~ 5 Classical Liberalism ~
In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke wrote, “I hear it is sometimes given out in France, that what is doing among you is after the example of England. I beg leave to affirm, that scarcely any thing done with you has originated from the practice or the prevalent opinions of this people, either in the act or the spirit of the proceeding” (75). His claim, however, is neglectful of Locke, Smith, and Paine all being among French reading material before and during the French Revolution. At least, they were notably of Sieyès’, Madame Roland’s, and the Condorcets’ reading material. In fact, the British former Prime Minister, Lord Lansdowne, literally said in the House of Lords in 1793, “With respect to the principles of France, those principles had been exported from us to France... [and were] generally inculcated by Dr. Adam Smith in his work on the Wealth of Nations.”[1] Further still, France was fixing to dispossess the peasants through enclosure just the same[2], exactly in the British vein. Such is perhaps the contradictory nature and ignorant irresponsibility of Anglo-US observers who’ve historically tried to disown the French Revolution as an evident result of their own philosophy and their capitalism.
Up is actually down regarding many conservatives today, since Burke revered the state as parental figure over and above the self-interested individualism of classical liberalism. Yes, in the context of too much liberal transformation of the state to serve the rational, self-interested ends of 18th century Enlightenment, Burke literally said that “the commonwealth itself would, in a few generations, crumble away, be disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality” since the self-interested, market liberals of the early French Revolution “are prompt rashly to hack that aged parent in pieces”[3]. Yet this atomized individuality could equate to middle-class conservative appeals today to mere “personal responsibility” and against government “handouts”. They use all the opportunistic and irresponsible pretexts to undermine what’s left of resources held publicly in common through the state. That is, healthcare and welfare. However, as a resentment-directing narrative towards one discriminated group or several (whether towards “welfare queens” in the US or First Nations people in Canada), Perelman unpacks its elitist intentionality, writing that “social programs, directed at the people who actually do the work, seem to be nothing more than impositions by ungrateful wretches, who are trying to extort excessive benefits from the already overburdened taxpayer—a code word for the wealthy, who…see themselves as the real creators of value.”[4] This is precisely for ascetic productivity’s sake. Additionally, it is individualistic gain at the expense of the collective (at the expense of many other individuals, that is), as it was termed and valued as “the commonwealth” by Locke and Paine.
Resources held in common so happen to be the affairs of state now but they weren’t once. They were once traditionally organized by the people themselves, such as rural European peasantry or First Nations communities, who subsequently triggered the entitlement and resentment of economic elitism. Here is John Bellers writing to the British Parliament in 1714: “Our Forests and great Commons (make the Poor that are upon them too much like the Indians) being a hindrance to Industry, and are Nurseries of Idleness and Insolence’’[5]. Also, Perelman on the invention of capitalism in Britain: “A 1794 report to the Board of Agriculture on Shropshire noted that the use of ‘the commons now open...operates upon the mind as a sort of independence.’ Others remarked that enclosure would ensure a ‘subordination of the lower ranks of society which in the present times is so much wanted’”[6]. It then becomes a matter of artificial and coercive force rather than some abstract game law, as in the so-called “Tragedy Of The Commons”, that resources held in common have been undermined in economic history.
Even Russell Kirk, as he compiled his guides to conservatism, wrote that the “superior sort” so valued by the right-wing or a Nietzsche, and against equality, should never oppress the lower.
Some men and some women are filled with ambition, energy, and remarkable qualities of mind and heart; these people ought to be allowed to develop their talents to the full, provided that they do not infringe upon the rights of other people. But other men and women – and these are the majority of mankind – prefer to live quietly, regularly, and securely; and these men and women ought to be allowed to live as they like….
– Russell Kirk’s Concise Guide To Conservatism, 28.
Yet the bluster of a Nietzschean or a conservative can be an expression of hollow vanity, a resentful “will to persecute”, towards those deemed lesser, as in today’s insistence from the right that younger generations are so “entitled” or such “snowflakes” wanting “handouts”.
It is in line with an economic elite, whether feudal nobility or middle-class manufacturing, to undermine resources in common and for economic subordination rather than freedom. “Only in a labor market whose exits were effectively barred by the prohibitions of criminal law could the full dependence on wage income necessary for disciplined labor become possible”, as Ignatieff explains in A Just Measure Of Pain of the use of prisons in the Industrial Revolution (26). Today, contrary to sense and social order, but certainly in line with economic unfreedom, many conservatives preserve this commercial individualism, and against dependence to a parental state (which is fair but their traditionalism is to preserve what isn’t Burkean tradition). Today they are undermining their own conservative notion of social order, of stability, and in favour of radical overhauls and transformations of society in order to oppress the “lower sort”. It’s a Frankenstein-like amalgamation of the worst aspects of both aristocratic conservatives and middle-class classical liberals who resented each other to the point of class warfare and duped the lower class for their class interests.
The profound irony of our time is that we’re patronized to adopt and conserve classical liberality from a classical liberalism that doesn’t know its own history, as in Peterson’s essay “Equity: when the left goes too far”. Classical liberalism is promoted on the basis of all the right-wing arguments that opposed classical liberalism! French Jacobins, who still happened to comprise General Lafayette, Paine, Condorcet, and others, sat on the left in the early days of the French National Assembly, which is where the “left” as a concept originates from in opposition to the reactionary, hierarchical, aristocratic, and slave-owning “right”[7]. The liberally-reformed penitentiaries of Britain nevertheless proved useful in jailing many British Jacobins as political prisoners in the 1790s onwards[8]. That is, they were jailed for ideologically seditious views by the Tories, in spite of free speech and thought. Often these jailed British Jacobins were liberal Whig Party voters and Paine readers all the same. Reform-minded liberals such as these were even patronized by the conservative Tories in at least one election that “equality of property” was a pipe dream – that they should accept Britain’s mere “equality under the law” and “our happy constitution” in gratitude[9]. The Tory Manwairing said:
In this country the law is no respecter of persons. In our courts of Justice all are equal; high and low, rich and poor, all are alike under the care of our laws. This is the happy Equality which everyone is entitled to, and enjoys in this country-and it is the only equality consistent with any form of government, with any system of society.
– A Just Measure Of Pain, 136.
Yet even back then, one’s financial standing determined their success in navigating the legal system, in spite of “equality under the law”, so the poor were criminalized more than the rich.
Indeed, Peterson’s utopic, positive synthesis of 1) Enlightenment ideals, 2) Anglo-US Common Law, and 3) Christian Universal Guilt can each be found in the 18th century US. Yet Bailyn wrote in his extensive book, The Ideological Origins Of The American Revolution, of the profound contradictions in those exact ideals as the revolutionary ideology was being developed:
There were among them, in fact, striking incongruities and contradictions. The common lawyers the colonists cited, for example, sought to establish right by appeal to precedent and to an unbroken tradition evolving from time immemorial, and they assumed, if they did not argue, that the accumulation of the ages, the burden of inherited custom, contained within it a greater wisdom than any man or group of men could devise by the power of reason. Nothing could have been more alien to the Enlightenment rationalists whom the colonists also quoted–and with equal enthusiasm. These theorists felt that it was precisely the heavy crust of custom that was weighing down the spirit of man; they sought to throw it off and to create by the unfettered power of reason a framework of institutions superior to the accidental inheritance of the past. And the covenant theologians differed from both in continuing to assume the ultimate inability of man to improve his condition by his own powers and in deriving the principles of politics from divine intent and from the network of obligations that bound redeemed man to his maker.
– The Ideological Origins Of The American Revolution, 33-4.
As for the liberally reformed penitentiaries in Britain, they succumbed to corrupt use, unproductivity, and decay in the following 19th century, just as Pinel’s modern asylum system in France also did. But they nevertheless left an ominous blueprint of state intervention – of Industrial Schools for children in Europe, and then North America for the 19th and 20th centuries[10]. 1) Ideological imprisonment, 2) starvation, and 3) forced labor, these traits were attributed to these carceral systems in Britain and France, as well as the Soviet Union’s Gulag system[11], the Industrial Schools of the US for Native Americans, and Canada’s Residential School System for First Nations altogether. What’s common to all these carceral systems isn’t even socialism, then, but something else entirely. Rather, they’re the lawful, involuntary, and disciplinary apparatus of modern, industrializing nations. Yet Britain’s own Great Reform Act of 1832[12] and further accomplishments in women’s suffrage, working-class suffrage, and racial suffrage (not just in Britain but the rest of the world), prove that the French Revolution’s own radical ideals of liberty, equality, and democracy weren’t innately doomed except by reactionary indolence. British penitentiaries became synonymous to Bastilles in the minds of both the British middle-class as well as the lower-class poor throughout the 1790s and the following Peterloo Era (named after the 1819 reactionary massacre in Britain)[13]. “Steel or Stile was short for Bastille” in the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, explains Ignatieff, and to symbolize the need for radical overthrow[14].
Today, however, all this political persecution, struggle, and hard-won accomplishment by the “lower orders” of society is taken for granted by the middle-class and the supposedly classical liberal, and the same patronization they endured is endured by the working-class and the radical left. The reactionary shoe is on the other foot. Such is the entire reactionary project of Haidt/Lukianoff’s classically liberal book, while their CBT precepts are the nefarious use that stoic philosophy has in sophistically lying, pathologizing, and domineering, not helping. CBT, as in Pinel, smacks of ascetic priestliness while Moira Weigal’s Guardian book review of Coddling of The American Mind, which she subtitles “How Elite US Liberals have turned rightwards”, highlights the political intentionality behind pseudo-reasonable appeals to reason, appeals to nature, argument to moderation, and classical liberality today.
In the 18th century, liberal revolutionists such as Sophie de Grouchy actually read Marcus Aurelius, a Roman Emperor and a stoic[15]. While even he declared in his naturalistic Meditations that, “All is change, yet not in such a way that we need fear anything new”, market society – for all its rationality, orderliness, lawfulness, and naturalness – doesn’t tolerate change very well. Where either gender fluidity or else a community imperative to deal with COVID-19 are concerned, the passions and anxieties of a market society become evident and embarrassing. Yet Emma Rothschild’s Economic Sentiments says that “a flux in the condition of men is the essential circumstance of modern commerce, in Smith’s, Turgot’s, and Condorcet’s description”[16]. Still, there are new things that ought to be feared. If one of Hume’s contributions to capitalism was writing in the context of taxation, “’Tis always observed, in years of scarcity, if it be not extreme, that the poor labour more, and really live better”[17], then capitalism (since it knowingly fosters artificial scarcity) should have been one of those new things feared. In Smith’s case, he encouraged corn merchants to raise prices, not on account of a mystical Invisible Hand, but in order to put “every body more or less, but particularly the inferior ranks of people, upon thrift and good management”; he even “should sometimes do this without any real necessity”[18], which is not in accord with any natural law of a market, but in an arbitrary whim.
In his essay “Equity: When The Left Goes Too Far”, Peterson collapses equality into equity. At the end of it, he appeals to “reasonableness” contra the left’s “equity doctrine” as he overgeneralizes about the left’s “diversity, inclusion, equity” from what is happening strictly in corporate settings: a fallacy of composition. Peterson therefore gaslights equity/equality leftism as “unreasonable”, despite the fact that Locke championed equality and Smith championed equity as they greatly contributed to the original liberal economics, the “Whig” US Revolution, as well as the left-wing of France’s legislature during their first revolution. In the US, the “Tories”, as the Loyalists were actually called in conservative reaction, exaggerated Locke’s equality. They claimed Locke’s republic would “cut off the legs of the tallest, that no man might look over the head of his neighbors.”[19] So it is with right-wing Poisoning The Well arguments today. Dostoevsky’s character Shatov, as a former liberal, could be paraphrasing Nietzsche and Peterson both as they cite Dostoevsky’s fiction rather than non-fiction:
“what are the men I've broken with? The enemies of all true life, out-of-date Liberals who are afraid of their own independence, the flunkeys of thought, the enemies of individuality and freedom, the decrepit advocates of deadness and rottenness! All they have to offer is senility, a glorious mediocrity of the most bourgeois kind, contemptible shallowness, a jealous equality, equality without individual dignity, equality as it's understood by flunkeys or by the French in '93. And the worst of it is there are swarms of scoundrels among them, swarms of scoundrels!”
– The Possessed.
Such a characterization of the middle-class is certainly expressed in Peterson and Nietzsche’s reading of The Possessed. But it can also end up being inverted over the course of several centuries, as the middle-class wrestled supremacy away from nobility above, on the basis of “formal” equality, not real equality with the peasant and working classes below, which are fundamentally distinguished in Claire Lacombe, The Society Of Revolutionary Republican Women, the sans-culottes, and the Enrages as the revolution’s proto-socialists.
To be fair to the conservative Burke, contemporary liberals today still maintain abstract “rights” and speechmaking rather than actualizing rights concretely for all humanity, as working people and Existentialism would demand regarding authentic freedom and equality, not freedom and equality in the mere speeches and legislation of elites habituated to too much dispassionate, austere stoicism, as in Madame Roland, Robespierre, and even Mary Wollstonecraft. Janet Todd is an authoritative scholar on Wollstonecraft. Todd writes that, despite her love of “rational equality” and liberal humanity among the lower middle-class, Wollstonecraft found the aristocracy “irredeemable” and the lower class “contaminating”[20]. I think that is what’s duplicitously wrong with Wollstonecraft and Anne-Josèphe’s liberal and middle-class faction, the Girondins, as an actual-historically elitist faction[21]. It is also what’s duplicitously wrong with the middle-class as an attempted mediating class trying to be both the class below and above itself (the working class in origin and productivity, the ruling class in government, idleness of wealth, and the right to command) yet hating both. François Lanthenas, himself of the French middle-class, commented on the middle-class in 1791, yet this might have been to flatter the sans-culottes:
The old bourgeoisie is entirely indolent. If equality pleases it, it is for not having any superiors and not for having equals…. The bourgeois wants to put himself in the place of the nobles, and allow the artisan to take his. [The artisan] alone forms the National Guard… he alone frequents the electoral assemblies. Finally, he alone is worthy of liberty, because he alone has good morals.
– quoted in The Cercle Sociale, the Girondins, And The French Revolution, 212-3.
This is possibly why Yuval Levin, the contemporary, conservative writer of the book The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and The Birth Of Right and Left, is correct to say of the middle-class, which was attempting to prevail exactly through the French Revolution, that “this middle, especially in a society focused on equalizing, will tend to be badly suited to rule” (83).
Burke himself was telling some truths of this revolution, though I wouldn’t say what doomed the French Revolution was equalizing, as most contemporary conservatives and liberals might argue. Rather, while that was promised in rhetoric, it became a middle-class equalization with the upper-class at the expense of the lower-class (as Marat and many of the sans-culottes came to realize) while most of Paine and Wollstonecraft’s written reactions to Burke are character assassinations from the resentful middle-class. Smith’s own Wealth Of Nations contributed to the middle-class’ impetus to power while simultaneously providing the sophistical rhetoric of being at once humane and disciplinary towards the working-class. Marat profoundly wrote of the revolution in 1791 that:
While many well-informed, affluent and intriguing members of the upper classes at first took sides against the tyrants, they did so only in order later to turn against the people, as soon as they might have secured its confidence and made use of its strength in order to assume for themselves the posts of the privileged classes that have been overthrown.
The Revolution was made only by the lower classes of society, by the workers, artisans, petty traders, peasants, in short, by the entire submerged class, by those disinherited ones whom the rich call the canaille, and whom the Romans in their arrogance once termed the proletariat.
– Writings Of Jean-Paul Marat, 42-3.
So, the middle-class today easily mixes itself up on its own legacy of equality. In all this confusion, mind you, what should be understood about Enlightened, reasonable, civilizing, middle-class, “bougie”, economic liberalism is that it was, in its origins, an equalizing and radical ideology, at least in theory, rhetoric, and paper – therefore utopianly and as a means of good revolutionary marketing. Noah Webster was a US Federalist, a close associate of Alexander Hamilton, and the “Father of American Scholarship and Education”. While he wholeheartedly denounced the French Revolution and the Reign Of Terror (to the consternation of Jeffersonian Republicans), Webster nevertheless wrote – in the context of Montesquieu’s French Enlightenment influence on the US Constitution – that “Wherever we cast our eyes we see this truth, that property is the basis of power”; “’a general and tolerably equal distribution of landed property is the whole basis of national freedom,’ and it is this that Montesquieu, wise as he was, had never understood”, Webster argued in Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins Of The American Revolution (373).
Kirk habitually lambasts egalitarian ideology in his The Conservative Mind. Yet some of his ideological arguments are contradictory in the context of this equating of property to power. He rejects abstract equality in the context of citing President Adams here, but then concedes ground to more material equality:
In any state, the sovereignty reposes wherever property resides. America is conspicuous for equality of land-holding. "The sovereignty then in fact, as well as morally, must reside in the whole body of the people."
Furthermore, but of the liberals of the French Revolution, Kates wrote that
Girondins economic thinkers sincerely believed that their policies would result in a society where wealth would eventually be equalized and poverty eliminated. “One of the effects of our Revolution,” wrote the former speculator Antoine Bidermann, “is above all more equality in wealth.” If Bidermann’s claim was propaganda, at least it was propaganda in which he and his colleagues themselves believed.
– The Cercle Sociale, the Girondins,
and The French Revolution, 212.
Kates wrote that Lanthenas’ solution to the aforementioned inequality the middle-class favoured “was a stringent inheritance tax that would redistribute wealth in an egalitarian fashion” but that required government action, which the Girondins did not have the impetus for, while the Montagnards and the Enrages did. The ideal of “laissez faire, laissez passer” (let things alone, let them pass) was conceived by the French physiocrats prior to the French Revolution to roll back government intervention in market activity[22]. During the revolution itself, the liberal Girondins’ utopian notion was that this freedom of commerce, “Laissez-Faire”, promised to achieve equality among small business owners, the petty bourgeoisie. Therefore, the government being kept out of the market should have achieved equality. But in actually accounting for Laissez-Faire’s first experimental attempt during the revolution, it did not account for the exact opposite occurring: The freedom of commerce more frequently provided small proprietors an excess of freedom at the expense of other small business owners, as well as consumers.
Market competition compels small proprietors to outcompete other small proprietors, or compels them into corporation, monopolization, or speculation – often by the blessing of the state – and still at the expense of other small proprietors. Lastly, where the ideal stagnation of wages (or its decrease by layoffs) and the increase of profits are concerned for the business, the worker as customer is constantly threatened. If one’s buying power is tied to their freedom to maneuver a completely commodified world, one’s buying power decreasing renders them increasingly unfree as it relegates them to having to work more by necessity not possibility. Relative to others, they are also rendered unequal such that they are compelled to be more disciplined and productive for someone else, not even for themselves as individuals.
The governing magistrate’s role, by Smith’s own admission, was to mediate the conflicts between employer and employee. He wrote in Wealth of Nations of disputes between employers and employees that “The masters upon these occasions are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen”, and he wrote later in Book 5, “It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security”. The Le Chepalier Law during the early French Revolution cemented state force in the market in 1791, not as a hindrance of businesses but as state protection of businesses, and at the expense of workers, because it prohibited them the right to associate and to strike. Smith admitted elsewhere that “Laws and government may be considered in this and indeed in every case as a combination of the rich to oppress the poor, and preserve to themselves the inequality of the goods which would otherwise be soon destroyed by the attacks of the poor, who if not hindered by the government would soon reduce the others to an equality with themselves by open violence.”[23] Therefore, the state has always had a role in the market for Smith. But this is where it perpetuates a particular group’s own equality and freedom of commerce, contra the inequality or unfreedom of commerce of another group: an underclass.
Nicholas de Condorcet was an 18th century Enlightenment French liberal philosopher who personally associated with Smith. With a hint of irony, Camus called him “the official theorist of progress”[24]. Monarchy, noble privilege, and state religion were re-established over and over again in France in his wake. Still, Condorcet said at the Cercle Sociale, the publishing house and occasional meeting place for Girondins, “I believe humankind is infinitely perfectible”[25], which might have given impetus to English capitalism’s own Materialist Optimism and penitentiaries. Ignatieff wrote of Condorcet:
The same psychological assumptions that inspired Condorcet's and Helvetius's faith in human perfectibility, served, when applied to questions of punishment, to validate the notion that criminals were defective mechanisms whose consciences could be remolded in the sensory quarantine of a total environment. The social anxieties of the middle class in the 1790s ensured that this hard faith in human malleability soon received operational formulation at the hands of the medical profession, in asylums for the insane, Houses of Industry for paupers, hospitals for the sick, and penitentiaries for the criminal. In each environment, the poor were to be "cured" of immorality, disease, insanity, or crime, as well as related defects of body and mind, by isolation, exhortations, and regimens of obedience training.
–A Just Measure Of Pain, 213
Such was the impetus for Pinel who personally associated with the Condorcets. Condorcet’s actual-historical statement of “infinite perfectibility” runs contrary to Peterson who idolizes vaguely “the people who founded the American system (and the actions and attitudes of the English and other early democrats and parliamentarians”[26] of which Condorcet and many French revolutionists still were a part. Without citing a soul and in accordance with his own classical liberal ideology (when it’s not conservative, Christian ideology), Peterson writes:
They believed that the people who were inevitably to be their successors were going to be just as flawed as they were, and just as flawed as people before them. What do you do about that, when you are not blinded by ideology, and you see the world and all its dramatic characters clearly? Well, you do not hope for the infinite perfectibility of humanity and aim your system at some unattainable utopia. You try to design a system that sinners such as you cannot damage too badly.
– Beyond Order, 337
This amounts to profound irony for Peterson, a psychologist, since he doesn’t know what psychology was up to in his own idyllic era. In spite of Peterson’s own overgeneralizing assumption that men in that time assumed a stunted or regressively “flawed” nature as sinners, Condorcet believed in improvability. But so did many who were orienting the working-class for materialistic drudgery. Religious exhortation sometimes was the means to that end. Yet Revolutionary Deists by Walters explains that many US Deists believed Christian religion “vitiated virtue by convincing humans that they were utterly corrupted by original sin and hence incapable of improving themselves through their own efforts” (8). It’s nevertheless absurd for a casuist, Peterson, to distribute rules that have sophistically improved so many men’s lives yet then discourages improvability. It is perfectibility as he likes.
While only some, not all, in Peterson’s romanticized (resentment-laden[27]) time period were Judeo-Christian and assumed everyone was a sinner, scholars on utopia might interject with saying that Judeo-Christian heaven is itself utopian[28]. For JFK, Reagan, and Obama, too, the US as a shining “City Upon A Hill”: also utopian. Reagan’s own idealized words in his 1989 Farewell Speech:
I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.
Lilla’s perspective, on the other hand, gives the contrary actuality to such a utopia in 2017.
Most Americans now recognize that Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill” has turned into rust belt towns with long-shuttered shops, abandoned factories invaded by local grasses, cities where the water is undrinkable and guns are everywhere, and homes across the country where families are scraping by with part-time minimum-wage jobs and no health insurance. It is an America where Democrats, independents, and many Republican voters feel themselves abandoned by their country.
–The Once And Future Liberal, 16.
Enlightenment as a system altogether could still amount to utopian shortcomings rather than mere pessimistic damage control. In its utopic ideal as Smith, Condorcet, and Wollstonecraft hoped, economic liberalism opposed corporation, monopolization, landlordship, and corrupt hierarchy yet we still have all of those. Condorcet favoured and held the revolutionary US up as an example for European revolution because, in his words, “the love of Americans for equality” will surely prevent the prohibitions, protected monopolies, visitations, and restrictive corporations causing “absurd vexations in Europe”[29]. And there apparently was a relative degree of equality in the US once (among Caucasian men), as Benjamin Franklin himself wrote:
The Truth is, that though there are in that Country few People so miserable as the Poor of Europe, there are also very few that in Europe would be called rich; it is rather a general happy Mediocrity that prevails. There are few great Proprietors of the Soil, and few Tenants; most People cultivate their own Lands, or follow some Handicraft or Merchandise; very few rich enough to live idly upon their Rents or Incomes; or to pay the high Prices given in Europe, for Paintings, Statues, Architecture and the other Works of Art that are more curious than useful.
– Information for Those Who Would Remove to America.
One can say the middle-class was the closest to ever achieve a classless society then – classless to the degree that there was only one class, so long as the racially enslaved underclass was also ignored and hierarchical conservatives (loyalists) emigrated or conformed to the new order of things. Today, the utopic ideals are inverted and many Americans appeal to equality found in the more socially democratic Europe. By the clear actualization of these ideals in the world as project, they can be goals to be achieved, as Hegel wrote in The Philosophy Of History: “the Imperfect, as involving its opposite, is a contradiction, which certainly exists, but which is continually annulled and solved; the instinctive movement—the inherent impulse in the life of the soul—to break through the rind of mere nature, sensuousness, and that which is alien to it, and to attain to the light of consciousness, i.e. to itself.” Dramatizing the French Revolution in his own novel Ninety-Three, Victor Hugo expressed a radically liberal sentiment as a kind of belief in the supernatural, and where Hegel, Kierkegaard, or Husserl would term this spirit or the more atheistic Beauvoir and Sartre would still term it transcendence, freedom, or creative project. Cimourdain says a supernatural state of society “is no longer possible,–it is a mere dream”, to which Gauvin says “It is a goal; otherwise, of what use is society?”:
Let us be a human society. Super-natural? Yes. But if you are to add nothing to Nature, why leave her? In that case you may as well content yourself with work like the ant, and with honey like the bee. Rest content among the laboring classes, instead of rising to the ranks of superior intelligence. If you add anything to Nature, you must of necessity rise above her: to add is to augment; to augment is to increase. Society is the exaltation of nature. I would have what bee-hives and ant-hills lack,—monuments, arts, poetry, heroes, men of genius. To bear eternal burdens is no fit law for man. No, no, no! let us have no more pariahs, no more slaves, no more convicts, no more lost souls! I would have every attribute of man a symbol of civilization and an example of progress; I would present liberty to the intellect, equality to the heart, fraternity to the soul. Away with the yoke! Man is not made for dragging chains, but that he may spread his wings.
One can even argue that the relative absence of rich and poor to begin with was how the US revolution, one of the few successful revolutions, could’ve even been successful. Class interests were broadly aligned rather than contradicting. But it’s worth noting that the US, in a more agrarian orientation at the time, was already transitioning to a manufacturing one. Franklin himself admitted that, “No man acquainted with political and commercial history can doubt [that] Manufactures are founded in poverty. It is the multitude of poor without land in a country, and who must work for others at low wages or starve, that enables undertakers to carry on a manufacture.”[30] Furthermore, the negative notion of paternal dependence so drummed up by the liberally-oriented to antagonize the state, then as in now, is a complete blindside to the gratitude ethic and petty tyrannical governing of private business, which maintains equally paternal dependence in the workplace. Smith wrote in Wealth Of Nations regarding the labouring poor that, “In order that they may work well, it is the interest of their master that they should be fed well and kept in good heart in the same manner as it is his interest that his working cattle should be so” (1269). This is a fine example of naturalistic/mechanistic reduction of a human being to a beast of burden by analogy, which leads to worker and existential alienation. Not to mention, it is an appeal to the master’s partial interests and passions in spite of the humane liberality Smith intended here for workers.
Analogous to Smith in Britain, Whitham explained of liberal Girondins in France:
Liberals such as the Rolands, Brissot, Verginaud, Condorcet, insisted on the liberty to think freely and to act independently, and though they may have used the romantic dogma of natural, human equality and rights, politically, they based their theory, as later Liberal thinkers, on the faith that individuality was the most valuable factor of well-being and could only mature, develop, expand, in an atmosphere of freedom. They were ready to fight for liberty, and a collateral, self-restraint; for personal independence, and a collateral, social control; nor did they see anything discordant in these notions, nor always remember that moral ideas were only realisable in a State when economic and material conditions gave support to such ideas….
– Men And Women Of The French Revolution, 162.
In the stageplay, where I write that Lacombe doubts the liberal mode of education, this is the aspect criticized, which is a maturity and liberty earned only as decided by someone else, as Whitham wrote of liberal education so theorized by the likes of Condorcet:
Every citizen must have the means of acquiring mastership of his own talents and tendencies, and was entitled to liberty, but only when by education and endeavor he had matured his faculties and could be entrusted with such liberty; and, whilst that maturing was in process, he must be directed by a sagacious, kindly governing body, in preparation for liberty. Anything that harmed personality was despotic; but personality could be the right only of humanitarian thinkers. The Sansculottes must take advice, instruction, submitting to persuasion, or force. All men were potentially free; all men were not equal. Couthon had spoken of the Liberals as a group of subtly clever men who professed to want a Republic because opinion had pronounced in its favour; whereas, in fact, Couthon said, they were scheming for a new aristocracy, hoping to retain their own influential positions, to dispose of all appointments and offices, and to ensure liberty for themselves. That was harsh, unjust to a minority of Liberals; yet many Liberals, idealising the People, as an abstraction, declared that if the people were allowed to know their own power they might oppress the bourgeoisie, the urban middle classes. Liberalism implied economic servitude for the workers.
– Men And Women Of The French Revolution, 162-3.
Indeed, Kates accounts for the Girondins as they left the Jacobin Club and their rivalry with the Montagnards began. They claimed the Montagnards were “arousing the irrational passions of the lower orders”. In the propagandistic word of the Girondins Brissot, “The doctrine of these dangerous men can be reduced to this one principle: to incessantly excite the multitude against its magistrates, and to always place themselves on the side of the multitude.” “The Girondins represented ‘the people,’ while the Jacobins claimed to serve the ‘multitude’”, Kates writes, but this was so far as these terms were also euphemistic doublespeak. The Girondins actually wished the sans-culottes could be won over to their ideology. Simple put, it was a double standard of political squabbling, which can be attributed to middle-class rhetoric today regarding all the meaningless noise surrounding the 2021 US Republican Capitol insurrection, as well as Democrat rejection of populism altogether. As an aside, one finds today that the moderate, or else right-wing, liberals are quite selective in what they understand as the people’s power. For their own group, they proclaim “we, the people” and yet if it’s not their group, it’s their individualism, individual rights, and the “rule of law” against “mob rule” or else a “globalist elite” as another kind of Orwellian doublespeak. Whitham wrote further of the Girondins:
Liberals believed in an ideal of democracy, but they could not work on equal terms with the people. Buzot spoke of the hideous muddy faces and stinking breaths of crowds in the Convention galleries, and regarded the Sansculottes as animals rather than as men; and other Liberals shared his view. They preached a liberty crusade for all humanity, disliked to take orders from their constituents and claimed the rights of benevolent autocrats after election. Montagnards, on the contrary, professed to believe that electors had full powers over their delegates, and acclaimed, if they did not always follow, the basic principles of democracy.
– Men And Women Of The French Revolution, 163.
Though the liberal Girondins fought for decentralization from Paris and government as ideals, they themselves laundered public funds to the Cercle Sociale publishing house, which was their own, for a politically-interested propaganda campaign against counter-revolutionary sentiments, and then against the Montagnards[31]. They wrote to the public as the Enlightened mediator, “Unite yourselves from the ends of the universe, in spirit and truth, to the National Convention of France”, but then of the Montagnards within the Convention that “Marat, his pupil Robespierre, and Danton, and Bazire, and Chabot, etc., be chased out of the Convention; then peace will reign in France.” If the Girondins themselves called for the Montagnards to be chased out of the Convention but then were themselves assailed at the Convention by the Society Of Revolutionary Republican Women, the sans-culottes, and the Montagnards, then it is supreme irony for the Girondins to be victimized martyrs in the Reign Of Terror, which is the narrative we’re used to today. In what follows regarding the Fourth Estate (France’s press and news media), Whitham could be referring to the Cercle Sociale’s propagandistic efforts to promote their interests, which could be an overextension and abuse of freedom of speech, not its defense[32].
The Liberals tried to snaffle the Fourth Estate. The Montagnards used the weight of the Fourth Estate for national ends. And Girondins and Montagnards alike made a religion of political theory and launched heresy-hunts, often on grounds of party interest, personal ambition, rather than by the sole fact of principle…. The Montagnards argued that they stood for the people as a whole. The Liberals stood more exclusively for the industrialists, property-owners; for personal and commercial independence among those of their own class; for constitutional-government against revolutionary-government; and so they decried cruel war measures imposed by the gravity of the situation, withstood trade restrictions, the enforced acceptance of assignats as legal tender, the laws of maximum, requisitions, confiscations, and so on.
– Men And Women Of The French Revolution, 163.
What center or right-wing liberals today don’t understand about the economic liberalism of the market is that theirs is only the same radical upheaval they fearmonger of socialists where starvation, the immiseration of a lower class, and the creation of an even more idle, incompetent class of ruling elite are concerned. If it so happened that the Jacobin Club actually harbored as diverse a group of constitutional monarchists, and then republicans, but always was for the abolition of chattel slavery (as were Anne-Josèphe, Claire Lacombe, Robespierre, Danton, Marat, the Rolands, the Condorcets, Thomas Paine, General Lafayette, and Sieyès), then we’re all Jacobins now.
But the defense of capitalism, whether liberal or conservative, is, in history, to preserve a system that treats people, not individualistically – despite its rhetoric of individuality – but resentfully as “mob”, “rabble”, “herd”, “rioters”, “looters”, “the multitude” or else a supply of disciplined, interchangeable labour. In spite of his liberal fellow-feeling, the young Smith himself wrote in a letter regarding the riots against compulsory service and low pay in the British Militia Acts: “The Lincolnshire mobs provoke our severest indignation for opposing the militia, and we hope to hear that the ringleaders are all to be hanged.”[33] Later, Roland, as Minister of Interior for France, certainly chided any business hoarder/speculator of grain as “a filthy scoundrel” and claimed “all speculation is a crime”. But, in the liberal and laissez-faire mode of government doing nothing, the problem of people starving was “a moral affair” outside of government control for him, neither a legal nor political one. As such, capitalism can be its own collectivist, not individualist, dystopia as soon as the lower ranks discover their exploitation by the middle and upper where they are rendered propertyless in life, not secure in property. Creuzé-Latouche, another liberal Girondin, spoke for himself in the stageplay, as in reality, regarding the high price of grain: “These words hoarders and monopolies are only the dangerous visions of foolish women or ignorant persons.” Such was the liberal impetus to discredit the sans-culottes calls for action, and in favor of the seller’s revenue.
Despite the known narrative that flatters the would-be, individual property-owner, capitalism isn’t a system that alleviates poverty in the millions. Rather, it’s a system that requires it for billions, since the London Police Magistrate Patrick Colquhoun admitted in 1815 that: “Poverty is…a most necessary and indispensable ingredient in society, without which nations and communities could not exist in a state of civilization. It is the lot of man. It is the source of wealth, since without poverty, there could be no labour; there could be no riches.” Liberalism certainly is dangerous, as the French Revolution, the original revolution-gone-awry, proves. Yet Jeremy D. Popkin’s research into those who overthrew Robespierre, ushered in the Thermidorian Reaction, and freed up commerce (much of this through Monsieur and Madame Tallien’s salon) is interesting if not surreal. Robespierre, a stoic, was certainly growing paranoid – was “catastrophizing” as Haidt/Lukianoff may say – as he made the Convention anticipate even more executions. This prompted Joseph Fouché, as he organized the Thermidorian overthrow, to catastrophize to each in the Convention that “You perish tomorrow if he [Robespierre] does not”. And yet, as Popkin writes of Fouché, Tallien, and Barras,
Robespierre’s most dangerous enemies were men who had played a leading role in the Terror, notably Joseph Fouché, who had launched the de-Christianization campaign in the fall of 1793; Jean-Lambert Tallien, who had overseen the repression following the federalist uprising in Bordeaux; and Paul Barras, who had been on mission in Marsailles. That Robespierre might turn against the more violent terrorists, and then fulfill his 1793 promise to reinstate [constitutional] protections, did not appear impossible, and indeed, many of his biographers have suggested as much.
– Jeremy Popkin, A New World Begins, 410.
The most zealous terrorists of the Terror, then, got off scot-free. This runs contrary to our commonplace understanding of the revolution, of Robespierre, and of The Committee Of Public Safety. Fouché, analogous to Colquhoun in London, became the minister of police under Napoleon. As opportunists altogether, the Thermidorians accumulated money, power, and position, and they did so by dialling back their “blood drinking” and attributing it to other Jacobins and the radical left as scapegoats. By this interpretation, scapegoating the radical equalizers such as Robespierre or Marat for the French Revolution’s developments is not as ethically/politically Black-and-White as one thinks. The French people nevertheless suffered, starved, and committed suicide by the thousands over the harsh 1794-1795 winter, post-Terror, as many of the middle-class celebrated, danced, and grew wealthy alongside returning nobles.
Classical liberalism insists today, as in back then, on no government intervention in the development of economies yet it offers too limited a program for when things go terribly wrong. They would never concede that the General Maximum, the government price controls called for by the Montagnards and sans-culottes, actually stabilized the inflation of the fiat tender, the assignat, and saved many of the French people[34]. Government intervention of any kind whatever is perceived as tyranny by classical liberals, even where mandates to fight disease are concerned. This might be its own superstitious prejudice against government across the board. Paine was also imprisoned by the Montagnards during the Reign of Terror. Yet after being released in November 1794, he still came to some enlightened realizations about the freedom of commerce in his later published works, Dissertation on First Principles of Government (1795) and Agrarian Justice (1797). Mark Philp’s introduction to the Oxford collection of these works wrote that,
In Agrarian Justice the rights-based, rather Lockean, claims for formal equality of Rights of Man are expanded into a more substantive (un-Lockean) egalitarianism. Moreover, where Paine had once praised the pacific effects of commerce, he now doubts that either commerce, or civilization more generally, is inevitably beneficial. Civilization has operated in two ways: 'to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state'…. To remedy the defects which arise from the inequality of property, Paine argues that each proprietor owes a ground rent to the community for the land he or she cultivates. There are limits to the amount of redistribution Paine believes is justified. He holds that the cultivator has a right to his or her produce while the claims of others are limited to a ground rent, based on their original common title to the earth.
“Introduction”, Rights Of Man, Common Sense, And Other Political Writings, xix.
Paine’s Dissertation on First Principles of Government also wrote that “the protection of a man’s person is more sacred than the protection of property” (400). Yet classical liberalism today is undoubtably ignorant and overriding of that, especially when looting gives some people the pretext to shoot looters. To its detriment, classical liberalism only favours reading the early parts[35], even just Book 1, of Wealth Of Nations for its more Laissez-Faire leanings, and in ignorance of the role government still plays in enforcing group interests in Smith’s succeeding four books. Classical liberals aren’t well-read on their own material.
Early on in the revolution, in reaction to the October Days’ bread riots, the bourgeois conservative Adrien Duquesnoy demanded a “violent blow to re-establish order” and that “some people who form themselves into a mob need to perish”[36] – as if starvation is nothing to complain about. The middle-class is far more reactionary in this originally right-wing manner than is in their own interests in our rapidly un-equalizing 21st century where everyone knows so little about the French Revolution beyond what they gathered from passing school curriculum. Wollstonecraft, as a British liberal, also aligned with the more commerce-oriented Girondins of France. Yet in spite of her own confidence dashed by the Montagnards’ elimination of the Girondins in 1793, she still maintained a sense of class solidarity in 1794, which many of her class betrayed in favour of commerce and nobility. Here, she could be summarizing the inconspicuous Thermidorian Reaction, as well as the regressive 19th century’s Conservative Order, both of which followed the overemphasized Reign Of Terror and still maintained the Guillotine’s use:
The destructive influence of commerce, it is true, carried on by men who are eager by overgrown riches to partake of the respect paid to nobility, is felt in a variety of ways. The most pernicious, perhaps, is its producing an aristocracy of wealth, which degrades mankind, by making them only exchange savageness for tame servility.
–A View Of The French Revolution, 369.
Abbé Sieyès, middle-class extraordinaire, should be credited with substantial influence over many of the French Revolution’s constitutions, as well as their failings. It was he who implemented the active/passive distinction between propertied and propertyless citizens, and between men and women, through the 1791 constitution. Later, through the 1799 constitution following the Terror – again in ignorance of the common people’s interests, he also implemented a second chamber of representatives of propertied men of greater “experience”. This was influenced by the US and the British principle of “balance of powers” (a bicameral legislature or electoral college). This constructed even more of a liberal democracy, which endeavors to serve the people but is distrustful of them at the same time in a fundamentally middle-class manner that can’t decide if it is elitist or populist. Rousseau’s The Social Contract condemned representative democracy, just as Kierkegaard did, both on the basis of the interests of thousands or tens of thousands of individuals being represented by one or a few. Sieyès favoured Locke’s representative democracy over Rousseau, though Rousseauist popular sovereignty was ideal only for small city-states[37], or smaller, in a workplace or household. Nevertheless, Napoleon’s opportunistic favouring of “law and order” and his emergent reign demonstrates that aristocracy, timocracy, and oligarchy might be closer to tyranny than Plato – or any other aristocratically-interested ruler – can actually claim of democracy, as Karl Popper’s The Open Society And Its Enemies noted. Such was and is the subjective intentionality of the aristocrat, however, as well as the intentionality and irresponsibility behind maintaining mere representative democracy over the lives of millions rather than workplace, household, and direct democracy in one’s immediate life and community, as in co-operative ownership and organization.
In the contemporary sense of applied neoliberalism, Naomi Klein’s book Shock Doctrine shows how dysfunctional revolution, radicalism, nihilism, and war can be veiled over as the “business opportunities” and “freedom” upheavals of classical liberalism just the same. But this is precisely in contradiction to utopic promises. The reasonable, materialist, US-British, 18th century classical liberal Paine assured readers in The Rights Of Man, against Burke, that a commercial and civil republic doesn’t or wouldn’t pursue war for revenue’s sake. He proclaimed, “If commerce were permitted to act to the universal extent it is capable, it would extirpate the system of war” (266); “It is a pacific system, operating to cordialize mankind, by rendering nations, as well as individuals, useful to each other” (265). Yet the utopic dreams of Brissot, Paine, and Madame Roland spreading liberality through France’s declarations of war contradicted that promise, just as the US contradicts that to this day. Nevertheless, bankers end up being quite contented with the destruction wrought by military regimes as they are imposed on other nations by the US. Campaigns to overthrow nations that don’t conform to the world market have ranged as far as the 1899-1902 Philippine–American War, a conflict wherein the US resorted to torture and mass murder of civilians. The war was justified by US President McKinley and Congress for “commercial opportunity, to which American statesmanship cannot be indifferent”[38]. Regarding the military junta in Venezuela, one banker in a 1953 Time magazine article said “You have the freedom here to do what you want to do with your money, and to me that is worth all the political freedom in the world”[39]. So it probably was regarding the socio-economic stability Napoleon offered France.
From liberalism originates our modern sense of needing progress, change, social upheaval, equality, rationality, and social justice. Liberalism did strive for individual and social organization, applying reason, and towards freedom. The British John Stuart Mill of the 1800s, himself a classical liberal, developed his own theories of political economy but this was increasingly towards socialism later in life and in favour of the free associations of co-operative ownership. All the contemporary classical liberal noise regarding Mill’s On Liberty obscures his Principles Of Political Economy, With Chapters On Socialism. He wrote of landlords that “They grow richer, as it were, in their sleep, without working, risking, or economizing. What claim have they, on the general principle of social justice, to this accession of riches?”[40] This was consistent with the other early-era classical liberals, Smith, Condorcet, and others, who also had little actual tolerance for landlordship and were in favour of small, freehold ownership, i.e., the liberation of the petty bourgeois from prejudices and inequality.
Today, however, classical liberalism appeals to right-wing arguments against revolution and change; right-wingers appeal to classical liberalism against government or else collective action; both so as to banter against the liberation of the working-class. Both are profoundly ironic, though, because right-wing aristocracy doesn’t even exist anymore thanks to the liberal middle-class itself largely outmoding them through its own class struggle. This was the necessary step towards the freedom of the middle and the working classes, however, contradicting Nietzsche’s ideologically-interested, yet outmoded section in Beyond Good & Evil: “Part 9 What is Noble?”, which is more malicious and a “will to persecute” as a reactionary, right-wing response to the freedom of others, than Burke’s own conservatism. Explicitly referencing the French Revolution, Nietzsche condemns French aristocracy’s renouncing of its own privileges. If Nietzsche meant to justify free individuals of “elevated” or high rank, contra the levelling of middle-class and liberal humanitarianism, how is that not its own levelling? How can we foster the raising up of all individuals in spirit – rather than strike them down or treat them as rabble and herd out of sheer resentment and weakness?
these days, people everywhere are lost in rapturous enthusiasms, even in scientific disguise, about a future state of society where “the exploitative character” will fall away: – to my ears, that sounds as if someone is promising to invent a life that dispenses with all organic functions. “Exploitation” does not belong to a corrupted or imperfect, primitive society: it belongs to the essence of being alive as a fundamental organic function; it is a result of genuine will to power, which is just the will of life. – Although this is an innovation at the level of theory, – at the level of reality, it is the primal fact of all history.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, “Part 9 What is noble?”, Beyond Good & Evil, 153.
On the contrary, the history of emancipation and democratic enfranchisement shows that Nietzsche’s historicist and naturalist overgeneralizations here – in favour of exploitation and aristocracy – were false. To his credit however, the humanitarianism of liberalism and the middle-class proved to be its own, pernicious means of social control, its own means of exploitation, and its own economic will-to-power over the working class, as Ignatieff demonstrates in A Just Measure Of Pain. For all of Nietzsche’s and the middle-class’ rhetoric of individuality, they only prove to always be in reference to a collective arrangement of community as a whole, which is inherently inconsistent.
Turgenev’s nihilist repudiates all, yet Camus’ understanding of nihilism is to despair and to negate. With negation being the nihilistic act, society as a whole negates one “serious” structure for another through the choice to rebel, if Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Paine’s US pamphlet Common Sense say anything for us today. Then, to maintain the structure it wants, society maintains negation against any emerging structures. That is to say, the status quo and conserved values are themselves nihilistic. That’s manifested in the execution of Socrates, La Fayette’s Champ-de-Mars Massacre, and the banning of women from the Convention galleries after the Prairial Uprising. The absolute male monarchy was a manifestation of the absolute truth of God himself. That is, until it wasn’t – until it was willed so by those wanting France’s constitutional monarchy or a republic instead. And there was no end to reactionaries scaremongering about the end of all order and values just the same. But this is only to excuse continued chaos-making for others and exceptions to their own values. Nihilism grows, not just in those radical minds inclined to a different order of things, but also in those conservative minds who don’t want to hear it. Existentialism, however, follows up by saying that there’s a sense of consequences, anxiousness, and responsibility to go with all that as soon as others are encountered, especially when you try to order the world mechanistically or materialistically to favour only yourself in rational, self-interested individualism, or the rational self-interest of your class while constructing a new underclass. Class consciousness arises because a class of individuals becomes conscious of itself as an underclass, i.e., is subject to persecution, prejudice, and exploitation. And it was chronologically the middle-class who first turned their exploitation into an impetus for national upheaval and social experimentation.
Since nihilistic repudiation is tangibly expressed through Enlightenment liberalism, and especially through Saint-Étienne’s sentiment earlier in section 3 Either/Or, classical liberalism naturally segues into the following section regarding nihilism.
[1] Economic Sentiments, 54.
[2] Rozental, Alek A.. The Enclosure Movement In France.
[3] Reflections On The Revolution In France, 82.
[4] The Invisible Handcuffs Of Capitalism, 274
[5] Perelman, Michael. The Invention Of Capitalism, 46.
[6] Ibid, 98.
[7] Kates, The Cercle Social, 197-8.
[8] Ibid, 120.
[9] Ibid, 136.
[10] Ignatieff, Michael, A Just Measure Of Pain, 205.
[11] Entrepreneurially-reformed by a capitalist prisoner turned prison guard, Naftaly Frenkel, with a nourishment scale, i.e., an incentivization-by-starvation system, which privileged trudosposobnost or “capacity to work”.
[12] Evans, J. Eric, The Great Reform Act Of 1832.
[13] A Just Measure Of Pain, 130, 141.
[14] Ibid, 141.
[15] Bergès and Schliesser, Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters On Sympathy, 5.
[16] Economic Sentiments, 241.
[17] Hume, David. “Of taxes”. Essays: Moral, political, and literary, 1752. Quoted in The Invention Of Capitalism, 92.
[18] Wealth Of Nations, 688.
[19] Frazer, Gregg L., God Against The Revolution, 12.
[20] Todd, Janet. “Introduction”, A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution by Mary Wollstonecraft, xxiv.
[21] Whitham, “Corday and Liberalism”, Men and Women Of The French Revolution.
[22] Szasz, Thomas, “Defining Disease: The Gold Standard of Disease versus the Fiat Standard of Diagnosis”, The Myth of Mental Illness.
[23] Lectures On Jurisprudence, 208.
[24] The Rebel, 194.
[25] Landes, Joan, "The History of Feminism: Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
[26] Beyond Order, 337
[27] Scheler, Ressentiment, 20.
[28] Sargent, Lyman Tower, “Utopianism in Christian traditions”, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction.
[29] As quoted in Economic Sentiments, 169.
[30] Franklin, Benjamin. The papers of Benjamin Franklin, Quoted in Invention Of Capitalism by Michael Perelman, 268.
[31] Kates, The Cercle Social, 228.
[32] Ibid, 254.
[33] As quoted in Perelman’s The Invisible Handcuffs Of Capitalism, 187.
[34] Hawtrey, R.G. “The Collapse of the French Assignats”.
[35] The Invisible Handcuffs Of Capitalism, 187-9.
[36] Popkin, A New World Begins, 186.
[37] Kates, The Cercle Social, 51.
[38] Kinzer, Stephen, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq, 47.
[39] The Invisible Handcuffs Of Capitalism, 138.
[40] Principles Of Political Economy, With Chapters On Socialism, 184.