2.4 The Invention of Modern Liberalism and Conservatism: part 4

Joseph Marie, comte de Maistre (1754-1821)

Dynamic Equilibrium: Why Tradition Fails

Rather than evaluate policies, Burke’s conservatism blamed the public’s abandoning traditional values for the American and French Revolutions. For centuries gradual adjustments to traditional solutions seemed to work, although the country increasingly lurched along like a car with bad spark plugs. Traditional answers could not solve new problems, especially those caused by old traditions. The financial laws that created the Great Depression could not solve it.

Changes that disrupt the economy, government, and community welfare trigger dynamic equilibrium shifts. The causes can seem surprisingly small. Records moved music from stages to homes. Public performances drove record sales. Record company employees pressed and shipped the albums to stores. Record stores hired sales clerks. Then large producers offered mail record clubs. Pirated tapes hurt sales, but stores sold tapes too. Those were homeostatic adjustments.

Digit recording changed the economics. CDs first sold like records. Then producers sold digital copies over the internet. There were fewer records or discs to press, ship, or sell in stores. LP production and distribution costs that justified $12.00 albums dropped to $2.50. The price, however, remained $12.00. Single song downloads dropped performers’ profits. Stores closed. Staff were laid off. Coming full circle, digital sales became the lure to fill expensive concert seats.

Tradition Is Imagining Things Are The Same

Analysis Is Testing Whether They Are Different

Burke’s and de Maistre’s rule by tradition depended on society being the same in 1790 as in 1066. They wrote, however, specifically because new lands, ideas, and technologies had changed the world.

We lazily assume that today’s normal was yesterday’s normal. When Locke wrote his Two Treatises (1660) capitalism did not exist. Instead, the English Corn Law (1815, 1822, 1828) enriched estate and farm owners by artificially inflating the costs for the working class and unban population.

Burke ignored significant social changes to defend bygone traditions that benefited him. (appendix 1). The population in 1066 was 1.25-2 million. When Burke published (1790) the population was 9 million. The real transformation was that in 1066, 90% of the population was rural. In 1790 it was 70% rural. In 1790 more people faced urban problems, than the entire 1066 population. No eleventh century traditions anticipated the economic and urban pressures Burke’s constituency faced.

De Maistre’s Altar of Blood Sacrifice

Joseph Marie, comte de Maistre (1754-1821), a lesser noble from the Savoyard region in France, was the second founder of conservatism. De Maistre combined “natural law” and God to prevent Hobbes’ “war of all against all”. He claimed social evolution created a natural hierarchy beyond human judgement. Only an absolute monarch and well-used executioner could control man’s inherent violence, and only the Pope could restrain the monarchs. The privileges of class were God’s design and the lower classes existed solely to serve the elite. Anyone challenging the Great Chain of Being deserved execution. That noble and religious disputes had caused a millennium of European war escaped analysis.

De Maistre says the silent parts aloud:

“In the whole vast domain of living nature there reigns an open violence, a kind of prescriptive fury which arms all the creatures to their common doom…Over all these numerous races of animals man is placed, and his destructive hand spares nothing that lives. He kills to obtain food and he kills in order to clothe himself. He kills to adorn himself, he kills in order to attack, and he kills in order to defend himself. He kills to instruct himself and he kills to amuse himself. He kills to kill. Proud and terrible king, he wants everything and nothing resists him.

“…And who in this general carnage will exterminate him who exterminates all others? Himself. It is man who is charged with the slaughter of man…Thus is accomplished the great law of the violent destruction of living creatures. The whole earth perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar, upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until the evil is extinct, until the death of death.“1

De Maistre considered the French Revolution divine retribution for the masses abandoning traditional values. Salvation required restoring nobility’s power and enforcing it through the executioner. Although de Sade (1740-1814) used sexual exploitation to exemplify the exploitation of the weak, his argument and de Maistre’s are precursors of Friedrich Nietzsche’s übermensch2: the individual self-evolved beyond conventional morality and societal constraints.

Burke and de Maistre defended conservative myths about of the way things were. Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) advanced Enlightenment principles, the second river. What new political ideas and experiences forced dynamic equilibrium change on ordinary people?

New world gold, silver, sugar, cotton, tobacco, and slavery upended old world economics. More subtly, the French Jesuit Relations, reports on the Iroquoian Nations beginning in 1610, challenged the justification of government.3 Iroquoian principles valued equality not hierarchy. Leaders had to persuade not order. Women had full independence over their lives and bodies. Women had the authority to declare war. They arranged and divided the land for farming. No individual was allowed to control essential goods to control others.4 These and similar rules created a working society guided by the principle of protecting individual freedom.

The principle of individual freedom distinguished the American and French Revolutions. Pain’s call for individual freedom in Common Sense (1776) drew public support for the revolution. His call for individual freedom is also why the Natural Aristocracy advocates drove Pain into exile in France. Those advocates wanted independence from English rule while retaining the privileges of class. Burke could support the American Revolution because it retained the Great Chain of Being.5 The Iroquoian and French Revolution principle of individual freedom is what terrified Burke and de Maistre.

A reasonable question is, “What am I supposed to do with this information?” Coming next: an attempt to organize this information into elevator pitches and position statements.

Appendix 1

Triggers of Dynamic Equilibrium Change

1337-1453 The 100 Year’s War.

1450 Moveable type.

1455 Gutenberg Bible.

1492 Rediscovery of the New World.

1517 Luther’s 95 Theses

1517 Protestant Reformation.

1545-1648 Counter-Reformation.

1618-1648 The Thirty Years’ War.

1642-1651 English Civil War.

1660 John Locke (1632-1704) Two Treatises On Government.

1751 Laissez Faire in France: origin of capitalism.

1760-1820 First Industrial Revolution.

1762 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) Social Contract (1762).

1765 Stamp Act.

1766 Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Baron de lÁulne (1727-81) Reflections on the Formation and Distribution of Wealth.

1775-1783 American Revolution.

1776 Declaration of Independence.

1776 Adam Smith (1723-1820) Wealth of Nations.

1776 Thomas Paine (1737-1809) Common Sense (1776).

1786-1787 Shay’s Rebellion.

1787 Constitution (ratified 1788).

1789-1799 French Revolution ending at Napoleonic Era.

1790 Edmund Burke (1729-97) Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

1791 Thomas Paine (1737-1809) Rights Of Man (1791). The Age of Reason (1794

1791 The Bill of Rights ratified.

These events and writings changed the basic organization and beliefs in Western Europe, England, and the colonies. Moveable type resulted in a rapid distribution of new ideas to challenge existing beliefs. Laissez Faire policies, capitalism, and the onset of the industrial revolution changed the relationship between people, labor, and the economy. It would take a century and a half in Britain, longer in America, to resolve the disruption they caused.

¹ De Maistre, Joseph, St Petersburg Dialogues: Or Conversations on the Temporal Government of Providence (1821)

² Nietzsche, Friedrich Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883)

³ Kenton, Edna The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents (1610-1791) Albert & Charles Boni: New York 1925

⁴ Graeber, David and David Wengrow The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York 2021

⁵ This will be addressed in the future with the Fundamental Constitutions Carolina (1669)