How the French Revolution explains the modern tyranny of the state imposed on the atomized individual.
In this week’s edition of “The Tuesday,” Kevin Williamson laments the outsized role that the 1930s plays in our historical imagination. For some time, conservatives have tended to look at every geopolitical foe as a potential Fourth or Fifth Reich, and progressives have similarly seen every economic downturn as an opportunity to foist a new New Deal on the country. Our analogical referents for current events seem to be drawn almost exclusively from that — admittedly fateful — decade.
But by fixating on the ’30s, Kevin argues that we risk missing more apt historical analogies for our present discontents. He encourages conservatives to take another look back at the French Revolution, noting that “comparison with 1789 remains terribly apt.”
The passage that Kevin quotes from François Furet’s Interpreting the French Revolution accurately summarizes the spirit of 1789 as one demanding the absolute politicization of everything. Furet notes that, under the sway of Jacobinism, “all personal problems and all moral or intellectual matters have become political” and that a conviction takes roots that “there is no human misfortune not amenable to political solution.” Consequently, “since everything can be known and changed, there is a perfect fit between action, knowledge, and morality. That is why the revolutionary militants identified their private lives with their public ones and with the defense of their ideas.”
This belief — that every private, personal problem is ultimately a political one that could conceivably be solved if the right rulers were put in place — has run amok in modern America, as Kevin rightly…
Read the full article at www.nationalreview.com
