Introduction: The State Triumphant
The struggle between William of Orange, also known as William III of England, and Louis XIV of France represent the apogee of the triumph of the European State as it evolved since the late Middle Ages.
These two great states had a robust administrative capacity and a united deliberative body to advise the monarch at the head of it - in England, it was Parliament. This body's membership been the ones who have invited William in, they were more than willing to vote him the funds and force needed to prosecute the War against Louis and James II, now his mere proxy (James would have had Parliament's heads if he were even to return to England at the head of a Franco-Irish army).
In the case of France, it have been Louis own mind, in addition to whichever ambitious noblewoman he was bedding at that particular day as well as the latest minister succeeding the one who was being exiled and his property confiscated.
For awhile it seemed both states were extremely capable to bend the affairs of Europe to their conflicting interests.
Louis was a great man, with natural talent at court, domestic and international politics, who had studied in the hard school of Cardinal Mazarin, that rare creature - a competent and ambitious royal regent actually interested in preparing the monarch to rule.
The successive counselors Louis took were extremely capable organizers, soldiers and financiers. He drew unto himself the best talent a great realm such as France could have. An administration like that could have hardly fail to produce tremendous initiative and innovation.
In comparison, the tools available to William seemed unfairly limiting.
He had to deal with an elected legislature which, while momentarily accommodating, was fully aware of its dignity and power and was full of ambitious and opinionated men. These men would not allow him to employ as ministers and generals but those they approved, and only by those methods they approved of. To make matters worse, Williamhad to contend with two such bodies- the Parliament in England and tye Estates General of the Netherlands.
To add to William's challenge, two countries were considerably poorer than France, one of them having most of its wealth tied to long speculative ventures in faraway lands.
Both had robust legal protections of property and the citizen, and in both taxation was conditioned on the consent of the governed. In contrast, Louis could have just confiscated any resources he deemed necessary, on top of the Taille - that Hundred Year War era poll tax, which, come hell or high water, all French commoners were obligated to pay, willingly or unwillingly.
Nevertheless, by the end of Louis' reign, France was bankrupt and exhausted, his armies were defeated.
The British archipelago was firmly united under William's successor, Queen Anne.
James II's remaining descendants and supporters would, after spending the next century engaged in petty intrigues and hair-brained schemes, give up and their last direct pretender would join the Church and rise to become a cardinal.
France have never recovered from the humiliation and damaged she suffered under her supposedly most glorious king.
England and the Netherlands, on the other hand, would emerge victorious but would become the twin economic powerhouses of Europe - the Dutch moving from seaborn commerce to the more secure field of high finance and the British ruling the waves and all traffic above them. But even in these countries all was not well - there was a genuine feel of discontent in the air, of grievance and wrong despite the national prosperity. After the latest shellacking of the French in the Seven Years War, the British found themselves engaged in yet another Civil War - this time, a Transatlantic one.
The Nobility of Service, the Clergy, the Gentry and the Burghers all have become entrenched in their positions at the table of the State. The latter, in all its manifestation, all powerful having the backing of those prominent groups, was at liberty to impose its will on the common people.
While in England and the Netherlands the public at large had some representation through Parliament or the Estates General, not everyone have enjoyed the franchise and therefore some found themselves the target of government action without being consulted or represented in the counsels of the State. The Poor are the most memorable, but so were religious non-conformist, women, the Irish and others as well, while having some protection in Law could not affect laws deliberately devised and enacted to regulate their lives by the State.
Of course, in France no subject had a legally sanctioned "representation" in the government nor any effective legal protections against it. Frenchmen had privileges and duties, but no rights. Some of them may be statesmen engaging in politics, but not one of them was entitled to vote on most state actions. Britons justly boasted of being "Free men, not slaves" compared to the French, despite the flaws and exceptions to their freedoms.
There was a sickness ailing the post-Medieval administrative state. To diagnose and cure these ailments, the next two centuries would see the rise of a discipline, or a collection of competing disciplines, which would have been utterly foreign to their ancestors of the 16th Century:
Ideology was, for the first time in history, being born.
I: Idea and Ideology, Individuals and Classes
There is in Dumas' great novel of the Fronde, Twenty Years After, the Vicomte de Bregallone visits the residence of the Abbé Scarron. In there he provides us with this beautiful scene, showing how individual actions is bent towards class-action in politics:
"Would you believe it, monsieur? that contemptible Mazarin has stopped poor Scarron’s pension.”
“That is unreasonable,” said Athos, saluting in his turn the two cavaliers. And they separated with courteous gestures.
“It happens well that we are going there this evening,” said Athos to the vicomte; “we will pay our compliments to that poor man.”
“What, then, is this Monsieur Scarron, who thus puts all Paris in commotion? Is he some minister out of office?”
“Oh, no, not at all, vicomte,” Athos replied; “he is simply a gentleman of great genius who has fallen into disgrace with the cardinal through having written certain verses against him.”
“Do gentlemen, then, make verses?” asked Raoul, naively, “I thought it was derogatory.”
“So it is, my dear vicomte,” said Athos, laughing, “to make bad ones; but to make good ones increases fame—witness Monsieur de Rotrou. Nevertheless,” he continued, in the tone of one who gives wholesome advice, “I think it is better not to make them.”
“Then,” said Raoul, “this Monsieur Scarron is a poet?”
“Yes; you are warned, vicomte. Consider well what you do in that house. Talk only by gestures, or rather always listen.”
“Yes, monsieur,” replied Raoul.
“You will see me talking with one of my friends, the Abbé d’Herblay, of whom you have often heard me speak.”
“I remember him, monsieur.”
“Come near to us from time to time, as if to speak; but do not speak, and do not listen. That little stratagem may serve to keep off interlopers.”
“Very well, monsieur; I will obey you at all points.”
....
“Well,” said the coadjutor, on seeing him, “you are in disgrace, then, abbé?”
This was the orthodox phrase. It had been said that evening a hundred times—and Scarron was at his hundredth bon mot on the subject; he was very nearly at the end of his humoristic tether, but one despairing effort saved him.
“Monsieur, the Cardinal Mazarin has been so kind as to think of me,” he said.
“But how can you continue to receive us?” asked the coadjutor; “if your income is lessened I shall be obliged to make you a canon of Notre Dame.”
“Oh, no!” cried Scarron, “I should compromise you too much.”
“Perhaps you have resources of which we are ignorant?”
“I shall borrow from the queen.”
“But her majesty has no property,” interposed Aramis.
At this moment the door opened and Madame de Chevreuse was announced. Every one arose. Scarron turned his chair toward the door, Raoul blushed, Athos made a sign to Aramis, who went and hid himself in the enclosure of a window.
...
Scarron followed their movements with a glance from the corner of his eye.
“Not one of them will do as he says,” he murmured, with his little monkey smile; “but they may do as they please, the brave gentlemen! Who knows if they will not manage to restore to me my pension? They can move their arms, they can, and that is much. Alas, I have only my tongue, but I will try to show that it is good for something. Ho, there, Champenois! here, it is eleven o’clock. Come and roll me to bed. Really, that Demoiselle d’Aubigne is very charming!”
So the invalid disappeared soon afterward and went into his sleeping-room; and one by one the lights in the salon of the Rue des Tournelles were extinguished.
Dumas, the master of historical fiction (and a talented researcher in his own right) gives us a more vivid picture of the dynamics we have hitherto merely glanced at from a distance.
Obviously there was no great convocation of the grand seigneurie and the bourgeoise of France, in which the leaders of both factions sat and decided on a literal bargain which the former ultimately betrayed. Rather, as the numerours frustrated great noblemen of the realm conveyed their feelings to their fellows in a thousand dinner parties, regional assemblies and social calls, which percolated throughout their social milieu, and as fristrated burghers did the same in their business meetings, dinners, counting houses and lawfirms, came a point in which, almost by sheer accident, their grievances converged. When crisis erupted, many burghers found themselves in agreement with their social superiors that such-and-such prince should have not, in fact, have been sent to this-or-that fortress, even only by virtue of this act being committed by a minister they despised.
Ideas and ideaologies follow a similiar pattern, but while, in the West at least, collective action came first to the political arena (medieval society was one of guilds, religious and saecular orders, great families, corporate towns etc) and the individual later on (as the west gradually adopted the idea of the individuated franchise), the lonely "idea" or principle came first to dominate Western political struggles, ideology being invented relatively late.
It is useless to speak about the economic differences between "royalist" and "parliamentarian" "ideologies" in the English Civil War. The royalists believed that taxes were good if they increased the power of the King and bad if they didn't. The parliamentarians believed the opposite.
The entire conflict of the Fronde was governed by a single issue- whether Mazarin was to remain the chief minister of the Crown, and by extension, what degree of power should Anne of Austria have as a regent against the wishes of the Estates of the realm.
Ideology operates quite differently, between the realm of simple principles and religion.
As young Stalin, who was a great student of ideology put it, an ideology (in his case, Marxist Socialism) is not merely a theory of a particular topic but "a whole worldview" (See Kotkin, Stephen "Stalin V. I: Paradoxes of Power PP. 107) determining the way in which all aspects of life are viewed.
The Ideologue is not a man of principle, but what Adam Smith would have come to call (in a cautionary tone) "a man of system"- he sees the entire world through a lens which colors all human enterprises and experiences.
We can see nowadays how leftists and rightists have their own way to look at economics, politics, family life, and even the natural sciences are assuming a certain ideological bias, people more willing to accept certain theories rather than others based on their ideological implications. People laugh at the Nazi branding of the Theory of Relativity as "Jewish Science" and the Soviet rejection of Genetics, but those are prime example of theories which are inconvenient for the ideology of both regimes.
It was only in face of protracted struggle that early modern Westerners had invented ideology (indeed, every single ideology still in existence around the globe is either of direct western vintage or merely a local application of a western one).
The remarkable success of this particular western invention is counter-intuitive, since ideology brings with it some seriously deleterious side effects- it blinkers and limits the scope of policy and perspective, it divides the People and set them at each other, it creates false dichotomies in political reasoning as well as chimeric, unsustainable alliances.
But the utility of ideology is so great in amassing political will for grand projects that it is, in fact, indispensable for a modern polity.
As the historian Stephen Kotkin noted, Modernity is a series of institutions which bring the masses into economic, political and intellectual life on the national (rather than the local) scale- markets allow the worker, petty grocer and the small farmer to produce and consume for and from the national (or even international) economy. Public education bring all individuals into the same intellectual universe. Mass Politics (or in other words, Ideology) bring the masses to think, support and oppose statesmen and state actions on the national level.
What we designate modernity was not something natural or automatic. It involved a set of difficult-to-attain attributes- mass production, mass culture, mass politics - that the great powers mastered.
Kotkin, Stephen: Stalin V. I - Pardoxes of Power PP. 62
Even autocratic and aristocratic systems cannot do without mass-support as the masses, who have become wealthier and capable of ideologizations by the rivals to the regime- demand to know by what right, and by what methods, are they ruled. Czarist Russia and Restoration France had made this discovery too late, and that was their doom.
II: The Center and the Periphery:
Both Conservatism and Radicalism started their way in Europe in the periphery of the countries they came to dominate.
The original thinkers of the Conservative movement in post-revolutionary England and France were two men who belonged to what can be described as ruling diasporas: the Franco-Swiss lawyer Joseph De-Maistre and the Anglo-Irish parliamentarian Edmund Burke.
Similarly, the originators of Radicalism were also marginal politically - from the disappointing son of a Isaac Rousseau, a watchmaker and part time dance instructor, to the hateful progeny of the defrocked monk Jean Mara(t), also of Geneva.
As early as the late 15th- early 16th Century, the Paduan intellectual Pietro Pomponazzi had questioned, along other widely reported miracles, the validity of one of the most commonly attested manifestation of the Divine Right of Kings - the Curing of the King's Evil - he explains it as a result of a peculiar hereditary trait rather than a show of divine favor.
And so, while the late Middle Ages have seen the slow but sure buildup of the Administrative State under the authority of the Crown, shored up by the principle of the Divine Right of Kings, the Renaissance, the Humanist movement and the Reformation had already started to erode this idea. By the middle of the 17th Century, there was an urgent need of a new source for legitimacy for the State. The English Parliamentarians had shown the way by declaring that Parliament is the representative body of "the People of England" but how did the People of England came to be a constituent body, and how came Parliament to represent them, as opposed to the King?
Hobbes counterattacked the question by declaring that the State exists by mutual implicit consent. Since there is naught but chaos without the State, all those who do not wish to live in chaos consent to the authority of the State. Therefore the subject cannot complain if the State exercises this consensual authority.
But consent as the source of legitimacy confirms the liberty of the individual. Therefore, despite himself, Hobbes had given an opening to a new faction of ideologues who argued for the limitation of State authority in favor of individual freedom- that is, to the early liberals.
A: The Early Liberals
Liberalism, on the other hand, have been the project of well connected individuals from the political center.
John Locke was an Oxford Don, an elite physician, the Secretary of the Board of Trade and a consummate politician and policy maker during the reigns of two of England's most cerebral reigns - that of Charles II and of William and Mary. Here was a man who knew the system in the thorough and comprehensive manner reserve to true insiders.
Montesquieu was a baron, and a high ranking member of the local parliament. While the high aristocracy lulled away the phantom pains of their severed political influence, he was active as one of the men who had actually ruled France in the name of the King.
Adam Smith was never employed in public office, but his father belonged to one of the most ancient and prestigious associations of jurists in Scotland - the Writers to the Signet. He himself had studied in the University of Glasgow and held a professorship in the University of Edinburgh, which at the time were rising to prominence as two of the best places of learning in Europe.
It would be tempting to assume, in the Marxian or Fascist line of thought, that these men of substance, comfortable circumstances and central role in their societies were writing in advocacy of the institutions of England, France and Scotland as they were, at most demanding changes that would have feathered their corner of the nest even further.
Nothing can be further from the truth.
We must remember that all these men lived in an age in which the Divine Right of Kings was either already or fast becoming the main pillar of the State. The State itself was geared towards the economic subordination of all economic, spiritual and intellectual life towards its own aggrandizement. The economic theory in vogue was Mercantilism, which saw trade as preparation or form of international scramble after gold, so useful in paying mercenaries. The artistic fashion have been the Baroque style, in which kings were gods, heroes, and romantic knights at the same time, vanquishing giants and monsters and taking possession of the throne of the Universe, handed to them by no lesser authority than God Himself. The Religious institutions were all tending away from the twin versions of Christian Universalism brought which emerged after the rupture of Western Christianity in the 16th century, and towards total subordination to the monarch.
The Liberal thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, railing against unitary State power, calling for liberalization of trade and decrying the arbitrary and ludicrous doctrine of the Divine Right.
All these opinions were not likely to ingratiate them with the rulers. Locke had to escape the wrath of Charles II and his brother James II (he returned with the retinue of William and Mary), Montesquieu dared voice his opinions only in retirement and only under the guise of fiction taking place in Persia. Adam Smith was the only one who had already lived in a State where his the rule of law was established and therefore could not be prosecuted, but his opinions were removed by far from official British Policy which had remained staunchly Mercantilist at least until the end of the American Revolution (British India Policy would remain so until Indian Independence).
In his excoriating condemnation of the old Administrative State, which he termed "The Stationary State", Adam Smith wrote:
In a country too, where, though the rich or the owners of large capitals enjoy a good deal of security, the poor or the owners of small capitals enjoy scarce any, but are liable, under the pretence of justice, to be pillaged and plundered at any time by the inferior mandarins, the quantity of stock employed in all the different branches of business transacted within it can never be equal to what the nature and extent of that business might admit. In every different branch, the oppression of the poor must establish the monopoly of the rich, who, by engrossing the whole trade to themselves, will be able to make very large profits.
(Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book 1,Chapter 9)
The Liberals, while being openly critical of Feudalism and hostile to its remnants, wished to re-create that which have been absent since the fall of the Feudal order - autonomy.
Of course, the Liberals wished this autonomy to not be limited to few noblemen and contingent on service of the Crown, nor did they wish the utter destruction of the administrative State, whose "blessings of good government", as a certain American Liberal would term it, they knew intimately and appreciated greatly.
They wished for a government that was not a sinecure or an asset, but a service and a vocation. A government that was not too humble to be assertive in the face of popular demands against justice, peace or the public good, but that would nevertheless be a servant to the People, not their master.
The early liberals did not wish to abolish the State or to rebuild it from the ground up. Instead they wished to curb and limit its power to commit abuses and keep it within the limits of Good government.
Even their economic views tend towards that end- Adam Smith was not fond of merchants, which he viewed as the State's main accomplices in the crimes of mercantilism- and his political philosophy is aimed not towards their interests but against the power of the State, since custom revenues were some of the oldest (and legally less dependent on Parliament) revenues available to the Crown.
If we must draw a crude picture of these thinkers, we must imagine them as a great army, divided into three corps:
The first, headed by Locke, are the legitimizers of Liberty. By postulating that government arises from mutual consent, they give justification to the idea that Mankind can and should remain free even under government- since Man did not escape the horrors of the State of Nature merely to be devoured by a State which is in that very state in regards to him. Therefore, Liberty was right.
The second, headed by Montesquieu, have shown what sort of government is required in order to make Man free- the device of the tripartite partition, the perfection of Polybius mixed constitution by James Madison- that Liberty is practicable.
Lastly, the third corps headed by Smith have demonstrated that Liberty is also prudent, that a free society would be the most prosperous, and therefore most capable of defending itself and attaining the higher goals of civilization.
B: The Radicals
The most telling detail about the origin and function of Radicalism in Europe is that it did not feed on some mysterious ambers of popular revolt preserved from the Middle Ages.
The last peasant revolt in England have been a pitiful affair of a few hundred impoverished day laborers marching down from Oxfordshire towards London. Elizabeth I had no problem crushing this demonstration. In France, there have been no significant revolts of the peasantry between 1351 and 1794, when the peasants of Brittany revolted- to protect the Ancien Regime.
The rise of the administrative State and the fall of the Feudal order had been a tremendous boon to the Peasantry, which was either officially or unofficially released from the binds of serfdom.
Peasants were now free to work as they pleased and save their money openly, besides the rents that still had to be paid to the lords who were transformed by the State from rulers to proprietors.
Those enterprising peasants who could bring their surpluses to market (instead of the lord's storehouses) could even purchase their farms outright, in which case they were quit and rid of the lord (and often became armigerous squires inn their own right) or improve their land so their profit have reduced the lord's rents to an insignificant expense - which resulted in some peasant even seeking to lease more land than they held before.
Additionally, as population grew, many settlements had outgrown their peasant origin.
Now the enfranchisement of the serfs and the policy of centralization that brought it about led to many of them gaining official recognition, being chartered and incorporated as townships and boroughs. This moved their commercial and industrious inhabitants to the ranks of respectably burghers, and out of the peasantry altogether, who could then start their generational march into the nobility of service and the political life of the nation.
Thus it was not in the interest of the peasantry to pull down the administrative State or to shake the power of the Crown.
Radicalism was born, as Aristotle predicted, out the resentment of those who advanced somewhat up the chain forged by the State but then failed to advance further.
It wasn't a continuation of the demands posed by the medieval peasant rebellions, which were largely fulfilled in Western Europe, nor of the Burgher-and-Gentry coalition that fought in the French Wars of Religion, the English Civil War, the Fronde and the Glorious Revolution.
Instead, it was the embodiment of the frustrations of those who failed to rise in the new, centralized society.
Godwin, the quintessential English radical, has been the son of a non-conformist pastor who was supporter by his father in law, a wealthy merchant.
His career is not one of a man of action, business, the law or practical politics. He was an outsider who was not witness to the true workings of the country and society.
He, together with Thomas Paine (a man of immense talents) are prime example of "men of system", which the old liberal sage of Scotland had warned against.
For Godwin (and his first wife Mary Wollstonecraft), that "system" was the belief in human innate goodness, which led them to the conclusion that all evil in Man must be the result of socially imposed perversion. That have led them to some truly bizarre conclusion. For instance, soldiers, Mary reasoned, must be the worst and most unnatural men since they are under the greatest limiting authority and discipline. Since she saw femininity (in its 18th century expression) as a result of women being placed under stricter social norms than men, she reasoned soldiers, who are limited in similar ways, must be the most effeminate of men.
To fully understand Radicalism we must understand that the European Radicals of that age were, or at least started their career, as Radical Liberals.
Since Locke reasoned that government was instituted by consent, to provide Mankind with good and free government, it follows that once it becomes destructive of those ends, it can be abolished and replaced- this, by itself, is not a radical statement, but the very justification of the Glorious Revolution which Locke had sought.
But in the Radical thought of the late 18th Century, starting with Jean Jacque Rousseau, the definitions of Liberty and Oppression have been stretched to their limits.
Suppose, argued the Swiss thinker, that the source of the State, and Society in general is the individual's consent. Therefore, it would be a violation of his consent by the State to coerce him to do anything which is not implicit by this original consent.
Since Rousseau believed that Man was originally good by his nature that would also imply that every force employed upon him can lead only to his removal from his natural state and his corruption. Corruption, eo ipso, is an act of tyranny. Therefore Rousseau can declare with confidence that Man is born free, and yet everywhere he is in chains - those are not the chains of the State violating the Law, One's life, liberty and property, but the very institution of society, by their very existence and operation to change Man from his natural (and therefore good) state to one suitable to them is tyranny and oppression.
By this the radicals- from Rousseau and Godwin to Maras and Robespierre - have departed forever from the Liberals. The older ideology wished to preserve Society and State and to reform and rationalize them. The younger wished to destroy them and rebuild anew a more "natural" and "just" one.
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