UNDERSTANDING AND POLITICS
385
toms and morality which no longer have their foundation in law–
fulness, every contingency must threaten a society which
is
no longer
guaranteed by citizens.
For
his
own time and its immediate prospects, Montesquieu had
this to say: "The majority of the nations of Europe are still ruled
by customs. But if through a long abuse of power, if through some
large conquest, despotism should establish itself at a given point,
there would be neither customs nor climate to resist; and in this
beautiful part of the world, human nature would suffer, at least
for a time, the insults which have been inflicted on it in the three
others." In this passage, Montesquieu outlines the political dangers
to a political body which
is
held together only by customs and tradi–
tions, that
is
by the mere binding force of morality. The dangers
could appear from within, as misuse of power, or from without,
as aggression. The factor which would eventually bring about the
downfall of customs in the early nineteenth century, he could not
foresee. It carne from that radical change in the world which we
call the industrial revolution, certainly the greatest revolution in
the shortest span of time mankind has ever witnessed; in a few
decades it changed our whole globe more radically than all the
three thousand years of recorded history before it. Reconsidering
Montesquieu's fears, which were voiced almost 100 years before
this
revolution developed its full force, it is tempting to reflect on
the probable course of European civilization without the impact of
this one, all-overriding factor. One conclusion seems inescapable:
the great change took place within a political framework whose
foundations were no longer secure and therefore overtook a society
which, although it was still able to understand and to judge, could
no longer give an account of its categories of understanding and
standards of judgment when they were seriously challenged. In
other words, Montesquieu's fears, which sound so strange in the
eighteenth century and would have sounded so commonplace in the
nineteenth, may at least give us a hint of the explanation, not of
totalitarianism or any other specific modem event, but of the
dis–
turbing fact that our great tradition has remained so peculiarly
silent, so obviously wanting in productive replies, when challenged
by the "moral" and political questions of our own time. The very
sources from which such answers should have sprung had dried up.
