Liberty or Equality

CHAPTER II DEMOCRACY AND TOTALITARIANISM: THE PROPHETS

Verzeiht, es ist ein gross Ergetzen

Sich in den Geist der Zeiten zu versetzen;

Zu schauen, wie vor uns ein weiser Mann gedacht,

Und wie wir’s dann zuletzt so herrlich weit gebracht.

—J. W. GOETHE, Faust

Above all things, men and women, believe me, the world grows better from century to century, because God reigns supreme, from generation to generation. Let pessimism be absent from our minds, and let optimism throw its glory over all our souls and all our lives henceforth and ever.

—W. E. GLADSTONE

1. THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY POLITICAL THINKERS

THE notion that tyranny evolves naturally from democracy can be traced back to the earliest political theorists; there are allusions to it in Aristotle’s Politics (v. 8. 2–3, 18), but the description of this evolutionary process in Plato’s Republic (Books viii, ix) provides us with a picture which, without exaggeration, can be called an almost perfectly accurate facsimile of the insidious transition which took place in central and eastern Europe after 1917 and, especially, after 1930. Here we find a description of the mass rebellion against the élites, the deification of youth, the ever mounting expropriation of the well-to-do until they begin to defend themselves, whereupon the masses select a “leader” whose task it is to protect “the people”; we see the bodyguards paid by the demagogue, the flight of the wealthy and of the intellectuals, the rejection of democracy by the desperate upper classes as a result of this development, the evolution from “protection” to tyranny, the spoliation of the temples, the militarization of the masses, the recruiting of criminals into the police force, the provocation of military conflicts in order to impose emergency measures at home and thus a stricter national discipline, finally “purges” and a mounting wave of corruption.

From then on until the advent of the eighteenth century there was not much speculation about the nature of political evolution, but the debate about the intrinsic qualities of the various governmental forms continued in full vigour from St. Thomas to Montesquieu. Still, the character of these analyses and investigations suffered somewhat from the relative uniformity of the political scene up to the American and French Revolutions; democracy, for instance, apart from certain city governments, had been restricted to very small areas. The political theorist had to rely largely on antique and certain medieval patterns.

Those observers, on the other hand, who were convinced of the “ultimate” victory of democracy—the historical “ultimate,” of course—were sharply divided between those who expected from it a new stability, balance and legitimacy, and those who—mindful of the experiences of 1789—regarded it merely as a preliminary step to tyranny, Caesarism or totalitarian servitude. Some of the latter, like Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), P. J. Proudhon (1809–1865), Herman Melville (1819–1891), J. J. Bachofen (1815–1887) and, to a certain extent, also Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and F. Nietzsche (1844–1900), expected the rise of what Mr. Hilaire Belloc aptly calls the “servile state.”

Others, overlooking the possibility of a peaceful and gradual evolution, were fascinated by the potentialities of the “dialectics” of democracy and democratism. They followed a direction of thought indicated by Plato and, up to a point, by Aristotle also. Among these we find Walter Bagehot (1826–1877), J. Burckhardt (1818–1897), Constantine Leontyev (1831–1891), F. M. Dostoyevski (1821–1881), Ernest Renan (1823–1893), Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872), Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), B. G. Niebuhr (1776–1831), J. Donoso Cortés (1809–1853) and Benjamin de Constant (1767–1830).

To the aforementioned, a group of other analysts should be added, thinkers who varied in their affinity and enthusiasm towards democracy. Some of these were outright enemies, others again were friends of the democratic ideology; but they all had very concrete fears and apprehensions, which in time proved to be well founded. Among such men should here be mentioned Edmund Burke (1729–1797), Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), Count Montalembert (1810–1870), Royer-Collard (1763–1845), Lord Acton (1834–1902), Prévost-Paradol (1829–1870), J. S. Mill (1806–1873), Lord Bryce (1838–1922), Sir Henry Maine (1822–1888), Orestes Brownson (1803–1876), W. E. H. Lecky (1838–1903), Henry Adams (1838–1918), H. F. Amiel (1804–1881), Alexandre Vinet (1797–1847) and Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881).

2. THE CONTAGION OF UNIFORMISM

It is uniformity again which figured so prominently in the French Revolution, when democracy appeared in its full totalitarian garb. Reviewing its powerful Napoleonic aftermath, Constant wrote in 1814:

It is quite remarkable that uniformity never met with more favour than in a revolution raised in the name of the rights and the liberty of men. The systematic spirit at first went into an ecstasy of symmetry; the love of power soon discovered what immense advantage this symmetry gave it. Though patriotism exists only as a lively attachment to the interests, manners, and customs of a locality, our self-announced patriots declared war on all these things. They dried up this natural fount of patriotism, and wished to replace it by a fictitious passion for an abstract being, a general idea, deprived of all that strikes the imagination and speaks to the memory. They began building the edifice by breaking up and pulverizing the materials they should have used. They came close to naming cities and provinces by numbers (as they did the legions and army corps), so much did they seem to fear that a moral idea might attach itself to what they were instituting!

Despotism, which replaced demagogy and made itself heir of the fruit of all these labours, very adroitly followed the blazed trail. The two extremes at first found themselves in agreement on this point, because at bottom in both extremes was the desire of tyranny. The interests and memories which are born from local habits contain a germ of resistance which authority only reluctantly endures and hastens to uproot. It has an easier road with individuals: it rolls its enormous weight over them as easily as over sand.

It was, indeed, no secret to Constant that the imperialistic methods of aggression practised by the French Revolution and the military dictatorship which constituted its aftermath resulted in a strengthening of the principle of uniformity. Not only the original domains of France, but also the newly conquered and incorporated territories had to suffer from this mania which proved to be so infectious.

Contemporary conquerors—peoples or princes—want their empires to present only a uniform surface, on which the proud eye of power can range without meeting any unevenness which may offend it or restrict its view. The same code of law, the same system of weights and measures, the same regulations, and (if one can arrive at it) eventually the same language—this is what one proclaims the perfection of any social organization. . . .

The “pure race” centralization, egalitarianism, a constitution (of sufficient strength so that a man of genius will not dare to engineer a coup d’état), support to industry and trade and, in opposition to all the aforementioned—a strengthening and a union of all elements of anarchy; finally, militarism. Point for point Imperial France! The nuances [of difference] are, from the broader and higher point of view which we are now taking, so insignificant that it is not worth while even to think about them.

Jacob Burckhardt, commenting with implicit bitterness on a speech of President U. S. Grant, remarked:

His apprehensions were based on the fear of revolutionary risings using totalitarian methods and envisaging totalitarian aims:

It seems that an essential condition for crises is to be found in the existence of a highly developed system of communications and the spreading of a homogeneous mentality over vast areas.

The interrelationship between dictatorship and equality, known to Aristotle (cf. Politics v. 9, 4–8), was no secret to Walter Bagehot either. The latter wrote about the French Second Empire:

This technique, already noted by Plato, is intrinsically democratic—in the classic sense. It must be remembered that ostracism, as a political institution, flourished in democratic Athens, and was primarily directed against outstanding persons.

Dostoyevski, on the other hand, with his interest turned toward the future rather than the past, saw in the egalitarian madness the cause rather than the result of tyranny. Thus he speaks of Shigalyov, the leftist ideologist in The Possessed:

Already Blake had remarked that “one law for the lion and the ox is oppressive.” To Burckhardt, egalitarianism as such was a destructive element, a mania which would have to run its course before an equilibrium could be found again and a more constructive period in history re-entered:

Still, the modern state with its demo-liberal “prehistory” would be the full executor of an egalitarian majoritism. Thus Burckhardt wrote in a letter:

These horrors, according to the great seer of Basel, are already conditioned by tendencies which can be found in earlier forms of democracy. He insisted:

No wonder that the modern dictatorships with their “equality in slavery” are so strongly based on the egalitarian system and on mass support, not on élites or existing aristocracies (save those coming into existence through the new bureaucracies). National Socialism of the German pattern has been no exception to the rule.

3. THE ILLIBERALISM OF DEMOCRACY

John C. Calhoun, the “Cast Iron Man” of the Southern States, was quite aware of this difficulty. He said:

This would not have surprised Orestes Brownson, who wrote a century ago:

This pessimism was shared by Macaulay, who wrote to H. S. Randall, an American friend, in 1857:

I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty, or civilization, or both. In Europe, where the population is dense, the effect of such institutions would be almost instantaneous . . .

Lord Acton was no less articulate when he remarked, in his “Lectures on the French Revolution “:

He was even more forceful in his review of Sir Erskine May’s Democracy in Europe, where he wrote:

Even more insistent was William Lecky, whose judgment was correct although his views seemed exaggerated to his contemporaries and at least “premature” to the generation succeeding him. He said:

Yet since democracy cannot relinquish its egalitarian heritage, the jealousy, envy and insecurity of the voting masses tend to give new impetus to the egalitarian mania as well as to ever increasing demands for “social security” and other forms of “economic democracy.” These cravings and desires result in specific measures, and thus we see finally a bureaucratic totalitarianism restricting personal liberties.

Lecky wrote, in the same place:

. . . in our own day, no fact is more incontestable and conspicuous than the love of democracy for authoritative regulation.

Orestes Brownson went even further when he wrote:

A contemporary of Nietzsche on the opposite side of the Atlantic, Herman Melville, was haunted by the same fears in relation to his own country. Allowing himself to be swayed by the picture of a purely collectivistic China grimly opposed to all individuality, he wrote with bitterness:

How of the teeming Prairie-land?

There shall the plenitude expand

Unthinned, unawed? . . .

Myriads playing pygmy parts—

Debased into equality:

In glut of all material arts

A civic barbarism may be:

Man disennobled—brutalized

By popular science—atheized

Into a smatterer;

Dead level of rank commonplace

An Anglo-Saxon China, see,

May on your vast plains shame the race

This vision is, admittedly, cultural rather than political; but neither to Melville, nor to John Stuart Mill, nor to De Tocqueville, were the deeper interconnections hidden. Mill also became a victim of this misinterpretation of China (largely a visual error); but the analysis and premonition of this fervent, though conditional, friend of democratic values are as timely today as ever. He wrote:

The modern régime of public opinion is, in an unorganized form, what the Chinese educational and political systems are in an organized; and unless individuality shall be able successfully to assert itself against this yoke, Europe, notwithstanding its noble antecedents and its professed Christianity, will tend to become another China.

Mill then continued to analyze, first, the character and the effects of the element of diversity in the European scene; and after emphasizing the interdependence between diversity and freedom, he gave a short survey of all the forces opposed to diversity and favouring equality and identity. In summing up he wrote:

In these pages Mill shows himself to be an unorthodox utilitarian. Of the egalitarian spadework of democracy he seems to have been less conscious—quite unlike J. J. Bachofen, the cultural anthropologist and friend of Burckhardt, who could write:

He begins his speculation by remarking that during his sojourn in the United States (1831–32) and after his return to Europe, he was haunted by the spectre of a new despotism which would engulf the nations of Christendom. After analyzing tyranny in antiquity, he comes to the conclusion that in spite of all the arbitrariness, brutality and vindictiveness of despots and emperors, the totalitarian element was fairly absent: the natural and historical obstacles for a complete regulation of civic and political life over vast areas would have proved insurmountable. About these early despots he remarks that:

their tyranny rested very heavily on a few but did not extend to a great number; it was focussed on a few main objects and neglected the rest; it was violent but limited in its scope.

He then insists that the coming form of tyranny is going to be so fundamentally new that there is absolutely no term, no label, no appropriate appellation he could use for it. “The thing is new, and since I cannot name it, I have to define it.”

His descriptive analysis starts with a vision of masses of men “alike and equal” attracted by small and vulgar pleasures. Yet:

This is an accurate picture of the totalitarian state, only seemingly marred by the author’s emphasis on the element of mildness. Here we have to bear in mind that brutality and cruelty in the totalitarian state are merely means to achieve specific ends. The vistas of De Tocqueville relate to a peaceful evolution (or, if we prefer, degeneration)—a slow process of interaction and decline, with men becoming gradually more like mice, and states more like Leviathans. His error is merely one of “timing.” If the political process is faster than the sociological (psychological, cultural, characteriological) decay; in other words, if full political totality is reached before individuals are ready for it—a reign of terror and brutality must set in, so that the population can be “weeded out” (and thus “homogenized,” as well as paralyzed) by abject terror. Such a situation will prevail if democracy has not had enough time to prepare the stage—if, for instance, the religious background is too personalistic, if racial diversities are too pronounced, or if class differences are too divisive a factor. Under these circumstances mildness will have to be replaced by concentration camps, mass exiles, deportations and gas chambers, until and unless a totally new and uniform generation grows up.

Yet if the whole process happens in an “orderly fashion” these excesses can be avoided. Men whose civilian valour finds its supreme expression in pulling a lever behind a protective curtain will not have the courage to rebel, and concentration camps (actually a “healthy sign” because they denote resistance) will not exist. Governmental paternalism will be acclaimed. And De Tocqueville remarks:

This meditation is continued in the next chapter (vii) where De Tocqueville insists again that the danger of a new tyranny is at hand:

Herman Melville, the great American seer, knew only too well that the disappearance of the old traditional values in our civilization would leave the empty and evil shell of a naked democracy the future:

Dostoyevski, however, saw a fateful germination of the seed of destructive ideas; he distinguished between the old-fashioned liberal—the representative of the late Russian Enlightenment—and the following far more radical, if not nihilistic, generation. The drift the great Russian novelist sensed was revolutionary. This is evident when we read of the reactions of Stepan Trophimovich, the old liberal, to a recently published book:

The liberal who continued to cling to a revealed religion and thus had an immutable basis for his philosophy, was, naturally, in another position. Still Count Montalembert, who was a convinced Catholic and a liberal, rejected democracy for political rather than for religious reasons. When elected to the Academy to take the chair of M. Droz he insisted in his inauguration speech (talking about the French Revolution):

Not being able to read in the book of history, which shows that democracy degenerates everywhere into despotism, it undertook to establish democracy in France . . . thus it dared to fight in every way the two foundations of all societies, authority and inequality; inequality which is the obvious basis of all activity and fecundity in social life; which is at the same time the mother and the daughter of liberty, since equality cannot be imagined outside of tyranny. To be sure, I am not speaking about Christian equality, whose real name is equity; but about this democratic and social equality, which is nothing but the canonization of envy and the chimera of jealous ineptitude. This equality was never anything but a mask which could not become reality without the abolition of all merit and virtue . . .

Ich habe gar nichts gegen die Menge;
Doch kommt sie einmal ins Gedränge,
So ruft sie, um den Teufel zu bannen,
Gewiss die Schelme, die Tyrannen.

I have nothing at all against the masses;
But whenever they get into a tough spot
In order to protect themselves against the devil,
They call those scoundrels, the tyrants.

The Genevan Henri Frédéric Amiel, with his Calvinistic background, had similar apprehensions. Speaking about the decline of authority in the social sphere, he remarked in his diary on March 20, 1865:

Alexander Herzen had his interest focused on the political rather than on the psychological problem. Analyzing the trend in France he wrote in his diary:

This political evolution went hand in hand with a social evolution; the statist Leviathan demanded a social Behemoth, and vice versa. A monolithic society was prepared by the rise of numerous mammoth associations and “coalitions.” These frightened such observers as Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski and Ernest Hello, who wrote his critical essays in the second half of the last century. He said:

Kierkegaard wrote in a similar vein:

Yet Dostoyevski ridiculed the concept even of a union based on purely material interests:

When a nation abandons its religious concepts a wicked and fear-inspired craving for union is generated which has as its goal the salvation of the belly. In this case social union has no other aim.

I do not know a country where there is in general less intellectual independence and less freedom of discussion than in America. . . . In America the majority builds an impregnable wall around the process of thinking.

This statement is supported by the observations of James Fenimore Cooper, who wrote about his country in roughly the same period (1838):

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny . . .

As a preparation for the absolute rule of the tyrannical state these corrosive forces play a fatal rôle in relation to human personality. (Observe that effective civilian resistance during World War II came only from “backward” nations.) John Stuart Mill, fully conscious of these degenerative trends among his co-nationals, wrote:

Our mere social intolerance kills no one, roots out no opinions, but induces men to disguise them, or to abstain from any active effort for their diffusion. With us, heretic opinions do not perceptibly gain, or even lose, ground in each decade or generation; they never blaze out far and wide, but continue to smoulder in the narrow circles of thinking and studious persons among whom they originate, without ever lighting up the general affairs of mankind with either a true or deceptive light. . . . A convenient plan for having peace in the intellectual world, and keeping all things going on therein very much as they do already. But the price paid for this sort of intellectual pacification is the sacrifice of the entire moral courage of the human mind.

And in a pessimistic vein he added:

All these tendencies and trends are deeply connected with the emergence of the new emphasis on quantity fostered by the democratic principle of majority rule. Jacob Burckhardt remarked in 1866:

Even more serious is the steady increase of complete despair about every kind of smallness; anybody who does not belong to a nation of at least thirty millions shouts: “Help us, oh Lord, we are drowning!”. . .

To Friedrich von Preen he wrote at a later date:

One’s self I sing, a simple, separate person

Yet after the word democratic, the word en masse,

Kierkegaard thundered against the oppressive rise of the masses. Thus we read in his diary:

Burke, who foresaw the rise of Bonapartism (see below, p. 61), was deeply conscious of the character of its democratic prelude. He said:

4. THE PROPHETS OF TOTALITARIANISM

Among those plagued by visions of the character of modern tyranny Juan Donoso Cortés, Marqués de Valdegamas, was surpassed only by De Tocqueville in the accuracy of his expectations. In his famous speech before the Madrid Diet on January 4, 1849, this grim Spanish prophet made a public profession of his views concerning the future of Western civilization.

The reasoning of Donoso Cortés, a conservative-liberal Catholic (though he was a personal friend of Veuillot, as an opponent of Carlism he was hardly an “ultra-conservative,” the label freely applied to him), has similarities with that of De Tocqueville, Joseph de Maistre and even of Arthur Koestler. With the French count, our marqués shared the fear of the effect of the modern means of communication; with De Maistre and Koestler he had in common the concept of external and internal forces. He conceived an interconnection between what he called the “political and the religious thermometers”; Christianity, for Donoso Cortés, was the religion of liberty, and each weakening of this religious force was bound to be accompanied by an increase of “external pressure.” His whole outlook was therefore deeply pessimistic. Beginning his analysis of the general political situation he then said:

Gentlemen, these words may sound terrible, but we should not refrain from terrible words if they express the truth—and I am decided on pronouncing them. Liberty is dead! She is not going to rise again, not on the third day, not in three years, perhaps not even in three centuries. . . .

Then the speaker launched into an explanation of his theory of the “two interconnected thermometers”: he surveyed the ethics of Christianity, and added a critical analysis of history based on his theory. He insisted that the Reformation had fostered the rise of absolute monarchies all over Europe which, finally, established permanent armies boasting millions of men. (These figures, if applied to the eighteenth century, are certainly greatly exaggerated.) But what are soldiers if not “slaves in uniform”?

This was still not the end. The religious thermometer continued to go further down and the political thermometer did not cease to climb. What new institutions were then created?

The Governments said: we have a million arms [brazos]. They are not sufficient; we need more; we need a million eyes; and so they established the police; and with the police a million eyes. In spite of this, gentlemen, the political thermometer and political repression continued to rise—since, in spite of everything the religious thermometer went down—and they kept on rising.

Even this was not the end of the downward trend of the religious thermometer. It kept on falling. More repression, more supervision was necessary. The governments decided that a million arms, a million eyes and a million ears were not enough. They insisted that they had to be everywhere at the same time. Thus the telegraph was invented.

Continuing to talk about the mutual relationship between religion and government, Donoso Cortés emphasized that the alternative to the rising despotism was a religious reaction (which he thought highly improbable). He said finally:

Here again we find a minor miscalculation, in time rather than in essence; Donoso Cortés rightly expected the end of (a “geographic”) patriotism and the rise of a “rootless” internationalism; but the intermediary stages of other, more limited collectivisms like ethnic nationalism cannot be found in his calculations. His eyes were fixed on a world-wide tyranny. That he had very specific fears is evident from his address of the following year in the Cortés. We will return to this issue later.

While Donoso Cortés saw, not exactly in democracy, but rather in “progress,” the basis of the coming tyranny, Jacob Burckhardt followed Plato more closely. He said:

An even darker view of the character of democracy was taken by Fisher Ames, who had declared at an earlier date that

Walter Bagehot, the keen analyst of Bonapartism, after commenting on the tactics and political strategy of Cæsar, had him address “the numerical majority of Roman citizens” with these words:

“I am your advocate and your leader: make me supreme, and I will govern for your good and in your name.”

He then continued to analyze the foundations of the imperial autocracy in Rome through democratic forces, reminding the reader:

How deeply this desire for a personal leadership is rooted, not only in democracy, but also in socialism, becomes manifest when we read of the outcry of H. van Kol (“Rienzi”) in his Socialisme en Vrijheit:

Talking about the “popular chief,” he adds:

The reference to the masses, who feel attracted to these leaders although the more intelligent people reject them, is highly revealing. Finally, especially dangerous is the influence exercised by “the demoniac” as formulated by Goethe on Burckhardt’s “awful simplifiers” preaching what Henri Hauser called fausses idées claires. The result of that is only too often Irving Babbitt’s “efficient megalomaniac” who—in the words of Burke—wants to “improve the mystery of murder.”

5. THE MENACE OF THE STATE’S GROWTH

Not only from a variety of political processes, but from the ever-growing state itself, did many nineteenth-century thinkers fear a distinctive menace to person and personality. The lie of the identification of “state” and “people,” of “state” and “nation” moved Nietzsche to write these famous lines:

Thus spake Zarathustra:

State, what is that? Well then, now open your ears; now I will tell you my tale about the death of nations.

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. It lies coldly and this lie crawls out from its mouth: “I, the State, I am the People!”

In order to crush all opposing forces and to facilitate the perfecting of the totalitarian machinery, it became necessary to step up the process of centralization. This alone is able to foster uniformity and egalitarianism, and to ensure swift execution of governmental orders. Yet centralism is opposed to the whole Christian tradition, with its libertarian and personalistic outlook.

There are also economic aspects to the mania of centralization. Henry Adams alluded to them in a rhapsodic statement:

All Civilisation is Centralisation.

All Centralisation is Civilisation.

Therefore all Civilisation is the survival of the most economical (cheapest). . . .

Under economic centralisation Asia is cheaper than Europe.

The world tends to economic centralisation.

Deploring the fact that the French Revolution, which for the first time in history had proclaimed the liberty of the citizen as well as the liberty of man, had artificially revived a “monarchical state absolutism,” he concluded:

The fact that a totalitarian bureaucratic rule has its origin in a spiritual crisis was no secret even to a positivist like A. Comte, who could write:

This whole interconnected process of democratization, centralization and bureaucratization is characterized by a furious hatred of personality and tradition. Its inorganic individualism evokes the spectre of collectivism. Royer-Collard admirably portrayed this crisis in a speech before the Chamber of Deputies, saying that:

We have seen the old society perish and with it this great number of local institutions and independent tribunals which formed part and parcel of it. These were powerful symbols of personal privileges, true republics within the framework of the monarchy. These institutions, these tribunals, it is true, did not share the prerogatives of sovereignty; but they set limits to it which honour defended with stubbornness! Not one of them has survived, and no new ones have been put in their place. The Revolution has left nothing standing but individuals. The dictatorship which set an end to it has, in this respect, completed the work of its predecessor . . .

. . . . From a society ground to dust emerged centralization. Centralization has not arrived, as so many other no less dangerous doctrines, with bold arrogance and the authority of a principle; it has insinuated itself modestly, as a consequence, as a necessary evil. Indeed, where we have nothing but “individuals,” all matters which are not properly theirs are public affairs, affairs of the State . . .

Franz Grillparzer, with great foresight, could write as early as 1849:

Der Weg der neuen Bildung geht
Von Humanität
Durch Nationalität
Zur Bestialität

And Austria’s great dramatist enlarged on that theme in 1859 when he wrote laconically on “Conditions in France”:

Legitimität
Autorität
Nationalität

Absurdität
Servilität
Bestialität

The Protestant Alexandre Vinet saw these possibilities of a further decline when he commented on the attack of the Radicals against the monasteries in the Swiss canton of Argovia in 1840:

It was, naturally, the rise of ethnic nationalism which provoked the rise of (biologic) racialism, an entirely new phenomenon in the European scene, greatly stimulated by the theories of Darwin. Count Gobineau was the first to preach this doctrine in a somewhat coherent form, but Alexis de Tocqueville quickly perceived its dangers. His Catholic and liberal suspicions were aroused; he wrote, in a memorable letter to Gobineau, that this racial determinism seemed to be spiritually connected with the theology of St. Augustine (he evidently accepted the Protestant deterministic interpretation of the Augustinian theology), Jansenius and Calvin. He then added:

This theory of predestination, I have to confess to you, seems to me to be a cousin of pure materialism. You can be certain that if the masses, which always reason along the beaten paths, accept your doctrine, they will be led straight from the race to the individual, and from social capacities to all sorts of capacities . . .

On the other hand, we also see conservative thinkers who took the racial element into consideration. Benjamin Disraeli was interested in this problem, as can be gathered from various remarks of “Baron Sergius” in his Endymion. It seems that he considered racial qualities (in a eugenic rather than in an anthropological sense) to be rock-bottom factors which will reassert themselves with the collapse of all higher culture and civilization. He said:

Yet of all visionaries of the horrors of total war none was more realistic, pessimistic and accurate than Taine. Before his eyes was a picture such as was painted in words by Herman Melville, who wrote prophetically about the forces of democracy:

From now on if he [i.e., the citizen in a democracy] is born a voter, he is also born a conscript, and has thus been saddled with a new obligation of limitless significance; the state, which so far was a creditor only in relation to its properties, now has become one in relation to its members. Yet a creditor never lets his assets lie fallow, and the state always finds reasons or pretexts to make them “work”. . .

A democracy cannot last. Its nature ordains that its next change shall be into a military despotism—of all known governments, perhaps, the most prone to shift its head, and the slowest to mend its vices.

. . . People talk now with arrogance and superficiality about political problems and the most sublime aspects of this great art, which needs a talent and an ability for training just as the other arts; so that those who really have an insight—which itself is so rare—are bound to get furious or sad. Without knowing the people involved, without having any comprehension of political affairs, without understanding the aims and means and difficulties, the praising and decrying goes on.

This democratic amateurism is hostile to knowledge, which will always be characterized by a certain aristocratic and esoteric quality. This inner antagonism between democracy and knowledge was best expressed by the montagnard who shouted in the face of Lavoisier’s defence lawyer, when the latter insisted that his client was an eminent scientist: La république n’a pas besoin des savants!”

Describing the coming upheavals he concluded:

Ernest Renan was similarly afraid of the dialectics inherent in militarism and revolutionism:

This process was all the more likely because there were destructive evolutionary possibilities within the democratic framework. Nietzsche said:

Thus we see how the foremost thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were tortured and haunted by the vision of enslavement and tyranny, of major collapses following the democratic interlude, of a complete repetition of Polybius’ νακκλωσις (“turn of the wheel”) ending in Burckhardt’s enigmatic magnum mare—that dark and chaotic ocean of the unknown in which servitude and human degradation was the only certitude.

6. THE AGE OF COLLECTIVISM

Materialism can (and in a sense must) assume a deterministic nature. De Tocqueville could not help remarking that:

Historians who live in democratic ages, then, not only deny that the few have any power of acting upon the destiny of a people, but deprive the people themselves of the power of modifying their own condition, and they subject them either to an inflexible Providence or to some blind necessity.

From this remarkable prophecy of an orientalized form of Marxism we can turn to the “Divine Marquis,” who was even more vehement on that issue when he exclaimed:

Herman Melville, the great American prophet—himself not a Catholic—realized better than any of his compatriots that the Church of Rome, enjoying a very central position in the world of religions, would be the main target of irreligious forces. The weakening or fall of Catholicism would hasten the advent of the “Dark Ages of Democracy” so dreaded by the poet. In Clarel he wrote:

Yet his apprehensions that Geneva and Wittenberg would side with the forces opposed to historic Christendom were strong:

“Rome and the Atheist have gained:

  These two shall fight it out—these two;

  Protestantism being retained

  For base of operations sly

In the purely political sphere, the struggle in Europe was accentuated by the bitter antagonism between the two structural forms, monarchy and republic. This antithesis still throws its shadows into our time, when “leaders” seek to eliminate “rulers,” and omnipotent party bosses overshadow surviving crowns. Yet the growth of republicanism and republican institutions with an increase of brutality and totalitarian methods was foreseen by many leading nineteenth-century thinkers. Burckhardt, who was one of them, wrote in 1882 to his friend, Friedrich von Preen, with whom he discussed primarily political problems:

All of Europe is menaced by wild revolutions and an iron despotism, while Germany is being driven into an alien servitude.

7. PROPHETS OF THE RUSSIAN PERIL

Such unmanly caution Herzen rejected for his fatherland:

We are slaves and have no chance of freeing ourselves, yet we won’t accept anything from our enemies.

Russia is never going to be Protestant.

The Russian is the right material for a radical change because:

The Marquis de Gustine, on the other hand, saw Russian egalitarianism as the result of a strong, absolute central power:

Nor could Chateaubriand (1768-1848), the liberal, Catholic aristocrat, be more optimistic than Leontyev. He feared for the future of Europe and he was afraid of Russia. We owe to George Ticknor an account of his gloomy prophecies. “I don’t believe in European society,” the brilliant author of Le génie du christianisme exclaimed in a social gathering:

Asked what an individual should do in such a tragic epoch, he answered:

Alexis de Tocqueville, who belonged to the next French generation, was afraid of Russia as a nation rather than of her revolutionary potential. In a letter to N.W. Senior he wrote in 1855:

I think with you that Russia is a great danger to Europe. I think so more strongly because I have had peculiar opportunities of studying the real sources of her power, and because I believe these sources to be permanent, and entirely beyond the reach of foreign attack (I have not the time now to tell you why). But I am deeply convinced that it is not taking from her a town, or even a province, nor by diplomatic precautions, still less by placing sentinels along her frontier, that the Western powers will permanently stop her progress.

A temporary bulwark may be raised against her, but a mere accident may destroy it, or a change of alliances or of domestic policy may render it useless.

I am convinced that Russia can be stopped only by raising before her powers created by the hatred which she inspires, whose vital and constant interest it shall be to keep themselves united, and to keep her in. In other words by the resurrection of Poland, and by the reanimation of Turkey.

Custine deplored the westernization of Russia with equal intensity. Thus he wrote about “Russia in 1839”:

And when Germany started to crumble and Russia was in the throes of Communism, Adams, then already a dying man, changed his mind somewhat:

Custine similarly recognized that a definite ideology, preferably of an altruistic character, would always animate Russia. “Peter I and Catherine II,” he wrote,

But speaking about the conflict between Western Europe (led by France and the Catholic Church) and the East (dominated by Russia and Greek Orthodoxy), Donoso Cortés wrote that this struggle will be one of liberty versus absolutism. Since we are living in one world, the spheres of these two domains will tend to overlap, and thus the clash is inevitable:

As to the possible new master of the world the general views of Donoso Cortés were not optimistic:

Donoso Cortés was not less vocal about Prussia, which he disliked and distrusted. In a letter to Count Raczyński, his Polish friend in the Prussian service, he poured out his heart:

It is obvious that the reasons for his dislike were partly of a religious nature. Donoso Cortés, who was also ambassador to Berlin, wrote of Prussia in 1849 that that country was bound to aspire for absolute leadership in the Protestant North. And he continued:

He then remarks:

Not only do these allusions to an “Iron Curtain” and the Politburo strike us, but so also does the description of the end of the Wars of Coalition in 1814–15:

8. SUMMARY

The visions and expectations of the nineteenth-century prophets of totalitarianism and tyranny were by no means comforting. Many of them, like De Tocqueville and Amiel, already saw the increase of societary pressure. Amiel wrote in his diary:

Nor would the “common man” find heaven on earth:

Indeed, there was not much hope left and it was . . .

Henry Adams was not a whit more optimistic when he wrote:

And later:

In this lament we also see the bankruptcy of logical ethics without a religious basis obliquely admitted. Indeed there is no “compelling argument” not to slit anybody’s throat except the Commandments given on Mount Sinai. Though the late Mr. H. G. Wells was the last man to admit it, the religious breakdown was one of the most basic reasons for our rapid decline. Aut Deus aut nihil: God or nothing. And it was God which our civilization rejected.

Every decay, every deeper crisis, every agony has a termination. Thus some day humanity will return to the path from which it strayed. New life is going to blossom on the ruins of our civilization. Whether we are going to see these “better days” matters very little. Edmond Schérer, sixty years ago, put before his readers a very pertinent question. He said:

Yet today we live in an epoch for which the words of Goethe are fully valid: