When the Money Runs Out by Stephen D. King

Author:Stephen D. King
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300190526
Publisher: Yale University Press

CHAPTER SEVEN

THREE SCHISMS

To understand the challenges stemming from a breakdown of trust – in particular, when the breakdown is linked to economic disappointment – it's worth going back to the thoughts of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859), author of Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution. In the latter, he argued that, well before the 1789 French Revolution:

public prosperity began to develop with unexampled strides. This is shown by all sorts of evidence. Population increased rapidly; wealth more rapidly still. The American war [of independence] did not check the movement: it completed the embarrassment of the state, but did not impede private enterprise: individuals grew more industrious, more inventive, richer than ever.

… measurably, with the increase in prosperity in France, men's minds grow more restless and uneasy; public discontent is embittered; the hatred of the old institutions increases. The nation visibly tends toward revolution.

… The regime which is destroyed by a revolution is almost always an improvement on its immediate predecessor, and experience teaches that the most critical moment for bad governments is the one which witnesses their first steps toward reform … Evils which are patiently endured when they seem inevitable, become intolerable when once the idea of escape from them is suggested.

… No one in 1780 had any idea that France was on the decline: on the contrary, there seemed to be no bounds to its progress. It was then that the theory of the continual and indefinite perfectibility of man took its rise. Twenty years before, nothing was hoped from the future: in 1780, nothing was feared. Imagination anticipated a coming era of unheard-of felicity, diverted attention from present blessings, and concentrated it upon novelties.

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