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We the Living Revisited
| Article
# : |
16262 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1989 |
2,788 Words |
| Author
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George Szamuely
George Szamuely writes for Commentary and The Wall Street
Journal. He is a former editor of the Times Literary
Supplement. |
There is some truth in the frequently cited maxim that were it not for the French Revolution, there would be no conservative movement to speak of. A decade or so earlier, it would not have occurred to anyone to believe that the institutions which for centuries had defined the parameters of European civil and political life needed any conservation. Yet now, with the threat of extinction looming, arguments in their justification had to be found, no less complex, sophisticated, and compelling than those put forward by the philosophers.
Two geniuses founded the movement. Edmund Burke and G.F.W. Hegel both rejected the familiar irreconcilable conflict between despot and dogma on the one hand, and enlightened reason on the other, and attempted to show instead that the two were infect in harmonious accord. "What is rational is real, and what is real is rational," is Hegel's memorable phrase. Modern European history was inherently progressive, they argued, moving as it inexorably was toward Protestantism in religion with its corollary of the separation of church from state and constitutional monarchy in government. Both men admired the American Revolution and loathed the French Revolution.
As it turned out, these arguments, though undoubtedly brilliant, were far from compelling. For one thing, it was hard to believe that the Europe of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--the science of horrendous wars, unruly and unstable nation states, and modes of government more bestial than anything seen for centuries, if ever--was a particularly rational and progressive place. Second, there was something terribly uninspiring about justifying the existence of institutions on the grounds that they were able to meet the requirements of their
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