PART THREE
THE IDEOLOGICAL LEGACY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Ten
Practical Reason in the Revolution: Kant's Dialogue with the French Revolution

Ferenc Fehér

Was there a genuine dialogue, that is, a conversation of two parties turning toward each other, between Immanuel Kant and the actors of the French Revolution? Or is it only posterity that constructs reciprocity between merely symbolic interlocutors who were in fact simply in a relation of simultaneity?

Decades after the French Revolution, representative commentators assumed a direct relationship between Kant's philosophy and the mainstream, sometimes even the extreme poles, of the revolutionary process. The irreverent yet profound parallel drawn by Heine between the two audacious petits bourgeois, Maximilien Robespierre, who challenged a king, and Immanuel Kant, who challenged God, is typical of this kind of understanding.^[1] Marx, in an aperçu that was never further elaborated by him, termed Kant's philosophy the adequate German reaction to the French Revolution (a remark, by the way, which was not necessarily a compliment on the part of Marx).^[2] But by now we know that the adequate reception in France of Kant's philosophy took place only decades after the Revolution.^[3] It is an equally well-known fact that Kant, ever true to his life-style, never made the slightest effort, unlike Humboldt or August Wilhelm Schlegel, to visit the scene of the great event. Even less did he commit himself to an active engagement in the style of Georg Forster. As Hannah Arendt correctly remarked, Kant always remained in the position of the spectator.^[4]

The First Great Political Philosopher of Modernity

And yet, we can draw the unambiguous conclusion from the sparse facts at our disposal that some of the central actors of the Revolution not only heard vague rumors about the crucial significance of Kant's philosophy but even guessed that the Revolution, which in Robespierre's words intended to real-

ize the promises of philosophy, needed Kant's theory, or a confrontation with this theory, for its own special purposes. In letters written to a friend in 1794–1795, Abbé Grégoire, the actual head of the constitutional clergy and one of the earlier founding fathers of the important, socially and religiously radical Le cercle social , made inquiries about Kant's book on religion. (He obviously had in mind the Religion Within Reason Alone .) And he knew what he was looking for. Grégoire needed a theory that would serve as the grounding for his complex strategy of a Christian democracy which fought against the terrorism of the earlier periods of the Revolution, against the relapse pure and simple into the prerevolutionary hierarchic structure of the Gallican church (which was the end result of the Napoleonic concordat), and against the barely concealed atheism of the leaders of the French Republic between the tenth of Thermidor and the eighteenth of Brumaire. Grégoire correctly guessed that Kant's theory, banned in Prussia, could serve as the foundation of such a position. What he could not realize without actually reading the book was that for Kant even Christian democracy was an unacceptable degree of institutionalization of the "invisible church."^[5]

Sieyès, who along with Condorcet was one of the greatest theoretical minds among the protagonists of the French revolutionary drama, expressed an even livelier interest in Kant's philosophy. When Wilhelm Humboldt visited Paris in 1798, Sieyès, then for a moment back again at the apogee of political power and gravely concerned with designing the proper constitution for the Revolution after so many constitutional crises, organized a colloquium for Humboldt in which Destutt de Tracy, Cabanis, and other idéologues participated. The purpose of the seminar was to get an authentic summary of Kant's philosophy from someone who seemed to be the adequate interpreter. When the semiofficial Moniteur published an enthusiastic review of Kant's book on perpetual peace in 1796, it characterized the German philosopher as a fellow republican. From this source alone Sieyès must have been aware that Kant not only had a general theory of knowledge and morals but also a political philosophy.^[6] And despite the apparent fiasco of the encounter, the theoretical instinct of the great revolutionary statesman was correct again. Throughout his active career from the convocation of the Assembly of the Three Estates to the eighteenth of Brumaire, Sieyès had been constantly preoccupied with how best to establish the republican institutions. Their essence was for Sieyès, just as for Kant, not a matter of technical arrangement. Both of them were convinced that the appellation of the form of the state is secondary. What is of primary relevance for the Republic are the actual forms of the channels through which genuine power is exercised.

The most famous encounter between Kant and the theoretical-political actors of the Revolution was his public debate in 1798 with Benjamin Constant over the "supposed right of telling a lie motivated by philanthropy," as

Kant characterized Constant's position. It is almost never appreciated that this exchange had a political dimension as well as an ethical one. Constant intended, with his famous parallel between the liberty of the ancients and that of the moderns, the former illiberal, the latter liberal, to provide a theoretical framework for the Republic that could serve as a safeguard against both Jacobin terror and a (new or old) kind of personal power. Paradoxically, neither of the polemicists realized that they shared a common premise: the criticism of ancient democracies as illiberal establishments. For Constant, Kant's ethical rigorism was doubly suspect. He believed he detected in what he regarded as Kant's collapsing of the ethical dimension into legality the vestiges of a terrorisic moral rigor similar to the ruthless style of ancient city-states and the "democratic" zeal of Robespierre , which had just recently been overthrown in Thermidor but which could return any time. A moral rigor of this kind, Constant was convinced, gave no latitude for the individual's self-defense against merciless laws. Furthermore, Constant was deeply troubled by Kant's very example: our absolute moral duty, regardless of consequences, to truthfully answer the question of a prospective murderer who comes to our house to make inquiries into the whereabouts of an innocent victim. For who could not grasp immediately that Kant's example, wittingly or unwittingly, referred to a situation that had been typical of the Jacobin terror, its atmosphere of constant house searches and quick executions? Without discussing the merit of the issue, I would only state that of the two positions that clashed here, Constant's thesis represented the mainstream liberal, habeas corpus principle according to which one owes obligations only to such laws as have been (directly or indirectly) endorsed by him or by his representatives. Constant further contended that truthfulness, a moral duty, implied no legal obligations. But for Kant, in spite of certain important similarities between his theory and Constant's political philosophy, there was no difference between the rigor of moral and of legal obligations: both barred exceptions.^[7]

The encounter of representative French revolutionary actors with Immanuel Kant's philosophy ended on a truly bizarre note. In 1801 Napoleon, then still nominally the first consul of the Republic, summoned Villers, the first French Kant expert. In his usually curt manner Napoleon assigned Villers to make a concise and comprehensible summary of the famous German theory within a short time. The result, which was predictable from the confrontation between the philosopher of perpetual peace and the founder of modern militarism, the thinker for whom the mere pragmatics of politics were worthless and the supreme Realpolitiker , was disastrous. Napoleon deleted Kant from his personal list of VIPs and publicly called him yet another sciarlatano in the style of Cagliostro.^[8]

Although these representative examples perhaps prove that "the French Revolution" was ready and ripe for a dialogue with Kant's philosophy, there

is no need for extensive demonstration of such a readiness on the part of Kant even though he referred explicitly and critically only once to a statesman of the revolution: Danton.^[9] Such a demonstration is superfluous because, put simply, it was the French Revolution that activated the latent political dimension of Kant's philosophy . There could be no doubt whatsoever that in Kant's view, even prior to the French Revolution, the proper position of the philosophical faculty had been "on the left," as he was to put it later in The Strife of the Faculties . For this, it suffices to read "What Is Enlightenment?" But the new critical philosophy born in the Copernican turn had not extended its legislation to the public sphere proper before 1789.

However, the outbreak of the Revolution, this "crucial fact of nature," imposed the obligation on the philosopher to publicly draw the political conclusions from his critical philosophy. And Kant, who was often accused of "philistinism," lived up to this obligation to the full, albeit sometimes in a thinly veiled manner that never deceived the authorities.^[10] Despite the enormous general theoretical results of the works written in the 1790s, The Metaphysics of Morals, On the Common Saying, Religion Within Reason Alone, On Perpetual Peace , and The Strife of the Faculties can be characterized as major works of modern political philosophy.

The reader who is familiar with the history of the French Revolution will find in these works a continuous philosophical commentary by Kant on almost all crucial junctures and decisions of revolutionary France. He was deeply concerned with the fundamental problem of the "legality" of a revolution, and, within the issue of legality, with the ways the Assembly of the Three Estates had transformed itself into a Constituent Assembly. He had a philosophical and highly critical opinion on the relationship between the king (as the repository of the executive power) and the Constituent Assembly, on the manner of practically suspending the king's executive power by the Assembly, and on the unification (which, Kant hoped, was only temporary) of the chief executive and the supreme legislative powers in one body. He had a deep and balanced opinion on the reform of the Gallican church, one that neither the revolutionaries nor the church dignitaries would have been happy with, but which had an important message for both contending factions. Everyone is familiar with his flat condemnation of the trial of Louis XVI which has never ceased to be the topic of heated debates up until today. Kant also had a passionate interest in the constitutional problems and the incessant constitutional crises of the Revolution.

In this dialogue of Kant's with the Revolution, which is not a mere aggregate of aperçus but which sprang from profound meditation on the problems posed by the Revolution under the primacy of practical reason , a completely modern type of political thought emerged. Immanuel Kant, and not Hegel, who forged a methodological axiom from this attitude, was the first great political philosopher of modernity. In marked contrast to most of his predecessors,

Kant did not design political—philosophical blueprints for future action from past models. Rather, through constant thought experiments, Kant transformed the present process understood as history into the raw material as well as a treasure trove of unresolved dilemmas for political philosophy. The Kantian attitude of the observer was not one of au-dessus-mêlée . Rather it was the stance of a new political philosophy and the end of the typical approach of political thought of the Enlightenment. Kant the spectator was far from impartial. But he contended that both the attitudes of a fully committed militant and that of the philosopher—king (one that he explicitly rejected and which was merely the obverse position of the king who reigns philosophically) were incompatible with a political philosophy under the primacy of practical reason.^[11]

Res Publica Noumenon

The two problems firmly posited for investigation by Kant's political philosophy were, first, the fact of the Revolution and its relationship to a new republican legal order as a dilemma and, second, the possible structure of the Republic . Concerning the characterization of the "fact of the revolution," a surprising harmony prevailed between Kant and Robespierre. In the trial of the king, the lawyer of Arras tore to pieces the legal double-talk of his colleagues in the Convention with a single brutal gesture. Enough of the legal farce, he brusquely demanded. This is not a trial, you are not judges, Louis is not an accused at the bar. You are revolutionary statesmen making an emergency decision on behalf of the Revolution. Taking an emergency measure of this kind means, Robespierre added, that we temporarily return to the state of nature in the act of destroying our enemy.^[12] Kant would have greatly appreciated (and perhaps he did) Robespierre's truthfulness, because this was precisely what Kant believed to be the truth about the fact of Revolution, and because truthfulness was an unconditional duty in his philosophy. With a brusqueness similar to Robespierre's, Kant stated in On the Common Saying that the revolution is status naturalis .^[13]

But at this point, the philosopher—observer and the revolutionary politician (who was also an amateurish philosopher of history) radically parted ways. The recognition that the Revolution meant a (presumably temporary) relapse into the state of nature prescribed a single course of action for Robespierre: those who make a revolution have to apply revolutionary measures regardless of the costs. For Kant, the recognition of the "natural character of the fact of the revolution" generated a deep, sometimes tragic, but for posterity always stimulating dilemma. On the one hand, the Revolution, as our relapse in the state of nature, as a "natural event," appeared to him as a cataclysm with a Janus-face in the phenomenal world. One of its faces, the one appearing in status naturalis , was horrifying. However, the well-known

dictum from The Strife of the Faculties shows us the smiling face of the same complex phenomenon. In this often-quoted place Kant was occupied in his usual manner with the problem of whether there is a single factum brutum , like the existence of mathematics for our faculty of knowledge or that of the moral law for our morality, that makes it possible to elaborate a theory of progress . And he found his fact in "this great public event," which, as a proof of the progress in nature , authorizes us to believe in the possibility of progress in the moral world.^[14] For the Revolution had proven indisputably that there is something in our phenomenal nature which rebels against despotism and shows affinity with freedom.^[15]

However, for Kant, unlike Robespierre, there was no simple transition from the natural to the moral—legal world, and he would have thrown away the maxim of Marat about "the tyranny of freedom" as a contemptible exercise in revolutionary Jesuitism. Even those who interpret Kant as a classic of liberal thought will find difficulties with his categorical denial of the right of a "lawful revolution" or rebellion. Indeed, resistance of any kind to a tyrannical authority, which is an accepted tenet of all liberal theories of government, is disallowed. This rejection of the theoretical possibility of a "lawful revolution" was repeated ad nauseam in his political writings of the 1790s.^[16] Kant emphasized that even the authority of that paragon of liberal transitions, the "glorious revolution" of 1688, had been based on a lie. The "constitutional agreement" on which the British regime had been resting until his own days, Kant remarked, had conveniently forgotten about the rebellion, and thus the usurpation of power, which had brought the new order of things to pass.^[17] If we add Kant's equally well-known proviso affirming the authority of the Revolution once it has consolidated itself into a legal order, an authority that is beyond appeal to the same extent as was its predecessor,^[18] Kant appears either as a legal stickler or a thinker of paradoxes, which would have been for him a brutal insult. And I find the thesis of Kant's self-censorship, as a supposed solution of the puzzle, more of a slander than an explanation.^[19] For Immanuel Kant could remain stubbornly silent when he was not able to speak what he regarded as truth.

Without being in agreement with Kant in the slightest, for I certainly do not believe that there is any moral—legal authority that can forbid people to rebel against tyranny, Kant's arguments seem to me neither inconsistent nor lacking in moral and political lessons. For Kant, the moral and legal worlds constituted a unity under the primacy of morality. Both were based on our freedom, and at the centerpoint of both there was duty, but in two different ways. Morality was the stricter domain because there our obligations were internal . Respect for the moral law, for the goal- and not just the meanscharacter of the other, had to be the actor's sole motive for the recognition of his act as properly moral. Legality allowed for more latitude. Here the legislator was not concerned with the actor's motives, only with his unconditional

compliance with the law. As a result of this unconditionality, Kant never ceased to emphasize the coercive (Zwang ) character of even those laws that had been passed in the most free agreement. As long as they are valid, we are subjected to them, we are subjects of the law . Only if we observe them unconditionally, that is, without making exceptions, do we show respect for the (good) maxims. Only thus can we raise ourselves from the mere phenomenal—natural to the noumenal, the properly human, genuinely free level.

This in itself would not be an absolute argument against the Revolution as an act of disrupting the chain of legality. For a revolution could also be a constitutive act, one of establishing new and better laws. And Kant was perfectly aware of both the despotic character of most laws up to his time and of the possibility and promise held out by new republican laws qua the completion of our ethisch—bürgerlich existence.

Moreover, his conception did not exclude absolutely, that is, for reasons of principle , the possibility of a "lawful revolution." There are at least three scenarios for this unlikely event, each of them having a certain kind of historical plausibility. The first is the abdication of the absolute prince on behalf of the "republic ." A strong argument can be made for Kant's interpretation of the transition in France from the Assembly of the Estates to the Constituent Assembly as the realization of this scenario. In terms of this version, Louis freely abdicated from his reign as absolute prince by the act of acquiescing to rule as a "caretaker sovereign," that is, the supreme executive. (This could be conceived of as a free decision by Louis despite the symbolic violent gesture of the masses, the storming of the Bastille, since he could have chosen, together with his brothers, the option of an immediate emigration.) A second scenario is the Posa—Philip story with a happy ending: the moral and political edification of the despotic ruler under the impact of the good advice given by a republican friend (where, it can be argued, entering into friendship, an equal and symmetrically reciprocal relationship with someone, is the prince's virtual starting point of self-reformation, his first "republican" act). And, in fact, this scenario was acted out in real life a few years later, in the court of Alexander I of Russia. But the fact is that the story in real life ended as negatively as in the theater. The difference was that in life it was also lacking in tragic grandeur. This result verified not only Schiller's but Kant's own skepticism toward the second possible Kantian scenario. For Kant invested incomparably more faith in public than private edification. A third, logical version of the "lawful revolution" was the possibility that an absolute prince, facing the overwhelming forces of a foreign invasion, turns to the populace and expects such miracles from the citizens ' zeal as could not be expected from the subjects' devotion. On this basis, the prince would grant them some kind of a constitution, which is what happened under the "hundred days' rule" of Napoleon.

But skeptical as Kant always remained concerning our phenomenal na-

ture, he foresaw at this point the more than latent possibility of a great and perhaps irretrievable historical catastrophe. In his Anthropology , he made a four-tiered typology of all possible human regimes that could be established after we had left the state of "wildness" tantamount to "independence from laws." This stage is confinement to the natural domain, a not yet properly human existence. The types are the following: anarchy (law and freedom without power); despotism (law and power without freedom); republic (a combined rule of power, law, and freedom); and finally barbarism (power qua violence without either law or freedom).^[20] For Kant only two of these scenarios, the despotic, our long common past state of affairs, and the republican, our future and possible emancipation from tutelage, may have been the genuinely historic types of societal order. He was convinced that we could neither relapse into "wildness" (since we had long lost our innocent ignorance) nor lastingly live in anarchy.

But how about barbarism? According to my hypothesis, the lasting rule of power as permanent violence without laws and freedom suddenly appeared on Kant's historical horizon under the impact of the French revolutionary drama. He witnessed the consecutive waves of creating and then almost immediately bending or shelving laws, a process that would have generated the atmosphere of an operetta had it not been for the blood dripping from the actors. Kant saw enthusiasm publicly degrading itself into a pathological passion and solemn declarations about universal freedom linked with the immediate and flagrant violation of the liberties of whole human groups. He watched as the centrality of freedom was replaced with that of happiness (a change of principles that he particularly detested and from which he expected the worst possible outcome).^[21] He heard the dithyrambs chanted collectively in praise of violence and the relapse in the state of nature which was confirmed by deliberately plunging revolutionary France into war. For Kant, this was the penultimate crime a free people could commit against itself and the rest of the world. The sight of all this filled Kant with the gloomy foreboding that the Revolution could destroy itself. This perspective was not excessively frightening for Kant since he believed that that "great public event," the fact of progress in nature, would never be forgotten.^[22] What he dreaded most was the example set by the moral suicide of a nation that perpetuated lawlessness and raised the violation of the maxim to the rank of virtue. In Kant's terms this choosing of the evil maxim could uproot even the bases of freedom in itself and would offer the worst possible example for the world.

It was Kant's great disciple, Schiller, who, in his celebrated Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man , almost simultaneously with the master's publicly raised doubts and fears, developed the radically modern category of barbarism as the pathology of our culture.^[23] And Schiller only drew the conclusions from Kant's premises in his pathomorphology. The Revolution had failed,

Schiller concluded more apodictically than Kant himself would have spoken, because it had brought into the political arena not free men but the helots of our civilization. The demons of unsatisfied needs and the cultural cripples of the modern division of labor with their one-sided skills rushed on the scene to be endlessly manipulated by the demagogues. In Schiller's understanding, barbarism has nothing to do with the savagery of the primitives. It is a modern malaise, one that takes the refined form of pathological enthusiasm and feeds on evil maxims. Once the coercive force of law was removed for a single moment (here Schiller and Kant were on the same wavelength), there was a greater chance for our lasting and premeditated relapse into the "state of nature" than for the creation of the free republic. And a lasting and premeditated relapse into the state of nature is tantamount to barbarism . Hence Kant's inflexible verdict over every act of rebellion as high treason that deserves the ultimate penalty. Only when such an act is capable of organizing itself into the rule of law does it, by an unintended dialectic of history, deserve the same unquestionable authority as did its predecessors.

Those who grasp Kant's deep-seated anxiety about barbarism as the possible future of our civilization, an anxiety triggered by the scenes of the Revolution, will have a better understanding of what Marx called die deutsche Misère than did the German left of the 1840s, which coined the term and explained the phenomenon as the result of the "spinelessness" of the German bourgeoisie and of the philosophers who were supposed to represent this bourgeoisie.

On this basis, we can also better understand Kant's categorical condemnation of the trial of the king. Since I have set forth my views extensively in a debate with Michael Walzer, I will only briefly return to the issue.^[24] For Kant, just as for Robespierre, the legal conviction of a king for his past reign was perfect nonsense and therefore, Kant added, a crime in the highest degree. (It was for him an even greater nonsense and a more monstrous crime in the case of a monarch who, after having reigned as an absolute prince, accepted to rule as the supreme executive.) Kant was of two minds even on the issue whether or not a monarch, forced into the status of a citizen, was morally and legally authorized to make attempts at regaining his former power. In this respect, his statements are contradictory, although he did not hesitate to condemn almost every attempt at a foreign intervention on the basis of Völkerrecht .^[25] Moreover, Kant was, correctly, convinced that the Constituent Assembly had been usurping the king's supreme executive power, which was an additional reason for the monarch to resent his own undignified dependence.^[26] Kant was sufficiently realistic to accept violent acts as emergency measures (particularly in the state of nature) under the condition that those perpetrating them accept their responsibility for the crimes committed. As long as the perpetrators paid their due to truthfulness, the abstract chance for the tyrannical moralist to mend his ways still existed. But once an act

of murder was displayed publicly and proudly as supreme justice, the people had chosen the evil maxim , which was the most negative term in Kant's vocabulary.^[27]

And yet, Heine's and Marx's diagnosis was correct, even if their explanation of the phenomenon remained one-sided: die deutsche Misere did exist. The price Kant had to pay in his political philosophy for his own extraordinary sensitivity toward the future dangers of modernity was blocking his own way to the much-longed-for realm of freedom, the republic, by discounting popular action altogether . Kant repeatedly asserted in his political writings of the 1790s that the hope for (republican) change can come only from the top, not from the bottom. In the main, what remained, despite Kant's own skepticism about the scenario, was the politics of Don Carlos . True enough, Kant added one important recommendation to his idea of "reform from above": the thesis of the centrality and necessity of the public sphere . Kant thoroughly condemned every kind of politics based on a maxim that could not be made public . He even made explicit what kind of politics he had in mind: that of open contempt by the absolute prince for the populace based on a repulsive misanthropy. This maxim secretly exists but cannot be made public because it would trigger rebellion, Kant asserted.^[28] And although Kant's expectations concerning the "republican effects" of a free public sphere, especially concerning a free press , were legitimately high, they could not delete the marks of "German misery" from his work.

This limitation did not prevent Kant from stipulating the republic as at least a possible free future for humankind. The main issues of Kant's republican theory are the idea of a res publica noumenon ; the centrality of the representative system; the relationship of powers to each other in the republic; and the character and prerogatives of the sovereign in its capacity of chief executive.

The res publica noumenon as a regulative idea^[29] is much less abstract speculation than a Realpolitiker would assume. Had Sieyès been familiar with the problems behind it, he would have been thrilled by Kant's train of thought and would have found the German philosopher a thoroughly kindred spirit (as he had guessed in advance). Kant's major point here is the distinction between republic and democracy : the first was his regulative political idea, the second a profoundly problematic establishment. By way of explanation, Kant points to the only democracies he was familiar with (the American example apparently weighed very little for him): the ancient city democracies of Hellas. And in sharp contrast to the idealization of the ancients which was so typical for his age and his own generation, he found them repulsive rather than attractive models. Ancient city democracies, Kant averred, had either been despotic in themselves or they had ended up in despotism. They were not familiar with the idea and practice of representation , and therefore their political system was at the mercy of a constantly changing popular opinion as well as abandoned to outbursts of popular fury.^[30]

The great originality of Kant's political philosophy consists not merely in being the first to make the distinction between republic (qua the regulative idea of the free state in modernity) and "democracy" (as the latter's first and highly imperfect form of appearance on the political scene).^[31] Equally original was the other distinction logically following from the first, the distinction between the form of government and the forms of power .^[32] This second distinction is normally attributed to Max Weber by the history of theory.

Kant's distinction was more than a terminological clarification. It was a profound conception that had literally grown out of his dialogue with the French Revolution. Similarly to Kant, two representative actors of the Revolution, Sieyès and Robespierre, had contended before and during the crisis of Varennes that the appellation of the state was, as Kant put it seven years later, a mere matter of letters. But they had different (implicit or explicit) considerations in making the distinction between forms of government and forms of power. For Robespierre, the criterion of a state of political affairs to qualify as genuinely republican was, irrespective of the appellation of the form of government, le bonheur du peuple . We know how passionately Kant opposed putting happiness, instead of freedom, at the center of republican considerations. Therefore, although his recommendation was in formal harmony with Robespierre's thesis, substantively they were on a collision course.

However, Sieyès's argument would have been very close to Kant's mind. Sieyès, like Kant, was preoccupied with the ways genuine political freedom could be achieved in large and complex national bodies. In his meditations he had returned, once again like Kant, to Aristotle's tripartite division of powers or forms of government (the two concepts remained undistinguished in Aristotle). From Sieyès's conception the same deeply ingrained suspicion of the direct rule of the demos transpired as from Kant's political philosophy. Sieyès too had, for reasons similar to those of Kant (namely, both rejected the idea of corporations within a "republic"), a thorough aversion for bornagain aristocracies, meritocratic or commercial. This was one of the reasons why Sieyès, always a tacit and therefore surviving enemy of Jacobinism, never joined the Gironde. Despite these similarities, however, the distinction between the forms of government and the forms of power gained true theoretical lucidity and depth only in Kant's political philosophy.

It is common knowledge that, of the main revolutionary trends, both the Gironde and the Montagne deluded themselves into believing themselves to be either the born-again or the last Greeks and Romans in the modern theater of politics. For serious theoretical reasons, some of which have already been mentioned, Kant categorically refused to don the costume of the ancients. And in this refusal he was one with Sieyès, a completely modern and individualist political thinker, as well as with Constant, who made the first philosophical effort to distinguish the freedom of the ancients from that of the moderns. Their major reason for rejecting the ancient paradigm was their

understanding of the Greek and, to a degree, even the Roman democracy as a direct rule (power) of the demos (or plebs ) over the rest of the civitas . Sometimes this rule took legal forms. At other times, it was exercised through naked violence. But much too often it transpired as domination without general freedom. Sieyès, Constant, and Kant unanimously believed that freedom could be guaranteed by, and reside only in, a legally organized authority to which the citoyens actifs give their free consent but to which they are equally subjected without exception . However, we shall see that Kant, who happily went along with Sieyès and Constant as far as their thesis of a legal authority was concerned, parted ways with them when the question of the moral foundations of the republic was raised. In this case the ancient example became unexpectedly important for him.

The character and the function of the supreme executive was a source of great theoretical concern for Kant. His problem can be formulated in the following terms. To him, there seemed to be nothing sacred in the crucial process of legislation and therefore in the legislators themselves. They had the mandate of the people, and they had to do a job relying on reason, which was an exacting and complex but ultimately normal human task. But once the laws were passed and transferred to the supreme executive power whose function was their enforcement, the laws had to assume a sacred character in Kant's conception which demanded absolute obedience to them.

The sacred character of law, this product of human and this-worldly legislators, posed the following problem for Kant with regard to the supreme executive. If the person whose task is to enforce the sacred laws is a mere agent of the state, how can the sacred character of the laws be ascertained from such a prosaic figure? If he is more than an agent, what will distinguish him from the well-known figure of the prince? This dilemma, never resolved by Kant, caused a certain kind of terminological vacillation in his theory. For Kant, a critic of the term "popular sovereignty," the "sovereign" was identical with the chief executive. At times, Kant referred to this "sovereign" as "invisible," "the personified law," rather than as an agent. However, in discussing the conflict of Louis XVI with the Constituent Assembly and the usurpation of the executive power by the legislative, Kant treated "the sovereign" like an agent of the republic.^[33] This minor inconsistency was solved by Kant, to the degree that the problem could be solved at all within the horizon of his age, by his theory of the role of Vernunftsreligion and the "invisible church" in the republic. But this issue cannot be addressed here.

Politics and Morals

Neither foes nor friends missed the moralistic character of Kant's dialogue with the French Revolution. His political theory indeed displayed the peregrinations of practical reason in the Revolution. In an immediate sense,

Kant's attention was focused on the morality of the political actor . Kant in fact elaborated a consistent theory of the relationship between politics and morals. Politics without morals , Kant contended, was based on the ugly vice of contempt for humans, and it internally bolstered the practice of despotism.

However, there is a perverse way of relating morals to politics, that of the "political moralist," a type that is worse than the mere political pragmatist or "political technocrat." Kant carefully lists the three evil maxims of the political moralist, the worst of which is "justify everything."^[34] It can come as no surprise for the readers of Kant that the "political moralist" appeared in his typology as an infinitely worse type of the political actor than the (hypocritically or misanthropically) pragmatic one precisely because of his evil maxims . By contrast, the moral politician makes the moral law the maxim of his politics, and he sees his task as the reconciliation of raison d'état with the moral law as much as possible. His principles are practical reason and justice.^[35]

Kant was fully aware of the enormous difficulty of reconciling the moral maxim with the practical exigencies of a given political task, the traps that lie in wait on the moral politican's thorny path. He even assumed that his favorite actor could at some point degrade himself into a despotic moralist . (And we can have hardly any doubt that he had in mind the Jacobin politician in general, perhaps even Robespierre in particular.)^[36] A despotic moralist contaminates the political atmosphere around himself and becomes the founding father of a despotic republic . However, Kant assumed that the "moral politician" could mend his ways and return to the correct path. We are already familiar with the absolute Kantian precondition of this kind of moral reform: truthfulness even in the despotic, therefore evil act; respect for the good maxim instead of choosing the evil maxim in defense of an aberration. This is why Kant defended the right of Louis XVI against the Convention. This is why he demanded, to the point of absurdity, obedience to even despotic (republican or monarchic) laws. This is why, in an aside in his Anthropology , speaking of "political fantasy," he appreciated even the "fantasies" or the fiction of the high rank and equality of the people, which were solemnly announced by the French Convention and never taken seriously by those despotic legislators.^[37] For it was the good maxim alone that stood between the republic and the abyss: the relapse into barbarism.

However, Kant was incomparably more concerned with the moral character of the republic than with the morality of its statesmen . To a degree, he was prepared to subscribe to the principle of the "moral politician" (despite the danger that the latter had the penchant to degrade into a despotic moralist): the republic, Kant contended in unison with Robespierre, cannot exist without virtues . And in the formal respect, Kant accepted the model of the ancient republics which he otherwise severely criticized as the unfree rule of demos .

At the same time, the two material principles Kant integrated into his "doctrine of virtue," one's obligation to one's own perfection and one's

obligation to the (morally approved) goals of others, were sufficiently updated and substantively defined to represent the spirit of modernity in Kant's moral and political philosophy. The first was the principle of physical and materal culture, Bildung in the proper sense of the Goethe period, a principle juxtaposed to our phenomenal existence, which, in Schiller's authentically Kantian description, appeared as self-fragmentation and self-degradation. The second substantive principle, one's obligation to the other's (morally acceptable) goals, was the principle of association . This provided as much space for "happiness" (or the social question) as possible within Kant's theory. For Kant was not an ideologue of unlimited wealth. On the contrary, one can infer from one of his remarks that he regarded extreme inequality as a serious error (and "injustice") of the government.^[38] He simply did not believe, here in unison with Saint-Just's attitude toward economics, that positive legislation on happiness was possible. However, the introduction of the second material principle, that of association, at least provided a public space within the republic to address the issue of happiness, the celebrated social question.

One would find tremendous difficulties with a clear-cut classification of Kant's political philosophy as consistently either liberal or radical. And this is not meant as a criticism, rather as a compliment. The critique of political reason, which was accomplished under the guidance of practical reason, yielded a completely new, dialogical type of political theory whose issues remain on the agenda of the present.

Eleven
Hegel and the French Revolution: An Epitaph for Republicanism

Steven B. Smith

Today no one can seriously doubt that the concept of revolution is a central organizing assumption of political life. There are various reasons to explain the importance of this term and others associated with it. In the first place, the phenomenon of revolution is thought to embody processes of change, development, and growth. So deeply have these notions become embedded, not just in popular discourse but in the more sophisticated languages of the natural and social sciences, that it is difficult to imagine how we could even begin to think without them. Second, most of the contemporary world powers—America, France, Russia, China, not to mention a host of lesser nationalities—have all established themselves by announcing a revolutionary break with their prerevolutionary pasts. Whether one is for or against these revolutionary movements, they appear to be a feature of the modern political landscape which is not likely to go away.

For most social and political theorists, it was the French Revolution (and only later the Russian) that became the model by which to measure revolutionary change.^[1] Two perspectives were typically adopted to explain this event. The first, proposed by Edmund Burke and later taken over by the "historical school," saw the Revolution as an attempt, motivated by misguided theory, to remake the world and human nature itself in accordance with its own vision of a just and humane society. In their efforts to establish a new republican order, the revolutionaries were led to rename months, abolish historical provinces, and establish new religious cults to worship abstract reason, none of which had any ties to previous French experience. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is nothing if not an object lesson on how a dogmatic interpretation of natural rights and the social compact can leave little room for such things as prudence, compromise, and balance which are essential to the political. For Burke, all attempts to found constitutions de

novo must be doomed to failure, and to the extent that such experiments are "metaphysically true" they must be "morally and politically false."^[2]

The second perspective was announced originally by Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic study The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution . Although Tocqueville's analysis bears certain superficial resemblances with Burke, especially in his skepticism regarding abstract rationalism, a close reading of his text shows that he could not have been more different. Whereas Burke stressed the role of ideas or revolutionary ideology, Tocqueville was crucially concerned with the study of institutions and the emergence of the modern administrative state. Furthermore, whereas Burke emphasized the absolute novelty of the Revolution, accepting the claims of the revolutionaries at face value, Tocqueville tried to penetrate behind the rhetoric of the Revolution to the social and political crises that had occasioned it. The core idea of Tocqueville's history is the profound continuity between the Ancien Régime and the Revolution. Just as in Democracy in America Tocqueville showed that the process of democratization was not something new but had deep roots going back over 700 years to the heart of feudalism, so too in the Ancien Régime does he show how the policies of the Jacobins did no more than extend the growth of public power and the tendency toward administrative centralization which had been established as early as the reign of Louis XIV. "Even if [the Revolution] had not taken place," Tocqueville sagely remarked, "the old social structure would have been shattered everywhere sooner or later . . . the Revolution effected what in any case was bound to happen."^[3] According to François Furet, a recent historian of the Revolution, the paradox of Tocqueville's analysis is that the French Revolution was already three-quarters over before it even began.^[4]

In this chapter I want to suggest that Hegel provides us with another third perspective on the revolutionary experience. Hegel neither wants to emphasize the absolutely unprecedented character of the Revolution as did Burke, nor does he want to minimize its specificity by dissolving it into a kind of longue durée as did Tocqueville. Hegel wanted to celebrate the Revolution but only after it had been firmly located and hence ensnared within his own philosophy of history. Once he had done this, I suggest, it became possible to honor the memory of the Revolution precisely because and to the degree that it no longer represented a threat. Henceforth the French Revolution like the other great turning points of modern European history—the Protestant Reformation in Germany and to a lesser extent the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in England—could be regarded not as isolated or discrete happenings but as part of a worldwide struggle aimed at the realization of freedom. It was Hegel's attempt ultimately to domesticate the Revolution by regarding it as a "moment," but only a moment in the collective Bildung of humanity, that constitutes in my opinion his unique contribution to the interpretation of the French Revolution.^[5]

The Impulse from Philosophy

"We should not therefore contradict the assertion," Hegel once wrote, "that the [French] Revolution received its first impulse from philosophy."^[6] By philosophy in this context it is clear that Hegel is referring to that movement in modern thought that goes under the name of Enlightenment. Although modern scholars have debated whether the Enlightenment is to be understood as a one or a many, a period of skepticism or of dogmatism, the birth of secular humanism or the last gasp of an age of faith, it seems to me central to understand its aspiration as revolutionary in its essence. The Enlightenment set itself the ambitious task of liberating thought from the "kingdom of darkness" in order to make men into the masters and possessors of the world.

From its inception the Enlightenment thought of itself as initiating a total break with the past. This, at first sight, appears paradoxical since the concept of Revolution originally implied a return to first principles as indicated by the syllable re- in the Latin word revolutio .^[7] For the Greeks and Romans, revolution was understood as part of a cyclical pattern of history in which birth, growth, decay, and regeneration were conceived along naturalistic lines. The Greek term metabolé was used to indicate either change or corruption, the inevitable fate that awaited all things.^[8] In human affairs, just as in the cosmos, a few invariant forms followed the same irresistible force as the stars follow their paths in the heavens. This pattern constituted a revolution in the original lexical sense of circulation. Thus Plato's cycle of regime transformation in books 8 and 9 of the Republic was followed closely by Aristotle's theory of constitutional change in the Politics .^[9] For Aristotle, who gave the classical conception of political change its canonical expression, there can be no such thing as a new beginning, for "practically everything has been discovered on many occasions—or rather an infinity of occasions—in the course of time." ^[10] The same cyclical pattern was taken up in the Histories of Polybius who uses the concept anakuklosis politeion to indicate the sempiternal recurrences into which human affairs are driven as if by nature. The cycle was a physis , a natural process, through which regimes were bound to pass unless by a stroke of good fortune they were able to escape this fate.^[11]

The original meaning of the term revolution , then, implied a return to some previously occupied position and not an overturning of all that has gone before. At the outset of modernity Machiavelli could still speak of revolution as a ridurre ai principii , that is, the periodic revitalization of civic life that can only come through a return to its original principles.^[12] In the same vein Hobbes could write of the events in England between 1649 and 1660 that "I have seen in this Revolution a circular motion of Sovereign Power."^[13] And Locke in the famous nineteenth chapter of the protorevolutionary Second Treatise of Government could describe the "dissolution of government" as a return of the legislative power to its original hands. For Locke, as for Burke later,

revolution properly signified a restoration of the original constitution, a retrieving of ancient liberties, so that he could call King William the "Great Restorer" and describe the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 as glorious precisely because it lacked what in the modern sense we call revolutionary. Revolution meant for these thinkers the very opposite of the idea of "irreversible change" or "total change" with which the term later came to be associated.^[14]

The concept of revolution made its way into modern European vocabularies through the language of literary criticism to describe the changes in fortune of a character from one state to another.^[15] Its later use signified a process of development or acceleration toward new and therefore unpredictable states of affairs. Revolution in this sense implied a capacity for novelty and an openness to change that were often seen as the root of the modern Enlightenment. In the decades before and after 1789 the term was expanded by thinkers to apply to areas as diverse as law, morality, religion, economics, and politics. The author of the article on "Revolution" in the Encyclopédie could define the term rather blandly as "a considerable change in the government of a state."^[16] But by 1772 Louis Sebastian Mercier could observe that "Tout est révolution dans ce monde,"^[17] and Robespierre at the height of the French Revolution could announce: "Tout a changé dans l'ordre physique; et tout doit changer dans l'ordre moral et politique."^[18] From then onward the term acquired overtones of an almost irresistible movement that would inaugurate a new era of human happiness in which autocracy would be exploded, superstition banished, and republican government established as the only political system rational in theory and tolerable in practice.^[19]

Here, as in so many matters, German philosophy accurately depicted the mood of the times even while it failed to participate in the leading events.^[20] Kant has rightly been called "the philosopher of the French Revolution" not only for his uncompromising insistence on the freedom and dignity of man but for his rejection of all authority that does not stem from man's own critical rationality.^[21] According to Heinrich Heine, Kant was "the arch destroyer in the realm of ideas [who] far surpassed Robespierre in terrorism." In both Robespierre and Kant one finds "the same stubborn, keen, unpoetic, sober integrity . . . the same talent for suspicion." The only difference is that "the one directs his suspicion toward ideas and calls it criticism, while the other applies it to people and entitles it republican virtue." By denying legitimacy to everything that was merely customary or traditional, Kant, the deicide, completed the work only half-heartedly carried out by Robespierre, the regicide. Accordingly, the Critique of Pure Reason was "the sword with which deism was executed in Germany."^[22]

Even allowing for some degree of poetic overstatement, Kant continually identified his philosophy with the Enlightenment and especially the events unfolding in France after 1789. In the Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason he

identified his age as one of Kritik to which everything must submit. Henceforth nothing—neither politics nor religion—was to remain exempt from "the test of free and open examination."^[23] Although Kant's views on the French Revolution constitute a study in themselves, his clear preference was for a policy of republican government at home combined with a federation of republics to govern international affairs abroad. By a republic Kant meant a form of government that requires the maximum degree of participation in the shaping of public decisions. Thus Kant could maintain that if we think of the commonwealth as a concept of pure reason "it may be called a Platonic ideal (res publica noumenon ) which is not an empty figment of the imagination but the eternal norm for all civil constitutions"^[24] or as he put it in the Rechtslehre , a republic is "the only enduring political constitution in which the law is autonomous and is not annexed by any particular person."^[25]

The same attitude is evinced in Kant's last published work, "The Contest of Faculties" (1798), in which he claimed to find evidence of a moral tendency toward progress evinced in "an occurrence in our times":

The revolution which we have seen taking place in our own times in a nation of gifted people may succeed, or it may fail. It may be so filled with misery and atrocities that no right-thinking man would ever decide to make the same experiment again at such a price, even if he could hope to carry it out successfully at the second attempt. But I maintain that this revolution has aroused in the hearts and desires of all spectators who are not themselves caught up in it a sympathy which borders almost on enthusiasm, although the very utterance of this sympathy was fraught with danger. It cannot therefore have been caused by anything other than a moral disposition within the human race.^[26]

This event, the French Revolution, proved to Kant that moral factors did play a part in history, however small. This moral tendency could be discovered in the enthusiasm provoked by the spectacle of revolution. That Kant could descry the execution of Louis XVI as a sin worse than murder but still congratulate the principle of revolution by which that action was carried out tells us something about its power. From Kant onward the concept of revolution acquired an almost transcendental significance that later thinkers would transmute into an idea of historical inevitability. Starting with Kant but proceeding in an unbroken line from Hegel to Marx, from Lenin and Trotsky to Mao Zedong, revolution became a kind of sacred duty undertaken by selfless men acting to fulfill the conditions of reason and freedom.

Reason and Revolution

Hegel was perhaps the first great thinker to internalize revolution as the principle of political life.^[27] Two passages taken from widely different periods of his life indicate the enduring grip of the French Revolution on his thought.

The first passage is taken from a letter to his friend Schelling written in 1796. Speaking of the Revolution's vindication of the "rights of man," Hegel goes on to say:

I believe that there is no better sign of the times than the fact that humanity is being represented as worthy of dignity and esteem in itself . . . . The philosophers demonstrate this dignity, the people will learn to feel it; and they will no longer be content to demand their rights which have been reduced to dust, but will seize them, appropriate them . . . . Thanks to the propagation of ideas which demonstrate how things ought to be, the indolence of those who confer eternity on everything that exists is disappearing. The vitalizing power of ideas . . . will elevate the spirits and [men] will learn to devour these ideas.^[28]

The second passage is taken from Hegel's lectures on the Philosophy of History written over twenty-five years later. From his chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin, Hegel, reflecting back on the experiences of the French Revolution, could still say:

Never since the sun had stood in its firmament and the planets revolved around him had it been perceived that man's existence centers in his head, i.e., in thought . . . . Anaxagoras had been the first to say that nous governs the world; but not until now had man advanced to the recognition of the principle that thought ought to govern spiritual reality. This was accordingly a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character stirred men's minds at that time; a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation between the divine and the secular was now first accomplished.^[29]

These two passages tell us a great deal. First, they are striking evidence of Hegel's "idealism," by which I mean his passionate conviction that it is ideas that motivate men and shape history. The French Revolution was not the outcome of demographic changes in the French population or the desire for cheaper foodstuffs, but can be traced back directly to the ideas of the Enlightenment with its demand that society realize the conditions of reason and freedom. Hegel's description of the Revolution as a "glorious mental dawn" testifies to his celebration of the Revolution not as just another event in European history but as an apocalyptic "moment" in the destiny of humanity, its liberation from bondage and servitude.

At the same time, however, there is a second, deeper meaning to these passages concealed by the rosy optimism of the first. On this second view, although Hegel continued to regard the French Revolution, along with the Protestant Reformation and Kant's "Copernican Revolution" in epistemology, as one of the great watershed moments in modern history, he also saw it as a great moral and political tragedy. Like Burke, to whom he has often been compared, Hegel came to see the revolution as the harbinger of an era of "ideological" politics.^[30] Unlike the older Aristotelian conception of politics

as prudence (phronesis), which found a resonance in Burke's later appeals to tradition and history, these new advocates, ideologues, and "men of principle" (Prinzipienmänner) as Hegel derisively calls them, set themselves up as the engineers and architects of the new social order.^[31] The revolutionaries, consequently, destroyed the fabric of traditional politics by appealing from the "is" to the "ought," from actually existing but imperfect regimes to the one naturally sanctioned social order. Whereas the older politics presented itself as a play of particular passions and interests, the new politics assumed a higher and therefore more doctrinaire bearing. "It is not private interest nor passion that desires gratification, but Reason, Justice, Liberty; and equipped with this title, the demand in question assumes a lofty bearing, and readily adopts a position not merely of discontent, but of open revolt against the actual conditions of the world."^[32]

Hegel traces the tragic, even nihilistic, character of the French Revolution back to the philosophy of the Enlightenment that was its cause. At the core of the philosophy was a conception of human beings as possessors of certain natural or inalienable rights. According to the thinkers who first promulgated this theory, government has its origins in the rational desires of individuals to protect and defend their preexisting rights as human beings. This conception already signaled an important shift in the way we think about the legitimacy or justice of government. Prior to the seventeenth century, governments made no reference to rights as their standard of legitimacy. To the extent that rights existed at all, they were considered derivative from a person's obligation as a member of a particular family, estate, or political community.^[33]

The idea of universal human rights that belonged to individuals as such was wholly an invention of modernity. This is not to say that human rights went unopposed, but by the end of the eighteenth century the doctrine of human rights had become the dominant strategy for justifying political institutions. Henceforth it would be impossible for regimes to legitimize themselves without some recognition of the rights of their subjects, which rights the regime was entrusted to protect and defend. Documents such as the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen did no more than put the stamp of approval on what philosophers like Locke and Rousseau had already declared in such works as the Second Treatise and the Social Contract .^[34]

Hegel believed that the problems of the French Revolution were caused by its attempt to instantiate the principles of natural rights developed by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. The problems with the philosophy of rights were threefold: they rested on (1) a methodologically faulty conception of the self or the subject of rights, (2) a politically faulty conception of the common good, and (3) a morally faulty conception of civic virtue. After examining each of these problems in turn, I want to turn in conclusion to a

paradox in Hegel's own understanding of the role of revolutionary movements in history.

Hegel is well known for his attack on the theory of rights for promoting an "abstract" or unreal conception of the self as denuded of all cultural traits and characteristics. Natural-rights theorists from Hobbes to Kant (and, more recently, Rawls) typically claim to discover the most universal features of human beings by means of a kind of thought-experiment, hypothetically stripping or peeling away everything we have acquired through the influence of custom, history, and tradition in order to discover the prepolitical state of nature and the natural man lurking behind them. In an early essay on Natural Law Hegel attacked the "antisocialistic" character of these theories for denying the natural sociality of man and for "posit[ing] the being of the individual as the primary and supreme thing."^[35] Such theories were static, lacking any sense of the dynamics of human history and the developmental structure of the moral personality. The self who is the subject of rights is not something "given" once and for all, but is a being in the making, that is, a creature with a history.

In rejecting the conception of the subject of natural rights, Hegel found it necessary to distinguish between two contending views. The first is the early modern school of Hobbes and Locke, which he designated as "empirical" or what today might be called naturalistic.^[36] In describing these theorists as empirical he meant that they tried to derive human rights from certain purportedly natural or observable needs that all human beings have in the state of nature. These theorists envisaged a research agenda where rights could simply be read off of certain natural propensities like the desire for life or property. For Hobbes, perhaps the paradigm case of the empirical approach, the most basic need that all human beings have is the desire for self-preservation. Hobbes defines a right as "the liberty each man has to use his own power as he will himself to the preservation of his own nature."^[37] And from the claim that each individual has a right to do what is necessary to preserve his own life, Hobbes adduces the duty to acknowledge the same right in others and to seek peace whenever others do so as well.

The second approach to natural rights Hegel calls "formal" and applies mainly to philosophies of the Rousseauean-Kantian type.^[38] These theories are formal because the ground of right they seek is not by means of an extrapolation from material needs and wants. Rather, if rights are to be strictly universal they must be grounded in something that transcends our empirically limited desires. This something is the will, which is not the sort of thing one can discover through ordinary empirical or scientific investigation but which is more like an absolute presupposition that must hold if our talk of rights is to make sense. This approach to rights is similar to what Robert Nozick has recently called a transcendental argument in philosophy.^[39] It begins with some empirical or factual premise and moves backward to de-

duce its conditions of possibility. With this transcendental turn in the argument, talk of rights takes on a significantly higher and more abstract level than it had attained in earlier thinkers. Rather than beginning with such mundane concerns as the desire for life or property, Rousseau and Kant typically speak of the right to self-determination or autonomy, the right to participate actively in making the law and not simply the right to be represented in council.

For reasons already alluded to, Hegel thought both of these methods were defective. Instead of setting out, as the empiricists do, by positing rights in some hypothetical state of nature or, as the formalists do, as part of the transcendental structure of consciousness, Hegel regarded rights as part of the dynamic structure of history. Rights claims are not static but are part of a long and arduous historical process leading men gradually, but inexorably, toward an awareness of their own freedom. By freedom is meant here not anything especially mysterious. Freedom, for Hegel, is a predicate not of individuals but of peoples or communities. Freedom is always realized within a particular institutional framework that, at a minimum, must contain such things as the rule of law, a market economy, and an impartial bureaucracy. These institutions are not just a precondition for but a dimension of freedom without which we cannot even begin to think of rights.

Rights are not, then, a gift of nature but are rooted in the prereflective customs and habits (Sitten) of a people. He confirms this point by a linguistic allusion to the Greek word for ethics, ethos , which he contrasts to "the newer systems of ethics [which] in making independence and individuality into a principle, cannot fail to expose the relation of these words."^[40] The "newer systems of ethics" to which Hegel here alludes are, of course, the natural-rights theories that insist that all duties and obligations derive from the agent's will. The subject of rights is taken to be not any particular person but an agent , a term the very generality of which already stakes a claim. The claim that rights pertain to individuals as such is itself bound up with the dynamics of Western history, which in turn is closely related to the processes of modernization and development.^[41] The fact that we think of ourselves not as bearers of particular social roles but as agents capable of acting autonomously is not for Hegel a natural condition but a historical accomplishment. Right means for him, approximately, the entire range of practical reason as proceeding from immanent rules embedded in historical circumstances. Just as there is no such thing as the autonomous individual outside the objective norms and rules of our situations, so is there no such thing as a right independent of all context and history.^[42]

In identifying rights as part of the broader ethical life of a people, Hegel is returning to an older quasi-Aristotelian conception of a community as a structure of relations within which our moral powers can develop. The idea here is that rights are "situated" within the objective structure of communal

norms and purposes so that "what is good and bad, right and wrong, are supplied by laws and customs of each, and there is no great difficulty in recognizing them."^[43] Interestingly the theorist who comes closest to Hegel's perspective is not the dogmatic Rousseau but the more flexible Montesquieu who Hegel recommends as a model of judicial discretion. Thus in L'esprit des lois did Montesquieu seek to comprehend "both the higher relationships of constitutional law and the lower specifications of civil relationships down to wills, marriage laws, etc. from the character of the whole and its individuality."^[44] The important methodological point Hegel is making is that rights are not prior to the community but are part of "the absolute ethical totality," which is "nothing other than a people."^[45] In contemporary parlance, the right is not prior to but presupposes the good.

The Politics of Virtue

The French Revolution looked to Hegel, and to many of his generation, as an attempt to recreate the conditions for social and political harmony which not only the Ancien Régime but all of postclassical culture had torn asunder. The revolutionaries, acting out of a desire to bring the doctrines of the philosophers down to earth, directed themselves against all traces of transcendence and other-worldliness. To bring about this reconciliation of the rational and the real, the radicals like Robespierre sought to recreate the kind of consensus and public spiritedness evinced by the ancient polis. The polis experience, at least as theorized by Rousseau, was based on a devotion to the general will at the expense of private interests and elevated the virtue of the citizen over and above those of the private man or bourgeois. "This will is not," Hegel tells us, "the empty thought of will . . . a mere symbol of willing; it is concretely embodied universal will [allgemeiner Wille], the will of all individuals as such."^[46]

The reference here to the universal will is clearly an allusion to Rousseau's volonté générale that is at the basis of the social contract. The general will is the source of freedom because it is the creation of all, and hence no one is coerced to do anything he has not agreed to do. Each individual participates in the creation of the general will and, in doing so, does no more than obey rules that he has set down for himself. Since there are no a priori limitations on what the general will may in fact will, it satisfies the individual's desire for freedom. The general will is not only the source of freedom but of security because its dictates must be universally and impartially applicable to all who have contracted. It is, then, the only possible source of right since its dictates accord with both the principles of freedom and those of equity.

Rousseau conceived the social contract, then, as the substitution of one type of freedom for another. Natural (or what we would call "negative") freedom, the freedom to do as one likes, is exchanged for rational liberty, the

freedom to live by laws of one's own making. Our rights are the exclusive product of the general will, which must take the form of public civil law. But if we ask, What is it that this rational will wills?, What is the content of this will?, Rousseau can provide no satisfactory answer. There is the same kind of vacuity about the general will that Hegel thought he observed in Kant's Categorical Imperative except that it is more dangerous since Rousseau saw the general will as a public legal body. The general will is not universal in the Kantian sense, applicable to rational persons as such, but in the more limited sense of applicable to members of particular communities localized in time and place. The general will, Hegel writes in the Philosophy of History , is free when "it does not will anything alien, extrinsic, foreign to itself . . . but wills itself alone—wills the will."^[47]

Hegel's reason for rejecting the Revolution's attempt to create the conditions necessary for the realization of the general will is precisely its lack of attention to the particularities of context and situation. Its abstractness and lack of content resulted in a "rage of destruction" that had "no inner significance or filling" anymore than "cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a draught of water." The claim that the general will is the only legitimate ground of society would not only abolish all existing institutions and hierarchies but would regard "all differences in talent and authority as being superseded." Nothing would be allowed to exist that is not a product of the general will. Even God, "the empty être suprème" of the radicals, is said to hover there "merely as an exhalation of stale gas." The culmination of the Revolution was, then, "the sheer horror of the negative" in which all the "determinate elements disappear with the disaster and ruin that overtakes the self in the state of absolute freedom."^[48]

The argument being made here is that although the general will can abolish, it cannot create. It can destroy the Old Regime but cannot build a new one. The idea of the general will is that I am only free when I obey the laws that I have myself helped to create. But since the law is the outcome of a collective decision, it cannot be decided by me alone. If everyone is to be free, then everyone must at least participate in the decision-making process. There is no sense here as, say, with Hobbes of authorizing someone else to do the work. The idea of government by consent, what Hegel calls "a mere symbol of willing," is insufficient. Any halfway measure such as representative institutions would be a violation of my inalienable right to self-legislation. The result is to create a permanent and implacable opposition between the people and their government which will always appear to them as a corporate body, a "faction" interposing itself between them and the general will.

The problem with Rousseau's general will is that it remains too abstract to serve as an instrument for political reform. Indeed, its very abstractness, as I will show in a moment, makes it peculiarly susceptible to manipulation

by political demagogues. The general will specifies a set of procedures by which valid laws can be achieved; it says nothing about what the character of those laws should be. Rousseau apparently thought that this procedural formalism alone was sufficient to prevent abuse but, as subsequent events were to show, his agnosticism about the ends and purposes of law was to prove dangerously open-ended.

The inability of the Revolution to create a cohesive republican community is not only related to an empty conception of the common good but to an equally vacuous notion of civic virtue. Following Rousseau, the revolutionaries saw the new French Republic as based on an austere, self-sacrificing conception of virtue in which private goals were ruthlessly subordinated to the pursuit of the public good. The chief task of the Revolution became the construction of a Republic of Virtue. The question the revolutionaries had to confront, then, was this: What guarantee does the man of virtue, the republican citizen, have that he is really acting for the public good? What are the guarantees against self-delusion and hypocrisy?

The only standard that the man of virtue can provide of his own moral goodness turned out ultimately to be his own self-certainty or sincerity. Sincerity thus became the essence of virtue. But herein lies the difficulty. For if sincerity is the only criterion of moral worth, then citizens must be judged not according to the outcome of their deeds but by their subjective convictions alone or the "law of the heart." The result of this purely subjective conception of virtue was to unleash a relentless search to unmask those hypocrites who pursue their own private ends under the guise of public spiritedness. As Hegel depicts it, the Reign of Terror was nothing more than the working out on the public stage of this obsessive concern with inner purity:

Virtue is here a simple abstract principle and distinguishes the citizens into two classes only—those who are favorably disposed and those who are not. But disposition can only be recognized and judged of by disposition. Suspicion therefore is in the ascendant; but virtue, as soon as it becomes liable to suspicion, is already condemned . . . . Robespierre set up the principle of virtue as supreme, and it may be said that with this man virtue was an earnest matter. Virtue and Terror are the order of the day; for Subjective Virtue, whose sway is based on disposition only, brings with it the most fearful tyranny. It exercises its power without legal formalities, and the punishment it inflicts is equally simple—Death.^[49]

One might, of course, wonder, why hypocrisy should be responsible for such a wave of violence and fanaticism. Hannah Arendt has argued that the desire to root out hypocrisy stems from the Revolution's own "favored simile" of itself as tearing the mask, the persona, off a corrupt French society to expose behind it the uncorrupted natural man. For a theorist like Arendt for whom politics is, literally, a kind of "play acting" where actors become

the roles and legal personae that they assume, this search for the natural or authentic man behind the mask is bound to be destructive.^[50]

According to Arendt, the tragedy of the French (and later the Russian) Revolution stems from what could be called the fallacy of misplaced compassion. Just as Rousseau had seen compassion as the source of all morality, so did Robespierre and Saint-Just regard virtue as the ability to identify oneself immediately with the immense poverty and suffering of the majority of the French people. Compassion, which Rousseau had regarded as the capacity to enter into the suffering of another fellow creature, was turned into a more diffuse sense of pity that meant (in Arendt's terms) "to be sorry without being touched in the flesh."^[51] Virtue thus becomes a purely subjective capacity to sympathize with the plight of an abstract other, whether that be the malheureux or the "wretched of the earth." Arendt traces the degeneration of the Revolution into despotism and terror back to this unusual capacity for moral sensitivity:

[E]ven if Robespierre had been motivated by the passion of compassion, his compassion would have become pity when he brought it out into the open where he could no longer direct it toward specific suffering and focus it on particular persons. What had perhaps been genuine passion turned into the boundlessness of an emotion that seemed to respond only too well to the boundless suffering of the multitude in their sheer overwhelming numbers. By the same token, he lost the capacity to establish and hold fast to rapports with persons in their singularity; the ocean of suffering around him and the turbulent sea of emotion within him . . . drowned all specific considerations, the considerations of friendship no less than considerations of statecraft and principle.^[52]

The result of Robespierre's Republic of Virtue was to create a regime motivated by precisely the kind of "pious cruelty" that political realists like Machiavelli had warned against. For Arendt, as for Hegel, the greatest cruelties in history have been committed out of an excessive idealism and devotion to causes. This was certainly true during the French Revolution where a Reign of Terror was established to purge the nation of all those "enemies of the people" suspected of harboring impure thoughts. The Revolution became self-devouring when those men, like the members of the Committee of Public Safety, entrusted with the oversight of the common good, came to regard even their own motives as suspect. Under these circumstances the temptations to suspect and then denounce one's neighbors, friends, and associates became irresistible.

Hegel's critique of the French Revolution should be seen, then, as an epitaph for republicanism. The language of republicanism, as Montesquieu had demonstrated before him, belongs ineluctably to the past. The failure of the Revolution to create anything faintly resembling the Greek polis or the Ro-

man res publica stemmed from its utter lack of connectedness to the present. In its original form republicanism was animated by the goals of political comradeship, fraternity, and communal solidarity. But as the two greatest republican theorists of modernity, Machiavelli and Rousseau, acknowledged, these virtues could also be narrow, particularistic, and intolerant. Valuing public freedom above all else, republicanism was led to act with a kind of punitive zeal against all those who fail or refuse to participate in the corporate project. This zeal is in turn aggravated by a quasi-religious ethos that exalts courage, self-sacrifice, and military glory above all other endeavors. The attempt to recreate republicanism today is not just politically irresponsible; it is historically false.^[53]

The Revolutionary Hero

There is, finally, a paradox in Hegel's treatment of the French Revolution. The paradox is that while the Revolution was reprehensible for the murder, violence, bloodshed, and terror it created, it was still regarded by Hegel as a "progressive" force in history, moving humanity closer to a certain desirable goal, namely, freedom.^[54] Nowhere does this paradox emerge more clearly than in Hegel's treatment of the revolutionary hero.

Hegel's concept of the revolutionary hero is the person responsible for large-scale social and political change. What interested him in particular was the discrepancy between the subjective intentions of individual revolutionary actors and the objective consequences of their deeds. In a series of brilliant analyses Hegel shows how individuals—Alexander, Caesar, Luther, and Napoleon are his typical examples—were often unaware of the larger import of their actions. Thus what Caesar thought he was doing in crossing the Rubicon was one thing. The influence that this action had not only in his own time but on later history is something entirely different and was no part of his conscious intention. This is the famous Hegelian doctrine of the "cunning of reason" whereby whatever individuals may have subjectively intended, the actual import of their deeds was and could not but be unknown to them.^[55]

Hegel appears to praise the revolutionary hero, often malgré lui , for helping to advance the cause of human freedom. Hence he is typically more concerned to forgive the revolutionary his sins than with sympathizing with the victims of his heroics. Although Hegel may never actually say that the ends justify the means, he recognizes that progress toward freedom is not achieved blamelessly. Thus in an early work on "The German Constitution" Hegel singles out Machiavelli's Il Principe not for holding up "a golden mirror for an ambitious oppressor" but for showing his fellow countrymen how to make a revolution. When one reads Machiavelli's work as Hegel recommends, not as "a compendium of moral and political principles applicable indifferently

to any and every situation, i.e., to none" but as a response to "the centuries before . . . and the history of his own time," one will see him less as a teacher of evil than as a teacher of popular liberty. Although many of the actions recommended by Machiavelli would be "criminal" if carried out by private citizens, Hegel maintains that if such actions are in the service of state-building rather than personal advantage one gains "a totally new complexion on the procedure of the prince." Machiavelli's work is in this respect "a great testimony to his age and to his own belief that the fate of a people . . . can be averted by genius." Unfortunately, Hegel concludes, "Machiavelli's voice has died away without effect."^[56]

This last statement proved altogether unwarranted. Even as Hegel was putting the final touches on this essay, his call for a German Theseus found resonance in the deeds of Napoleon who was busy putting the Florentine's plans into effect. Although Napoleon, this "world soul" as Hegel called him, is never mentioned by name in the Phenomenology , Hegel's writings are replete with oblique references to him. In his Jena lectures on the Philosophy of Mind , for instance, he is clearly casting Napoleon into the role of a Machiavellian prince or a Rousseauist legislator who founds a state by a sheer act of will. "All states are founded," he says, "by the sublime acts of great men . . . . Theseus founded the Athenian state; also in this way during the French Revolution a terrible power held the state generally. This power is not despotism but tyranny, pure terrifying power."^[57]

Even as he lauds the revolutionary founders of the state for providing the conditions for freedom, Hegel recognizes that their actions are rarely received so benignly by their own people. In this way was "Theseus repaid with ingratitude" and "Richelieu and others with hatred for their acts of violence."^[58] This might be called history's revenge upon the hero. They are overthrown not because their actions are intrinsically evil but because they have become superfluous. Thus Hegel remarks of Robespierre that "power abandoned him because necessity abandoned him and so he was violently overthrown."^[59] Once their ends are accomplished, their services are no longer needed. In the language of the later Philosophy of History , such men merely "fall off like empty hulls from the kernel."^[60]

It is sometimes remarked that Hegel saw himself as the German Machiavelli trying to do for his time what Machiavelli had done for Italy.^[61] This comparison is apt as far as it goes, but herein lies the difference. Although Machiavelli did not live to see the realization of his plans for national liberation, Hegel regarded Napoleon's goal of a fully unified Europe as already well under way. If Machiavelli was a kind of revolutionary John the Baptist, Napoleon was Hegel's messiah. Of course, the extent of Hegel's Bonapartism has been a subject of considerable controversy among Hegel's principle interpreters. For Alexandre Kojève, the Napoleonic Empire makes possible for the first time in history the universal recognition of the right to

equal freedom and dignity. Only in the "universal and homogeneous state" that Napoleon brought into being can man be fully and completely "satisfied," for only here has the revolutionary struggle for recognition been brought to an end. But when the foundation for the state has been laid, the work of the architect is made redundant. Like the original Theseus, Napoleon, the modern tyrant, is fated to disappear from the scene he helped to create. Strictly speaking, it is not Napoleon but Hegel who comes at the end, for he alone can put into conceptual form what Napoleon did.^[62]

But here lies the paradox. Hegel praises Napoleon as the agent of a historical mission of which he (Napoleon) was only dimly aware. But how is such praise merited if it is achieved at the cost of thousands and even millions of innocent lives? Moral praise or approbation is generally reserved for persons whom we deem to have acted on good reasons or with good intentions. At least since Kant the role of intention or the "good will" is thought to play a crucial part in moral evaluation. But Hegel is prepared to award praise to persons who, through no intention of their own, produced consequences that merely happen to be beneficial. The preferred form of moral justification, then, is a kind of consequentialism where even great criminals can be considered praiseworthy if good consequences are seen to follow from their actions. Clearly, then, revolutionary figures are justified in riding roughshod over conventional moral constraints so long as their actions are deemed beneficial in the long run.

The chief problem with Hegel's philosophy of history is practical, not theoretical. If one believes that what one ought to do is what contributes most to the greatest amount of total freedom, then there are no clear limits on how one can treat existing persons in order to realize that goal. Until that end is reached all actions, however cruel they may seem, can be justified against the standard of a generic humanity raised to the level of an implacable judge, jury, and executioner. History becomes, then, a kind of secularized theodicy in which present evils are explained and even justified in terms of the good consequences they will ultimately cause to bring about. Indeed, the history of the twentieth century has been replete with tyrants from Stalin to Hitler to Pol Pot who have excused their crimes on the grounds of their contribution to some future well-being. This kind of moral justification appears as nothing so much as a set of IOUs issued against an indefinite future.

It must be said that Hegel's own position is ambiguous regarding the completion or end of world history. His thought fluctuates between two poles: one which emphasizes the transient and dialectical character of all being, and another that depicts the ultimate consummation or realization of freedom at the end of history. It is well known—or at least often believed—that Hegel thought he lived at the end of history, at that "absolute moment" in historical time when the philosophical demand for freedom and its political realization had at last been accomplished. No longer would it be necessary

to think of freedom as an abstract ideal that continually recedes before us; freedom instead would be something fully and adequately embodied in the institutions and practices of the modern European state. Such a state would provide the grounds for the final "reconciliation" between reason and reality. Only at the end of history, "when philosophy paints its grey in grey," will the owl of Minerva come home to roost.

Yet even on Hegel's own account another possibility suggests itself. Even leaving aside his remark that America is "the country of the future," he cannot altogether rule out future animadversions of the spirit.^[63] If Hegel was right to say that philosophy is not simply about history but is something that takes place in history, "its own time apprehended in thoughts," then there is no way, strictly speaking, to know that we stand at the end of history. To know this would require the ability to get outside of history, to see it, as it were, from a God's-eye view. But this is precisely what Hegel says we cannot do. On his own account man is the historical animal par excellence. Since there is no way to escape from history, there is no way of knowing whether, or if, it has at last come to an end.

Nevertheless, the result of Hegel's philosophy of history has not been to restrain the revolutionary spirit but to liberate, unwittingly, a kind of political messianism that promises to deliver humanity not from any particular evil but from evil in general. It is not any particular order of society but the human condition itself that must be transformed. For this kind of eschatology, the end is not brought about by a superintending providence operating outside of history but through conscious human will and activity working in and through history. Consequently, it is never enough to wait patiently for the end; it is necessary to force the end, to act as if the end were already immanent in our deeds. Thus there is an implicit social activism concealed here which encourages revolutionary militants to initiate the terrors that must precede the end of history. Political messianism may be born out of frustration and even rage against existing political realities, but it is in the end forced to turn against politics as such. The dream of an end of history, like the biblical end of days, is predicated on the destruction of the world as we know it, and most of the people in it.^[64]

Conclusion

If Hegel's views on revolution can be faulted it is for turning what was originally a messianic and eschatological vision into a theory of history and human progress. There is, of course, a vigorous literature debating Hegel's appropriation of the messianic theme. For some, notably Karl Lowith, his views on the end of history represent a "secularized" eschatology, whereas for others, like Hans Blumenberg, the very idea of a secularized eschatology is a contradiction in terms. Whereas eschatological thinking speaks of a final judgment breaking into history from the outside, the idea of progress to

which Hegel is attached seeks possibilities at work within or immanent in history. Far from being identical in function, the idea of progress originally set itself over against eschatological expectations brought about through divine intervention. Progress has little to do with millennial faith in a transcendent deity but much to do with "human self-assertion" and the desire to take control over one's own destiny. The Hegelian (and later Marxist) construction of an end of history is not a Heilsgeschichte that sees divinity breaking into history from the outside but is the outcome of purely immanent developments that can be either hastened or retarded by human activity.^[65]

It should go without saying that Hegel was not a terrorist and should not be saddled with the tyrannical moralisms of both the left and the right. He even, arguably, sought to dampen the revolutionary spirit of his age by showing history to be a "slaughterbench" where heroic individuals invariably come to grief. Nevertheless, Hegel's ideas about the progressive character of revolutionary movements clearly resonate with certain of our leading beliefs about progress and modernization. Whereas the ancient Greeks spoke of revolutions as part of an endless cycle of nature doomed to eternal repetition over time, one of the hallmarks of modernity has been the belief that we are capable of breaking out of this cycle and creating something new. Certainly, the scientific, industrial, and political revolutions of the modern age have been thought of as evidence that humankind is awakening from its dogmatic slumber and rolling back the forces of ignorance and superstition. If we understand the Enlightenment to mean the ultimate triumph of reason over unreason, then it would seem that the Hegelian belief in the emergence of reason and freedom in history represents the culmination of the Enlightenment.

In the face of the experiences of the twentieth century it is difficult to retain anything of the Enlightenment's faith in history as the story of man's secular redemption. The Enlightenment's belief that advances in our scientific and technological rationality can bring about a "better world" has been all but relegated to the status of one of the self-consoling mythologies of the age. At the very least the belief that further advances in history will lead to the amelioration of human suffering has been massively contradicted by the experiences of Auschwitz and the Gulag. The chief task facing political theory today must be to keep alive some sense of the primacy of human rights and the dignity of the individual while resisting the temptations of a dynamic, teleological philosophy of history.

Twelve
Alexis de Tocqueville and the Legacy of the French Revolution

Harvey Mitchell

It must not be forgotten that the author who wishes to be understood is obliged to carry all his ideas to their utmost theoretical conclusions, and often to the limits of the false and impracticable; for if it is necessary sometimes to depart in action from the rules of logic, such is not the case in discourse, and a man finds it almost as difficult to be inconsistent in his language as to be consistent in his actions. (Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique)^[1]

In my lifetime, I have already heard it said four times that the new society, such as the Revolution made it, had finally found its natural and permanent state, when succeeding events proved this to be mistaken. (Tocqueville, "Réflexions diverses")^[2]

Alexis de Tocqueville's observations on authorial concern for consistency are to be found in the Introduction to the first volume of Democracy in America . His disillusion with the prognostications heralding the end of the French Revolution comes close to the end of his fragmentary notes on its actual events, for which he failed to work out a satisfactory conceptual framework. His stance on the two problems raised in the epigraphs may be seen as an instance in his work of an underlying search for continuity. It was in 1850 that he said he was prepared to put his trust in "a freely ranging judgment on our modern societies and forecast of their probable future . . . which I can only find in writing history . . . [and] [i]t is only the long drama of the French Revolution that provides such a period."^[3]

Thus for more than half his life, he was driven to seek consistency in his accounts of human actions that must by their very nature forever remain inconsistent: writers seemingly accomplished this feat with some ease, for almost without thinking about it, they imposed the language of logic upon and offered explanations for the actions they described. There is no reference

in Tocqueville's thoughts on the question of the writer's unconscious reproduction of the language of prevailing discourses, but there is every reason to believe that he assumed that the writer works within it, constructing theories of human action in accordance with it, investing them with the appearance of unassailability, and also running the risk of becoming a prisoner of his own constructs. A circular relation is created between the interpreting discourse and the interpreted object, in the course of which the author loses sight of his historical particularity. Tocqueville's sense of irony, his taste for the paradoxical, his cunning recovery of silent and stubborn human ambiguities, attest to his awareness of the problem. He accepted it as a challenge more consciously, he believed, than most of the gens de lettres of his own day, and set out to bind human unpredictability and structural trends in a tightly constructed interpretation. In many respects, L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution was just such a book, and he took enormous pride in its magisterial and economical perspective, for which he devised a rhetoric of necessary change and equally necessary continuity. But he did not believe that he had succeeded in creating the best kind of balance. He spent the last three years of his life pondering how he could make a breakthrough to the Revolution itself, and he perhaps also wondered if he had lived up to Montesquieu's book on the greatness and decline of the Romans, which he held up to himself as a model for his own work, because of his belief that it had overcome the problems of "mixing . . . history, properly speaking, with philosophical history."^[4]

At yet another level, he played with the idea that if sound grounds could be established for reducing the role of probability in human affairs, coherence would constitute less of a problem, inasmuch as human actions would not be as subject to the power of the contingent; but he came to believe that individuals could only come to terms with the mysteries of probability, never master them, just as he accepted the sense of incompleteness in his unsatisfied yearning for certainty.^[5] This was matched by his resignation, amounting to stoicism, that both the mysteries of the unknown and the unknowability of truth could be borne by a faith in human power to sense the good.^[6] Taste for this kind of enquiry may be seen as a pervasive theme in his emotional being and was expressed in his intellectual life in his project to interpret the Great Revolution as the starting point of a modern struggle between impersonal forces and liberty. He was unwilling, as he wrote to the former Restoration deputy, Royer-Collard, one of the more outstanding critics of its politics, to believe in human decline in the face of the counterevidence of human progress in so many areas of life.^[7] He was consequently unwilling to settle for a seemingly coherent account of the revolutions of the past which would distort the nature of the struggle for liberty in an uncertain universe. In daring to reach a less false account of it, he exposed himself to enormous anxieties. To this will to comprehend the sources and outcome of the Revolution must be added his doubts in finding an understanding audience.^[8] The

responses to his work never quite lived up to his own search for the polyvalent meanings of the Revolution. Hence his disappointment that he had not been understood never left him.

At the center of his interpretation of the French Revolution—whose history he believed was just as likely to escape finality as an author's quest for consistency, a truth destined to remain for him a permanent source of frustration—were the problems of continuity and determinateness, two of his favorite leitmotifs, which arose both from his study of politics and society and his own political and existential preferences. That the last might constitute an intrusion in his métier as historian he never concealed, but he felt confident that there was no necessary conflict between a work of historical enquiry and a teleological account of human affairs. The Revolution carried with it certain aspects of the past; the historian must try to embody them in a coherent interpretation; and, since Tocqueville did not belong to a nonexistent fraternity of historians entirely detached from politics, but to the tradition of men in politics who wrote about the past to locate themselves in the present, he also thought that an essential aspect of his life as a public writer was to discern how significant features of a society's past might point to others in the future, as yet hidden. Persons who were cognizant of the power of impersonal forces were in a better position to distinguish real from false choices and had some chance to shape their worlds.

Tocqueville saw the problem of the French Revolution as exposing the tensions between determinateness and choice, and continuity and change, not only within each of these dual pairs but between them. He saw the two dualities as the principal variants of human history in which they dovetailed, informed, and bore upon each other but were not easily, because they were not transparently, reconcilable. Thus he remained constantly poised on the edge of tentativeness when he spoke about modern liberty as the most likely casualty of democratic revolutions, expecting that his fears might indeed become realities but hoping that individuals and events might conspire to achieve the opposite. This thought remained with him forever. He took it up, for example, when he made a distinction between the stances of historians in different ages. Historians in aristocratic periods centered their explanations around the actions of great personages; historians in democratic times tended to rob human beings of their power and transfer it to great forces external to themselves—to necessities. Neither were right: the first, because they sacrificed what was concealed and of long duration to the momentary voices of the present; the second, because it was necessary "to raise the faculties of men, not to complete their prostration."^[9] Tocqueville's stance was self-consciously aristocratic in a democratic age which heightened his desire to rescue the individual voice from necessities.

Liberty, from this heroic but melancholy stance, consisted in the exercise of options within contexts of varying opacity made up of layer on layer of cus-

toms, mores, moral systems, opinions, and language,^[10] which cling to human beings most tenaciously when they mistakenly believe that they are fully aware of them and think they are able to soar above them, only to find that their imaginations have taken them too far. This is why he inveighed against the Enlightenment men of letters whom he could not forgive for dreaming about and encouraging "une société imaginaire."^[11] That is why, in addition, Tocqueville's philosophy of history embodies an indignant protest against the notion that popular revolutions are planned. They are "desired rather than premeditated," and those who claim to be their leaders are simply borne along by the wind that takes them into unknown countries.^[12] He mocked Lamartine's criticism that he had written about the Revolution as an accident. Rather, as he put it, the Revolution was "the great transformation of the whole of European society, achieved through violence, but prepared and necessarily heralded by the work of centuries."^[13] Revolutions happen, and have a quality of determinateness that ought to check human beings who presume to act with a full knowledge of their surroundings. Conceding the presence of determinateness apparently was not the same as hard determinism, for the first did not amount to a capitulation to a "chain of fatality . . . suppress[ing] men from . . . history," as he had remarked earlier in his Souvenirs . Human beings, however, are equally mistaken, he said, when they beckon to a concept like chance to help them out of the tangle of the inexplicable; chance was a primitive code word for their ignorance, since there is nothing that is not prepared beforehand. Thus sheer chance is not only less interesting, it loses its power to defy the "natural law" and, hence, must shed its arbitrariness when it is seen, as Tocqueville did, as an integral part of multicausal explanation. Though he left unclear the nature of his position on design in the cosmos and in history, as we shall see later he was overwhelmed by the "surprise" of the Revolution. He was therefore not at all disposed to discount as inconsequential the precise moment when events took a particular turn, or when individuals acted in unexpected fashion. In retrospect, as soon as the unexpected is experienced and thought about in the present, it always mocks individuals with reminders from the past, yet continues to tantalize them with the notion that the past will not totally shape the present. Of course, the fantasy that they could start afresh in utopian fashion would always be hard to dispel, even if the realities of their previous "institutions, cast of minds and . . . state of morals" would catch them up and presumably set them right.^[14] But if he was wary of utopian visions, he was far from unreceptive to the element of free choice. His mind was not set on condemning the past as an incubus on the present. He wanted to understand the role of human diversity in shaping it in order to avoid illusions about the future. Thus for Tocqueville the French Revolution had heavy paradoxical meanings. They were structured in humankind itself. The analogs of self and society could, he believed, capture civic reality; but that was not the same as

claiming that it could be caught by reducing the complexities of civic reality to personal biography.

The Revolution as Contradiction

Tocqueville's interpretation of the Great Revolution found its way into his writings before the 1856 publication of L'Ancien Régime , but it cannot be treated satisfactorily without recognizing that it owed its genesis, not only to Democracy in America , but especially to his Souvenirs . His search for an unwavering, relatively stable reference point in himself, to be attained by finding an exit from his personal "labyrinth,"^[15] reached an acute stage as he began to ponder the significance of the 1848 Revolution and its aftermath. He confronted his own daimons and the daimons of the Great Revolution in his "secret" Souvenirs , which he began to write at the age of forty-five, claiming that thoughts not subject to public scrutiny were the only ones free from dissimulation. Thus, he argued that if he could be true to himself, he could be true to his subject. For him there could be no questioning the intersubjectivity of such entities as the public and private, the social and personal. They were, he believed, threatened by the development of a government that, in its omniscience, would isolate persons and effectively destroy both their private and their public lives.^[16] So in choosing an "unmoved" point in himself, he was not claiming that the points external to himself were subordinate to his will, but only that the world of self and others outside it were in a constant state of flux, and that individuals have no choice but to adopt a metaphysical fixity to make possible an interpretation of the empirical world. The maneuver was a heuristic device not to challenge but to confirm "the chain of history, so that [he could] the more easily attach to it the thread of [his] personal recollections."^[17] Just as the 1830 Revolution released the energies that created Democracy in America , so 1848 was a turning point for Tocqueville. It forced him to bring into sharper relief the links he had already been making between the Great Revolution and the emergence of democracy.

When the second volume of Democracy in America appeared in 1840, he had been, if not completely, yet fairly, confident in his analysis of the trajectory of democratic revolution. He plotted it in general terms as a succession of psychosocial stages. In its first stage, enormous energies fueled by boundless ambition are released, bringing to dizzying heights of power groups of men competing with one another and inspiring others waiting in the wings to make the best of the general confusion caused by changes in laws and customs. The power shifts continue for some time after the consummation of the Revolution and take place in an atmosphere in which people cannot respond outside their former contexts of behavior. The second stage is a compound of recollection and a sense of instability, each stimulating further ambitions, while opportunities for satisfying them diminish rapidly. The last stage is

reached with the complete disappearance of the privileged class of the aristocracy, the onset of political amnesia (the blotting out of the memory of the general and specific political struggles), and the restoration of order when the adaptation of desires to available means is reasserted: "the needs, the ideas, and the feelings of men cohere once again; men achieve a new stable level in society, and democratic society is finally established."^[18]

Tocqueville's anatomization of the Great Revolution and its 1830 aftermath was, he came to believe, incomplete, because, with the coming of the 1848 Revolution, he saw that what had begun in 1787–1789 had not reached its end. He needed to move into the realm of self-absorption to recognize or rationalize his weaknesses and errors in the Orleanist Chamber of Deputies, to purge himself of them, and to deny his parliamentary colleagues' accusations of underhandedness and slyness. By these means, he overcame his pain; he found that he could, as he phrased it, take pride in his "pride" as a man, politician, and author. He wanted to think that the approval of others was not the source of his pride, which he compared with the restlessness and disquiet of the mind itself.^[19] He was preparing himself for his return to the writer's loneliness soothed by the writer's superior stance,^[20] the only center for a "sincere"^[21] interpretation of the Great Revolution that had been leaving its marks in his imagination for a quarter-century, but which he and others after 1830 had mistakenly thought they had been able to assemble into a coherent whole. Not until he could "re-collect" himself^[22] could he begin to recollect —this time, he hoped, more accurately—more of the wholeness of the Great Revolution, in order to reach some understanding of why the actors of 1848 had appropriated from it what suited them and discarded the rest. The only result of pillaging rather than understanding the past was the creation of a wholly new set of false recollections. "The terrifying originality of the facts remained concealed from them," because the enormous powers of unreliable memories, the fictionalization and the theatricalization of the past, hid it from their view. Thus they were hard at work in "acting the French Revolution, rather than continuing it."^[23] Acting out could also mean playing at being revolutionaries and, indeed, Tocqueville's evocations of the theater to describe the actions of the politicians support such a view.

The 1848 revolutionaries were in part stuck in a scenario from the past; in fluctuating degrees, and in a chaos of fluttering poses, they were prisoners of its signs and behavioral practices.^[24] Tocqueville characterized the dilemma of the subject or the self in the familiar terms of self-interest and lack of distance preventing him from seeing himself as he is; the "views, interests, ideas, tastes and instincts that have guided [the self's] actions; the network of little foot-paths which are little known even by those who use them," wove the intricate network of a veil or a screen.^[25] He wanted to use the power of the past, rather than bury it in personal lives and social settings, in order to grasp something even more difficult. It he could emerge from the maze with a

heightened understanding of where he had been, he could help rescue his countrymen from their labyrinth —a term that he had already used in his Democracy^[26] —tell them where they had been, where they were likely to be going, and prepare them for the democratic future. But he did not want to slip into the naive belief that the past automatically teaches human beings much about the present, especially when "old pictures . . . [are] forced into new frames."^[27] He also wanted to convince readers that the best lesson history could offer was that it never repeats itself despite the propensity human beings have to repeat themselves. He began with an acerbic observation on historians:

I started to review the history of the last sixty years, and I smiled bitterly when I thought of the illusions formed at the conclusion of each period in this long revolution; the theories on which these illusions had been nourished; the erudite dreams of our historians, and all the ingenious and deceptive systems by the aid of which attempts were made to explain a present which was still dimly seen, and a future which was not seen at all.^[28]

He then moved on to speak in even less-flattering tones about the politics of revolution. In his brilliant use of the metaphors of the theatre of the grotesque and comic to describe the events of February, May, and June, and later, in drawing his portrait of Louis Napoleon, the new democratic despot whose model for his assumption of power was the first Napoleon, he was trying to warn Frenchmen not to mistake illusory for real change. Shifting his focus to England about a year after he completed his Souvenirs , he used similar language in telling Nassau William Senior that revolutions inevitably lead to masquerades.^[29] If the Great Revolution was to be saved from the burlesque into which the majority of its heirs had dragged it—the irony was that they believed they were being faithful to it—its real nature had to be revealed. This could not be done by fashioning a discourse of mutilation—cutting the Revolution from its roots in the Old Regime—nor by indulging in a cynical one dwelling on how it was being travestied—a sure sign of a partial understanding of its causes, and thus a failure to reply to its hidden cues for individuals to engage in choice. If Tocqueville had been an advocate of simple and stark continuity, his commitment to political liberty in a democratic age would have been a species of playacting more perverse than the political acting he deplored: a heavily constrained notion of liberty could only support belief in deep and irreversible social structures. To be sure, fissures and faults, located deep in human archaeology, were always at work, but if they created new resting places it was not without the help of human agency. A reverse advocacy of discontinuity, with implications of radically new directions, would have trivialized his project, since exercising liberty would have been as effortless as wearing comfortable clothes. The issue for Tocqueville was thus not reducible to a discourse on the relative merits of continuity and

discontinuity as instruments of historical explanation. The Great Revolution had to be seen rather as an epicenter from which continuing shocks continued to radiate. In it inhered, as it were, the continuity with the past, and it was itself the very source of the change subverting it, with determinateness and choice engaged in a ceaseless dialectic. Tocqueville was playing on a subtle but vital difference when he spoke of the 1848 revolutionaries as "acting the French Revolution, rather than continuing it."^[30] If the differences were obscured, historical continuity would be reduced in the long run to continual reenactments of a single scenario and not be seen for what it is—a continuation of a series or a succession of stages that had begun in France's prerevolutionary past, with the Great Revolution marking a partial embodiment of an obedience to ancient social and political impulses, as well as a harbinger of a new age. If Tocqueville's project is interpreted in the first sense, then change cannot figure in his philosophy of history; if, in the second, it is never far from it.

Tocqueville did not take either path unequivocally. His opening remarks in L'Ancien Régime about unintended consequences may be seen as a compromise, but they remained the basis of one of his abiding intellectual principles; he transformed it into a powerful image focused on the blindness of politicians, who, in their mutual challenges for place and power, actually think that intentions and results are unambiguously related, because, as he put it at one point, they fail to note that "the kite . . . flies by the antagonistic action of the wind and the cord."^[31] The end of an action is not necessarily to be found in its intention. The net effect of the Great Revolution is to be sought as much in the unexpected tensions that create it as in those that it creates. Unintended consequences are in any case as important as, or indeed constitute, the paradox that the revolutionaries "used the debris of the old society to construct the edifice of the new."^[32] This could be taken both as a silent rebuke to and as an endorsement of Edmund Burke, whom Tocqueville elsewhere criticized as blind to the abuses of the Old Regime and to the grandeur of the revolutionary image of renewal;^[33] and it may appear to place Tocqueville on the side of those who see change as mere froth on the tides of an implacable history. Unlike Burke who tended to see change as an inversion or a perversion of a universal natural order but employed legalistic and utilitarian arguments against it, Tocqueville tried to remove himself from these remnants of an older theodicy and from the seductions of utilitarianism. Nor did he see change as part of providential design, as did Joseph de Maistre,^[34] Louis de Bonald,^[35] and even Mallet du Pan:^[36] the first was literal minded and vengeful; the second saw the turmoil of the Revolution as part of an expiatory plan; the much more sober Mallet preferred to speak of a less personal "force des choses." Tocqueville used some of the providential vocabulary, drained it of its conventional religious referents, and substituted for them a far more distant and unknown divine presence, which almost

amounted to a divine absence from human affairs. He therefore ultimately deprived providence of consequentialism, which is its marrow. He tried to be indifferent, as his thoughts on certainty and probability show, to rigorist notions of determinism. In most instances, he envisaged change as the instrument by which long-term trends asserted themselves more clearly and strenuously, shedding the encumbrances of obsolete practices sanctioned by conventional legal practices.

The reverse side of this notion of change, as Tocqueville saw it, was that the exalted ideals that animated the early revolutionaries were delivered a cruel and decisive blow. Whether or not he borrowed the notion of the Revolution as monster from Burke, he called it a creature of diseased minds, a "virus,"^[37] but he thought of it as creator as well. The Revolution was both the symbol and devourer of the highest values. Its greatest legacy for Tocqueville was that it was both the child and mother of modern liberty. Nonetheless the temptation to devalue it seemed to be an older and more persistent psychic drive. He was not forgetting the liberties that he believed were once part of the corporate structure of the Old Regime and that had been crushed by the state as it assumed its modern shape and imposed itself over civil society. But he was more concerned about a new and modern liberty that had to find its appropriate political setting. The Revolution as contradiction lived as a reality in Tocqueville's mind so much so that he celebrated 1789 as "that period of [naive] inexperience, but also a time of generosity, enthusiasm, heroic courage, lofty courage and [a sense] of grandeur, a time of deathless memory to which the thoughts of men will turn with admiration and respect long after those who have seen it, as well as we ourselves have vanished."^[38] It was in 1789 that Frenchmen were confident enough to believe that they could be equal and free at the same time. The years leading up to 1789, Tocqueville had hinted earlier, however, represented just such time. In that period between the silencing of the imagination characteristic of caste societies and the isolation and "torpor" of a society of conforming equals, "new ideas suddenly change[d] the face of the world."^[39] As momentous as such periods in history are, Tocqueville would not let go of his more pessimistic view that liberty vanishes when admiration for absolute government feeds on the contempt human beings feel for their neighors.^[40] Tocqueville was once again giving voice to the dangers he had detected twenty years earlier in democratic societies—in which equality and tyranny were likely to coexist—of inflating the benefits of private comfort to the detriment of good citizenship.

The Revolution was thus a paradox. Because Tocqueville could not settle the question of the determinateness of the past, apart from his belief that the "unknown force"^[41] at work in the destruction of aristocratic society could only have been regulated or slowed down by human agents with practical

wisdom, the Revolution had been a promise yet perhaps also an unintentional trap. However, he did not draw out the full import of the paradox. He did not write the planned history of the "vicissitudes of that long revolution." His first aim had been to develop the motif that he had set out in 1836 in his État social et politique de la France avant et depuis 1789 , which John Stuart Mill translated and published in the London and Westminster Review . In the État , he took care to say that the revolutionaries had been shaped by the old order and remained recognizable under the superficial change.^[42] But, as he put it to Henry Reeve twenty years later, what the Revolution had truly accomplished and what its "violent labors" against the Old Regime had brought to birth that was truly new, were necessarily distinguishable. "But that [such a work] would lead me too far," he added.^[43] As he grew older, his doubts about his capacity to explore these tensions increased and reveal how much he was troubled both by the common perception that the Revolution was a total break with the past and by his conviction that this was much too shallow an explanation.

Tocqueville's image of the cataclysmic and unpredictable force of the Great Revolution figured in his lexicon as a perplexing instance of the uncertain effect of human action in history, with the result that it threatened existence with meaninglessness. In the tropes of others closer to the Revolution in time, either as participants or observers, its unfolding caught them in its embrace, inflaming passion, rarely cautioning distance. In spite of his declarations of "disinterestedness," his aim to be "strictly precise,"^[44] and his pride in his patient archival research, his adoption of a strategy of detachment was tinged with a degree of self-doubt, but he never quite grasped its roots, possibly because he saw nothing contradictory in passionately avowing his political beliefs while denying that they constituted a species of prejudice, since he could not conceive of it as inimical to or obstructive of his great love for and his need to defend liberty. He wanted to possess the secret of the event and the idea, to capture them, as it were, as they occurred, were thought, or were uttered—to find them in the grid of the Revolution in its actuality. The challenge threw him into a state of perplexity, inducing a state of vertigo.^[45] He deeply sensed that he could not achieve the feat of penetrating to the raw reality of persons and movements; that at best his history would be a work of pale representation, but he wanted desperately that it should be more "true" than the work of others. He saw himself as a philosopher-historian and instructor to the future; by appealing to a "superaddressee"—I am borrowing Bakhtin's conception of the writer's ideal audience^[46] —he thought he would be able to release the discrete mysteries of the French Revolution as well as reveal the general laws of revolution in their largest sense. But his project was to be accomplished, he promised himself, by resolutely setting himself apart from historians who claimed

"mathematical exactness" in speaking about human affairs,^[47] only to fall victim, as politicians and kings were prone, when they thought they were avoiding the mistakes of their predecessors, to errors of their own.

Tocqueville honestly acknowledged that his pose in the Souvenirs paled to nothingness in the light of the power of the events of 1848 upon which, in repose, he was reflecting.^[48] And those events, he said, almost immediately assumed a mimetic character. Tocqueville treated the revolutionaries of 1848 as unconscious parodists of 1789, who just as unconsciously contributed to a comic view of the past; the comic was history's revenge; it offered the consolation of laughter; in Tocqueville's scale of values it was ironic laughter; it was the other side of history that is usually thought to have only a serious dimension. Thus the comic did not conceal the nature of human history but was instead a way to a fuller knowledge of it.^[49] Are we justified in concluding that in Tocqueville's view the men of 1848 were merely replaying an old script in their floundering uses of the radical rhetoric of 1789, and were unable to devise a new one that would take them and France beyond it? This makes sense if we recall his belief that the 1848 actors did not continue what 1789 had begun. Such an insight nevertheless left Tocqueville with a feeling of deep unease. Could he articulate how what he admired in 1789 might be continued and bring an end to the Revolution, some sixty years after it had shaken the world, without reconstituting the realities of the immense varieties of the conflicts and their participants preceding and during the Revolution? His contemporaries, whose every weakness he caught in verbal caricatures worthy of Daumier, were, he thought, fair game; but they were safely locked away in his "secret" memoirs of the 1848 Revolution, although the fact that he could not keep the Souvenirs completely secret, as his correspondence with some of his friends shows, proves how much his call upon his inner self was determined by his need to make sense of the Revolution, and that he could not begin to do so without reemerging from his solitude.^[50] Would he be able to expose the flaws and extol the deeds of the principal actors of the Great Revolution, the "real" but dead actors, those whose actions and whose party labels the politicians and enthusiasts of 1848 ingested so greedily? Would the "real" actors be any more real than their imitators? In theory, the answer could be yes, since, in Tocqueville's framework, they represented a genuine break with the past and their conduct constituted a foundational act. This question, however, he could not confidently confront, though he knew how important it was to open the question of the role of key actors. It was their impotence, volatility, fear, and self-interest that he observed. They were overwhelmed by momentary confidence and longerterm bafflement.^[51] He was more comfortable moving around the long antecedents and the long-term effects of the Revolution, despite his conviction that human beings cannot be absolved from and in fact contribute to the making of their own history, whether for good or ill, and should therefore be a proper

subject of historical enquiry. The utterances of the men of 1789 could not be more opaque than the impermeability of the institutions, including language, under which they lived and which had originally shaped them together as a community, which tied them together by invisible bonds and bound them to a more and more remote past. They had to be transparent in some mythic beginning—in the years leading up to 1789, and in 1789 itself—the brief period in which modern liberty for Tocqueville came to life and which came to serve as a constant reminder of what people could accomplish. But, as we shall see, even such a privileged moment did not elicit from him a prolonged interpretation of the leading actors either at the outset of or during the Revolution.

"Le Mal Révolutionnaire"

Tocqueville feared being swallowed up in an ocean of materials, and he swam away from its undertow by subordinating the actors to his theory that the choice made in favor of liberty was blown off course—more—that the totality of human actions, rather than persons, took on a pathological character, for which he invented the locution, "le mal révolutionnaire." Imprecise though it was, it may best be understood as an inversion of the will that amounted to a kind of illness or impoverishment of the spirit. Images of disease, sickness, defective organs, and the need to dissect them to find causes were meant to expose the sources of the Old Regime's defects.^[52] That was one path to understanding. Physiological metaphors for political breakdown were commonplace before Tocqueville's time. So were metaphors of unsettled and "unnatural" states of mind for deviant political and social action. He made use of both, but his language suggests that, although he found plausible explanations for the violence of the Revolution, he was more perplexed by revolutionary mentality than by the breakdown of entrenched polities. It should be noted that he did not integrate these as part of a single dynamic process. He could write with comparative ease about the signs of a complacent and dying social order and a well-intentioned but ineffective, inept, and often mendacious administration, but he found "le mal révolutionnaire," which followed the breakdown of the Old Regime, too intractable a subject. From the context with which he surrounded the phrase, it is safe to say he meant the successively more violent stages of the Revolution itself. Le mal révolutionnaire, he seemed to be arguing, was synonymous with revolutionary government, which was illegitimate, although he did not say how, except by suggesting it was due to the excesses of democracy itself. The newness of democratic equality led to scenes of brutality and inhumanity. The violence, which he contrasted with the benign nature of democratic theory, possessed a virulent quality that grew out of the very texture of the lives of oppressed people and need not therefore be surprising. Le mal révolution-

naire was also more importantly a kind of philosophy and theory of action; the likelihood was that, even when it exhausted itself along with the concrete particularities giving rise to and created by revolutionary society, it would not disappear but would remain as a permanent, if shadowy, human passion. It had always been at, or the Revolution had brought it to, the surface of human experience; and it was repeatable.^[53] We cannot know whether he thought the mal révolutionnaire was a fall or an original flaw, since he seems to have been unable to choose between these two explanations. Thus he could scarcely have found it a simple matter to speak of individual responsibility, and he retreated to the notion that, if anything, the "mal" manifested itself and could best be represented as an example of a profound break with the past, which, in its turn, descended into incoherence and error.^[54]

The development of such incoherence—the revolutionary disease—may have been given, he was suggesting, its impetus and rationale by the pamphleteers who were especially prominent in 1788–1789. Tocqueville's notes reveal a fairly close inspection of several of their ideas; there is no evidence that he ever looked at the later, more revolutionary papers and pamphlets. The earlier ones were produced by men whose ideas, he claimed accurately, constituted more than just a transition point between the old and the new political discourses. The outlines and often the substance of their ideas were already, if not fully in every case, establishing a lexicon of revolutionary challenge. The prime example was Sieyès, whose pamphlet, Qu'est ce que le Tiers-Etat , Tocqueville described as a veritable cri de guerre —"a specimen of the violence and the radicalism of opinion, even before the struggles that are said to have provoked violence and radicalism." In doing so, it was the germinal expression of the Revolution ("le plus congénital de la Révolution"). In his call for full-scale war against the ancient social and legal structures of France and the absolute and unlimited triumph of his theories, without due regard for their practical effect, Tocqueville sounded a note of outrage and wonder at the breathtaking presumption that could ignore the cultural and political heritage of an ancient civilization and reduce politics to the mechanical counting of heads.^[55]

Two crucial points emerge from his analysis of Sieyès's powerful and decisive pamphlet, which he resumed and expanded in his evaluations of pamphlets written by Mounier,^[56] Barnave,^[57] Brissot,^[58] Rabaud-Saint-Etienne,^[59] and Péthion.^[60] The first was their animus against the idea of favoring the united action of the legal orders and social ranks, exemplified by the decision of the three Estates at Vizille in the province of Dauphiné to remain a single body.^[61] The second was the almost total repudiation of Montesquieu's constitutionalism, which Tocqueville said was distorted by the pamphleteers who saw it as a screen to promote the special interests of the privileged. All of them were too blinded by their aversion for the Old Regime to grasp the

benefits of a gradual readjustment of the balance of political forces in the monarchy.

For example, Mounier's great error was to allow himself to be carried away by the bizarre notion that a bicameral assembly was to be avoided because only a unicameral one could effect the changes France required. Only after they were introduced did Mounier feel secure enough to entrust the nation to a divided assembly. Such a formula, which placed the political future of the nation at the mercy of a single class or a single party, Tocqueville complained, was "excellent indeed for making a revolution, but hardly the one to bring an end to it at the right time." The obliteration of all the features of an orderly society in these circumstances degraded liberty, and equality, left on its own, simply became another name for servitude.^[62] Such a process in Tocqueville's eyes was a striking demonstration of how the powers of centralization were strengthened. Mounier's precise aim, he said, was not to support centralization, but he supported the steps that led to it^[63] ("Il ne veut pas précisément la centralization, mais ce qui y conduit"). This instance of unintentional consequences was once again the reward of false premises.

Barnave, too, had originally spoken out against innovation, when the monarchy dared to invade the rights of the magistrates in 1788. He did so, Tocqueville observed with approval, in the spirit of Montesquieu's detestation and fear of despotism. Tocqueville marveled at Barnave's youthful appeals for a union of all classes and interests, his praise of the "illustrious families" of France that protected the monarchy with their blood, and his "sincere" appeals to natural equality and democracy; and although Tocqueville wondered about the prospects of a permanent union of all the forces ranged against the despotic state, he conceded that such a union had reached the limits of the possible.^[64]

Thus, though he kept coming back to the theme of united action, noting that the future Girondin, Brissot, had appealed for caution, conciliation, and harmony, he acknowledged that Brissot's opposition to the exclusivity of the first two orders was his major and most decisive argument. As a result of his stay in the United States, he had become convinced that a Convention was a necessary step toward the remaking of the political map of France. For Tocqueville this was a truly revolutionary idea. Whether or not Brissot's text justifies Tocqueville's reading of it, Tocqueville derived a certain pleasure from and accorded his respect for Brissot's understanding of the conservative nature of the American political experience. As proof, Tocqueville mentioned the American decision to adopt a bicameral legislature. He may also have been recalling his praise of the makers of the American Constitution. Recognition of the utility of American practices was much more desirable in Tocqueville's opinion than the views of the "worst imitators" who had "taken from the United States the abstract principles of their con-

stitution without having felt the need of applying them conservatively which had been achieved in America."^[65]

From Brissot Tocqueville went on to consider Rabaud-Saint-Etienne who, he dryly observed, took four years to discover that he was tired of acting the part of the tyrant and was executed for admitting that he was mistaken for thinking that the regime of privileges was more to be feared than royal power. Rabaud's sudden insight, Tocqueville could not resist adding, was a good case of human intelligence knowing too late that it was liberty that needed support; instead, the mind had mistakenly turned its energies to equality.^[66] But there was more in Tocqueville's interpretation of the desire shown by all the pamphleteers to move swiftly against any political ploy to retain any semblance of traditional representation. What choices did they have, Tocqueville finally asked himself? Almost none since, in their desire to end privilege, they were unable, because of the profound political differences between France and England, to adopt the English political model to enable them to reduce and limit rather than abolish what had to be ended.^[67] Similarly his notes on a pamphlet attributed to Pétion show how he continued to perceive that the revolutionary discourse was moving further and further away from Montesquieu's ideas and that, although liberty was not foresaken, the "final word of the Revolution" came to be "let us try to be free by becoming equal, but it is a hundred times better to cease to be free than to remain or to become unequal."^[68]

The revolutionaries who then came into their own were "men who carried audacity to the point of sheer insanity, for whom no innovation was surprising, no scruple could act to restrain, and who would never hesitate to execute an action." Tocqueville was again sounding the theme of equality, the hunger for which had become so overwhelming that it was elevated above and displaced for all practical purposes everything else that the actors of 1789 were bringing to political consciousness in their desire to regenerate France. Those who were responsible for the deflection were not, however, "new beings," nor "the isolated and ephemeral creation of a single moment, destined to disappear with it. They had rather formed a new race of men that endured and gained ground throughout the civilized world, everywhere preserving the same features, the same passions, and the same character. They were already here when we were born, and they are still with us."^[69]

Humanitarianism and generosity, two of the noblest features of the Enlightenment, had been blighted by an inhuman revolution.^[70] Le mal révolutionnaire had produced murderous effects and was always ready to be summoned up from the depths of human experience. On what grounds was he making these ominous claims? In part, he was calling on Burke's outrage at the climate of revolutionary suspicion of all established opinion. But he was more interested in exposing the origins and consequences of popular opinion. He did so delicately but devastatingly. He was far from denying the connec-

tion between ideas and actual events; but he refused to extend to the extreme actions of Year II a footing in solid ideas. At best, those actions and the ideology inspiring them constituted the revolutionary degradation of political ideas and conduct. He had little regard for most of the men of letters of the Old Regime, whom he mistakenly represented as misunderstanding the nature of politics, and who assumed, so to speak, the role of an unofficial public opposition, but did so irresponsibly by producing streams of impractical ideas.^[71] At the same time, he made a distinction between abstract ideas and popular expressions of opinion. To the first he conferred a kind of dignity by conceding the good intentions of their theorists, while condemning the savage practices of the uneducated, unlettered, and disorderly elements in society, who took control of and shaped the violent phases of the Revolution. The humanitarians who were trying to transform political culture had no way of controlling their intellectual products, as the latter began to attract a mass audience.^[72] In Democracy , he had already dissected the power of public opinion; in L'Ancien Régime , he adverted to the processes by which public opinion achieved its force in the political and cultural structures of monarchical France. In democracies, he noted in his earlier work, opinion truly came into its own as mistress of the world, because equality erased trust among private men but enhanced their faith in the infallibility of public judgment.^[73] In the French Revolution, books were used by the populace, including the peasantry, to satisfy their "lust for revenge."^[74] This led to the inevitable deterioration of opinion, as it descended downward to the people from the literary figures and self-styled philosophers.^[75] Tocqueville's intention was to make the link between his earlier belief that the ubiquitous nature of public opinion in democratic nations stifled the critical mind and his later belief that nothing could resist its tyranny in revolutionary times. As if to underline this point, he expressed envy for the way in which the English upper classes had made a revolution in 1688 and carefully controlled it by ensuring that it did not pass into the hands of the people. Not so the National Assembly, which had wavered in its resolution. It failed to pass Lally-Tollendal's "timid" motion of 22 July 1789, urging popular moderation, and thus transferred sovereignty to the people of Paris.^[76]

Tocqueville saw in the democratic revolution a single but agonistic event that tore its principal actors apart: for him it was indeed the specter haunting Europe, but it was also the creator of a new society. He may have departed from the full import of his original assertion that democratic peoples must "secure the new benefits which equality may offer them . . . [and] to strive to achieve that species of greatness and happiness which is our own,"^[77] but he did not doubt even then that were the descent of democracy into democratic despotism to become more and more irreversible, it would be because human beings were wrong to believe it right but were still willing to satisfy their inclination to simplify rather than diversify the means to reach their

greatness.^[78] However, he questioned his own pessimism when he opposed Arthur de Gobineau's racial theories. He contrasted the "illness" of the revolutionary belief in total self-transformation with the "illness" of the postrevolutionary belief in the futility of will and virtue, and rejected both such expectations and such nihilism.^[79]

The theme of continuity that has so enthralled readers of Tocqueville has blinded them to what he regarded as new in the Great Revolution and its echoes in the nineteeth century and after. He did not intend to support, nor may he be read retrospectively as doing so, the claim that the Terror foreshadowed the broad outlines and experiences of the univers concentrationnaire of the twentieth century. So respectful was he of the unique rather than the uniform circumstances of events that he distinguished the 1793 Terror that "still preserved in its crimes a certain hypocrisy of forms and honesty missing" from Louis Napoleon's repressive policies that were sending thousands of unfortunate victims into exile without trial.^[80] He made the same point after 1856 when he described the "perfected atrocities" characteristic of the Directory, that is, the deportations to Guiana of journalists and politicians, the imprisonment of priests, the forced loans, the confiscations, and the law of hostages, which were, he said, much more cruel than any of the laws of 1793 and were not necessarily consequent on them.^[81]

His general remarks on the Terror are couched in language he had consistently used. His conviction that the majority's loss of its rights and willing acquiescence in its own exploitation by tyrannical minorities recalls Montesquieu's conviction that individuals have a profound propensity for subjection. What had to be painted, Tocqueville promised in his notes, was the state of the revolutionary mind by means of which the majority rendered the tyranny of the minority possible. He admired Mallet du Pan's Mémoires for adverting to an explanation of the Terror that bordered on his own concerns. It was a powerful force that he said came close to organizing disorganization and uniting the forces of despotism and anarchy, and which was, he agreed with Mallet, not a singularly French but a European phenomenon, one of the most "active and contagious diseases of the human mind."^[82] Quite early on, in the first volume of his Democracy , he noted that any legislative body, such as the French Convention, which had usurped the role of government, was destined to self-destruction because, while its power was subject to shifts in the popular will, it tyrannized society in the name of that will, by claiming a false identity with it. Its vigor was thus an artifice, subject to imminent disclosure.^[83] The insight is reminiscent of Montesquieu's depiction of the operations and ultimate impotence of despotism.^[84] Something like the overthrow of the despotism of the legislative power, Tocqueville intimated, must have begun but was not completed at Thermidor. By the end of his life, he was satisfied that he had discerned the contours of the new democratic despotism. He had shifted his concern from the powers concentrated in the

legislative body to those in the clenched fist of the executive power.^[85] The study of the Revolution's inflation of the popular will strengthened his conviction that it was the key to popular subjection.

It is not at all certain that he was prepared to entrust liberty to the bourgeoisie of his own day, who were hardly the same as they were at the beginning of the Great Revolution.^[86] He was less interested in embarking on an analysis of their newer sources of wealth than in commenting on the development of their power and their total inwardness. They had undergone a sea change in two generations. Tocqueville was once again reflecting on the ironies and paradoxes of unintended consequences. By triumphing in 1789 and after, the bourgeoisie ended the unity of opposition to the crown. That union had captivated Tocqueville's admiration because it symbolized a willingness for self-sacrifice. By contrast, 1830 was the triumph of selfishness—it gave the bourgeoisie the chance to establish their full identity and their hegemonic power to demonstrate how they would utilize it. Tocqueville excoriated their abuses of power over the next eighteen years, noting disdainfully that they were enduring ignominies in 1848 similar to those suffered by the nobility whom they had displaced. The new governing class, "through its indifference, its selfishness and its vices," proved "incapable and unworthy of governing the country."^[87] Just as he inveighed against the old aristocracy for its exclusiveness, he turned against a similar shortcoming in the bourgeoisie of his own time but found that, despite their common defect, one difference between them was striking, perhaps decisive. The middle class was far from being a homogeneous body. It expanded and contracted, it bordered on other classes, and, for this reason, was hard to locate, define, or attack, even if it tried to retain its exclusivity.^[88] Indeed, it was liable to greater vulnerability than the aristocracy and would, in the light of 1848, be forced to face the fact that property was no longer shielded by the system of odious privileges that had been abolished in the Great Revolution, and was therefore more directly open to attack.^[89]

Tocqueville just as determinedly ridiculed what he thought were the illusions of the socialist sects. There could be no question of entrusting them with the defense of liberty. But we should not forget that he adverted to the existence in the eighteenth century of conflicting views of political economy,^[90] calling into question the paramountcy of private property. He thus helped to bring to consciousness the question of how the desire to free the market from legal restraints, traditional conventions and customs, and the power of the state triumphed over the challenges to a market society and had become the established dogma of the discourse of political economy. Tocqueville's reactions to the observed effects of the new political economy, rather than to its growing but by no means assured status as a body of noncontingent truths, were far from positive. Although he admitted that the growth of the modern economy conferred technological benefits, and

although he affirmed that commerce prepared individuals for freedom,^[91] he had, long before his work on the Revolution, believed it necessary to look at the "concealed relationship between . . . liberty and commerce." From his examination, he drew the conclusion that freedom in its largest sense gave birth to commerce.^[92] Indeed, he was in some important ways more sympathetic to some of the dying moral principles that underlay a premodern economy, while denying at the same time that they had any final purchase in a world that was being instructed by its leading political economists not to confuse commerce and ethics. In Democracy , his views on individualism and jeremiads against the effects of economic success and well-being on the prospects of personal political liberty made up his testament to the ultimate vacuity of restless ambition in a world that had ended endemic scarcity and had enthusiastically embraced material gratification as a goal, while investing with intense passion the power that such self-concentration gave to people in a democratic society to act in the name of but almost invariably against civic responsibility. It was as if he were saying that in some inexplicable way the relationship between modern political economy and liberty had been distorted—that commerce, the child of liberty, might in due course strangle its parent, rather than preserve it, and thus help to smother civic responsibility whose leading principle was liberty.

His conviction was not without its sense of desperation, and the problem was how to overcome or at least to mitigate it. As is often the case in interpreting Tocqueville's thought, what he failed to integrate into his deft crafting of his consistent view of the past holds the key to the question. When in Democracy he charted the development of equality in America and in France, the two societies in which forms of democracy had been reached by different routes—one without, the other with violent revolutionary struggle—he saw equality not only as a legal and political reality, but also as a desirable condition for expanding economic capabilities in the eyes of those who yearned for it. One may therefore read L'Ancien Régime in a state of forgetfulness of the immensely significant role Tocqueville gave in his Souvenirs to the bourgeoisie's defense of property in the prelude to and aftermath of 1848, in the course of which, as we saw, he took a much harder line against the nonpropertied majority. If we remain forgetful, we may also overlook the extent to which he had seen the 1830 Revolution as a license for the bourgeoisie to plunder society. He castigated them for not taking care to see how their apotheosis of and seduction by wealth would generate bitter social conflict. And after 1848, he predicted darkly that fate decreed alternations between license and oppression, rather than a regulated and stable system of liberty.

Tocqueville thought about liberty's and history's elusiveness as a positive inducement to human beings to see them both as reminders of their fragile hold on life's meaning. The only liberty that mattered was the liberty that allowed human beings to obey the laws they themselves enacted, provided

the nations of which they were part made a proper use of it.^[93] He valued "the stable, regulated liberty, restrained by religion, custom and the law" about which he spoke in his Souvenirs ,^[94] and not the unregulated liberty that led to the undoing of the "authentic" liberty he believed was one of the great unclaimed legacies of the Enlightenment.^[95] It is therefore an error to think that Tocqueville would have been ready to concede that in democracies "the new sense of equality, society and humanity [could] only be reconciled with liberty on condition that it never be realized." This conclusion is reached on the grounds that actualization would see human beings "slipping into the imaginary which would effect a split between the reign of opinion and the reign of power, between the reign of science and men who are subjugated."^[96] Tocqueville, it is true, warned against this. The revolutionaries, he complained, had moved recklessly into an embrace of their own artifice, "une société imaginaire," and had produced a disaster. Instructive for Tocqueville in his understanding of the Revolution was that it provided additional evidence of the fragility of modern liberty. In Democracy , he had spoken about the practical measures he believed necessary to strengthen liberty. But after 1848, after writing L'Ancien Régime , and during the last three years of his life as he reflected further about the events of the Revolution, he could not resist coming back to those moments before and during the earliest stages of the Revolution when a rare moment had united all classes. That is the only meaning that may be given to his belief that 1789 would remain enigmatic so long as human beings were caught in the tangle of reliving, rather than continuing, what it had begun. He had set out to escape from the labyrinth of the past, constructed a coherent view of it to instruct his fellow creatures to avoid its deepest recesses, and invented his own imaginary future to keep the image of liberty alive.

Thirteen
Transformations in the Historiography of the Revolution

François Furet

Translated by Brian Singer

I

The French Revolution was first interpreted in terms of class struggle, before Marx, by the liberal historians of the Restoration. The mechanics of Marx's explanation of history would remain similar, though the outcome and actors were different. He continues with the idea of class conflict but extends it to the proletariat and bourgeoisie, and turns their conflict into the last act in the history of human alienation, since the proletariat is said to bear within itself the end of class society. But this new "end of history" does not prevent him from interpreting, like his bourgeois predecessors, the causes of the French Revolution in terms of the middle class ascendancy—an ascendancy slowly achieved at a social level in the last centuries of the Ancien Régime and crystallized in 1789 when the bourgeoisie came to political power.^[1]

The problem with this sort of interpretation, even before Marx, is its inability to account for the modes by which power is taken and held: for it analyzes the contents of the revolutionary event, not its forms, and still less its duration. This can be illustrated by a brief look at the French liberals. Guizot, for example, works out in great detail the idea of the historical rise of the middle class, tied to the entire march of civilization. He examines its economic dimension: the growth of production and consumption, the progress of the market, the rise in living standards, the wealth of the cities and the extravagance of the wealthy; its social dimension: the increased role of the middle class that, freed from feudal domination with the increasing emancipation of the Communes, had become central to the construction of national unity; its moral dimension: the conquest of individual autonomy, both in relation to God (Protestantism) and the City (citizenship as the individual's participation in human history); and lastly its political dimension: the con-

stitution (or reconstitution) of law and the public sphere—which had been fragmented under feudalism and reincarnated by the monarchy in the name of the nation. Civilization —a term that Guizot took from the eighteenth century to express less a state than a process, that by which European society becomes "civil"—encompasses at one and the same time the growth of the economy and liberty, the progress of the individual and administrative unity, the Reformation and the nation-state. Its secular dismantling of the feudal system culminated with 1789, which finally allowed modern society and its deus ex machina, the middle class, to appear in the full light of history. "When periodizing revolutions," he notes in his lessons of 1820–1821, "one must begin with the day they burst forth—it is the only precise date one can assign them. They do not, however, take place within such a time framework. The tremors that one terms 'revolution,' are less a symptom of what is beginning than the declaration of what has happened."^[2]

But the problem now becomes how to explain the frenzied course of events after 1789. For if the Revolution expressed a necessity of history, a history that had been all but realized prior to it, then it is the revolutionary event itself, its "shadows" and "tempests," to use Guizot's revealing vocabulary, that becomes opaque. And this for two reasons: first, the event displays a strange discrepancy between its rationale, that is, the ensemble of causes that brought it about, and its course, which would lead to its excesses. Instead of establishing representative government, which was to crown and complement the new society, the Revolution followed an erratic trajectory that placed it in conflict with its own principles—since neither Robespierrism nor Bonapartism are compatible with liberty. Second, the uncontrollable character of that trajectory suggests that the middle class, though supposedly victorious in 1789, did not really control its course. There was something truly anarchic about the Revolution of 1789, more powerful than any individual or class strategy, something that would swallow up all of its actors and for a long time render impossible the formation of a stable government. But as Guizot never wrote on the French Revolution itself, he left neither an in-depth analysis of the revolutionary course of events as such, nor a commentary on the difficulties involved in conceptualizing the necessity of 1789 along with all the seemingly contingent events it inaugurated.

These same difficulties can be found in Mignet, himself an author of a history of the Revolution,^[3] but one who was no less convinced of the necessity of revolutions in general, and of that of 1789 in particular. As with Guizot, he viewed 1789 as having been completed prior to its actual occurrence. "All the Estates General did was to decree a Revolution that had already been completed." It was, therefore, irreversible. Still, it had traversed tumultuous periods, which appeared incompatible with the seemingly self-evident character with which it had first been greeted. Nonetheless, this same chaotic movement was "almost inevitable" (Introduction, p. 4). In order to demon-

strate this claim, Mignet does not have recourse to a "ruse of reason" type of reasoning but resorts instead to a series of interconnected actions deliberately intended by the actors themselves. If the Revolution was necessarily so long, bloody, and complex, despite being inscribed in what preceded it, it was because it had such powerful enemies who reoriented its direction. In their struggle against the Revolution, these enemies provoked the passions of its most extreme partisans. Thus, following the middle-class revolution, there was the people's revolution of 1792, and then, once the nation was saved, the pendulum swung back with the Thermidorian reaction. If there was indeed something necessary about the course of the revolutionary events, it was of a secondary order, deduced from the primary necessity that gave birth to modern society under the guidance of the middle class.

Thus Mignet saves his philosophical reading of the revolutionary events at the cost of logical inconsistencies. The year 1789 was inevitable, an event prepared beforehand by the entire evolution of the Ancien Régime; yet it provoked tremendously hostile reactions on the part of individuals and classes with enough strength and freedom of action to oppose it. The "second revolution," that of 1792, made by the "multitudes" against the middle class, does not possess the dignity of the first, since it did not correspond to any larger necessity of history. It could not, by definition, create institutions or laws since its violence was entirely defensive; and yet it too was inevitable, if only temporarily, as a provisional line of defense for the first revolution. In this manner the determinist interpretation is able to encompass all the detours of revolutionary politics in the name of a grand design, as in Joseph de Maistre,^[4] though in a completely different sense. Even those struggles most closely tied to personal rivalries draw their raison d'être from the two provisional ends of the Revolution, to destroy the Ancien Régime and push back the enemy, in order to restore it to its normal course, its original social base and project, the establishment of the rule of law. The dictatorship was a parenthesis necessary for the establishment of liberty; the rule of the people was the necessary instrument of middle-class government. What appears as the most improvised is still determined by social groups, in accord with the Revolution's nature.

Marx read Mignet's History , along with all the literature on the subject, during his one-year stay in Paris in 1844. But his understanding of the French Revolution remained indebted to the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right .^[5] Hegel had elaborated his theory of the state via a critique of the Revolution, and Marx, in his turn, criticized the Hegelian philosophy of right by turning its theory of the state upside down—without, however, losing sight of the French Revolution, the privileged and almost obsessive example of the period. For Hegel the state lies atop society, as the supreme substance of that history which is to close the characteristically modern gulf between the public and private spheres and realize man's liberty. With Marx, the

young Marx of 1843–1844, the opposite holds true: civil society has primacy over the state. And modernity is characterized above all else by a market society—with the extension of market relations throughout the spheres of production and distribution, and the removal of all obstacles to economic activities—and by the private individual, a monad enclosed in his work, interests, calculations, and pleasures, separated from his fellow man and indifferent to the community and its concerns.

Now, 1789 was a product of this modernity. In effect, with the French Revolution bourgeois society appeared in its nudity, liberated from its feudal chains. After Guizot and Mignet, Marx also provided a social interpretation of 1789, if in modified terms. He too claimed that the bourgeoisie, which had already mastered society, crowned its domination by seizing political power. And in this regard, the bourgeoisie established a representative democratic state, the successor to absolute monarchy. That is to say it established a public sphere that appears autonomous—radically separating the political from the societal realm—but which remains dependent. This state appears autonomous because its representative character expresses the separation of society from the state, and its democratic character (its universality) expresses the abstract equality of the citizen relative to the individual's real situation in civil society. This autonomy, however, is a lie: the state is merely the communitarian mask for a social reality marked by private individualism; a simple alibi that provides the illusion of equality in an inegalitarian world. The separate individuals of modern civil society have alienated themselves within the imaginary community of the state.

This dialectic between the social and political realms provided Marx not just with a general interpretation of the Revolution but with elements for charting its course. As an exemplary expression of modern politics, the French Revolution disclosed with exceptional clarity what Marx called "the state's idealism." This was the significance of 1789, but even more so of 1793 and the Jacobin dictatorship, during which period the revolutionary spirit was revealed in its most radical form. But in this unequal contest, where the social man was the real basis of the imaginary, political man, civil society ended up recovering what the Revolution had temporarily usurped. If 1793 had been the apogee of the citizen's emancipation, Thermidor 1794 was its truth. Yet the revenge of the real on the idea was short lived, since it was followed by the Bonapartist dictatorship. For although Napoleon certainly takes bourgeois interests into account—he was, after all, responsible for the Civil Code, the true social foundation of the postrevolutionary world—he imposed on the bourgeoisie a dictatorial state that had other interests, that had its own ends, and was indeed itself its own end. In this sense, Napoleon reinvented the Terror even as he gave it a different content, that of conquest instead of virtue. The imperial dictatorship was an administrative version of the Terror, achieved at the cost of a change in objective. Here Marx returned

to a theme dear to liberal historiography: the elaboration of a relation between Robespierrism and Bonapartism in terms of the state's domination of society.

But as a result, he too ran into the problem common to every social interpretation of the Revolution, that posed by the multiplicity of political forms. It may be easy to conceptualize the transition from 1789 to 1793 (from the constitutional monarchy to the Republic) in terms of the radicalization of men and ideas, but how does one explain the fact that the government established in Thermidor 94—this time a truly bourgeois regime—would also slide out of control and end up in 1799 in a new version of the absolutist state? The first Bonaparte already raised the same difficulty for the young Marx that the second Bonaparte raised for the mature Marx: that of a state established by the bourgeoisie and partially in its service, yet independent of it. Both bourgeois and nonbourgeois—what did Robespierre represent? and what does Napoleon represent? Although the mature Marx never returned to the Revolution as systematically as in his "youthful" writings, it is not hard to see from his writings on the Second French Republic and the rise of the second Bonaparte that he had never resolved the enigma already present in his analysis of 1789 in The Jewish Question or The Holy Family . If the "illusion" of the modern state is simply a mystification by which the bourgeoisie disguises its undivided class rule, why was there this seemingly endless series of revolutions and coups d'état, all presumably in the service of this same power? Marx is most promising when, as in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte , he reintroduces the idea of the state's independence relative to society. But he never followed through with this idea, as suggested to him by France's history. For it was constantly being eclipsed by the opposite idea: the state as an instrument of the dominant class and as such tied to the latter's fortunes—triumphant in its rise, condemned during its decline. The prisoner of a determinist philosophy not unlike that of the liberals, Marx found himself in the same impasse for having interpreted France's political history in terms of the development of its civil society and economy.

Perhaps this impasse prevented Marx from writing the history of the Convention about which he dreamed during his youth, but it did not stop his successors. For the historiography of the French Revolution during the twentieth century has been dominated in most European universities, beginning with the Sorbonne, by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and Leninism. The first appeared, at the time, to constitute the social revolution prophesied by Marx, which was to follow France's political revolution. Once power was consolidated, the prediction appeared to be confirmed, and the Russian revolution was situated in an almost natural line of succession with 1789—and all the more plausibly as the Russian Bolsheviks did not cease to claim the Jacobins as their predecessors. As for Leninism, that most subjectivist variant of Marxism, it enabled a glorification of the disruptive, creative, and

almost demiurgical aspect of the concept of revolution, not just as a privileged form of action, but as its only valid form—at the expense of a concern for the objective conditions behind the historical events.

This explains two features of the Leninist interpretation of 1789 which push Marx's analysis in a leftward direction. Marx had always upheld the idea, developed by the French historians of the Restoration, that the absolute monarchy's power was autonomous relative to society, the arbiter between the nobility and Third Estate; but twentieth-century "Marxist" historiography^[6] sees the absolutist state as aristocratic, governing in the interests of a formerly feudal class that still retained its social dominance. This claim cannot be found in Marx and is a projection onto the past of Leninism's intransigence relative to the class content of the modern capitalist state—the instrument of monopoly capital, whatever its "formal" procedures. And this claim changes the Marxist interpretation of the French Revolution, since for Marx eighteenth-century French society was already largely bourgeois.

At once the French Revolution no longer appears the same. If it still remains, in the last analysis, a product of capitalist development, in its Leninist version it now appears borne by a twofold necessity; for it also had to overturn and uproot an aristocratic society and a state that would defend themselves tooth and nail. In this domain as in others, Leninism privileges the voluntarist side of Marxism. More than simply the advent of the bourgeoisie, the French Revolution appears as the epic drama by which the bourgeoisie revealed and created itself, as a succession of regimes punctuated by violent acts in which the bourgeoisie struggled with and triumphed over a formidable counterrevolution. In contrast to Marx, the Leninist historian of the Revolution celebrates the course of the Revolution more than its results. This explains the greater emphasis placed on 1793 than 1789, and the preference for the Jacobins over the Constituents, to say nothing of the Thermidorians. With the men of 1793, the historian who admires October 1917 finds himself on familiar ground, since the Soviet experience also illustrated the necessity of dictatorship and Terror. He shares with the Jacobins and Bolsheviks the belief that revolutionary action can and must change society: the very same belief that Marx had analyzed as characteristic of the political illusion that the social revolution was to have buried and overcome.

The superimposition of the image of the Russian on the French Revolution gave rise to new and original works of research and erudition, most notably with regard to the study of the popular classes and their actions during the latter part of the eighteenth century. At the same time, however, it inevitably deepened the problems presented by the social interpretation of the revolutionary events since Mignet and Marx had written in the nineteenth century. Both had already found it extremely difficult to conceptualize the Revolution's character in relation to its course. If the bourgeois revolution culminated in what is nonbourgeois (and "anticipates" the rev-

olution to come), why call it bourgeois? But here the contradiction, which inheres in Marxism, between historical necessity and subjective voluntarism, is taken to extremes. On the one hand, it is incarnated in two collective actors who had contradictory interests but were harnessed to the same historical mission. And on the other hand, the bourgeoisie, though it had reached maturity, continuously demonstrated its inability to realize the task to which it had been assigned. In effect, the bourgeois government of 1789 proved the least stable of governments, since it cleared the way for state forms that the bourgeoisie did not control, such as the dictatorship of Year II and Bonaparte's despotism.

II

In the last thirty years the whole of the social interpretation of the French Revolution has progressively unraveled—not just in its Marxist form but also in its earlier, classically bourgeois and liberal form, as it first appeared with the historians of the Restoration. The Marxist version, it is true, had weakened the explanatory value of this interpretation by associating the idea of the bourgeoisie with precise historical conditions, like the prior victory of a capitalist economy. And the leftish, Leninist version of Marxism rendered the concept of the bourgeois revolution even more problematic by superimposing 1917 on 1789 and glorifying the dictatorship of Year II, the Revolution's most voluntarist episode. As a result, the social interpretation of the Revolution has continuously lost its relevance with the addition of specific, supplementary characteristics imputed to its necessity.

This point can be clarified by an examination of precisely these conditions, this time by going back over the course of the history, while considering the Leninist, the simply Marxist, and the original, liberal-bourgeois interpretations respectively.

In the case of Marxism-Leninism, the problem is to situate the Revolution's least bourgeois period—characterized by the provisional domination of the sans-culottes, a state-controlled economy, and a terrorist dictatorship directed not just against the aristocracy of birth, but of wealth as well—within the overall necessity of the Revolution's bourgeois nature. Why was the bourgeoisie's political ascendancy accompanied by episodes that are its negation? The contradiction is all the more difficult to resolve as greater emphasis is placed on the Revolution's unfolding than its results and, in particular, on the dictatorship of 1793 that supposedly "anticipates" the conditions of the revolution to come, that of 1917. In this version, what is appreciated above all else is the revolutionary character of 1789, rather than its bourgeois character. And it is difficult, when celebrating the rupture between democracy and the law, and the inability of the men and principles of 1789 to establish durable political institutions, to uphold the bourgeois na-

ture of the Revolution as one's central interpretative thread. In order to do so one must resort to the idea of an aristocratic counterrevolution that forced the bourgeoisie into an alliance with the people and led to the extended use of violence. But the reasoning here proves circular, for resistance to the Revolution, which was almost nonexistent in 1789, was in fact conditioned by the Revolution's radicalism and cannot be explained in terms of class interests.

Now it is true that one does not find this hypervoluntarist conception in Marx. He insisted on the objective factors that led to 1789 and, in particular, the maturity of the French bourgeoisie as the socially dominant class prior to its conquest of power. But as Marx linked this social dominance with that of the capitalist economy, he led the historian before another impasse, one that was underscored in the 1960s by the English historian, Alfred Cobban:^[7] at the end of the eighteenth century, the French economy, being based largely on agricultural production and a multiplicity of small rural plots, was not capitalist, as can be seen if compared to the English economy of the same period. And the bourgeoisie of 1789—the bourgeoisie that, for example, filled the Third Estate's seats in the Estates-General or, a little later, the administration of the departments—was not a capitalist bourgeoisie. If it included a certain number of shopkeepers and merchants (but practically no "manufacturers"), its vast majority was composed of legal practitioners—lawyers, judges, prosecutors—an entire world that owed more to French absolutism and the state-bureaucratized society of the Ancien Régime than to the "Manchester" spirit. Furthermore, if one judges the French Revolution not by its actors but by its objective results, one cannot speak of it in terms of capitalism; for the French economy remained more than ever, if compared with England, of a preindustrial type. The Revolution and the Empire democratized the bureaucratic and military values of the old French society, giving the people access to a domain once reserved for the aristocracy. Far from having transformed these national values, the revolutionary period gave them new roots.

If one must hold on to the idea of a bourgeois revolution, then it would be better to endow that revolution with that indeterminacy which it had for the Restoration historians, and make it the tip of a much larger movement, designated somewhat vaguely as the progress of "civilization." From this perspective one can delimit a series of long-term conditions of 1789, such as the quantitative growth of the economy, the progress of communications and exchanges, the decline in mortality rates, improvements to the domestic and urban environments, and the modernization-unification of the kingdom by state action—all things with which the men of the eighteenth century were very much concerned. The French Revolution was a child of growth and not of stagnation. But the historian gains nothing by making the bourgeoisie alone responsible for such progress, since he cannot situate the bourgeoisie, at the end of a long historical process, as the sole actor or beneficiary of the

Revolution. And so the historian finds himself having to renounce the idea that there exists, for the explanation of 1789, some royal road around which all the causal series could be arranged, and whose centerline would be formed by the bourgeoisie, the central actor in the development of civil society.

Now, such a renunciation need not detract from the Revolution's historical dignity—on the contrary. By ceasing to be the product of a class, it appears all the more as at the origins of modernity. Indeed, one is now in a position to rediscover the role attributed to it, for better or worse, by its most perceptive witnesses—Sieyès, Benjamin Constant, Burke, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel: that of bringing forth a world of autonomous individuals, entrusted with reconstructing the City on the basis of their free wills. The latter is not a specifically bourgeois project, since it continues to define the efforts of even those who seek to go beyond the bourgeois horizon, according to socialist doctrine. It encompasses all the attempts undertaken since 1789 to form a political community out of the atomized social universe of the modern individual. In this sense, both the bourgeois universe and the socialist claim to succeed the latter are its progeny. And it remains our point of departure for understanding what separates us from the Ancien Régime, whatever our views relative to the future of modern society. In other words, for today's historian the enigma of 1789 remains intact: it constitutes both a rupture and an origin. It remains our principle figure of historical discontinuity and cannot be domesticated within the terms of the short- or long-term domination of a class, in accord with some preassigned future.

By uncoupling 1789 from the bourgeoisie, one rediscovers something of the mysterious indeterminacy of these celebrated events. One gives the historical actors back their freedom of action—actors who wanted above all to be free, that is, to be able to transform the course of history by an act of will. And the best indicator that this liberty has been restored is the importance given to the Revolution's political dimension, that is, to the way the actors themselves thought and expressed what they were doing. The names they assigned to things are the best signs of the passions they experienced. When a period is obsessed with its political divisions, to the point of using them to define a radical rupture with the past and create a completely new language relative to man and society, it hardly seems reasonable to reduce the period to the advent of an economic form. The French Revolution was, above all else, a laboratory of modern politics. It offers an exceptional wealth and complexity of political materials, as well as many intelligent actors and penetrating commentators. In order to approach its true historical reality, one must give up viewing history as though people in the past were submerged in an opacity that only the historian (or philosopher) can illuminate. One must return to what in history was explicit, which, in the case of the French Revolution, is to be found in its political history, as marked out by an extremely

important historico-philosophical tradition. The latter is as old as the Revolution itself (for it begins with, for example, Sieyès or Burke^[8] ), moves beyond France's frontiers (since German philosophy provides a fundamental contribution), and is enriched throughout the nineteenth century, notably as a result of the French intelligentsia's obsessive relation with—and consequently, its intellectual enthrallment to—the last ten years of the preceding century.

In truth, the French Revolution is so vast an event, and so rich and deep, that it has become central to an analysis of the specificity of modern democracy in relation to the ancient world, as well as to the nation-state assembled by the absolutist monarchy. This line of investigation did not begin post factum but during the Revolution itself, and by its own actors. For example, an examination of the parliamentary debates at the beginning of the Revolution—in the year 1789—reveal that the great figures of the Constituent Assembly were aware of and discussed at length the problems they would have to face: the relation between what was designated as a "revolution" and the preceding centuries, the complexity of the articulation between the rights of man and positive law, the inalienable character of the people's sovereignty and the indispensability of delegating it, the organization of the sovereign into different powers, the compatibility of the legislative power of the sovereign Assembly with the derivative executive power retained by the formerly absolute monarch, and so forth. We have not ceased to pose the same questions in the very terms they were conceptualized by the actors and their contemporaries—and as such, they remain questions basic to our own time. Now all these debates soon converged onto a single, obsessive theme, that of "ending the Revolution"—which twentieth-century historiography has dismissed as due merely to reactionary fears, when it concerns a central problem of modern politics with which we are still very much occupied.

The same applies to what, a little later, was called the "Terror." The Thermidorians, or at least certain of them, were more subtle analysts of the phenomenon than Mathiez or Soboul,^[9] even though they specialized in this period. Benjamin Constant, in particular, had an infinitely richer line of questioning than Mathiez.^[10] Of course Constant "knew" fewer of the details, but the questions posed by the young Swiss Thermidorian, beginning the year after Robespierre's fall, are far more interesting than those of the communist historian more than a century later. One more proof, amongst so many others, that neither chronological distance nor archival research suffice to guarantee any gains in comprehension, when these supposed advantages are accompanied by a decline in the substantiality of the hypothesis or in the quality of the minds. In many regards, the task of today's historian is to rewrite the Revolution's history within the lines of questioning elaborated by the nineteenth century, but with the enriched documentation bequeathed by the twentieth century.

In this rediscovery of the importance of politics—and of the nineteenth century—a particular place must be reserved for Alexis de Tocqueville, an author who remains essential, at least for the French historian. If, as I believe, the French Revolution was truly what it claimed to be, namely, the empirical form by which the world of free and equal individuals appeared historically, then Tocqueville was probably the person who studied the implications of this epoch-making project with the greatest persistency. He considered the latter in its deepest sense, for "democracy" in his intellectual system does not designate a type of political regime, nor even a state of society, but the condition of modern man, required to view his fellow citizens as his equals. True, Tocqueville saw the victory of democratic principles as the product of a providential design, and thus as the very meaning of universal history. But in his eyes democracy can be subject to very different destinies, since equality can just as easily give rise to the citizen's liberty as the state's despotism.

Now the French Revolution illustrates both possibilities. In 1789 the entire nation rallied against despotism to give birth to democracy, since aristocratic liberty combined with democratic liberty to render the revolutionary explosion governable within the framework of free institutions. But what then followed, with the legislative and the Convention, provided a glimpse of the potential, in the new world of individual equality, for an infinitely more comprehensive despotism than the power of the former absolutist kings. Moreover, the French Revolution only ended with the establishment of a new absolute monarchy, which recreated in an infinitely more authoritarian and centralized form, the administrative state of the Ancien Régime. What Tocqueville sought to discover was the secret link that ties the egalitarian individualism of modern democracy to the tentacular expansion of the centralized state. As he did not have time to write his projected volume on the French Revolution proper, we will never know how he would have analyzed its history in detail; but at least it is possible to know how, with regard to its philosophical foundations, he viewed the question of the drift toward despotism.

By contrast, as regards the other fundamental problem posed by the Revolution, that of its radicality, or in different terms, that of the origins of its rationalist voluntarism, Tocqueville left us his L'Ancien Régime .^[11] The entire book is devoted to answering the following question: How can one explain the nonhistorical character of the Revolution, its rejection of the past and its abstract constructivism, in terms of what preceded it? He responds by citing two tendencies operating in the Ancien Régime, and which formed its very substance. On the one hand, the absolute monarchy's destruction of aristocratic society and every political tradition of liberty. On the other hand, the elaboration of a philosophy of the "tabula rasa," which one can already find preformed in Turgot and Condorcet at the height of their power and in-

fluence in 1774–1776. The Ancien Régime gave democratic radicalism both an instrument for the total subversion of authority, through the centralized state, and an education in such subversion, through the citizens' alienation in a world of pure ideas. As such, L'Ancien Régime was not so much a preface to the Revolution or repertory of its origins, than a first revolution predating that of 1789. There lay a tradition concealed behind the rejection of tradition, which would weigh on the Revolution's course and lead to a rediscovery of the centralized state, in a far more perfect version than under the former kings.

One can, moreover, imagine Tocqueville's analysis of the hidden continuity between absolutism and the Revolution being enriched by extending it to the national political imaginary. The monarchy had developed its power as an incarnation of the nation, as the head of a political body conceived of as immemorial, constitutive of social life (l'être ensemble), and as represented by the king of France—"represented" in the earlier sense of the term, that is, as identical to what it reproduced (reproduit à l'identique). It is this totality that the Revolution smashed, on the one hand, by breaking up the organicist society of bodies into free individuals, and on the other, by separating the nation from the king. Now the deputies had to "incarnate" the nation, but from within an atomized society. A difficult task in the best of cases—particularly when undertaken for the first time—but in this case almost impossible, since it was a matter of joining the radical individualism of 1789 with a no less radically unitary conception of the nation.

This can be seen, for example, during the first great constitutional debate of 1789, at the end of August/beginning of September, when the deputies were organizing the transfer of the king's absolute sovereignty to the people—a transfer that began on the seventeenth of June when the assembly of the Third Estate rebaptized itself as, simply, the "National Assembly," and thereby carried out the first, most basic act of the Revolution. In this fundamental debate, the right wing of the revolutionary camp, the first moderates of the Revolution, pleaded for sovereignty in the English manner, with a king and parliament composed of two chambers. But the idea of tying the Revolution to the national past by sharing power between the old monarchy and the new national representation proved impossible for two reasons. First, the "monarchists" were appealing to a tradition and monarchy that did not exist, or no longer existed, if it ever had even the beginnings of an existence in the French past. And then the attempt to "restore" this monarchy, accompanied by a second chamber that would have revived the phantom of aristocratic power after two centuries of absolutist rule, appeared all the more unreal given the radical condemnation as "feudal" of a principle that threatened to survive the absolute monarchy after having preceded it.

In this sense, the radical camp had a more traditionalist understanding than the moderate party: it appropriated the sovereignty developed by abso-

lutism, while the monarchists sought to reinvent it in a form it never had. The radicals gave the Constituent Assembly the sovereign power to reconstruct the political body. But the peremptory affirmation of chronological discontinuity on the part of the patriotic party, which gave new meaning to the word revolution , was inseparable from the reappropriation of a conception of political sovereignty that owed its character to absolutism. The people took the place of the king, but the place remained the same. In effect, pure democracy had replaced absolute monarchy. And just as the earlier conception had left no room for anything but the monarch, the new sovereign power could not consent to anything that was not of the people or its "representatives." As such, the idea of the Ancien Régime being formed in August-September 1789 implied the symbolic and practical overturning of the throne and was proclaimed as such by a large majority of the Constituents, despite being masked by the king's new position as the nation's first functionary.

In this way one can, without referring to the history of ideas or the confrontation of social classes, cast new light on the radical character possessed by the Revolution since the beginning, when the counterrevolution did not yet have a social base or any real force. The Ancien Régime and the Revolution formed a couple, radically disjointed yet inseparable.

At this point I do not want to illustrate by further examples how one might renew the history of the Revolution, conceptualized in terms of both the actors' freedom of action and their situational constraints. Indeed, the latter enables one to give them back their extraordinary historical initiative, while simultaneously restoring the Revolution to the historical continuity with which it wanted to break so passionately. By following both these paths the historian can understand the tremendous collective overinvestment in politics that marked the revolutionary years, the difficulties in taming its explosive force, and its latent messianism. The demonstration of the inconsistencies of the social interpretation of 1789 has liberated political analysis from the tutelage of the economic infrastructure, and returned to the center of historical interest the enigma identified by the most penetrating minds of the revolutionary era: How can one form a body of people out of modern individuals, who define themselves by what separates them? The opposition between political and social rights which has fascinated so many generations of commentators is itself simply a variant of this same question, which the Revolution posed at first triumphantly, then tragically.

After almost a hundred years of a historiography obsessed with going beyond the French Revolution—or what amounts to the same, with the limits of the latter—we are now, by contrast, in the midst of rediscovering that the problems posed by the French events of 1789 still form the substance of our present political civilization. I am tempted to stress this point today more than ever, during this fin de siècle , when the bankruptcy of all the attempts to resolve the contradictions of the era of free individuals appears so

clearly. And when the evidence suggests, now more than ever, that democracy's dynamics are based on the idea of a political body formed of individual wills and pledged to guarantee and constantly extend individual rights. In this sense we still remain within the world of 1789, and with the problems posed during that celebrated year by an Assembly that had been convoked for other purposes, but which still speaks to us today as if it were only yesterday.