Where the News Ends:
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin No Liberty In Perfectionism IT is one of the strongest and saddest lessons of history that the worst crimes, the most terrible acts of...
...Revolutionary messianism suffered a severe setback in 1848, when the flood tide of revolution was followed by an ebb tide of reaction...
...But it has been a great force in the 20th century, and it has found no more learned and acute analyst than Professor Talmon...
...Some of Fourier's ideas bordered on the fantastic, yet he found a fair number of disciples from the United States to Tsarist Russia...
...Talmon delves at length into the strange dreams of Claude Saint-Simon, French aristocrat who wanted to set up a kind of technocratic government of a united Europe and who was shocked because England seemed so lacking in "general ideas...
...In his new volume, Talmon describes the politically messianic dreams which filled the first half of the 19th century...
...Man's craving for some miracle that will substitute peace for strife, that will create a new heaven and a new earth, is apparently eternal and unquenchable...
...There have been times when this craving was satisfied by the emergence of religious prophets with more or less imposing claims and credentials...
...As for the obscure tradesman Charles Fourier, he was "a Kafka type...
...another was an attempt by a Russian landowner, Petrashevsky, to build a communal home for his serfs...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin No Liberty In Perfectionism IT is one of the strongest and saddest lessons of history that the worst crimes, the most terrible acts of cruelty and tyranny, are often committed not for greed or lust or sheer deviltry hut as part of a dedicated, unselfish effort to realize some perfectionist ideal...
...A very erudite scholar who is at home with the whole gamut of Utopian dreams which have captured the human imagination for the last two centuries has now published the second volume of an ambitious and extremely valuable project in political science, a study of what he aptly calls "totalitarian democracy...
...An individual, by thoughtful self-training, may reach a high level of moral and intellectual development...
...There is no finer or more penetrating analysis of the fallacy of "people's democracy," whether of the Jacobin or the Communist brand, than this citation from the French liberal Benjamin Constant: "The people which can do all is dangerous, indeed more dangerous than any tyrant, or it is, rather, certain that tyranny will seize the rights accorded to the people...
...His remedy was to organize all humanity into millions of "phalanges" or "phalansteries," where groups of people would live together in cooperation, not competition, where children would be educated with a minimum of discipline and where marriage bonds would be not too binding...
...Soviet peasants perhaps wish they could get rid of collective farming as easily...
...The leitmotiv that gives unity and coherence to this book is the incompatibility between perfectionism and liberty...
...The revolutionary dictator Maximilian Robespierre, incorruptible disciple of Rousseau, shed far more blood on the scaffold than the royal despots who preceded him...
...Lytton Strachey, in one of his brilliant flights of imagination, represents Philip II as wondering whether he has burned enough heretics to insure his own salvation...
...But since the time of the French Revolution it is the secular messiahs, with political, economic and philosophical schemes of salvation, who have been in the ascendant...
...Both the Soviet Union and Red China offer abundant proof that when man tries to create a Utopian paradise he is much more likely to shape an inferno of terror, espionage and persecution...
...But to force a perfectionist role on society in the name of some abstraction like Rousseau's "general will" is the surest road to unlimited tyranny...
...Cramped by the narrowness of his condition and paralyzed by inhibitions and checks, he spun dreams of complete release in some rapturous self-fulfilment...
...In a preceding work, Totalitarian Democracy, Talmon analyzed the French Jacobin theory that a virtuous elite minority has the right as well as the duty to lead the masses, for their own good, to a new revolutionary order of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—or Death...
...Suspecting a new trick of the barin (master) to exploit them, the serfs promptly burned it down...
...One waits eagerly for future volumes which will carry the story of the duel between despotic perfectionism and fallible liberty down to our own time...
...Fourier was one of the most prolific and eloquent denouncers of the heartlessness and hopelessness of the early industrial system...
...I am referring to Professor J. L. Talmon's new work, Political Messianism (Praeger, 607 pp., $8.75...
...Perhaps because of the fallible nature of man, death was more successfully achieved than the three more positive ideals...
...Robert Owen's "New Harmony" community which failed to live up to its name, was one product of Fourier's teachings...
...It will need to do nothing more than to proclaim the omnipotence of the people by threatening it, and to speak in its name by imposing silence on it...
Vol. 44 • March 1961 • No. 11
