Liberal Moments: Reading Liberal Texts by Ewa Atanassow & Alan S. Kahan

Author:Ewa Atanassow & Alan S. Kahan [Atanassow, Ewa & Kahan, Alan S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Political Ideologies, Conservatism & Liberalism, History & Theory
ISBN: 9781474251075
Google: g9UxDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2017-09-07T21:26:40+00:00

14

Jacob Burckhardt’s Dystopic Liberalism

Alan S. Kahan

The great harm was begun in the last century, mainly through Rousseau, with his doctrine of the goodness of human nature. Out of this plebs and educated alike distilled the doctrine of the golden age which was to come quite infallibly, provided people were left alone. The result, as every child knows, was the complete disintegration of the idea of authority in the heads of mortals, whereupon, of course, we periodically fall victim to sheer power. In the meantime the idea of the natural goodness of man has turned, among the intelligent strata of Europe, into the idea of progress, i.e. undisturbed money-making and modern comforts, with philanthropy as a sop to conscience. … The only conceivable salvation would be for this insane optimism, in great and small, to disappear from people’s brains. … A change will and must come, but only after God knows how much suffering.1

Men are no longer willing to leave the most vital matters to society, because they want the impossible and imagine that it can only be secured under compulsion from the state. … Absolutely everything that people know or feel that society will not undertake is simply heaped onto the daily growing burden of the state. At every turn, needs grow, bearing their theories with them, and not only needs, but debt, the chief, miserable folly of the nineteenth century.

Now power is of its nature evil, whoever wields it.2

Our task, in lieu of all wishing, is to free ourselves as much as possible from foolish joys and fears and to apply ourselves above all to the understanding of historical development. … Out of the jumble and confusion we shall win a spiritual possession; in it we want to find not woe, but wealth.3

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