Strikingly, while the authors go about their tasks in very different ways, they each look above all to the same place for inspiration: revolutionary France. Past histories of liberal free-market democracy have tended to find its origins and fullest expression in the Anglo-American political tradition, with particular attention to the seventeenth-century English political writer John Locke. His arguments that men had a natural right to life, liberty, and property, and to resist tyranny, are easily cast as an origin point of the modern liberal ideal. These histories treated continental Europe as a place of great liberal hopes but even greater, indeed catastrophic failures: the French Revolutionary Terror, fascism, and many other varieties of political extremism. Miller, Rosenblatt, and Edelstein by contrast all urge us to look away from what Edelstein arrestingly calls the “strange and atypical” Anglo-American story. Miller barely mentions Locke, and Rosenblatt and Edelstein both try to knock him off the perch on which earlier histories placed him. Rosenblatt states categorically: “Liberalism owes its origins to the French Revolution.”
Taken together, the three books suggest that the Western liberal tradition may indeed have the strength and the resources necessary to withstand the political storms now gathering. But we should not conflate this tradition with the narrower set of mostly Anglo-American ideas that has been conventionally identified as its core, and labeled (mistakenly, according to Rosenblatt) “classical liberalism.” All three authors clearly believe that this narrower tradition has concerned itself too heavily with individual rights—above all, economic rights—as opposed to the common good. It has not paid enough attention to moral values and moral education, and it has not done enough to encourage broad democratic participation. Such arguments are not entirely new, but these books offer impressive new evidence and analyses. And at a moment when liberal democracy has shown itself rather more resilient in France and Germany (even with their current travails) than in Brexit Britain and Trumpist America, the case for looking to Continental sources for inspiration is particularly timely. [...]
Nor did Athens launch a durable democratic tradition. After its fall, democracy as a concept fell into long centuries of discredit and eclipse, with most leading Western commentators, up to and including the American Founding Fathers, seeing it as barely superior to mob rule. America, Miller reminds us, was not founded as a democracy but as a republic in which wise elites would restrain unruly expressions of the popular will. Only with the French Revolution did an ideal of egalitarian, participatory government again gain prominence. Miller here singles out the urban sans-culotte movement, which briefly turned the local electoral districts of some French cities into democratic assemblies, open to all male residents and meeting in permanent session. And he has particular praise for the Marquis de Condorcet’s draft constitution of 1793, which would have given local assemblies unprecedented power to challenge and curb the actions of a national legislature (the draft was never approved, still less implemented). [...]
To the extent that a self-conscious “liberal” movement existed, according to Rosenblatt, it was not to be found in Britain and America but on the European continent, starting in the French Revolution. While respectful of individual rights, this liberalism was moralizing, elitist, and concerned with the classic philosophical question of how to construct a stable, enduring, moderate regime. In France, the writers Benjamin Constant and Germaine de Staël, who came to prominence in the Revolution’s last stages, developed a political program that remained much closer to the earlier meanings of “liberty,” with an emphasis on a paternalistic “government of the best.” In the nineteenth century, German thinkers led the way in developing a “liberal” Protestant theology as well as economic ideas that anticipated the policies of modern welfare states. These self-proclaimed liberals, Rosenblatt notes, were emphatically not democrats. They mistrusted the common people and advocated limited suffrage. Nor were they libertarians. They generally did not consider property a core right, and while they warned against government becoming tyrannical, they did not seek to minimize its powers. Constant defended laissez-faire in the economic realm; many others did not.
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