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Puritan: "He gets nothing out of his wealth for himself, except the irra–
tional sense of having done his job well." This restless economic activity
is driven by theological anxiety - by the anxious search for signs of
election:
The tremendous internal pressure under which the sect member in his
conduct was constantly held ... His whole social existence in the
here and now depended upon his 'proving' himself ... The capitalist
success of a sect brother, if legally attained, was proof of his worth
and of his state of grace....
Weber's model was grounded in an understanding of the dynamics
of guilt and anxiety and the function of action as an antidote
to
anxiety
to
make entrepreneurial capitalism combined with inner worldly
asceticism one of the driving forces of Western history.
The bicentenary of the French Revolution invites us to view that
momentous event in the light of the management of anxiety. One of the
outstanding works engaging with an historical manifestation of anxiety
in the Revolution is George Lefebvre's
The Great Fear of
1789:
Rural
Panic in Revolutionary France
(1932). The "great fear" refers to a general
feeling of anxiety which swept areas of rural France in the second half of
July and early August of 1789. At this time the countryside joined the
towns in revolution. Revolt broke out in rural areas.
These events were historic for France and for the Western world.
This was when the peasants were freed of feudal holdovers. This social
event, more than any other, made the Revolution a lasting imprint on
the political life of France and insured the rural base for republicanism in
the long run of French history: the Revolution gave the peasantry their
land, and on August 4, 1789, the National Assembly abolished feudal
privileges, rights, and titles for all time in Western Europe. As Lefebvre
describes the rising of the peasants against the feudal lords:
In the woodlands of Normandy, in the Hainaut and Upper Alsace,
chateaux or abbeys were attacked by those seeking
to
burn archives
and force surrender of manorial rights. In Franche-Comte and the
Maconnais peasants set fire
to
many chateaux, sometimes laying them
waste. The bourgeoisie was not always spared: they, too, had to pay.
In A1sace the Jews suffered.
He analyzes the fear as a "defensive reaction" against an "aristocratic
plot" that did not yet exist. The two were inseparable clements. The fear
was of "brigands" in the service of undefined hostile forces who were
