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counter-revolution. What France might have become if it had not- at
great cost admittedly-broken out of the medieval prison-cage can be
studied in contemporary Spain. Incidentally, the endless Iberian and
Latin-American cycle of bloodletting over the past century-and-a-half
is much closer to what the Greeks called
statis
than anything that has
occurred in France since 1789. A writer domiciled in the United States
might also have reflected upon the curious circumstance that France's
relations with her former colonies-including Algeria- are decidedly
better than U.S. relations with Latin America (even setting aside the
distressing Cuban experience). It seems the messianic and universalist
character of the French Revolution, however confusing and even danger–
ous in the short run, is still paying dividends. This pragmatic argu–
ment should appeal to Americans brought up in the decidedly unmessianic
spirit of Ben Franklin. Whether it will appeal to Hannah Arendt I
doubt. Her cast of mind is unpragmatic and bears a close resemblance
to that of some contemporary European ideologists. I hazard the guess
that Simone Weil (whom she never mentions) is her favorite writer.
It is the more remarkable that she has found a spiritual resting-place
among the classic statements of the American faith in reasoned progress
and constitutional liberty. These statements have never escaped criticism
even from writers who were otherwise in sympathy with the aims
expressed in 1776. Bentham thought the Declaration of Independence
a "hodge-podge of confusion and absurdity"
(Warks,
X. 63 ) , but then
Bentham had a poor opinion of any document not composed by
himself. On the whole, French, English and American liberals and
radicals have over the years worked out a community of mind that
transcends their earlier divergencies, and of late this spirit has even
shown a capacity for assimilating refugees from Central Europe brought
up to regard
all
statements of the liberal faith as so much antiquated
nonsense.
Against this background one may question the relevance of an
attempt to treat the American experience as an embodiment of traditions
and principles foreign to Europeans (with the possible exception of the
English). Not that there is any doubt as to the more radical and
universal character of the formulation which the common faith received
in eighteenth-century France. The French had come on the scene at a
moment when the compromise solution worked out by the British in 1688
--constitutional government under oligarchic control-no longer satisfied
thinking people who had dimly begun to sense that democracy might
become an actual possibility. Along with this went the first stirrings
of the industrial revolution and hence the "social problem" in its
