Isolation of Government
None of these classes are engaged in the process of “government”. The economic life of the nation is dictated by its administration that exercises absolute fiscal and judicial authority. The path of least resistance is always to lay the heaviest burden of the nation’s fiscal needs on “the people”, the politically invisible and unheard class. The nobles and middle class can make their interests heard in Paris, which by this time has become like an ancient city-state exercising dominion over and exacting tribute from its surrounding regions, but no voice speaks for “the people”. And the people silently seethe.
Through generations of political absenteeism, the French have become wholly unfamiliar with the practical knowledge of governing themselves.
Meanwhile Paris had become the center of Western civilization. Arts, literature, political philosophy, the cultural fruits of intellect flourished. Among many luminaries France produced Montesquieu (The Spirit of the Laws, published 1750) and Rousseau (The Social Contract, published 1762), perhaps somewhat representative, respectively, of the “rational enlightenment” and “Romantic” trains of thought that transported 18th century Paris society to heights of delicious fancy.
Everybody believed in the natural goodness of human nature and the perfectibility of man. Romantics idealized the “noble savage” whom the European explorers and colonists had encountered in the New World (much to the detriment of the savages, though polite society need not brook the expression of such unpleasantries).
Montesque and the American Constitution
America’s constitution is patterned after the tripartite division of legislative, executive and judicial powers advocated by Montesquieu, who innocently enough believed that this balance of powers constituted an “incorruptible” system of government. Which may have been true if selfless men of “enlightened reason” occupied its offices. But which was ridiculously naïve to a political realist.
In an 1864 book by Maurice Joly titled, “The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu”, Machiavelli welcomes the recently arrived Montesquieu to Hades where they await the Resurrection. Montesquieu regales Machiavelli with the brilliance of his “incorruptible” system of tripartite government, where the three branches of government act as effective brakes on each other’s ambitions to power. Machiavelli proceeds to dismay Montesquieu with his devious and readily effected plan to corrupt Montesquieu’s ‘perfect’ government, and finally horrifies Montesquieu with the revelation that his beloved Republican France has ALREADY descended back into Imperial tyranny.
Realpolitik
Joly’s subtitle is, Humanitarian Despotism and the Conditions of Modern Tyranny. Libertarians know to be wary of Greeks, and governments, bearing “gifts”. But most people are not lovers of liberty and they would rather have the loot. So Machiavelli trumps Montesquieu in the game of realpolitik.
Rousseau, who would later desert his Paris family for a ‘natural’ life in the South Pacific, believed that the invention of metallurgy was the beginning of the fall of man from our previously ‘natural perfection’. The Biblical Garden of Eden remains a powerful image of paradise lost in the minds of anti-industrial “naturalists” into our own time.
From Idealism to Less Than Ideal Action
The nobility and monarchy actively encouraged what they believed to be harmless and intellectually delightful philosophical speculations on the natural rights and equality of all men, though these idealistic dreams were deeply subversive to the aristocratic worldview that justified the very existence of nobles and monarchs and their privileges. They didn’t see, de Tocqueville writes, that political “theories” that inhabit and enliven the hearts and minds of a people will ultimately become demands for political “actions”.
de Toqueville reports that toward the middle of the 18th century these “literary men” became the leading politicians of the country. They designed rational systems of law-bound government to be peopled by men of “enlightened reason“. Their utter lack of experience with actual government by and of real people blinded them to the much less fortunate realities of human vice and weakness seeking power for its self-interested purposes, so they dazzled the French intelligentsia with their wonderful schemes unburdened by practical political considerations. In the absence of constraining knowledge, everything was possible. de Tocqueville writes,
“The political systems of these writers were so varied that it would be wholly impossible to reconcile them together, and mould them all into a theory of government.
Still, setting details aside, and looking only to main principles, it is readily discerned that all these authors concurred in one central point, from whence their particular notions diverged. They all started with the principle that it was necessary to substitute simple and elementary rules, based on reason and natural law, for the complicated and traditional customs which regulated society in their time.
It will be ascertained, on close inquiry, that the whole of the political philosophy of the eighteenth century is really comprised in that single notion.
It was not new. For three thousand years it had been floating backward and forward through the minds of men without finding a resting-place. How was it that it contrived to engross the attention of all the authors of the day just at this time? How did it happen that, instead of lying buried in the brain of philosophers, as it had done so often, it became so absorbing a passion among the masses, that idlers were daily heard discussing abstract theories on the nature of human society, and the imaginations of women and peasants were fired by notions of new systems? How came it that literary men, without rank, or honors, or riches, or responsibility, or power, monopolized political authority, and found themselves, though strangers to the government, the only leading politicians of the day? I desire to answer these queries briefly, and to show how facts which seem to belong to the history of our literature alone exercised an influence over our revolution that was both extraordinary and terrible, and is still felt in our time.
It was not chance which led the philosophers of the eighteenth century to advocate principles so opposed to those on which society rested in their day. They were naturally suggested by the spectacle they had before them. They had constantly in view a host of absurd and ridiculous privileges, whose burden increased daily, while their origin was growing more and more indistinct; hence they were driven toward notions of natural equality. They beheld as many irregular and strange old institutions, all hopelessly jarring together and unsuited to the time, but clinging to life long after their virtue had departed; and they naturally felt disgusted with all that was ancient and traditional, and-each taking his own reason for his guide-they sought to rebuild society on some wholly new plan.
These writers were naturally tempted to indulge unreservedly in abstract and general theories of government. They had no practical acquaintance with the subject; their ardors were undampened by actual experience; they knew of no existing facts which stood in the way of desirable reforms; they were ignorant of the dangers inseparable from the most necessary revolutions, and dreamed of none. There being no approach toward political liberty, the business of government was not only ill understood, it was not understood at all. Having no share in it themselves, and seeing nothing that was done by those who had, these writers lacked the superficial education which the habit of political freedom imparts even to those who take no part in politics. They were hence bolder in their projects of innovation, fonder of theory and system, more prone to despise the teaching of antiquity and to rely on individual reason than is usually the case with speculative writers on politics.
Ignorance of the same kind insured their success among the masses. If the French people had still participated in the government by means of States-General, if they had still taken part in the administration of the public business in Provincial Assemblies, it is certain that they would have received the lucubrations of these authors with more coolness; their business habits would have set them on their guard against pure theory.”
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