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embodiment of spiritual health was located in the Anglo-American
tradition, and particularly in the United States Constitution ; the lesser
breeds (specifically the French and other Latins still dazzled by
the false glow of 1789) must rest content with an approximation.
Their sins, it was suggested, might be forgiven them, on condition
that they repented their original presumption. (This, it may be noted,
was also the opinion of Petain and the noble band of self-sacrificing
public servants who sustained his devoted labors during the years when
the Vichy regime set about dismantling the godless system of civil
liberties established by the Republic).
The part played by ordinary hysteria in the propagation of this
faith is a matter for conjecture. One surmises that the echo it found
among people who normally content themselves with plainer intel–
lectual fare had something to do with the concurrent spread of
purely political anxieties. On the face of it there was no compel–
ling reason why the well-known differences between the American and
the French tradition should be inflated into a doctrine tending to
separate the United States from half its actual and potential allies.
As Hannah Arendt pertinently remarks in her new work, "even revolu–
tions on the American continent speak and act as though they knew
by heart the texts of revolutions in France, in Russia, and in China, but
had never heard of such a thing as an American Revolution" (p. 218).
There are reasons for this, some of which she mentions in passing,
notably the American habit of equating freedom with "free enterprise."
I can only regret that, though Miss Arendt dissociates herself from this
thoughtless equation, she has gone the neo-conservatives one better by
treating the difference between American and French interpretations
of democracy in quasi-theological terms. To genuine Tories, the two
revolutions have always looked remarkably alike, and even at the
present day one finds a Burkean Whig like Michael Oakeshott deploring
the Declaration of Independence in terms usually reserved for Rousseau's
spiritual progeny. Among European theologians, Karl Barth thought
there was not much difference between the classic manifestoes of
1776 and 1789, though he preferred the American version, for the
obvious reason that theology had not been completely extruded and there
was some talk of duties as well as rights. Whether this amounts
to
a
difference in principle so great as to warrant the assertion that the
French in 1789 made a complete break with the past is a question for
philosophers, not for historians. The historian can only register the
fact that, by comparison with the French Revolution, the American has
remained an isolated phenomenon. I t is none of his business to dis-
