An essay in universal history from an Orthodox Christian Point ofView part the age of revolution
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AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY From an Orthodox Christian Point ofView PART 3. THE AGE OF REVOLUTION (1789 TO 1861) Volume 1: from 1830 to 1861 Vladimir Moss © Copyright, Vladimir Moss, 2016. All rights reserved. 34. LIBERTY AND LIBERALISM 6 35. THE GEOPOLITICS OF SLAVERY 16 36. SLAVERY IN AMERICA 22 37. RICH AND POOR: THE ROTHSCHILD CENTURY 26 38. VICTORIAN RELIGION AND MORALITY 39 39. THE BRITISH EMPIRE 51 40. THE BRITISH IN IRELAND 55 42. THE BRITISH IN INDIA 66 43. MILL ON LIBERTY 73 44. UTOPIAN SOCIALISM 82 45. THREE WESTERN JEWS: (1) DISRAELI 94 46. THREE WESTERN JEWS: (2) HEINE 99 47. THREE WESTERN JEWS: (3) MARX 104 48. "THE SPRINGTIME OF THE NATIONS" 117 49. NAPOLEON III, THE MASONS AND ITALY 132 50. THE ORIGINS OF NATIONALISM: (5) ITALY 136 52. WAGNER’S WELTANSCHAUUNG 146 53. NATIONALISM, TRISTAN AND THE DEATH WISH 162 54. THE WILL IN NATURE: DARWIN 167 55. TSAR NICHOLAS I 178 56. THE ORIGINS OF NATIONALISM: (6) POLAND 184 57. THE RUSSIAN CHURCH AND THE ANGLICANS 190 58. THE JEWS UNDER NICHOLAS I 197 59. RUSSIAN HEGELIANISM 200 61. RUSSIA AND EUROPE: (1) CHAADAEV VS. PUSHKIN 211 62. RUSSIA AND EUROPE: (2) BELINSKY VS. GOGOL 221 63. RUSSIA AND EUROPE: (3) HERZEN VS. KHOMIAKOV 227 64. RUSSIA AND EUROPE: (4) KIREYEVSKY 235 65. RUSSIA AND EUROPE: (5) DOSTOYEVSKY 244 66. THE SLAVOPHILES ON THE AUTOCRACY 250 87. METROPOLITAN PHILARET ON CHURCH AND STATE 269 71. THE ORIGINS OF NATIONALISM: (7) GREECE 289 72. THE ORIGINS OF NATIONALISM: (8) SERBIA 298 73. THE ORIGINS OF NATIONALISM: (9) ROMANIA 304 CONCLUSION. THE TSAR, THE SULTAN AND THE PATRIARCH 310 The human I, wishing to depend only on itself, not recognizing and not accepting any other law besides its own will - in a word, the human I, taking the place of God, - does not, of course, constitute something new among men. But such has it become when raised to the status of a political and social right, and when it strives, by virtue of this right, to rule society. This is the new phenomenon which acquired the name of the French revolution in 1789. F.I. Tiutchev, Russia and the Revolution (1848). Come to me, Lucifer, Satan, whoever you may be! Devil whom the faith of my fathers contrasted with God and the Church. I will act as spokesman for you and will demand nothing of you. Proudhon, Idée générale de la revolution. Some people by the word “freedom” understand the ability to do whatever one wants ... People who have the more allowed themselves to come into slavery to sins, passions, and defilements more often than others appear as zealots of external freedom, wanting to broaden the laws as much as possible. But such a man uses external freedom only to more severely burden himself with inner slavery. True freedom is the active ability of a man who is not enslaved to sin, who is not pricked by a condemning conscience, to choose the better in the light of God's truth, and to bring it into actuality with the help of the gracious power of God. This is the freedom of which neither heaven nor earth are restrictors. St. Philaret of Moscow, Sermon on the Birthday of Emperor Nicholas I, 1851. The root elements of our Russian life have been characterized long ago, and they are so powerfully and completely expressed by the familiar words: Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality. That is what we must preserve! When these principles become weaker or fail, the Russian people will cease to be Russian. It will then lose its sacred three-coloured flag. St. Theophan the Recluse, Letters, VII, p. 289. 34. LIBERTY AND LIBERALISMThe Bourbon restoration in 1815 did not restore full absolutism. For if the Jacobin tyranny, and the Napoleonic one that followed it, were now discredited, there were few who wanted a return to the absolutism of the old regime. And so, while Louis XVIII's powers were declared to rest on a divine mandate, a bicameral legislature on the English model was established, and in 1821 the rights of citizens to freedom of religion and thought were reaffirmed. However, Louis's successor, Charles X, attempted to turn the clock back, and his coronation ceremony in Rheims in 1825 had all the ceremonial of the ancien regime, including the medieval practice of touching for scrofula.1 But he was not popular, and in 1830 he was overthrown.2 The July Days introduced a constitutional monarchy headed by another Bourbon, Louis-Philippe, the Duke of Orléans. As Alistair Horne writes, “his acceptability to both sides in 1830 stemmed largely from the fact that his father had been the duplicitous regicide Philippe Egalité – though apostasy had not sufficed to save his neck during the Terror. Louis-Philippe had been nominated for the post of Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom by both Charles X and the Commune of Paris, and for the remainder of his eighteen=-year rule between revolutions he would do his utmost to be all things to all sides. It was symbolic that the last King of France, the very antithesis of Louis XIV, accepted the crown not at Rheims but in the Palais Bourbon, as the politically elected ruler of ‘the people’. Shorn of all mystical or inherited droits, the People’s King had little more power than a British constitutional monarch…”3 The difference between the revolutions of 1789 and 1830 consisted in the latter's concentration on broadening electoral suffrage and in its more openly commercial flavour, in keeping with the new spirit of commercial enterprise. “The July revolution,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, “was carried out by the people, but the middle class which had touched it off and led it, was the chief beneficiary”.4 "Master of everything, as no aristocracy had ever been or perhaps will never be, the middle class, which one has to call the governing class, having entrenched itself in power and soon afterwards in its self-interest, seemed like a private industry. Each of its members scarcely gave a thought to public affairs except to make them function to profit his own private business, and had no difficulty in forgetting the lower orders in his little cocoon of affluence. Posterity will possibly never realize how far the government of the day had in the end taken on the appearance of an industrial company, where all operations are carried out with a view to the benefit the shareholders can draw from them."5 A theory now had to be devised that would guard the triumphant middle classes against both the earlier and more recent forms of tyranny. Such a theory was liberalism… “Liberalism,” writes Norman Davies, “developed along two parallel tracks, the political and the economic. Political liberalism focused on the essential concept of government by consent. It took its name from the liberales of Spain, who drew up their Constitution of 1812 in opposition to the arbitrary powers of the Spanish monarchy; but it had its roots much further back, in the political theories of the Enlightenment and beyond. Indeed, for much of its early history it was indistinguishable from the growth of limited government. Its first lasting success may be seen in the American Revolution, though it drew heavily on the experiences of British parliamentarianism and on the first, constitutional phase of the Revolution in France. In its most thoroughgoing form it embraced republicanism, though most liberals welcomed a popular, limited, and fair-minded monarch as a factor encouraging stability. Its advocates stressed above all the rule of law, individual liberty, constitutional procedures, religious toleration and the universal rights of man. They opposed the inbuilt prerogatives, wherever they survived, of Crown, Church, or aristocracy. Nineteenth-century liberals also gave great weight to property, which they saw as the principal source of responsible judgement and solid citizenship. As a result, whilst taking the lead in clipping the wings of absolutism and in laying the foundations of modern democracy, they were not prepared to envisage radical schemes for universal suffrage or for egalitarianism. “Economic liberalism focused on the concept of free trade, and on the associated doctrine of laissez-faire, which opposed the habit of governments to regulate economic life through protectionist tariffs. It stressed the right of men of property to engage in commercial and industrial activities without undue restraint. Its energies were directed on the one hand to dismantling the economic barriers which had proliferated both within and between countries and on the other to battling against all forms of collectivist organization, from the ancient guild to the new trade unions.”6 Liberalism was an individualist creed in that its aim, in line with the main stream of intellectual development since the Renaissance, was the maximum development and happiness of individual men. It was concerned to protect individual freedoms from the encroachment of all collectives, including the State. However, trends towards individualism have always gone hand in hand historically with trends in the opposite, collectivist direction; and the horrors caused by liberal individualism elicited the growth of socialist collectivism... “The core beliefs of mid-nineteenth century liberalism,” writes John Darwin, “sprang from the contemplation of this fearful period of European history [the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars]. Escape from the cycle of war and revolution required political institutions that would defend the state equally against popular revolt and parvenu despotism. Rulers must be more ‘legitimate’. They needed the loyalty of a wider range of communities and interests. Their servants and officials must be kept in check, ideally by a representative body. That raised the question of who should represent whom. Most of all it raised the question of how far a government should regulate the social and economic life of its citizens. Liberalism’s answer to this was the key to its position, the fundamental premise of its political theory. “It was brilliantly sketched by the Swiss-born Frenchman Benjamin Constant, whose political writings were a fierce rejection of revolutionary violence and Napoleonic tyranny. Constant argued that ordinary people were bound to resist interference in their private and social lives and that arbitrary acts by the state destroyed the mutual trust between individuals on which all social and commercial relations depended. He distinguished between the proper (and narrow) sphere of authority and the wider realm (what would now be called ‘civil society’) in which the self-regulation of private interests should prevail. Modern societies, he suggested, were too complex to be ruled politically after the fashion of an ancient city state – the model to which many earlier writers (including Rousseau) had appealed. Diversity, pluralism and localism were the secret of stability and freedom. Secondly, the legislators, to whom the executive should answer, should be drawn from those least likely to favour the extension of arbitrary power or to be seduced by a demagogue. Politics should be the preserve of the propertied, who would exert a wholesome (and educated) influence on the ‘labouring poor’. The propertied were the true guardians of the public interest. Thirdly, it was necessary for property rights and other civil freedoms to be protected by well-established rules – an idea that implied the codification of the law and its machinery. “Constant advanced a further crucial justification for his liberal system: it alone was compatible with social progress. All forms of arbitrary government tended sooner or later to impose uniformity. Yet without freedom of thought all societies were condemned to stagnate, since the expression and exchange of ideas was the means of advance in every sphere. Indeed, without the free circulation of ideas, governments themselves would scarcely know what course to pursue. Neither Constant nor the liberal thinkers who followed him intended to promote an anarchy of ideas. Their real concern was with the intellectual freedom of the educated, enlightened and propertied. For (or so they assumed) it was these who were the real political nation, the defenders of freedom, the engineers of improvement. Under their tutelage, civil society would be freed, but also dynamic. “Of course, a sea of arguments swirled around these beliefs. Could a hereditary monarch be trusted as head of state, or was a republic the only safe form of representative government? Could women be part of the political nation, or was their ‘physical faculty’ a decisive bar? Did commercial and industrial wealth confer political virtue on its possessors, or did this spring only from property in land? Was religion the enemy of freedom of thought or the vital prop of social morality? Should the laws embody the ‘custom of the country’ (and become the subject of historical inquiry) or (as the ‘utilitarian’ followers of Jeremy Bentham believed) emancipate society from the ‘dead hand’ of the past? Then there was the question that vexed liberalism more perhaps than any other: was the achievement of ‘nationality’ – a shared ethnic, linguistic and (sometimes) religious identity – the essential precondition for liberal institutions to function properly? And what if the pursuit of nationality conflicted with the central tenets of the liberal programme: freedom of thought and the strict limitation of government power? Was nationalism a forward-looking ideology or (except in a few and ‘progressive’ places) a creed of the backward and benighted?”7 All of these contradictory tendencies were present in the original French revolution, which was at first liberal in character, but later developed a socialist and totalitarian character, and ended up in the nationalism of the Napoleonic empire. Which of these tendencies triumphed depended largely on the circumstances in which the struggle took place - that of oppressed individuals or classes within a sovereign nation or oppressed nations within a multi-ethnic empire. As yet the potential conflicts between the two - for the fact the liberation of the nation might mean putting off the liberation of the individual for the time being, and vice-versa - were only dimly perceived. Still less clearly perceived was the fact that the revolution could not be used to make limited reforms, and then stopped in its tracks before it became "dangerous". The path that the first French revolution took after 1792 should have made that obvious. But many conservative liberals who took part in the second French revolution of 1830 deluded themselves into thinking that the further development of the revolutionary idea could now be arrested. They thought they could sow the wind without reaping the whirlwind, as if the genie could be let out of the bottle to do some "cleaning", and then put back again before the breeze became a hurricane. They failed to see that the revolution was not a rational human desire for limited, reasonable reform but an irrational, elemental, satanic force whose ultimate aim was simply total destruction. The most typical of these conservative liberals was François Guizot, Prime Minister of France in the 1840s. In 1820, when Louis XVIII's Charter conceded legal equality, religious toleration and the necessity for parliamentary consent to new laws on taxation, he declared: "I consider the revolution of 1789 to be over. All its interests and legitimate wishes are guaranteed by the Charter. What France needs now is to do away with the revolutionary spirit which still torments her."8 Guizot's real ideal was not the French revolution, but the "Glorious" English one of 1688, a relatively bloodless affair that put the men of property firmly in power. He thought that "moderate" revolutions such as 1688 and 1789 could somehow avert "radical" ones such as 1793. That is why he supported the overthrow of Charles X in 1830, hoping that Louis Philippe could play the role of William of Orange to Charles X's James II: "We did not choose the king but negotiated with a prince [Orléans] we found next to the throne and who alone could by mounting it guarantee our public law and save us from revolutions... Our minds were guided by the English Revolution of 1688, by the fine and free government it founded, and the wonderful prosperity it brought to the British nation."10 And since the English Revolution had put the middle classes into power (although only after the Reform Act of 1832 did they really begin to acquire power at the ballot box), he wanted the same for France. "I want," he said, "to secure the political preponderance of the middle classes in France, the final and complete organization of the great victory that the middle classes have won over privilege and absolute power from 1789 to 1830."11 But Louis Philippe, though more liberal than his predecessor, was not liberal enough for the Zeitgeist. He sought to establish a "golden mean" between absolutism and Jacobinism. As he said in a speech from the throne in January, 1831: "We seek to hold to the juste milieu [golden mean] equally distant from the excesses of popular power and the abuses of royal authority".12 But such a "golden mean" was attained only by the English in the nineteenth century for any long period of time. Louis Philippe's reign was cut off by a more radical revolution, that of 1848, which was succeeded by the still more radical revolution of the Paris Commune in 1870. For why should the spirit of liberty favour only the men of property and not also the proletariat? Guizot and Louis Philippe are clear examples of the inconsistency and ultimate ineffectiveness of those who oppose revolution, not root and branch, but only in its more obviously unpleasant and radical manifestations. "The Liberal view of government, as one might suspect, is an attempt at compromise between these two irreconcilable ideas. In the 19th century this compromise took the form of 'constitutional monarchies', an attempt - again - to wed an old form to a new content; today the chief representatives of the Liberal idea are the 'republics' and 'democracies' of Western Europe and America, most of which preserve a rather precarious balance between the forces of authority and Revolution, while professing to believe in both. "It is of course impossible to believe in both with equal sincerity and fervor, and in fact no one has ever done so. Constitutional monarchs like Louis Philippe thought to do so by professing to rule 'by the Grace of God and the will of the people' - a formula whose two terms annul each other, a fact as evident to the Anarchist [Bakunin] as to the Monarchist. "Now a government is secure insofar as it has God for its foundation and His Will for its guide; but this, surely, is not a description of Liberal government. It is, in the Liberal view, the people who rule, and not God; God Himself is a 'constitutional monarch' Whose authority has been totally delegated to the people, and Whose function is entirely ceremonial. The Liberal believes in God with the same rhetorical fervor with which he believes in Heaven. The government erected upon such a faith is very little different, in principle, from a government erected upon total disbelief; and whatever its present residue of stability, it is clearly pointed in the direction of Anarchy. "A government must rule by the Grace of God or by the will of the people, it must believe in authority or in the Revolution; on these issues compromise is possible only in semblance, and only for a time. The Revolution, like the disbelief which has always accompanied it, cannot be stopped halfway; it is a force that, once awakened, will not rest until it ends in a totalitarian Kingdom of this world. The history of the last two centuries has proved nothing if not this. To appease the Revolution and offer it concessions, as Liberals have always done, thereby showing that they have no truth with which to oppose it, is perhaps to postpone, but not to prevent, the attainment of its end. And to oppose the radical Revolution with a Revolution of one's own, whether it be 'conservative', 'non-violent', or 'spiritual', is not merely to reveal ignorance of the full scope and nature of the Revolution of our time, but to concede as well the first principle of the Revolution: that the old truth is no longer true, and a new truth must take its place."13 The revolution in ideas went hand in hand with the industrial revolution. The origins of the industrial revolution are to be found in the English agrarian revolution of the eighteenth century. Its essential features were the "privatization" of the common land (in England, the pioneer in both the agrarian and industrial revolutions, through the Enclosure Acts of 1760 to 1830), its more efficient capitalist exploitation by a new breed of capitalist landowners, creating a new surplus in food and market in agricultural produce, and the destruction of the feudal bonds that bound the peasant to the land that he worked and the landowner for whom he worked. This led to the creation of a large number of landless agricultural labourers who, in the absence of work in the countryside, sought it in the new industrial enterprises that were being created in the towns to exploit a series of important technological innovations. The most important of these innovations from a purely political point of view was in communications. "The most famous demonstration," writes Davies, "of the value of superior communication was staged on 19 June 1815, when Nathan Rothschild made a record killing on the London stock market, having used a special yacht to bring news of Waterloo many hours in advance of his rivals."14 The impact of the explosion in newspaper reading was so great that the Austrian Chancellor Metternich wondered "whether society can exist along with the liberty of the press."15 Indeed, his secretary Friedrich Gentz wrote in 1819 to Adam Mueller: "I continue to defend the proposition: 'In order that the press may not be abused, nothing whatever shall be printed in the next... years. Period.' If this principle were to be applied as a binding rule, a very few rare exceptions being authorized by a very clearly superior Tribunal, we should within a brief time find our way back to God and Truth."16 But the press could not be muzzled. And so in the 1848 revolution, "even the most arch-reactionary Prussian junkers discovered... that they required a newspaper capable of influencing 'public opinion' - in itself a concept linked with liberalism and incompatible with traditional hierarchy."17 As the poet Robert Southey wrote: "The steam engine and the spinning engines, the mail coach and the free publication of the debates in parliament... Hence follow in natural and necessary consequences increased activity, enterprise, wealth and power; but on the other hand, greediness of gain, looseness of principle, wretchedness, disaffection and political insecurity."18 The world as we know it today is largely the product of this dual revolution – the liberal revolution and the industrial revolution - that took place in the central decades of the nineteenth century. Its main workshop and demonstration hall was Britain, where both liberalism and industrialism had been born in the eighteenth century - not for nothing was it called the Victorian age after Britain’s queen. It was on the back of this dual revolution that a third would break out – the communist revolution… Yüklə 1,41 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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