The Public Philosophy > Chapter VII. The Adversaries of Liberal Democracy > Liberalism and Jacobinism
We are living in a time of massive popular counterrevolution against liberal democracy. It is a reaction to the failure of the West to cope with the miseries and anxieties of the Twentieth Century. The liberal democracies have been tried and found wanting--found wanting not only in their capacity to govern successfully in this period of wars and upheavals, but also in their ability to defend and maintain the political philosophy that underlies the liberal way of life.
If we go back to the beginnings of the modern democratic movements in the eighteenth century, we can distinguish two diverging lines of development. The one is a way of progress in liberal constitutional democracy. The other is a morbid course of development into totalitarian conditions.
One of the first to realize what was happening was Alexis de Tocqueville. He foresaw that the 'democratic nations are menaced' by a 'species of oppression ...unlike anything that ever before existed in the world." But what is more, he discerned the original difference between the healthy and the morbid development of democracy. In I833, after his voyage in America, where he had foreseen the threat of mass democracy, de Tocqueville visited England. There he was impressed with the contrast between the attitude of the English aristocracy, which was just in the way of accommodating itself to a newly enfranchised mass of voters, and the French noblesse of the Ancien Régime. He went on to reflect that
…from an early time a fundamental difference existed between the behavior of the governing classes in England and in France. The nobility, the cornerstone of medieval society, revealed in England a peculiar ability to merge and mix with other social groups, while in France it tended, on the contrary, to close its ranks and preserve its original purity of birth.
In the earlier Middle Ages all Western Europe had a similar social system. But some time in the Middle Ages, one cannot say exactly when, a change pregnant with tremendous consequences occurred in the British Isles and in the British Isles only--the English nobility developed into an open aristocracy while the continental noblesse stubbornly remained within the rigid limits of a caste.
This, observes de Tocqueville, is the most revolutionary fact in English history, and he claims to have been the first to observe its importance and to grasp its full significance. It is, truly, a deep and illuminating observation on the conditions which are favorable to a healthy and progressive evolution of democracy and on the conditions which make it morbid and degenerative. The crucial difference is between what we might call enfranchisement by assimilation into the governing class, as exemplified in England, and, per contra, enfranchisement by the overthrow and displacing of the governing class as exemplified in France. In the one the government remains but becomes more responsible and more responsive; in the other, the government is overthrown with the liquidation of the governing class.
Although the two ways of evolution appear to have the same object a society with free institutions under popular government--they are radically different and they arrive at radically different ends.
The first way, that of assimilation, presumes the existence of a state which is already constitutional in principle, which is under laws that are no longer arbitrary, though they may be unjust and unequal. Into this constitutional state more and more people are admitted to the governing class and to the voting electorate. The unequal and the unjust laws are revised until eventually all the people have equal opportunities to enter the government and to be represented. Broadly speaking, this has been the working theory of the British movement towards a democratic society at home and also in the Commonwealth and Empire. This, too, was the working theory of the principal authors of the American Constitution, and this was how --though few of them welcomed it --they envisaged the enfranchisement of the whole adult population.
The other way is that of the Jacobin revolution. The people rise to power by overthrowing the ruling class and by liquidating its privileges and prerogatives. This is the doctrine of democratic revolution which was developed by French thinkers in the eighteenth century and was put into practice by the Jacobin party in the French Revolution. In its English incarnation the doctrine became known as Radicalism. In America, though it had its early disciples, notably Tom Paine, not until the era of the Founding Fathers was over, not until the era of Andrew Jackson, did the Jacobin doctrine become the popular political creed of the American democracy.
The Jacobin philosophy rests on a view of human society which the encyclopedist, Holbach, stated in this way:
We see on the face of the globe only incapable, unjust sovereigns, enervated by luxury, corrupted by flattery, depraved through unpunished license, and without talent, morals, or good qualities,
What Holbach had, in fact, seen on the face of the globe was the French court then the most powerful in Europe and the paragon of all the lesser courts. When he was writing, it would have been difficult for anyone on the continent of Europe to imagine a king and a ruling class who were not, like those he saw living at the Court of Versailles, exclusive and incompetent, corrupt, unteachable and unconcerned.
'Would you know the story in brief, of almost all our wretchedness?' asked Diderot. 'Here it is. There existed the natural man, and into this man was introduced an artificial man, whereupon a civil war arose within him lasting through life ...If you propose to become a tyrant over him.... do your best to poison him with a theory of morals against nature; impose every kind of fetter on him; embarrass his movements with a thousand obstacles; place phantoms around him to frighten him. Would you see him happy and free? Do not meddle with his affairs.... I appeal to every civil, religious and political institution; examine these closely, and, if I am not mistaken, you will find the human species, century after century, subject to a yoke which a mere handful of knaves chose to impose on it.... Be wary of him who seeks to establish order; to order is to obtain the mastery of others by giving them trouble.
If we compare the mood of this passage with that of the Declaration of Independence, the work of the other brand of revolutionists, we must be struck by the nihilism of Diderot. Diderot had been exasperated to a blind destructive despair by the rigidity of the French governing caste. He could not feel that there was anything to be done with any government, judging by the one he suffered under, except to abolish it.
Jefferson and his colleagues, on the other hand, were interested in government. They were in rebellion because they were being denied the rights of representation and of participation which they, like other subjects of the same King, would have enjoyed had they lived in England. The Americans were in rebellion against the 'usurpations' of George III, not against authority as such but against the abuse of authority. The American revolutionists had in fact participated in the colonial governments. They intended to play leading parts, as indeed they did, in the new government. Far from wishing to overthrow the authority of government, or to deny and subvert, as Diderot did, the moral foundations of authority, they went into rebellion first in order to gain admittance into, and then to take possession of, the organs of government.
When they declared that 'a prince (George III) whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people,' they were not saying that there was no one who was fit to be the ruler of a free people. They were imbued with the English idea that the governing class must learn to share its special prerogatives by admitting new members. The American Revolutionists were themselves the new members who had been unjustly, in fact illegally, excluded from the government of the colonies. They themselves meant to govern the colonies after they had overthrown the government of the King. They were not nihilists to whom the revolutionary act of overthrowing the sovereign is the climax and consummation of everything.