Suchergebnisse

The origins of modern democracy are so closely bound up with the history of liberalism that it is a matter of considerable difficulty to disentangle them and to distinguish their distinctive contributions to the common political tradition of modern Western culture. For this question also involves that of the relation between the three revolutions, the English, the American, and the French, which transformed the Europe of the ancien régime, with its absolute monarchies and state churches, into the modern world. Now all these three revolutions were liberal revolutions and all of them were political expressions of the movement of the European enlightenment in its successive phases. But this movement was not originally a democratic one and it was only in the second half of the eighteenth century that the democratic ideal was clearly formulated. On the continent of Europe the revolution of ideas preceded the political and economic revolutions by half a century, and the revolution of ideas was not in any sense of the word a democratic movement; it was the work of a small minority of men of letters who looked to the nobles and the princes of Europe rather than to the common people, and whose ideal of government was a benevolent and enlightened absolutism, like that of Frederick the Great or the Empress Catherine of Russia. There was an immense gulf between the ideas of Voltaire and Turgot, of Diderot and D'Alembert, and the opinions of the average man. The liberalism of the philosophers was a hothouse growth which could not be easily acclimatized to the open air of the fields and the market place.

The history of the secularization of modern culture has yet to be written, and the reasons for this are easy enough to understand. For on the one hand, the mind of the secularized majority has been so deeply affected by the process of secularization that it cannot view that process in an objective historical manner, while on the other, the religious minority has been forced into an attitude of negative opposition which is no less unfavorable to dispassionate study. Nevertheless, it is emphatically a problem which requires an historical approach. The process of secularization was a historical movement no less than the Reformation, a minority movement which was gradually transmitted to wider circles until it eventually won the key positions of social and intellectual influence through which it dominated European society. This movement, which was already known as the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, and the accompanying ideology, which later acquired the name of Liberalism, have long been studied by historians chiefly in Germany and France, though in a somewhat piecemeal fashion; but their work has not hitherto been fully assimilated by educated opinion in England and America. Here the tendency has been to concentrate attention on political and economic change, and above all on the American and French revolutions. But we have not paid enough attention to the intellectual revolution that had already taken place before there was any question of a political one. Yet it is this intellectual revolution that is responsible for the secularization of Western culture. This intellectual movement, like most of the movements that have changed the world, was religious in origin, although it was anti-religious in its results. It owed its dynamism to the resistance of a religious minority and its diffusion to the illjudged and unjust, though sincere, action of religious orthodoxy. It is indeed, the supreme example in history of the way in which religious persecution and repression defeats its own object and serves the cause it is attempting to destroy.