey Ostrogorski’s Democracy and the Organization of Political Parties. Bryce and Ostrogorski studied the workings of Anglo-American political machines such as New York’s Tammany Hall and Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham Caucus. Cochin considered such organizations (plausibly, from what I can tell) to be authentic descendants of the French philosophical and revolutionary societies. He thought it possible, with due circumspection, to apply insights gained from studying these later political machines to previously misunderstand aspects of the Revolution.

One book with which Cochin seems unfortunately not to have been familiar is Robert Michels’ Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, published in French translation only in 1914. But he anticipated rather fully Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy,” writing, for example, that “every egalitarian society fatally finds itself, after a certain amount of time, in the hands of a few men; this is just the way things are” (p. 174). Cochin was working independently toward conclusions notably similar to those of Michels and Gaetano Mosca, the pioneering Italian political sociologists whom James Burnham called “the Machiavellians.” The significance of his work extends far beyond that of its immediate subject, the French Revolution.

The essential operation of a democratic political machine consists of just two steps, continually repeated: the preliminary decision and the establishment of conformity.

First, the ringleaders at the center decide upon some measure. They prompt the next innermost circles, whose members pass the message along until it reaches the machine’s operatives in the outermost local societies made up of poorly informed people. All this takes place unofficially and in secrecy (p. 179).

Then the local operatives ingenuously “make a motion” in their societies, which is really the ringleaders’ proposal without a word changed. The motion passes—principally through the passivity (Cochin writes “inertia”) of the average member. The local society’s resolution, which is now binding upon all its members, is with great fanfare transmitted back towards the center.

The central society is deluged with identical “resolutions” from dozens of local societies simultaneously. It hastens to endorse and ratify these as “the will of the nation.” The original measure now becomes binding upon everyone, though the majority of members have no idea what has taken place. Although really a kind of political ventriloquism by the ringleaders, the public opinion thus orchestrated “reveals a continuity, cohesion and vigor that stuns the enemies of Jacobinism” (p. 180).

In his study of the beginnings of the Revolution in Brittany, Cochin found sudden reversals of popular opinion which the likes of Monsieur Aulard would have taken at face value, but which become intelligible once viewed in the light of the democratic mechanism:

On All Saints’ Day, 1789, a pamphlet naïvely declared that not a single inhabitant imagined doing away with the privileged orders and obtaining individual suffrage, but by Christmas hundreds of the common people’s petitions were clamoring for individual suffrage or death. What was the origin of this sudden discovery that people had been living in shame and slavery for the past thousand years? Why was there this imperious, immediate need for a reform which could not wait a minute longer?

Such abrupt reversals are sufficient in themselves to detect the operation of a machine. (p. 179)

The basic democratic two-step is supplemented with a bevy of techniques for confusing the mass of voters, discouraging them from organizing opposition, and increasing their passivity and pliability: these techniques include constant voting about everything—trivial as well as important; voting late at night, by surprise, or in multiple polling places; extending the suffrage to everyone: foreigners, women, criminals; and voting by acclamation to submerge independent voices (pp. 182–83). If all else fails, troublemakers can be purged from the society by ballot:

This regime is partial to people with all sorts of defects, failures, malcontents, the dregs of humanity, anyone who cares for nothing and finds his place nowhere. There must not be religious people among the voters, for faith makes one conscious and independent. [The ideal citizen lacks] any feeling that might oppose the machine’s suggestions; hence also the preference for foreigners, the haste in naturalizing them. (pp. 186–87)

(I bite my lip not to get lost in the contemporary applications.)

The extraordinary point of Cochin’s account is that none of these basic techniques were pioneered by the revolutionaries themselves; they had all been developed in the philosophical societies before the Revolution began. The Freemasons, for example, had a term for their style of internal governance: the “Royal Art.” “Study the social crisis from which the Grand Lodge [of Paris Freemasons] was born between 1773 and 1780,” says Cochin, “and you will find the whole mechanism of a Revolutionary purge” (p. 61).

Secrecy is essential to the functioning of this system; the ordinary members remain “free,” meaning they do not consciously obey any authority, but order and unity are maintained by a combination of secret manipulation and passivity. Cochin relates “with what energy the Grand Lodge refused to register its Bulletin with the National Library” (p. 176). And, of course, the Freemasons and similar organizations made great ado over refusing to divulge the precise nature of their activities to outsiders, with initiates binding themselves by terrifying oaths to guard the sacred trust committed to them. Much of these societies’ appeal lay precisely in the natural pleasure men feel at being “in” on a secret of any sort.

In order to clarify Cochin’s ideas, it might be useful to contrast them at this point with those of the Abbé Barruel, especially as they have been confounded by superficial or dishonest leftist commentators (“No need to read that reactionary Cochin! He only rehashes Barruel’s conspiracy thesis”).

Father Barruel was a French Jesuit living in exile in London when he published his Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism in 1797. He inferred from the notorious secretiveness of the Freemasons and similar groups that they must have been plotting for many years the horrors revealed to common sight after 1789—conspiring to abolish monarchy, religion, social hierarchy, and property in order to hold sway over the ruins of Christendom.

Cochin was undoubtedly thinking of Barruel and his followers when he laments that

thus far, in the lives of these societies, people have only sought the melodrama—rites, mystery, disguises, plots—which means they have strayed into a labyrinth of obscure anecdotes, to the detriment of the true history, which is very clear. Indeed the interest in the phenomenon in question is not in the Masonic bric-a-brac, but in the fact that in the bosom of the nation the Masons instituted a small state governed by its own rules. (p. 137)

For our author, let us recall, a société de pensée such as the Masonic order has inherent constraints independent of the desires or intentions of the members. Secrecy—of the ringleaders in relation to the common members, and of the membership to outsiders—is one of these necessary aspects of its functioning, not a way of concealing criminal intentions. In other words, the Masons were not consciously “plotting” the Terror of ’93 years in advance; the Terror was, however, an unintended but natural outcome of the attempt to apply a version of the Mason’s “Royal Art” to the government of an entire nation.

Moreover, writes Cochin, the peculiar fanaticism and force of the Revolution cannot be explained by a conspiracy theory. Authors like Barruel would reduce the Revolution to “a vast looting operation”:

But how can this enthusiasm, this profusion of noble words, these bursts of generosity or fits of rage be only lies and play-acting? Could the Revolutionary party be reduced to an enormous plot in which each person would only be thinking [and] acting for himself while accepting an iron discipline? Personal interest has neither such perseverance nor such abnegation. Throughout history there have been schemers and egoists, but there have only been revolutionaries for the past one hundred fifty years. (pp. 121–22)

And finally, let us note, Cochin included academic and literary Societies, cultural associations, and schools as sociétés de pensée. Many of these organizations did not even make the outward fuss over secrecy and initiation that the Masons did.

 

By his own admission, Cochin has nothing to tell us about the causes of the Revolution’s outbreak:

I am not saying that in the movement of 1789 there were not real causes—[e.g.,] a bad fiscal regime that exacted very little, but in the most irritating and unfair manner—I am just saying these real causes are not my subject. Moreover, though they may have contributed to the Revolution of 1789, they did not contribute to the Revolutions of August 10 [1792, abolition of the monarchy] or May 31 [1793, purge of the Girondins]. (p. 125)

With these words, he turns his back upon the entire Marxist “class struggle” approach to understanding the Revolution, which was the fundamental presupposition of much twentieth-century research.

The true beginning of the Revolution on Cochin’s account was the announcement in August 1788 that the Estates General would be convoked for May 1789, for this was the occasion when the men of the societies first sprang into action to direct a real political undertaking. With his collaborator in archival work, Charpentier, he conducted extensive research into this early stage of the Revolution in Brittany and Burgundy, trying to explain not why it took place but how it developed. This material is omitted from the present volume of translations; I shall cite instead from Furet’s summary and discussion in Interpreting the French Revolution:

In Burgundy in the autumn of 1788, political activity was exclusively engineered by a small group of men in Dijon who drafted a “patriotic” platform calling for the doubling of the Third Estate, voting by head, and the exclusion of ennobled commoners and seigneurial dues collectors from the assemblies of the Third Estate. Their next step was the systematic takeover of the town’s corporate bodies. First came the avocats’ corporation where the group’s cronies were most numerous; then the example of that group was used to win over other wavering or apathetic groups: the lower echelons of the magistrature, the physicians, the trade guilds. Finally the town hall capitulated, thanks to one of the aldermen and pressure from a group of “zealous citizens.” In the end, the platform appeared as the freely expressed will of the Third Estate of Dijon. Promoted by the usurped authority of the Dijon town council, it then reached the other towns of the province.[2]

. . . where the same comedy was acted out, only with less trouble since the platform now apparently enjoyed the endorsement of the provincial capital. Cochin calls this the “snowballing method” (p. 84).

An opposition did form in early December: a group of nineteen noblemen which grew to fifty. But the remarkable fact is that the opponents of the egalitarian platform made no use of the traditional institutions or assemblies of the nobility; these were simply forgotten or viewed as irrelevant. Instead, the nobles patterned their procedures on those of the rival group: they thought and acted as the “right wing” of the revolutionary party itself. Both groups submitted in advance to arbitration by democratic legitimacy. The episode, therefore, marked not a parting of the ways between the supporters of the old regime and adherents of the new one, but the first of the revolutionary purges. Playing by its enemies’ rules, the opposition was defeated by mid-December.[3]

In Brittany an analogous split occurred in September and October rather than December. The traditional corporate bodies and the philosophical societies involved had different names. The final purge of the nobles was not carried out until January 1789. The storyline, however, was essentially the same. [4]  La Révolution n’a pas de patrie (p. 131).

The regulations for elections to the Estates General were finally announced on January 24, 1789. As we shall see, they provided the perfect field of action for the societies’ machinations.

The Estates General of France originated in the fourteenth century, and were summoned by the King rather than elected. The first two estates consisted of the most important ecclesiastical and lay lords of the realm, respectively. The third estate consisted not of the “commoners,” as usually thought, but of the citizens of certain privileged towns which enjoyed a direct relation with the King through a royal charter (i.e., they were not under the authority of any feudal lord). The selection of notables from this estate may have involved election, although based upon a very restricted franchise.

In the Estates General of those days, the King was addressing

the nation with its established order and framework, with its various hierarchies, its natural subdivisions, its current leaders, whatever the nature or origin of their authority. The king acknowledged in the nation an active, positive role that our democracies would not think of granting to the electoral masses. This nation was capable of initiative. Representatives with a general mandate—professional politicians serving as necessary intermediaries between the King and the nation—were unheard of. (pp. 97–98)

Cochin opposes to this older “French conception” the “English and parliamentary conception of a people of electors”:

A people made up of electors is no longer capable of initiative; at most, it is capable of assent. It can choose between two or three platforms, two or three candidates, but it can no longer draft proposals or appoint men. Professional politicians must present the people with proposals and men. This is the role of parties, indispensable in such a regime. (p. 98)

In 1789, the deputies were elected to the States General on a nearly universal franchise, but—in accordance with the older French tradition—parties and formal candidacies were forbidden: “a candidate would have been called a schemer, and a party a cabal” (p. 99).

The result was that the “electors were placed not in a situation of freedom, but in a void”:

The effect was marvelous: imagine several hundred peasants, unknown to each other, some having traveled twenty or thirty leagues, confined in the nave of a church, and requested to draft a paper on the reform of the realm within the week, and to appoint twenty or thirty deputies. There were ludicrous incidents: at Nantes, for example, where the peasants demanded the names of the assembly’s members be printed. Most could not have cited ten of them, and they had to appoint twenty-five deputies.

Now, what actually happened? Everywhere the job was accomplished with ease. The lists of grievances were drafted and the deputies appointed as if by enchantment. This was because alongside the real people who could not respond there was another people who spoke and appointed for them. (p. 100)

These were, of course, the men of the societies. They exploited the natural confusion and ignorance of the electorate to the hilt to obtain delegates according to their wishes. “From the start, the societies ran the electoral assemblies, scheming and meddling on the pretext of excluding traitors that they were the only ones to designate” (p. 153).

“Excluding”—that is the key word:

The society was not in a position to have its men nominated directly [parties being forbidden], so it had only one choice: have all the other candidates excluded. The people, it was said, had born enemies that they must not take as their defenders. These were the men who lost by the people’s enfranchisement, i.e., the privileged men first, but also the ones who worked for them: officers of justice, tax collectors, officials of any sort. (p. 104)

This raised an outcry, for it would have eliminated nearly everyone competent to represent the Third Estate. In fact, the strict application of the principle would have excluded most members of the societies themselves. But pretexts were found for excepting them from the exclusion: the member’s “patriotism” and “virtue” was vouched for by the societies, which “could afford to do this without being accused of partiality, for no one on the outside would have the desire, or even the means, to protest” (p. 104)—the effect of mass inertia, once again.

Having established the “social mechanism” of the revolution, Cochin did not do any detailed research on the events of the following four years (May 1789–June 1793), full of interest as these are for the narrative historian. Purge succeeded purge: Monarchiens, Feuillants, Girondins. Yet none of the actors seemed to grasp what was going on:

Was there a single revolutionary team that did not attempt to halt this force, after using it against the preceding team, and that did not at that very moment find itself “purged” automatically? It was always the same naïve amazement when the tidal wave reached them: “But it’s with me that the good Revolution stops! The people, that’s me! Freedom here, anarchy beyond!” (p. 57)

During this period, a series of elective assemblies crowned the official representative government of France: first the Constituent Assembly, then the Legislative Assembly, and finally the Convention. Hovering about them and partly overlapping with their membership were various private and exclusive clubs, a continuation of the pre-Revolutionary philosophical societies. Through a gradual process of gaining the affiliation of provincial societies, killing off rivals in the capital, and purging itself and its daughters, one of these revolutionary clubs acquired by June 1793 an unrivalled dominance. Modestly formed in 1789 as the Breton Circle, later renamed the Friends of the Constitution, it finally established its headquarters in a disused Jacobin Convent and became known as the Jacobin Club:

Opposite the Convention, the representative regime of popular sovereignty, thus arises the amorphous regime of the sovereign people, acting and governing on its own. “The sovereign is directly in the popular societies,” say the Jacobins. This is where the sovereign people reside, speak, and act. The people in the street will only be solicited for the hard jobs and the executions.

[The popular societies] functioned continuously, ceaselessly watching and correcting the legal authorities. Later they added surveillance committees to each assembly. The Jacobins thoroughly lectured, browbeat, and purged the Convention in the name of the sovereign people, until it finally adjourned the Convention’s power. (p. 153)

Incredibly, to the very end of the Terror, the Jacobins had no legal standing; they remained officially a private club. “The Jacobin Society at the height of its power in the spring of 1794, when it was directing the Convention and governing France, had only one fear: that it would be ‘incorporated’—that it would be ‘acknowledged’ to have authority” (p. 176). There is nothing the strict democrat fears more than the responsibility associated with public authority.

The Jacobins were proud that they did not represent anyone. Their principle was direct democracy, and their operative assumption was that they were “the people.” “I am not the people’s defender,” said Robespierre; “I am a member of the people; I have never been anything else” (p. 57; cf. p. 154). He expressed bafflement when he found himself, like any powerful man, besieged by petitioners.

Of course, such “direct democracy” involves a social fiction obvious to outsiders. To the adherent “the word people means the ‘hard core’ minority, freedom means the minority’s tyranny, equality its privileges, and truth its opinion,” explains our author; “it is even in this reversal of the meaning of words that the adherent’s initiation consists” (p. 138).

But by the summer of 1793 and for the following twelve months, the Jacobins had the power to make it stick. Indeed, theirs was the most stable government France had during the entire revolutionary decade. It amounted to a second Revolution, as momentous as that of 1789. The purge of the Girondins (May 31–June 2) cleared the way for it, but the key act which constituted the new regime, in Cochin’s view, was the levée en masse of August 23, 1793:

[This decree] made all French citizens, body and soul, subject to standing requisition. This was the essential act of which the Terror’s laws would merely be the development, and the revolutionary government the means. Serfs under the King in ’89, legally emancipated in ’91, the people become the masters in ’93. In governing themselves, they do away with the public freedoms that were merely guarantees for them to use against those who governed them. Hence the right to vote is suspended, since the people reign; the right to defend oneself, since the people judge; the freedom of the press, since the people write; and the freedom of expression, since the people speak. (p. 77)

An absurd series of unenforceable economic decrees began pouring out of Paris—price ceilings, requisitions, and so forth. But then, mirabile dictu, it turned out that the decrees needed no enforcement by the center:

Every violation of these laws not only benefits the guilty party but burdens the innocent one. When a price ceiling is poorly applied in one district and products are sold more expensively, provisions pour in from neighboring districts, where shortages increase accordingly. It is the same for general requisitions, censuses, distributions: fraud in one place increases the burden for another. The nature of things makes every citizen the natural enemy and overseer of his neighbor. All these laws have the same characteristic: binding the citizens materially to one another, the laws divide them morally.

Now public force to uphold the law becomes superfluous. This is because every district, panic-stricken by famine, organizes its own raids on its neighbors in order to enforce the laws on provisions; the government has nothing to do but adopt a laissez-faire attitude. By March 1794 the Committee of Public Safety even starts to have one district’s grain inventoried by another.

This peculiar power, pitting one village against another, one district against another, maintained through universal division the unity that the old order founded on the union of everyone: universal hatred has its equilibrium as love has its harmony. (pp. 230–32; cf. p. 91)

 The societies were, indeed, never more numerous, nor better attended, than during this period. People sought refuge in them as the only places they could be free from arbitrary arrest or requisitioning (p. 80; cf. p. 227). But the true believers were made uneasy rather than pleased by this development. On February 5, 1794, Robespierre gave his notorious speech on Virtue, declaring: “Virtue is in the minority on earth.” In effect, he was acknowledging that “the people” were really only a tiny fraction of the nation. During the months that ensued:

there was no talk in the Societies but of purges and exclusions. Then it was that the mother society, imitated as usual by most of her offspring, refused the affiliation of societies founded since May 31. Jacobin nobility became exclusive; Jacobin piety went from external mission to internal effort on itself. At that time it was agreed that a society of many members could not be a zealous society. The agents from Tournan sent to purge the club of Ozouer-la-Ferrière made no other reproach: the club members were too numerous for the club to be pure. (p. 56)

Couthon wrote from Lyon requesting “40 good, wise, honest republicans, a colony of patriots in this foreign land where patriots are in such an appalling minority.” Similar supplications came from Marseilles, Grenoble, Besançon; from Troy, where there were less than twenty patriots; and from Strasbourg, where there were said to be fewer than four—contending against 6,000 aristocrats!

The majority of men, remaining outside the charmed circle of revolutionary virtue, were:

“monsters,” “ferocious beasts seeking to devour the human race.” “Strike without mercy, citizen,” the president of the Jacobins tells a young soldier, “at anything that is related to the monarchy. Don’t lay down your gun until all our enemies are dead—this is humanitarian advice.” “It is less a question of punishing them than of annihilating them,” says Couthon. “None must be deported; [they] must be destroyed,” says Collot. General Turreau in the Vendée gave the order “to bayonet men, women, and children and burn and set fire to everything.” (p. 100)

Mass shootings and drownings continued for months, especially in places such as the Vendée which had previously revolted. Foreigners sometimes had to be used: “Carrier had Germans do the drowning. They were not disturbed by the moral bonds that would have stopped a fellow countryman” (p. 187).

Why did this revolutionary regime come to an end? Cochin does not tell us; he limits himself to the banal observation that “being unnatural, it could not last” (p. 230). His death in 1916 saved him from having to consider the counterexample of Soviet Russia. Taking the Jacobins consciously as a model, Lenin created a conspiratorial party which seized power and carried out deliberately the sorts of measures Cochin ascribes to the impersonal workings of the “social mechanism.” Collective responsibility, mutual surveillance and denunciation, the playing off of nationalities against one another—all were studiously imitated by the Bolsheviks. For the people of Russia, the Terror lasted at least thirty-five years, until the death of Stalin.

Cochin’s analysis raises difficult questions of moral judgment, which he does not try to evade. If revolutionary massacres were really the consequence of a “social mechanism,” can their perpetrators be judged by the standards which apply in ordinary criminal cases? Cochin seems to think not:

“I had orders,” Fouquier kept replying to each new accusation. “I was the ax,” said another; “does one punish an ax?” Poor, frightened devils, they quibbled, haggled, denounced their brothers; and when finally cornered and overwhelmed, they murmured “But I was not the only one! Why me?” That was the helpless cry of the unmasked Jacobin, and he was quite right, for a member of the societies was never the only one: over him hovered the collective force. With the new regime men vanish, and there opens in morality itself the era of unconscious forces and human mechanics. (p. 58)

Under the social regime, man’s moral capacities get “socialized” in the same way as his thought, action, and property. “Those who know the machine know there exist mitigating circumstances, unknown to ordinary life, and the popular curse that weighed on the last Jacobins’ old age may be as unfair as the enthusiasm that had acclaimed their elders,” he says (p. 210), and correctly points out that many of the former Terrorists became harmless civil servants under the Empire.

It will certainly be an unpalatable conclusion for many readers. I cannot help recalling in this connection the popular outrage which greeted Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem back in the 1960s, with its similar observations.

But if considering the social alienation of moral conscience permits the revolutionaries to appear less evil than some of the acts they performed, it also leaves them more contemptible. “We are far from narratives like Plutarch’s,” Cochin observes (p. 58); “Shakespeare would have found nothing to inspire him, despite the dramatic appearance of the situations” (p. 211).

Not one [of the Jacobins] had the courage to look [their judges] in the eye and say “Well, yes, I robbed, I tortured and I killed lawlessly, recklessly, mercilessly for an idea I consider right. I regret nothing; I take nothing back; I deny nothing. Do as you like with me.” Not one spoke thus—because not one possessed the positive side of fanaticism: faith. (p. 113)

Cochin’s interpretive labors deserve the attention of a wider audience than specialists in the history of the French Revolution. The possible application of his analysis to subsequent groups and events is great indeed, although the possibility of their misapplication is perhaps just as great. The most important case is surely Russia. Richard Pipes has noted, making explicit reference to Cochin, that Russian radicalism arose in a political and social situation similar in important respects to France of the ancien régime. On the other hand, the Russian case was no mere product of social “mechanics.” The Russian radicals consciously modeled themselves on their French predecessors. Pipes even shows how the Russian revolutionaries relied too heavily on the French example to teach them how a revolution is “supposed to” develop, blinding themselves to the situation around them. In any case, although Marxism officially considered the French Revolution a “bourgeois” prelude to the final “proletarian” revolution, Russian radicals did acknowledge that there was little in which the Jacobins had not anticipated them. Lenin considered Robespierre a Bolshevik avant la lettre.

The rise of the “Academic Left” is another phenomenon worth comparing to the “development of the enlightenment” in the French salons. The sheltered environment of our oversubsidized university system is a marvelous incubator for the same sort of utopian radicalism and cheap moral posturing.

Or consider the feminist “Consciousness Raising” sessions of the 1970’s. Women’s “personal constructs” (dissatisfaction with their husbands, feelings of being treated unfairly, etc.) were said to be “validated by the group,” i.e., came to be considered true when they met with agreement from other members, however outlandish they might sound to outsiders. “It is when a group’s ideas are strongly at variance with those in the wider society,” writes one enthusiast, “that group validation of constructs is likely to be most important.”[5] Cochin explained with reference to the sociétés de pensée exactly the sort of thing going on here.

Any serious attempt to extend and apply Cochin’s ideas will, however, have to face squarely one matter on which his own statements are confused or even contradictory.

Cochin sometimes speaks as if all the ideas of the Enlightenment follow from the mere form of the société de pensée, and hence should be found wherever they are found. He writes, for example, “Free thought is the same in Paris as in Peking, in 1750 as in 1914” (p. 127). Now, this is already questionable. It would be more plausible to say that the various competing doctrines of radicalism share a family resemblance, especially if one concentrates on their negative aspects such as the rejection of traditional “prejudices.”

But in other passages Cochin allows that sociétés de pensée are compatible with entirely different kinds of content. In one place (p. 62) he even speaks of “the royalist societies of 1815” as coming under his definition! Stendhal offers a memorable fictional portrayal of such a group in Le rouge et le noir, part II, chs. xxi–xxiii; Cochin himself refers to the Mémoires of Aimée de Coigny, and may have had the Waterside Conspiracy in mind. It would not be at all surprising if such groups imitated some of the practices of their enemies.

But what are we to say when Cochin cites the example of the Company of the Blessed Sacrament? This organization was active in France between the 1630s and 1660s, long before the “Age of Enlightenment.” It had collectivist tendencies, such as the practice of “fraternal correction,” which it justified in terms of Christian humility: the need to combat individual pride and amour-propre. It also exhibited a moderate degree of egalitarianism; within the Company, social rank was effaced, and one Prince of the Blood participated as an ordinary member. Secrecy was said to be the “soul of the Company.” One of its activities was the policing of behavior through a network of informants, low-cut evening dresses and the sale of meat during lent being among its special targets. Some fifty provincial branches accepted the direction of the Paris headquarters. The Company operated independently of the King, and opponents referred to it as the cabale des devots. Louis XIV naturally became suspicious of such an organization, and officially ordered it shut down in 1666.

Was this expression of counter-reformational Catholic piety a société de pensée? Were its members “God’s Jacobins,” or its campaign against immodest dress a “holy terror”? Cochin does not finally tell us. A clear typology of sociétés de pensée would seem to be necessary before his analysis of the philosophes could be extended with any confidence. But the more historical studies advance, the more difficult this task will likely become. Such is the nature of man, and of history.

Notes

[1] François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 173.

[2] Furet, 184.

[3] Furet, 185.

[4] Furet, 186–90.

[5] http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/01psa.html ^[3]

Source: TOQ, vol. 8, no. 2 (Summer 2008)

 

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