Author: calebgbruns187

The study of the origins and founding of America is a very touchy subject. There are all kinds of interpretations of what caused the revolt of the colonies to break from the British empire.

The Marxist outlook saw it from an economic standpoint. They felt the reason why the colonies revolted was because of the restrictions on trade. The famous book by Charles Beards argues the reason why the American constitution was written was fundamentally for freedom of trade and not for human rights.

There is also the religious interpretation. They viewed that the Christians in the colonies saw themself as called by God to rebel against the tyrant king so they could worship freely. If it wasn’t for the Judeo Christian values and their interpretation of the bible there wouldn’t have been a revolution.

But the one influence that everyone agrees had a huge impact on the American Revolution was the Enlightenment Movement that happened from the late seventeenth century to the late eighteenth century. In Peter Gays’ book, The Enlightenment it shows what this movement was all about. It was a campaign of an informal group of writers across the western world from France, Italy, Germany, the British empire and across the Atlantic to the new world. These writers were very influential in the way people view the world in that time period.

These writers so-called philosophes disagree on a lot of things but the one concern that brought them together was freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of trade, freedom from arbitrary power, freedom to criticize everything. Even the power of government and the sacred church.

If there was a book being burned or opinion being censored they were the first ones to ferociously criticizes that oppression. It was a political right that was most important to them.

One writer said it was a recovery of nerve from the dark ages of superstition, bigotry, pessimism, fear, and loss of self-confidence.

The philosopher, Emmanuel Kant, who toward the end of this period coined the phrase for the Enlightenment “Dare to Know” Meaning taking the risk of discovery.

They saw themself in the age-old battle of reason and unreason. That has been fought and lost in the ancient world and was now in their time being fought again.

They looked to the past of ancient antiquity for models in this mission for the rebirth of freedom, like the courageous stoics against the superstitious tyrants. This is how they justified their rebellion.

They identified with classical figures. They compared their own time and situation with that of the Greeks and or Romans.

When Edward Gibbon visited the eternal city of Roman in 1764 he decided to write his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He studied how the classical world of the first Enlightenment fell into the superstitions of the dark ages. Gibbon saw it as a call to duty to write a history in a philosophical way.

So as the Enlightenment figures looked back at the classical world as their influence, Americans should look to the Enlightenment as one of pillars that the nation was built on.

The phrase Neocon has come to be used to describe a type of person who is a warmongering right wing nut, who just wants war for wars sake. It is usually used today in reference to the people that supported the of invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Members of this neoconservative movement see themselves as coming from the same tradition as the Democratic party during WW2 and the Cold War under Roosevelt and Truman who were internationalists with an assertive foreign policy.

Neocons like Paul Wolfowitz who would serve in the George W. Bush administration as the Deputy Secretary of Defense. In the 1970’s Wolfowitz saw him self as the exact opposite to Conservatives like Henry Kissinger. As Wolfowitz disagreed with his policy of de taunte; a strategy of containment and deterrent, one of limited engagement.

Kissinger who was a conservative was arguably the most influential person on America’s foreign policy during this time. At one point serving both as Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor in the Ford administration.

In his book A World Restored, Kissinger praises the Austrian statesmen Metternich. Who in the nineteenth century was the diplomat that orchestrated the balancing of the different sovereign powers across Europe after Napoleon was defeated.

Wolfowitz believed that Kissinger missed the point. That the real hero of that time was the tsar of Russia Alexander the first who pushed to confront and defeat the tyrant Napoleon on principals of universal human rights.

Journalist and author Christopher Hitchens was also another Neocon who came from a far leftist Trotskyite background who wrote a book (The Trials of Henry Kissinger) about the alleged war crimes of Henry Kissinger and was one of the public intellectuals that supported and argued for regime change in Iraq.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg9ceg0sCKc&t=3s

Left or Right these Neocons believed America should be the world’s super power that uses it military might to advance democracy across the globe.

A figure who describes the thoughts of a true fascist was in the person of Joseph D Maistre who the great essays Isaiah Berlin argues was one of the first to write and articulate the fascist mood and outlook.

Maistre from Chambery France lived during the time of the french revolution in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century when the old traditions and customs were being wiped away and the most pressing topic in the public conscience was how a man should be governed.

Sides were being picked in this debate and Maistre saw himself on the side of a Catholic reactionary against the Revolution of the philosophes.

He was an aristocrat, a man from the middle ages, a defender of the pope, friend of the hangman who opposed the revolution of rational, empiricism, liberalism and democracy.

Most historians and thinkers throughout the ages have written Maistre off as interesting but not important, a foolish man of the past fighting against the progress of history.

In Berlin’s essay on the Origins of fascism, he argues that Maistre’s writings were those of an ultra modernist. Born before his time, His thought was not of traditional conservatism. He didn’t argue from the place of the Roman church like Thomas Aquinas or blind faith in the statue quo but from history and the animal kingdom. What do you find when we study these things but blood and death.

This Berlin argues was the modern fascism paranoid world view that we wouldn’t see for another century.

Maistre was obsessed with the stupidity and wickedness of man, that the only solution was punishment, suffering and pain through society hierarchy with the executioner at the forefront.

There was no noble savage that Enlightenment figures like Rousseau described. Man is not born free, he is wicked and society is meant to curb his violent instincts.

The enemies of this hierarchal system are those who wanted to organize society on rationality, on written constitutions built by journalists, scientists, the supporters of the French revolution.

Maistre believed that these revolutionaries had a shallow understanding of reality. He thought a stable society is held together by irrational institutions. Like hereditary kingship, which logically makes no sense compared to choosing a ruler by the masses like democracies like Athens. but this tradition of the monarchy has withstood the test time of fifteen hundred years and Athen only a few hundred.

Authority needs to come from a place of no appeal. The second you start to question authority there is no rest. Man needs to submit to the nation and lose his personal identity completely, like a river that falls into the ocean and dissipates. The absurd idea of individual liberalism, motivated by self-interest only causes lawlessness and anarchy.

A desire for romantic self-sacrifice to the state to suffer and die with no interest in ones happiness, is the violent irritational goals of the pessimistic view of totalitarianism that came to life in the twentieth century.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juMl4TQzA34