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Rethinking the Liberal Legacy
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16125 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1989 |
2,760 Words |
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A.J. Mandt
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HEGEL'S CRITIQUE OF LIBERALISM
Rights in Context
Steven B. Smith
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989
251 pp., $29.95
In July 1789, the middle-class militia of Paris joined the popular mob in attacking the Bastille. The great prison-fortress in the heart of the city was the bastion of the ancien regime. By its nature, the Bastille showed the majesty and divine authority of the royal regime to be nothing but despotism and brute force. Its fall not only shifted the balance of military force in the tumultuous city but set in fluid motion all the basic symbols of political legitimacy: sovereignty, right, justice, and authority.
In a remarkably short time, the shock effects of the Parisian street fighting propagated throughout Europe. Long before the hapless Louis XVI lost this head, the seismic forces unleashed in France had begun to shake down the edifice of the old order. The contours of the new political landscape that emerged had the shape of what we have since come to call liberalism.
The liberal era transformed the drama and symbols of politics. The high throne and festooned monarch were replaced by the parliamentary rostrum and frock-coasted representatives of the people. The duties of subjects gave way to the rights of citizens. The notion of society as a hierarchic edifice of privileged (and underprivileged) ranks and orders was supplanted by the notion of the universal equality of man. Not least, the power of the church waned; it could no longer claim to anoint and sanctify authority. Henceforth, popular, not divine, elections would perform the ritual of anointing, and the temples of public wisdom would be boardrooms and counting houses, union halls, newsrooms, and universities, not churches and monastic chapter houses.
The political disruptions of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era did not spring from virgin soil. The ground had been prepared by the long internal decline of the ancien regime: The noble classes had become debilitated and parasitical, the church corrupted, the royal government incompetent and venial. The regime had proven itself incapable of coping with the pressing social and economic problems of the eighteenth century.
At the same time, modern philosophy demolished the worldview that legitimated the existing order. Modern political thought was naturalistic, taking its point of departure from a general description of man's earthly condition, rather than from a teleological account of his ultimate potentialities or a theological account of his creaturely existence under divine Providence. On this modern view, the legitimation of social and political institutions depended on their conformity to real human needs and desires, rather than to some ideal rational order. In classical thought, the proper aim of human activity had been to realize predetermined rational ideals--the virtues. In modern thought, the aim of action was to achieve the satisfaction of existing needs and desires. Classical thought had sought to subordinate existing desires to rational ideals; modern thought regarded the objects of desire as "natural ends" not subject to rational criticism.
Those modern ideas came to focus in the
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