Friedrich Gentz - Revolution: Conservative vs. Liberal

Subject: Revolution: Conservative vs. Liberal
From: KEVIN4VFT
To: Separation of Church & State
Date: 6/25/00

In article <20000625130714.04016.00000295@ng-cq1.aol.com>, brentlysr2000@aol.com (BrentlySR2000) writes:

><<<The Founding Fathers were conservatives>>>
>
> Conservative? My gosh... they rebelled against the British government,
> incited revolution, established an entirely new government based on rights...
> and somehow you feel that conservative? If they were conservatives, they
> would have been loyal to their king. The founders certainly didn't "adhere
> to traditional methods and views," as good old Webster says a conservative
> should do.
> BrentlySR2000

I gather this is a rhetorical question (the assertion of an argument
in the form of a question; a question which seeks to make a point
rather than elicit a response) since Brently has announced that
he does not read any of my posts.

For the benefit of others, however, here is my response (see
also my post to Trish):

In a message dated 6/25/00 10:07:29 AM Pacific Daylight Time, brentlysr2000@aol.com writes:

> Conservative? My gosh... they rebelled against the British government,

because the gov't was trampling on tradition and long established rights

> incited revolution,

it was the British that sent armed troops to the colonies without
lawful or constitutional warrant

> established an entirely new government based on rights...

traditional rights of long standing

> and somehow you feel that conservative?

Yes, and so does Clinton Rossiter, Russell Kirk,
and I can't think of a single scholar of any repute who
would say otherwise. You cite one scholar who says the
Founding Fathers were in Clinton's liberal camp
and I'll cite 10 who disagree.

> If they were conservatives, they
> would have been loyal to their king.

It is the modern liberal who puts the centralized state ahead of traditional rights.

> The founders certainly didn't "adhere
> to traditional methods and views," as good old Webster says a conservative
> should do.

The word "conservative" is a recent invention. It does not appear in
Webster's first edition. The word "liberal" has a more ancient pedigree,
but it now has a meaning almost opposite what it had in the 19th
century. A 19th century European "liberal" is what we today would call
a free-market conservative. Notice this entry from A Guide to the Study
of the USA, Library of Congress 1960, p.950:

6061. Ekirch, Arthur A. The decline of American liberalism. New York, Longmans, Green, 1955. 401 p. 55–11447 E183.E4
A history of American liberalism which identifies it with the classical philosophical values of the 18th-century Enlightenment, and especially with individual liberty and decentralized government. Professor Ekirch equates the decline of these concepts with the trend, since the American Revolution, toward ever greater political, economic, and social centralization and concentration of control. He views the rise and fall of the liberal tradition in the United States as a succession of crises and an overall decline. The rising Colonial and Revolutionary liberalism was tempered by a conservative reaction after the war. Exemplified partly by Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, a reviving liberalism was smothered by the Civil War and reconstruction. Although the author finds evidence of a liberal recovery early in the 20th century, he consider progressivism in the United States to have been delusive, the reaction after World War I disastrous, and the liberal retreat since World War II nothing less than a rout.

This is PRECISELY the position of Pat Buchanan and the "isolationist" right.
See also Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan.
See also Erik von Kuhnelt-Leddihn's book, Leftism.

William Jackman, History of the American Nation, Vol. 9, p. 2860
These are enormous services to render to any free country, but above all to one which, more than any other, is governed not by the men of rank or wealth or special wisdom, but by public opinion, that is to say, by the ideas and feelings of the people at large. In no country were swift political changes so much to be apprehended, because nowhere has material growth been so rapid and immigration so enormous. In none might the political character of the people have seemed more likely to be bold and prone to innovation, because their national existence began with a revolution, which even now lies only a century behind. That none has ripened into a more prudently conservative temper may be largely ascribed to the influence of the famous instrument of 1789, which, enacted in and for a new republic, summed up so much of what was best in the laws and customs of an ancient monarchy.

Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order, p.318
As John Randolph declared of himself in the nineteenth century, so might those gentlemen-planters have said of themselves in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: "I am an aristocrat: I love liberty, I hate equality." Such men, when their liberty seemed in question, made a Revolution—on conservative principles.

Kirk, The Roots of American Order, pp. 396-401
This point deserves a digression. The best brief early analysis of the distinction between the [French and the American] revolutions was made by a writer who participated in neither: a young man of German culture, Friedrich Gentz. Often the perspective of a neutral observer is to be preferred to the conclusions of a man personally involved in a cause.

In the last year of the eighteenth century, John Quincy Adams, only thirty-three years old, was Minister Plenipotentiary of the United States to Prussia. Adams was educating himself the whole of his life; and, perfecting his German during his residence in Berlin, he translated from the Berlin Historisches Journal (April and May, 1800) a long essay on the American and French revolutions by Gentz, a rising Prussian man of letters, three years older than the precocious Adams.

Gentz was founder and editor of that journal of ideas, and sole contributor to it. These were men of mark: Adams would become the sixth President of the United States, and Gentz (as associate of Prince Metternich) a principal architect of the reconstruction of Europe after Napoleon's fall. "It cannot but afford a gratification to every American attached to his country," Adams wrote to Gentz in June, 1800, "to see its revolution so ably vindicated from the imputation of having originated, or having been conducted upon the same principle, as that of France."

Gentz had studied under the innovating philosopher Kant; but Burke's Reflections [on the Revolution in France, (1790)] had converted the young Prussian to conservative principles. Abhorring the theories and consequences of the French Revolution, Gentz had translated the Reflections into German, so exerting his first influence upon European politics and making his reputation. Like Gentz, the younger Adams had been much struck by Burke; and though he tried to play arbiter between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, really Adams was persuaded by Burke's principal arguments. His Letters of Publicola, published in 1791, had [p.397] demolished Paine's Rights of Man and had denounced the French revolutionaries, much to Thomas Jefferson's vexation. The Americans, young Adams had written, had not fallen into the pit of radical abstract doctrine:

"Happy, thrice happy the people of America! whose gentleness of
manners and habits of virtue are still sufficient to reconcile the
enjoyment of their natural rights, with the peace and tranquillity
of their country; whose principles of religious liberty did not result
from an indiscriminate contempt of all religion whatever, and whose
equal representation in their legislative councils was founded
upon an equality really existing among them, and not upon
the metaphysical speculations of fanciful politicians, vainly
contending against the unalterable course of events, and
the established order of nature."
[John Quincy Adarns to Friedrich Gentz, June 16, 1800, and
his "Letters of Publicola", June-July, 1791, in Writings of
John Quincy Adams (edited by Worthington Chauncy Ford;
New York: Macmillan, 1913), Vol. II, p. 463, and Vol. I, p. 98.]

So Adams was of one mind with Gentz, and saw in Gentz's essay the most succinct and forceful contrast between the moderate polity of the American colonies (founded upon a respect for prescriptive rights and customs), and the levelling theories of French radicalism. Only the word "Republic" was common to the two new dominations, Adams declared; and the French Republic already had ceased to contain any element of true representative government. Adams' translation of Gentz was published anonymously at Philadelphia in 1800.

With Burke, and with John and John Quincy Adams, Gentz perceived that disaster would come from the fallacies of Turgot and Condorcet and Rousseau and Paine and other movers of the French Revolution. His essay, The American and French Revolutions Compared, contrasts the theories and the course of the two movements. The American Revolution, [p.398] Gentz argues, was what Burke had called the Glorious Revolution: "a revolution not made, but prevented." The American Patriots had stood up for their inherited rights; their claims and expectations were moderate, and founded upon a sound apprehension of human nature and natural rights; their new written constitutions were conservative. But the French revolutionaries, hoping to transform utterly human society and even human nature, broke with the past, defied history, embraced theoretic dogmas, and so fell under the cruel domination of Giant Ideology.

Prudence and prescription guided the steps of the Americans, who simply preserved and continued the English institutions of representative government and private rights; fanaticism and vain expectations led the French to their own destruction. Burke, at the outbreak of the troubles in America, had maintained that the colonists were trying to conserve, not to destroy; they sought to keep liberties gained over the centuries, not to claim fanciful liberties conjured up by closet philosophers; they were "not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English principles," in Burke's phrases. "Abstract liberty like other mere abstractions is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some sensible object."

Repeatedly, in his comparison, Gentz touches upon the broad differences between American and French principles that the course of history, since 1776, has made more clear. He compares, for instance, the Americans' sound understanding of natural rights with the French illusion of the abstract "Rights of Man" -- "a sort of magic spell, with which all the ties of nations and of humanity were insensibly dissolved." The pretended right of an abstract "people" to do whatever they might like, Gentz insisted, would swallow up all the old hard-earned rights of groups and individuals. The Americans sought security; the French, through their armed doctrine, irresponsible power. "As the American revolution was a defensive revolution, it was of course finished, at the moment when it had overcome the attack, by which it had been occasioned. The French Revolution, true to the character of a most violent revolution, could not but proceed as long as there remained objects for it to attack, and it retained strength for the assault." [p.399]

Later in the nineteenth century, the talented French writers Alexis de Tocqueville and Hippolyte Taine would judge the French Revolution similarly. In the twentieth century, American historians tend to confirm Gentz's verdict. "The Americans of 1776," Clinton Rossiter writes, "were among the first men in modern history to defend rather than to seek an open society and constitutional liberty; their political faith, like the appeal to arms it supported, was therefore surprisingly sober...Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of this political theory was its deep-seated conservatism. However radical the principles of the Revolution may have seemed to the rest of the world, in the minds of the colonists they were thoroughly preservative and respectful of the past...The political theory of the American Revolution, in contrast to that of the French Revolution, was not a theory designed to make the world over." [note 2: Clinton Rossiter, Seedtime of the Republic: the Origin of the American Tradition of Political Liberty (New York: Harcourt, Brace 1953), p. 448.]

With the French revolutionaries, the whole attitude toward history, continuity, and the "contract of eternal society" was ruinously different. "So France, exhausted by fasting under the monarchy," Taine puts it, "made drunk by the bad drug of the Social Contract, and countless other adulterated or fiery beverages, is suddenly struck with paralysis of the brain; at once she is convulsed in every limb through the incoherent play and contradictory twitchings of her discordant organs. At this time she has traversed the period of joyous madness, and is about to enter upon the period of sombre delirium; behold her capable of daring, suffering, and doing all, capable of incredible exploits and abominable barbarities, the moment her guides, as erratic as herself, indicate an enemy or an obstacle to her fury." [note 3: Hippolyte Taine, The French Revolution (translated by John Durnad; New York: Henry Holt, 1897), Vol. I, pp. 355-56.]

As Gentz points out, there occurred persecutions, cruelties, confiscations, and exiling of honest people in the course of the American Revolution also. "But what are all these single instances of injustice and oppression, compared with the universal flood of misery and ruin, which the French revolution let loose upon France, and all the neighboring countries? If, even in America, private hatred, or local circumstances, threatened property or personal security; if here and there even the public authorities became the instruments of injustice, of revenge, and of a persecuting spirit, yet did the [p.400] poison never flow into every vein of the social body; never, as in France, was the contempt of all rights, and of the very simplest precepts of humanity, made the general maxim of legislation, and the unqualified prescription of systematic tyranny." [note 4: Friedrich Gentz, The French and American Revolutions Compared (edited by Russell Kirk; Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1955), pp. 44, 60, 81.]

What made this enormous difference in the conduct of the two revolutions? Circumstances and theories. The Americans had nothing to overthrow within North America but a few English civil officers and an English army of occupation; while the French revolutionaries had a powerful and complex establishment, the Old Regime, to pull down. The Americans not only appealed to old "chartered rights," but firmly believed in those established rights and institutions; the French were enraptured by "theoretic dogma," which we now call ideology, and justified their fierceness by their visions of a future earthly paradise. As Tocqueville would write, halfway down the stairs the French revolutionaries threw themselves out of the window, in order to get to the ground more quickly.

A recent writer, Daniel Boorstin, comes to a conclusion identical with that of Gentz: "The American Revolution was in a very special way conceived as both a vindication of the British past and an affirmation of an American future. The British past was contained in ancient and living institutions rather than in doctrines; and the American future was never to be contained in a theory. The Revolution was thus a prudential decision taken by men of principle rather than the affirmation of a theory." [note 5: Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 94-5.]

Gentz drew a contrast between principle and ideology; between prudence and fanaticism; between prescriptive rights and extravagant ambitions; between historical experience and utopianism; between representative government and democratic despotism (or what J.L. Talmon calls "totalitarian democracy"). In examining the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States, those differences between the two Revolutions must be borne in mind. The Declaration was meant as a call for unity of purpose among the Patriots; as Franklin said, either they must all hang together, or else they would all hang separately. Also it was an apology to the world -- France in particular -- for the [p.401] Patriots' armed rising, in hope of assistance from abroad. Hastily drawn up by Jefferson and a committee of four others, the Declaration is not an original work of political theory: instead, it reflects theories that had been discussed in America for the preceding decade and longer. Nor is the Constitution -- except for implications that may be drawn from it -- a theoretical document at all.

"I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided," Patrick Henry told the Patriot planters of Virginia in 1775, "and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past." In the beginning, Henry was one of the more radical Patriots, but even he desired no revolution of theoretic dogma. The Americans looked for guidance to their own historical past in America, and to the past of the civilization, European and Christian, in which they shared. For novel abstract theories of human nature and society, most of the men who subscribed to the Declaration and the Constitution had no relish.

George Bancroft, History of the United States, Vol.6, p.446-47
To perfect the system and forever prevent revolution, power is reserved to the people by amendments of their constitution to remove every imperfection which time may lay bare, and adapt it to unforeseen contingencies. But no change can be hastily made. An act of parliament can at any time alter the constitution of England; no similar power is delegated to the congress of the United States, which, like parliament, may be swayed by the shifting majorities of party. As to the initiation of amendments, it could not be intrusted to the president, lest it might lead him to initiate changes for his own advantage; still less to a judiciary holding office for life, for, such is human nature, a tribunal so constituted and deciding by a majority, by whatever political party its members may have been named, cannot safely be invested with so transcendent a power. The legislatures of the states or of the United States are alone allowed to open the "constitutional door to amendments;" and these can be made valid only through the combined intervention of the state legislatures and of congress, or a convention of all the states elected expressly for the purpose by the people of the several states. In this way no change of the constitution can be made in haste or by stealth, but only by the consent of three quarters of the states after a full and free and often-repeated discussion. There is no legal road to amendment of the constitution but through the consent of the people given in the form prescribed by law. America, being charged with the preservation of liberty, has the most conservative polity in the world, both in its government and in its people.

This was true when Bancroft wrote (1882), but no longer so today.

Although I agree with much of the conservative principles of
Kirk, Rossiter, and the Founding Fathers, as a pacifist I
cannot condone the use of armed force against human beings
created in the image of God to protest taxes or other
abstract transgressions of human constitutions and
traditions.

Kevin C.
http://members.aol.com/XianAnarch/cause/1776.htm
---------------------------------------------

And they shall beat their swords into plowshares
and sit under their Vine & Fig Tree.
Micah 4:1-7

Kirk, The Roots of American Order, p.396

Gentz had studied under the innovating philosopher Kant; but Burke's Reflections had converted the young Prussian to conservative principles. Abhorring the theories and consequences of the French Revolution, Gentz had translated the Reflections into German, so exerting his first influence upon European politics and making his reputation. Like Gentz, the younger Adams had been much struck by Burke; and though he tried to play arbiter between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, really Adams was persuaded by Burke's principal arguments. His Letters of Publicola, published in 1791, had [p.397] demolished Paine's Rights of Man and had denounced the French revolutionaries, much to Thomas Jefferson's vexation. The Americans, young Adams had written, had not fallen into the pit of radical abstract doctrine:

Kirk, The Roots of American Order, p.397

"Happy, thrice happy the people of America! whose gentleness of manners and habits of virtue are still sufficient to reconcile the enjoyment of their natural rights, with the peace and tranquillity of their country; whose principles of religious liberty did not result from an indiscriminate contempt of all religion whatever, and whose equal representation in their legislative councils was founded upon an equality really existing among them, and not upon the metaphysical speculations of fanciful politicians, vainly contending against the unalterable course of events, and the established order of nature."1

[note 1: John Quincy Adarns to Friedrich Gentz, June 16, 1800, and his "Letters of Publicola", June-July, 1791, in Writings of John Quincy Adams (edited by Worthington Chauncy Ford; New York: Macmillan, 1913), Vol. II, p. 463, and Vol. I, p. 98.]

Kirk, The Roots of American Order, p.397

Kirk, The Roots of American Order, p.398

Repeatedly, in his comparison, Gentz touches upon the broad differences between American and French principles that the course of history, since 1776, has made more clear. He compares, for instance, the Americans' sound understanding of natural rights with the French illusion of the abstract "Rights of Man"—"a sort of magic spell, with which all the ties of nations and of humanity were insensibly dissolved." The pretended right of an abstract "people" to do whatever they might like, Gentz insisted, would swallow up all the old hard-earned rights of groups and individuals. The Americans sought security; the French, through their armed doctrine, irresponsible power. "As the American revolution was a defensive revolution, it was of course finished, at the moment when it had overcome the attack, by which it had been occasioned. The French Revolution, true to the character of a most violent revolution, could not but proceed as long as there remained objects for it to attack, and it retained strength for the assault." [p.399]

Kirk, The Roots of American Order, p.399

Later in the nineteenth century, the talented French writers Alexis de Tocqueville and Hippolyte Taine would judge the French Revolution similarly. In the twentieth century, American historians tend to confirm Gentz's verdict. "The Americans of 1776," Clinton Rossiter writes, "were among the first men in modern history to defend rather than to seek an open society and constitutional liberty; their political faith, like the appeal to arms it supported, was therefore surprisingly sober...Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of this political theory was its deep-seated conservatism. However radical the principles of the Revolution may have seemed to the rest of the world, in the minds of the colonists they were thoroughly preservative and respectful of the past...The political theory of the American Revolution, in contrast to that of the French Revolution, was not a theory designed to make the world over."2

Kirk, The Roots of American Order, p.399