Distinguishing Two Revolutions

By Yuval Levin

Saturday, July 15, 2023

 

Friday was Bastille Day, and in conveying America’s best wishes to our French friends and allies, Secretary of State Antony Blinken tweeted the following message:

 

The War of Independence and the French Revolution were fueled by the same aspirations for freedom, democracy, and human rights. Today, we are more committed than ever to defending them — together. Warmest wishes on Bastille Day to the people of France.

 

If you squint just right, maybe you could read this as a carefully couched warning about radicalism. The American and French revolutions were “fueled by the same aspirations” in the sense that the fire in the hearth of a warm and stable home is fueled by the same oxygen as a raging inferno that burns down a city. Oxygen is vital, and fire is a tremendous force for good, but to set it loose without some broader grasp of how it can be used to support a flourishing household is to run the risk of catastrophe.

 

But that is not what Blinken was saying, of course. He was saying the American and French revolutions sought the same ends by the same means.

 

There were some Americans who thought the same, at least in the early stages of the French Revolution. One of them was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, so his view certainly has to be taken seriously. But it’s worth seeing that for all of his zeal for the French Revolution while it was happening, Thomas Jefferson concluded late in his life, after seeing what became of the Revolution, that it had gone too far, and that if the king and the people had reached an arrangement more like the moderate American regime (or even like the limited monarchy of the British), they could have averted “those enormities which demoralised the nations of the world, and destroyed, and is yet to destroy millions and millions of its inhabitants.”

 

Those enormities were a function of the unbounded radicalism of the revolution itself, and of the fact that they then led to military dictatorship and the Napoleonic wars. This was not where the American Revolution pointed, because while the American Revolution sought to ground political life in the core and fundamental truth that we are all equal under God, it did not take this truth to require a politics of radical disjuncture.

 

In fact, the difference between the two revolutions is precisely a difference of “aspirations,” to use Blinken’s term. It marks the difference between two understandings of liberal politics that remains highly relevant for us now.

 

One way of understanding liberalism sees it as the result of a discovery of new political principles in the Enlightenment — principles that pointed toward new ideals and institutions, and toward an ideal society liberated from the traditional constraints of political life and capable of instantiating perfect equality and individual freedom. Liberalism, in this view, is the pursuit of that ideal society.

 

The other way of understanding liberalism sees it as the product of countless generations of gradual political and cultural evolution in the West — from Athens and Rome and Jerusalem through the middle ages and into the modern era. By the time of the Enlightenment, and especially in Britain, this process of gradual evolution had begun to arrive at political forms that pointed toward some timeless principles in which our common life must be grounded, that accounted exceptionally well for the complexities of society, and that allowed for a workable balance between freedom and effective government given the constraints of human nature. Liberalism, in this view, involves the preservation and gradual improvement of those long-evolved forms.

 

These two visions of society are not polar opposites. Both speak to facets of the kind of liberal-democratic society we now inhabit. But they are profoundly different. And one vision is plainly progressive, while the other is plainly conservative. Their differences run very deep, because they are ultimately rooted in opposing conceptions of human nature. (If you want to know more about what I mean by that, I’ve got a book you ought to read.)

 

The more conservative vision of liberalism is actually the one that has generally been put into practice. But its radical critics have always wanted to insist that it is not what liberalism really means. There have always been some conservatives willing to embrace the calumny as a description and to equate liberalism with utopian radicalism too. They would in effect dismiss the actual reality of our society as an impossibility, or at least as doomed for some reason to fall into line with the shallowest theories of its shallowest radicals. Such fatalism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: If we leave the fate of the liberal society to those who equate it with the aspirations of the French Revolution, then they will own its future. But if we work to show the rising generation why the conservative vision of the free society is right, and how they might conserve the best of what they have inherited, then tomorrow’s radicals will be as frustrated as yesterday’s.

 

The American Revolution certainly contained elements of both the radical and the conservative ways of thinking about the nature of our society. And the opening of the Declaration of Independence could point in either direction. But after articulating the core truths that underlie the liberal order, the Declaration makes clear that these truths had already come to underlie the way of life of the people of America — and indeed of Britain, too. It is not the principles alone that justified America’s separation from Britain, but the practical failure and refusal of the British government to govern America in accordance with them, as it had largely done before the 1760s. As it works through its grievances against the king, the Declaration sums up a key category of his abuses by accusing him of “taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.” That is certainly an unusual justification for a revolution. The Americans accused the king of bringing about a break from their political tradition, rather than calling for such a break themselves.

 

That is not how the French Revolution expressed its aspirations. The French pursued precisely a break — a complete restarting of history on novel foundations. The American Revolution sought, on the contrary, to build upon the best of the foundations made available to it by the long political tradition of the West. The Constitution made this even clearer.

 

In 1793, as the horrors of the French Revolution had become clearer, Alexander Hamilton warned about precisely the equation of aspirations that Blinken proposes:

 

When I find the doctrines of atheism openly advanced in the convention, and heard with loud applause; when I see the sword of fanaticism extended to force a political creed upon citizens who were invited to submit to the arms of France as the harbingers of liberty; when I behold the hand of rapacity outstretched to prostrate and ravish the monuments of religious worship, erected by those citizens and their ancestors; when I perceive passion, tumult, and violence usurping those seats, where reason and cool deliberation ought to preside, I acknowledge that I am glad to believe there is no real resemblance between what was the cause of America and what is the cause of France—that the difference is no less great than that between liberty and licentiousness. I regret whatever has a tendency to confound them, and I feel anxious, as an American, that the ebullitions of inconsiderate men among us may not tend to involve our reputation in the issue.

 

Yes, indeed.

 

The French are America’s oldest friends. They deserve a warm greeting on their national day. And they did learn with time that, as a practical matter, a more functional free society requires precisely the sort of moderation that their revolution openly rejected. But at least in speech, they continue to identify the aspirations of their free society with the radicalism of their revolution. And there continue to be some Americans who would identify our society’s aspirations with that radicalism, too. They continue to be wrong. And it remains very important to see that such radicalism is not the only way to understand what the liberal society can be — and not the right way to understand what our society is and ought to be.