As he left office, Washington hoped that his policy of neutralitywould be followed, as well as the rest of his advice. In fact, theimpact of the French Revolution and accompanying wars was tolead to strains on good order of a kind even greater than those ofthe mid-1790s. On the other hand, there were observations of amore lasting value in his Farewell Address, which was to bediscussed as a living document in the twentieth century. More ofthat, and also of American and Russian constitutional order later.But for the moment, we will not leave the eighteenth century.Instead, having noted again that there were echoes of Montesquieu,witting and unwitting, in the retiring President’s remarks, let uscross the ocean to set out a view of constitutional order formed atabout the same time in offshore Europe.Earlier in his career, Edmund Burke had been a good friend tothe American cause, although not to all of its revolutionary aspects.In general, he was a supporter of constitutional order, even ifunwritten rather than written, perhaps. Certainly, in 1790, soonafter the outbreak of the French Revolution, he had described it as‘a revolution of doctrine and theoretic dogma’, the first such sincethe Reformation, and bound, like its predecessor, ‘to introduce otherinterests into all countries than those which arose from their localityand natural circumstances’. Thus, for example:The Russian Government is of all others the most liable tobe subverted by military seditions, by court conspiracies,and sometimes by headlong rebellions of the people, suchas the turbinating movements of Pugatchef. It is not quiteso probable that in any of these changes the spirit of systemmay mingle in the manner it has done in France. TheMuscovites are no great speculators—but I should notmuch rely on their uninquisitive disposition, if any of theirordinary motives to sedition should arise. The littlecatechism of the rights of man is soon learned; and theinfer-ences are in the passions.Six or so years on, and the situation had deteriorated almostbeyond recognition, as Burke was to spell out in his Letters on theProposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France. Many laterobservers would say that by 1796–7 the Republic was returning tosome kind of order, but not Burke at the time. In his view, since theRevolution, a state had prevailed worse than anarchy, for thegovernment had become ‘the most absolute, despotic, and effective’that had ever appeared on earth:Never were the views and politics of any governmentpursued with half the regularity, system, and method, thata diligent observer must have contemplated with amaze-ment and terror in theirs. Their state is not an anarchy, buta series of short-lived tyrannies.France had no public, and the French people had become absoluteslaves, in a manner ‘so searching, so penetrating, so heart-breaking’that nothing like it was known by ‘the helots of Laconia, theregardants of the manor in Russia and Poland, even the negroes inthe West Indies’.42In such conditions, Russian and other peasants were less likelyperhaps to be seduced by ‘the little catechism of the rights of man’,but Burke found it necessary, nevertheless, to develop furtheranalysis and issue more warnings. He looked with approval atthe past:There have been periods of time in which communities,apparently in peace with each other, have been moreperfectly separated than, in latter times, many nations ofEurope have been in the course of long and bloody wars.The cause must be sought in the similitude throughoutEurope of religion, laws and manners. At bottom, theseare all the same. The writers on public law have often calledthis aggregate of nations a commonwealth. They hadreason. It is virtually one great state having the same basisof general law, with some diversity of provincial customsand local establishments. The nations of Europe have hadthe very same Christian religion, agreeing in thefundamental parts, varying a little in the ceremonies andin the subordinate doctrines.It would seem, then, that the Reformation was no longer the greatrevolution in theory and doctrine that it had been for Burke in1790. In 1796–7, he continued:The whole of the polity and economy of every country inEurope has been derived from the same sources. It wasdrawn from the old Germanic or Gothic customary, fromthe feudal institutions which must be considered as anemanation from that customary; and the whole has beenimproved and digested into system and discipline by theRoman law. From hence arose the several orders, with orwithout a monarch (which are called states), in everyEuropean country; the strong trace of which, wheremonarchy predominated, were never wholly extinguishedor merged in despotism. In the few places where monarchywas cast off, the spirit of European monarchy was still left.Those countries still continued countries of states; that is,of classes, orders, and distinctions such as had beforesubsisted, or nearly so. Indeed the force and form of theinstitution called states continued in greater perfection inthose republican communities than under monarchies.Possibly Montesquieu might not have agreed with this lastobservation, but in general his spirit presided over the letters ofBurke, who went on to remark that Europe’s ‘system of mannersand of education’ was so similar throughout the continent that ‘nocitizen of Europe could be altogether an exile in any part of it...andnever felt himself quite abroad’.But now, ‘a general evil’ was to be found in every country ofEurope, and among all orders of men. The centre of the evil wasFrance, and the circumference was ‘the world of Europe whereverthe race of Europe may be settled’. Looking around this world,Burke lighted last on the most important of all, as he saw it—Russia, where he hoped that the Emperor Paul, the former GrandDuke who had succeeded Catherine the Great in 1796, wouldrule in the tradition of Peter the Great, since: ‘He is sensible thathis business is not to innovate, but to secure and to establish; thatreformations at this day are attempts at best of ambiguous utility.’Burke then went on to say: ‘I do not know why I should notinclude America among the European powers, because she is ofEuropean origin; and has not yet, like France, destroyed all traceof manners, laws, opinions, and usages, which she drew fromEurope.’ Nevertheless, an America ‘men-aced with internal ruinfrom the attempts to plant Jacobinism instead of liberty in thatcountry...whose independence is directly attacked by the French’was unwisely advocating ‘a treacherous peace’ with those Frenchforces threatening both peace and neutrality everywhere. ForFrance was bent on forming a universal empire through universalrevolution, and would attempt sooner or later to involve all othercountries in a war against Britain and the British constitution,destroying for ever the balance of power and artificially creatinga new constitution almost every year.43From Burke in 1797, let us move towards conclusion by way ofMontesquieu about half a century before. In The Spirit of the Laws,we found the classical exposition of constitutional order. Lookingback at the British Revolution of the seventeenth century,Montesquieu observed that the nobility was buried with CharlesI, and that Charles II believed himself to be less powerful than hisfather. On the other hand, he wrote:It was a fine spectacle in the last century to see the impo-tent attempts of the English to establish democracy amongthemselves. As those who took part in public affairs hadno virtue at all, as their ambition was excited by the successof the most audacious one [Cromwell] and the spirit ofone faction was repressed only by the spirit of another, thegovernment was constantly changing; the people, stunned,sought democracy and found it nowhere. Finally, aftermuch motion and many shocks and jolts, they had cometo rest on the very government that had been proscribed.44A monarchy without a nobility could hardly have been the same,but would promote more virtue than its regicide predecessor.Montesquieu would appear to have looked upon the seventeenth-century revolution, then, as Burke looked upon the revolution atthe end of the eighteenth century.Of course, we cannot say how Montesquieu would have reactedto events in France in 1789 and after. But we can observe that hismasterpiece, looked upon as subversive enough at the time of itspublication, was now considered for the most part a force forconservatism. Its argument that any polity should embody the spiritof its people was being replaced by the argument that the spirit should be changed, or at least more liber-ated. On the other hand,Marat declared in 1785 on the road to revolution that Montesquieuwas ‘the first among us to carry the torch of philosophy intolegislation, to avenge outraged humanity, to defend its rights, andin a way, to become the legislator for the whole world’. Generally,according to Anne M.Cohler: ‘In France, during and after the FrenchRevolution, Montesquieu’s concern to balance power led to thequestion of whether there remained any independent politicalbody, king, or noble, that could be used to moderate the sovereigntyof the people.’45Of course, the revolutionaries themselves in the years following1789 were too preoccupied with day-to-day events and too muchmen of affairs ever to set down in an extended form their ownview of the world. On the other hand, Robespierre at least wasable to express his broad outlook in a speech of 25 December 1793,which we have already encountered in the Introduction and whichwill now lead us from Chapter 1 towards Chapter 2:The theory of the revolutionary government is as new asthe revolution which has brought it to power. We mustnot look for it in the books of political writers, who by nomeans foresaw this revolution; nor in the laws of tyrantswho, content to abuse their power, are hardly preoccupiedwith investigating its legitimacy.... The function of thegovernment is to direct the moral and physical energies ofthe nation towards the goal for which it is instituted....The greater the power, the more free and rapid is its actionand the more necessary is it that good faith directs it; forthe day it falls into impure or perfidious hands, libertywill be lost; indeed, its name will become the pretext andexcuse of counter-revolution itself and its energy will bethat of a violent poison.46Constitution, revolution, counter-revolution, would the greatwheel never stop turning? On 5 February 1794, Robespierre triedto put forward ‘an exact theory and precise rules of conduct’, anew concept of virtue, ‘an order of things where all base and cruelpassions are bound up and all the benevolent and gen-erouspassions are aroused by the laws’. The people would be led byreason and the enemies of the people by terror in a situation whichwas as if ‘the two opposing spirits that have been contending forcontrol of nature are fighting, in this great epoch of human history,to establish irreversibly the history of the world, and France is thetheatre of this awesome combat’.47 The second speech was not theequal of the first. Robespierre was already in decline, and was tolose most coherence before his execution in late July 1794. Butopposing spirits of constitution and revolution, if not quite as hedefined them, would continue their struggle.Before moving on to Marx, let us see what we have done withMontesquieu. Without repeating the opening remarks of thischapter, let us simply note that The Spirit of the Laws has helped usto conduct a kind of laboratory test. Historians often talkmetaphorically of the litmus test, for example of the manner inwhich a tendency or movement may become more acidic— thatis, redder—or more alkaline—that is, bluer. Here, I shall use in asimilar way the more refined ‘universal indicator’ of the ‘pH test’.48That is, in drawing up their constitutions, the American FoundingFathers and the Russian Empress made use of the great work fortheir own purposes. Thus, Montesquieu’s book is the ‘neutral’: overthe Atlantic, American ‘alkali’ affected it in the creation of a basisfor the federal republic; over the continent, Russian ‘acid’ workedupon the emerging structure of enlightened absolutism. In this case,by ‘alkali’ I mean the inbuilt tendency in the USA towardsrepresentative government, ultimately democracy, the politicalculture formed by the immi-grants from Europe in their newsetting. On the other hand, I take ‘acid’ to be the political cultureevolving in Russia over the centuries in its particular environment.Thus, we have pointed out the relationship between Montesquieu’sWestern world order on the one hand and the stage reached at theend of the eighteenth century by Russian history and our selectedprincipal comparator, American history, on the other.Let us now proceed to conduct a similar experiment with Marxand his Capital
No comments:
Post a Comment