The French Revolution and Our Western Crisis

May-June 1989

By James W. Skillen

Washington—This year marks the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution—an earth-shaking event that many consider the real beginning of modern times. However, the debate still rages over the meaning of that Revolution.

For example, a new book by Simon Schama, entitled Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York, Knopf, argues that the Revolution was actually a counterrevolution. It was a horrible, violent disruption of the development of democracy and capitalism which the aristocratic classes had already begun to promote.

Whatever the historians finally conclude about chronology, the Revolution represented some of the most destructive, blind, and pretentious forces that have, in fact, come to mark the modern world. It was fired by the demand for complete human autonomy and opposition to God, as Dutch historian Groen van Prinsterer explained in the 1840s.

This is not to say that everything emerging after the Revolution was bad or destructive. Nor is it to imply that the old order, the ancien regime, should have been maintained as it was. Much that was unjust in France and elsewhere required reform and radical change. Nevertheless, from a Christian point of view we should recognize that the Revolution was the source of many of modernity's failures and bondages.

Revolution East and West

For many modernists, however, the only real threat to democracy and capitalism is communism. And since communism is showing many signs of failure today, we can celebrate the French Revolution and modern progress in the West without undue self-criticism. This attitude marks Zbigniew Brzezinski's new book, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (New York, Scribner's).

Why mention Brzezinski here? The reason is that the Russian Revolution of 1917 did not arise in a vacuum. It too was inspired, in part, by the French Revolution. Thus, while criticism of communism is certainly justified, Brzezinski's self-congratulatory attitude about the West is hardly appropriate. He seems to be unconscious of the common underlying spirit of modernity that infused both the French and Russian Revolutions.

When, for example, Brzezinski urges the West to keep on promoting the cause of human rights, he does not pause to ask whether we have a sufficiently strong basis to sustain the protection of human rights today. After all, the French Revolutionaries slaughtered tens of thousands of people in the name of advancing the "rights of man." That was supposedly the foundation of modern European democracy. The Russian Revolutionaries slaughtered millions of people in the name of the "rights of man"—that is, the rights of those people who should be allowed to build the new socialist order. Hitler slaughtered millions of people in the name of the nationalist rights of one race of people. Modern nationalism was also born out of the French Revolution.

My point is that the collapse of Hitler's nationalist fascism or of Stalin's and Gorbachev's communism does not leave a healthy West standing firmly and solidly on a democratic and capitalist base without any cracks. The French Revolution was more powerful and influential than that. The West today is still in conflict, still in dispute over the foundations of society.

Society, Politics, and Economy

In a recent article in Commentary magazine (December, 1988, pp. 21-26), Jerry Z. Muller considers the movements of our times, including the rapid rate of change in the Soviet Union and China, and notes that people everywhere are now thinking of capitalism not socialism as the "wave of the future."

But don't jump too quickly to the conclusion that this is all for the good, says Muller. While historical evidence shows that market capitalism 'seems to be a necessary condition of political democracy," it is not sufficient to guarantee democracy. Muller raises a caution for those who think that current economic reforms in the Soviet Union and China will lead inevitably to greater democracy. Experience makes it "painfully clear that a capitalist economy is compatible with a wide range of politics, many of them neither liberal, nor democratic, nor pacific."

Moreover, something even more important than the relation between democracy and capitalism must also be considered. According to Muller, the broader issue is the shape and quality of human life within all our non-market and non-political institutions such as families, churches, schools, and voluntary organizations. "A recurrent theme in modern social thought," he says, "is that capitalism tends to replace small, intimate communities based on custom and shared belief with more anonymous forms of association based upon law and the pursuit of self-interest: status is replaced by contract."

Therefore, just as capitalism is not a sufficient condition for democracy, so capitalism, even in a democratic context, does not assure human well-being in all other respects. "It is no wonder, then," says Muller, "that the fate of non-market institutions in contemporary capitalist societies has reemerged as a central concern of conservatives, liberals, and radicals alike." There is more to human culture and society than the economic and political institutions.

Ideologies and Visions of Life

What Muller's article does is to drive us back to some fundamental questions about the meaning of human life in our modern, differentiated society two centuries after the French Revolution forced modernity onto Europe. Simple slogans in support of capitalism, democracy, freedom, and the "rights of man," do not take us very far. We have to ask, "What forms of capitalism, what forms of democracy, and what kinds of differentiated institutions are healthy and just?"

Here, then, I want to bring in one more contemporary author, the well-known social commentator and scholar, Thomas Sowell, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California. In his 1987 book, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles (New York: William Morrow), Sowell argues that different basic "visions" of life control our approach to decision making and our thinking on all kinds of political, economic, and cultural matters.

Sowell's argument hinges on his initial, basic distinction between what he calls a "constrained vision" and an "unconstrained vision" of human life and society.

The constrained vision, says Sowell, is one held by people like Adam Smith who simply accepted the fact that human life and the world are bound by constraints, and thus not able to be radically changed.

The unconstrained vision, on the other hand, has been held by people like Adam Smith's contemporary, William Godwin, who believed that the world and human nature can be reformed, made better, and even radically changed.

Sowell, however, does not seem to recognize that his dichotomy between constrained and unconstrained visions does not reach significantly beyond the boundaries of modern humanism. He is correct that basic visions, ideologies, and worldviews do guide thought and action. But there are other visions of life in addition to the two he discusses. In fact, Sowell's two visions represent only the two poles of conflict within modern humanism.

What do I mean by the conflict or tension within modern humanism? The Renaissance and early stages of Enlightenment humanism lifted very high an ideal of scientific reason. Human knowledge unfettered by ecclesiastical dogma and spiritual myth was supposed to lead human beings into freedom and maturity because such knowledge would give control over nature. This ideal of knowledge as power was not one of "unconstrained" human freedom beyond nature but rather one of complete intellectual supremacy over nature based on the mastery of nature's inner "constraints."

By about the time of the French Revolution, however, an inner dilemma in this "science ideal" was becoming clear to many humanists. The dilemma was this: if complete scientific mastery is the key to human power and freedom, then what happens when scientists conclude that human nature itself is completely subject to the laws of nature which the sciences are mastering? What happens, of course, is that human freedom evaporates. If human nature is also subject to the laws of nature, and if intellectual mastery of nature reaches completion, then human power gained by means of scientific knowledge leads to the complete reduction of human freedom to the control of science. Human freedom turns out to be an illusion.

In response to this crisis in the science ideal, many thinkers tried to discover and affirm a core of human autonomy that is not subject to the laws of nature. A new kind of "freedom ideal" emerged that sought to express human self-sufficiency through political nationalism, individual anarchy, various art forms, and in other ways. What is most important to see at this point is that the original, modernist ideal of an autonomous humanity unbounded by God or the church or anything beyond humanity itself, was the driving force behind both the "science ideal" and the later "freedom ideal."

Needed: A Christian Vision

Today we do indeed face the challenge of conflicting visions of society. Political and economic struggles do arise from deeper ideological conflicts. Sowell's book helps us to understand the inner tension between two different streams in modern humanism, but it does not help us to find a Christian standpoint. For that kind of philosophy we need help from those who accept divine sovereignty over this creation and who believe that human beings are creatures called by God to fulfill many different responsibilities in the highly differentiated world in which we live.