Autor: Manent, Pierre

Buch: An Intellectual History of Liberalism

Titel: An Intellectual History of Liberalism

Stichwort: Liberalismus nach d. Revolution; 2. Zyklus d. L. (Ende d. 1. Zyklus durch Rousseau); 3. Element neben Zivilgesellschaft u. Staat: "Gesellschaft" (Grundlage nicht in Natur, sondern Geschichte) -> religiöse Sprache; Säkularisierung d. säkularen Religion

Kurzinhalt: After the Revolution, the men of the nineteenth century no longer lived merely in civil society or the state, they lived in a third element that received various names, usually "society" or "history." ... an atheist under the true God ...

Textausschnitt: CHAPTER VII
Liberalism after the French Revolution

80a I have tried to show in the preceding chapters how the development and consolidation of the liberal point of view had their origin in the theologico-political problem, and more precisely in Hobbes's response to it. Rousseau put an end to this first cycle of liberalism by heightening to the breaking point the tensions that had given liberalism its original vigor and thrust. The second liberalism, which emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, bore little resemblance to the first: it was separated from it by Rousseau and the French Revolution. The task of this liberalism was, in a way, to absorb the shock produced by this complex of events, feelings, and ideas. (Fs; tblStw: Politik) (notabene)

80b We must begin by pointing out that the liberalism of the nineteenth century accepts and approves the French Revolution, not only its results but the act itself (if not all its acts). The point is worth stressing. Burke, who can also be called liberal, was nevertheless not followed by any of the great French liberals in his condemnation of the French Revolution.1 Certainly, they made distinctions within the Revolution, condemning, for example, the terrorist phase. But fundamentally they were, intellectually and also emotionally, on the side of the revolutionaries and against the ancien régime. For us their attitude is surprising: in our retrospective viewpoint, "liberties" were rather better guaranteed, in fact if not in principle, under the ancien régime, at least in its final period, than during the Revolution or the Empire, as they themselves sometimes admit. How can their revolutionary enthusiasm, which seems not to be shared by French liberals today, be explained? (Fs)

80c The most obvious explanation is reasonably convincing. After all, the ancien régime was founded, at least officially, on the very principles against which liberalism originally rose up: absolute sovereignty of the king and semipolitical power of the Church. On the other side, the revolutionaries and the members of the Constituent Assembly set themselves the task of carrying out the liberal program, of constructing a body politic based on representation and the separation of powers that would truly guarantee security, equality of rights, and property. But this cannot be the whole story. After all, the revolutionary experience had just established that the representative principle could turn into despotism, that the people's sovereignty could be confiscated by a handful of men; in short, the liberal conception of political order was fraught with mortal danger for liberties. (Fs)
81a Where did the French Revolution take place, in what social setting, what political context, in what aspect of human association? It did not occur in civil society, whose life was suspended and organs destroyed; nor did it occur within the context of the state, since all the laws of political action and wisdom were found lacking. The revolutionaries were claiming to construct the state that would at last adequately represent society, but they belonged neither to state nor to society. They aimed beyond both of them and thereby invented a new role for man. (Fs)

81b But this new role was implied, without being acknowledged, by the very distinction between civil society and the state on which liberalism had been working for a century and a half. Liberal man, capable of splitting himself into proprietor and citizen, could be neither one nor the other: he was implicitly a third man, different from both proprietor and citizen. The unfolding of the French Revolution made strikingly apparent a human situation and a human role that liberalism implied without revealing. I am not suggesting that the French Revolution was liberal as such or that the development of liberalism necessarily led to the Revolution. There is something else at stake, which requires us to examine public feeling in the postrevolutionary period. (Fs)

81c After the Revolution, the men of the nineteenth century no longer lived merely in civil society or the state, they lived in a third element that received various names, usually "society" or "history." Regardless of what it was called, this element had the greatest authority. This "society" then was more than and different from "civil society": the latter had been created by the totality of relationships spontaneously formed by men, transformed by the desire for preservation, while the former had no explicit natural foundation. Its authority did not lie in nature, but in "history," in the historical evolution. (Fs) (notabene)

81d It is true that, from the seventeenth century on and especially in the eighteenth century, Europeans had felt that a process independent of political events was changing the state of social man, thanks to progress in the sciences, art, and commerce. But this process was perceived as a technical improvement of man's social nature. Man did not cease to live in nature, he simply was living better thanks to this improvement. That something entirely different was at stake in the nineteenth century is revealed by the most cursory comparison of the writings of Montesquieu and Benjamin Constant, two authors who have more in common than any other thinkers on the two sides of the French Revolution. There is no prerevolutionary author who grants more authority to history, understood as development of "knowledge" and "commerce," than Montesquieu. There is no pre-revolutionary author who asserts as much as he the decisive importance of historical development for human security and liberty. Unlike Constant, however, he did not have the feeling of living in the element of history, under the authority of history. Montesquieu wanted to establish history's authority but did not feel it. This difference is so important that it quite often blinds Constant to the fact that Montesquieu is saying the same thing as he. (Fs)

82a It is definitely from the Revolution that this feeling dates. More precisely, it derives from the fact that the Revolution failed to develop adequate political institutions. The Revolution, therefore, could not be considered the foundation of a new body politic, still less a mere change in regime—the only two definitions of political "revolution" available until then. The Revolution offered the original spectacle of a political change of unheard-of scope, yet having no stable political effects, of a political upheaval impossible to settle, of an interminable and indeterminate event. The fact that men had the feeling of living in a third element, a "meta-political" element, as it were, revealed by the Revolution, can be confirmed by the religious interpretation soon to be given to the notions of "society" and "history." Although the eighteenth century had been so hostile to religion, and the Revolution had conducted a violent dechristianization, the first part of the nineteenth century was in fact extraordinarily "religious." I do not mean to say that the French docilely reintegrated the Church into society, which did not happen; nevertheless, they began to interpret political and social events in religious terms, such that their political considerations became inseparable from the religious ones. The observation applies to everyone, or almost everyone, in the nineteenth century—to the liberals as well as the Saint-Simonians, to Chateaubriand as well as Quinet, to Tocqueville as well as Michelet. Here, however, I am considering only the liberal authors: this third element of which I am speaking, this metapolitics that determines politics, is actually Christianity "realizing" itself. (Fs) (notabene)

82b And indeed, if men feel themselves to be living in a third element, which is neither social nature nor political art, they cannot conceive of this element as real, other than by appealing to the only conceivable third term, one that is essentially different from nature and art, and stands above them—like religion. Simultaneously, since what is at stake here is not the soul's salvation but the understanding of society, these authors bent religion to fit the century, and made Christianity a "secular religion." For Chateaubriand as for Tocqueville, the new equality of civil and political rights is the last conquest of the Gospel, its fulfillment so long and so mysteriously deferred. (Fs) (notabene)
83a Because of our long experience, we have now become flexible. We move in this third element of "society" or "history" like fish in water, and even consider the notion of "culture" to be incontrovertible. Consequently, atheists as well as Christians today run the risk of being blind to the internal necessity of this variety of nineteenth century religion, which, too religious to be genuine politics, too political to be true religion, reveals the extreme precariousness of the "third man" whom we have become. (Fs)

83b The second aspect of liberalism's relationship to the Revolution is that while accepting the revolutionary event's authority, and even adhering to the revolutionary religion, liberals will distinguish the Revolution's politics from its religion. They will endeavor to elaborate theoretically and practically the political institutions entailed by the Revolution, yet made unworkable by its religion. What defines the liberal project after the Revolution is its desire to secularize the secular religion to which it adheres; what characterizes the liberal after the Revolution is that he is an atheist under the true God, under the God in whom he believes. Hence liberals will also be critics, and sometimes very sharp ones, of the Revolution. In terms of practical politics, they will be followers of the Revolution rather than "reactionaries" demanding a "return" to the ancien regime; but they will also be critics who wish to "continue" or "deepen" the Revolution, and hence make impossible the stabilization of the liberal institutions implied by its principles. (Fs)