110
PARTISAN REVIEW
French Revolution were the seeds of the totalitarian despotism
which threatens the world today. The fathers and grandfathers
of Hitlerism are not medieval feudalism or nineteenth-century
romanticism but Bentham and Condorcet, the ,orthodox econo·
mists, and the liberal constitutionalists, Darwin, Freud and the
Behaviorists. The great discovery of the Enlightenment was that
human reason is absolute. On this discovery were based not only
all subsequent liberal creeds but also all the subsequent totali·
tarian creeds from Rousseau on.
He defines two types of liberalism: the reformist, which is rational
and
ineffective, and the revolutionary, which is irrational and pOtent. It
is the second type, naturally, that he finds most threatening to his own
values. Rousseau
is
its father, Marx was "the first to follow in
his
footsteps" and is also "the father of Hitlerism," which is the end-product
of the whole tradition. The American Revolution is not in the historical
tradition of the Enlightenment and 1789, but on the contrary the first great
"conservative counter-revolution" against this tradition. "The separation
of government and society originated with the generation of 1776
and
1787-the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution and the liberal
conservatives such as Burke in England.... We have to return to
the
principles and to the philosophy of the conservative counter-revolution
of 1776 and 1787."
This is at least a broad and stimulating perspective, and it is a pity
that Drucker doesn't treat it more seriously. (But then the question
arises:
can
it ·he so treated?) His attempted antithesis between 1776
and 1789 would need vastly more documentation than he gives it. The
American revolution
was
much more conservative and moderate than its
French counterpart-in fact it was really not a
revolution
at all
in
the
sense of 1789 and 1917-but this was not due to an ideological divergence
but to the different historical circumstances of the two movements. The
Americans were simply freeing themselves from oppressive foreign rule;
there was no entrenched feudal class to overthrow, no revolutionary masses
to push on to extremes; far from it being necessary to shatter the existing
social and economic forms, as in France, the aim of the revolution
was
to give an already existing society a chance to develop. In fact, the
extraordinary thing is not that the two revolutions should have been
different, but that they should have been so similar, that the influence
of the Enlightenment should have been strong enough to force the
Americans to assume its garb, despite the limited nature of their revolu–
tionary aims. Drucker expatiates a good deal on the beauties of the
American Constitution, but he doesn't mention that there is not a single
reference in it to God. Nor does he mention that the Declaration of
the
Rights of Man of 1789 was directly inspired by the Declaration of
Independence of 1776. Nor that Jefferson, the ideological leader of the
American revolution, retained his sympathy for the French revolution
even though the Terror and the Napoleonic period (wherein he differed
basically from Burke), and that it was Jefferson, the friend of the
J
acobins and the most radical of the American leaders, who in 1800 put
