HISTORY AND IMMORTALITY
27
Moreover, Marx construed his pattern as he did because of his
concern with action and impatience with history. He
is
the last
of those thinkers who stand at the borderline between the modem
age's earlier interest in politics and its later preoccupation with history–
consciousness. One might mark the point where the modem age
abandoned its earlier attempts to establish a new political philosophy
for its rediscovery of the secular by recalling the moment at which
the French Revolutionary calendar was given up, after one decade,
and the Revolution was reintegrated, as it were, into the historical
process with its twofold extension toward infinity. It was as though
it was conceded that not even the Revolution, which, along with
the promulgation of the American Constitution, is still the greatest
event in modem political history, contained sufficient independent
meaning in itself to begin a new historical process. For the Republican
calendar was abandoned not merely because of Napoleon's wish to
rule an Empire and to be considered the equal of the crowned heads
of Europe. It also implied the refusal, despite the re-establishment of
the secular, to accept the conviction of the ancients that political
actions are meaningful regardless of their historical location, and
especially a repudiation of the Roman faith in the sacredness of
foundations with the accompanying custom of numbering time from
the foundation date. Indeed, the French Revolution, which was in–
spired by the Roman spirit and appeared to the world, as Marx
liked to say, in Roman dress, reversed itself in more than one sense.
An
equally important landmark in the shift from the earlier
concern with politics to the later concern with history is encountered
in
Kant's political philosophy. Kant, who had greeted in Rousseau
"the Newton of the moral world," and had been greeted by his con–
temporaries as the theorist of the Rights of Man,
3
still had great
difficulty in coping with the new idea of history, which had probably
come to his attention in the writings of Herder. He
is
the last philoso–
pher to complain in earnest about the "meaningless course of human
affairs," the "melancholy haphazardness" of historical events and
developments, this hopeless, senseless "mixture of error and violence,"
3 The first to see Kant as the theorist of the French Revolution was
Friedrich Gentz in his
"Nachtrag zu dem Raesonnement des Herrn Prof. Kant
ueber das Verhaeltnis <;wisehen Theorie und Praxis"
in
Berliner M onatsschrift,
DecetiJber '1793.
