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DAVID SIDORSKY
historical growth, he is prepared to wager "a thousand to one" that it
will never be built.)
Berlin refers to this prediction as comically false, and it contrasts with
his insight about future Russian developments when he wrote that "If the
Russians ... play with this serpent (of modern doctrines) no people will
be more cruelly bitten." These predictions provide a foil to his compre–
hensive view of Maistre as the "terrifYing prophet" who, while arguing
for restoration of an irretrievable past, projected a vision of the new or–
der. That "order which Maistre had outlined as the only remedy against
the dissolution of the social fabric came into being," Berlin writes "in
our own time, in its most hideous form." Thus, Berlin concludes that
the "totalitarian society, which Maistre, in the guise of historical analysis,
visualized, became actual." Its actualization has shown the power of
Maistre's insight, not as a conservative thinker but as the prophet of the
Fascist reality "of our day."
In the course of developing this intellectual portrait, Berlin reviews
and analyzes many of Maistre's criticisms of the Enlightenment and the
Revolution. Among these is his original critique of the theory of lan–
guage as a constructed artifact advanced by reductionist philosophers and
his biting analysis of Rousseau's praise of the primitive. There is a degree
of ambivalence about his temperament which appears to combine an
objective quality of realism with an extremist tendency to fanaticism.
Berlin cites a letter of Maistre's ally, Lammenais: "He was endowed with
a generous and noble soul, and his books are all as if written on the
scaffold. "
This recognition of the difference between Maistre's temperament
and his beliefs points to another factor in assessing the role that ideas and
beliefs play in political activity. There is a direct line, for example, that
can be traced in the career of Charles Maurras between his actions for
the restoration of throne and altar and his subsequent support for the
government of Petain . T. S. Eliot shared the convictions of Maurras on
both the monarchy and the church, and Eliot's teacher at Harvard,
Irving Babbitt, was as ardent a critic of the French revolutionary heritage
during the same period. Yet it is impossible to envisage Eliot or Babbitt
being involved in Maurras's activities like having his bodyguard of
Camelots du Roi violently break up a lecture on Racine and chase the
speaker from the hall.
The general point is the distance between the intellectual construc–
tions of nineteenth century thought that he surveys and the political
movements of the twentieth century which were built on these founda–
tions. For in the political actions of Lenin, Stalin, or Hitler the history
that seems
to
emerge is not so much one of persons guided by utopian
ideas toward terrible deeds as it seems to be one in which they manipu-
