Edmund Burke records that two thirds of the Anglican clergy initially supported the French Revolution.  He wrote Reflections on the Revolution in France to show that the Revolution was not merely an understandable effort at reform but an entirely unique intellectual and spiritual pathology.  A language for this disorder of the soul did not exist in Burke’s time, and his own effort to form one, though rhetorically brilliant, was not successful.  Later thinkers would describe it as the work of “the Enlightenment,” “ideology,” “rationalism,” or of an elite sect of subversive intellectuals known as the “philosophes” or, as they would later be called in Russia, the “intelligentsia.”

These expressions are insightful, but they all presuppose that the pathology in question is unique to modern times—that, apparently from nowhere, there appeared in 18th-century Europe a perverse and destructive form of thought that is still with us.  The truth, however, is that this intellectual and spiritual pathology is quite ancient and goes to the very roots of Western culture.  Eric Voegelin provides a better account in describing the pathology of the French Revolution, and of later ideologies, as a modern form of gnosticism—an heretical movement within early Christianity.  Certainly, there are striking parallels between gnosticism and modern ideologies, but they do not provide us with an internal understanding of how entirely secular revolutionaries think of themselves.  What does provide such understanding is a form of thought that predates Christianity by six centuries—pagan Greek philosophy.  Whatever it was, Greek philosophy was not a gnostic Christian heresy.  It possessed a rationale distinct from Christianity or, indeed, any religion whatsoever.  And it is the errors native to this peculiar form of thought that we must work through if we are to understand modern revolutionary ideologies.

The philosophical act of thought has not changed much in its essential structure from its beginning among the Greeks until today.  It is built on three principles.  First, the philosopher is trying to understand the ultimate nature of things—as when we ask, What is time? or property? or justice?  When we raise such questions, we are seeking a kind of understanding that is final, unconditioned, and absolute (the principle of ultimacy).  Second, philosophic reason is independent of, and transcends all, tradition.  Philosophy cannot begin by acknowledging the independent authority of poets, priests, prophets, or founding fathers.  Philosophy must be free to examine all assumptions and to reach judgments about them using nothing but its own pure reason untainted by prejudice (the principle of autonomy).  Third, philosophical judgment about what is ultimately real, based on the thinker’s autonomous reason, claims to rule all thought and action (the principle of dominion).  Plato’s famous doctrine that philosophers should be kings is the secret ambition of all philosophic thought.

The first to challenge philosophy as a whole were the Pyrrhonian skeptics, a sect that arose in the fourth century B.C. and flourished into the Christian era.  The skeptics attacked the principle of autonomy by showing that no philosopher had ever successfully purged his thought of the external authority of tradition, instinct, and natural inclination.  Further, if philosophic thought could separate itself from tradition and inclination, it would be entirely empty and incapable of deciding any question in theory or in practice.  From this, the Pyrrhonians concluded that no one should make any claim about the nature of reality and that everyone should live pragmatically according to mere appearance and feeling.  

The Pyrrhonian critique of philosophy was revived 2,000 years later by David Hume, who drew a quite different conclusion.  He argued that the desire to understand what is ultimately real is as firmly implanted in human nature as the instinct to breathe and, thus, cannot be abandoned.  But he agreed with the Pyrrhonians that philosophical autonomy independent of tradition is vacuous.  From this he concluded, however, not that we should abandon philosophy but that we should reform it.  Philosophers must openly acknowledge the dependence of their reason on custom and tradition.  Tradition and custom are not barriers to understanding reality that must be transcended but the only medium through which to apprehend it.  The medium is partly opaque, often incoherent and incomplete, and is thus open to criticism—but only by one who is a loyal and skillful participant in it.  “Philosophical decisions,” Hume said, “are nothing but reflections of common life methodized and corrected.” 

Hume’s insight was a rediscovery of one first reached by St. Augustine, who was himself, at one time, a skeptic.  We may imagine Augustine thinking: If reason is tradition-laden, then the first question of rationality is, To which tradition of inquiry shall I give my allegiance?  And this, Augustine discovered, is not a question of pagan rational autonomy but of the will.  In converting from philosophic skepticism to Christianity, Augustine gave his allegiance to sacred biblical tradition as the source of a reformed philosophic rationality, a move expressed in his maxim “Credo ut intelligam” (“I believe in order to understand”), which contradicts the maxim of Greek philosophy—that one should not believe until one understands.  In uniting biblical tradition with pagan Greek philosophy, Augustine forged a new form of speculative inquiry more powerful than either by itself.  It would become institutionalized in the medieval universities; guide the great speculative systems of Aquinas, Ockham, and Scotus; and remain the dominant form of rationality in Christian civilization until the 16th century, when pagan philosophical autonomy would suddenly reappear, shattering Christendom and itself into a thousand fragments.  

What we call “the Enlightenment” was not a bright idea of 17th-century Europeans but a reenactment of the hubris of pagan philosophical autonomy, which had maintained much of its freedom within the constraints of Christian tradition.  Christians were taught to think for themselves.  Aquinas’s dialectical method required constructing powerful arguments against Christian beliefs and refuting them.  The most powerful arguments for atheism ever produced were made by 17th-century French Jesuits.  And it should not be surprising that some would be more convinced by the arguments for atheism than by the Jesuits’ refutation.  Having been vigorously exercised for centuries within Christendom, philosophy grew strong, eventually recovered its pagan disposition, and finally rebelled against its Augustinian role as the handmaid of theology.  

The radical transcendence demanded by philosophical autonomy requires the total destruction in thought of all traditional authority.  Descartes, the “father of modern philosophy,” speaking of the attitude of philosophical reason toward traditional order, says: “I know no better remedy than absolutely to raze it to the ground, in order to raise a new one in its stead.”  This revival of pagan philosophical autonomy would gradually filter down to the populace, so that, a century and a half later, a member of the National Assembly, during the French Revolution, could, as a matter of course, invoke Descartes’ language of total destruction leading to a totally new creation.  

All the establishments in France crown the unhappiness of the people: to make them happy they must be renewed, their ideas, their laws, their customs must be changed; . . . men changed, things changed . . . destroy everything; yes destroy everything; then everything is to be renewed.

And the French Revolution tried to do just that.

The same rejection of reform in favor of total criticism, total destruction, and total renewal continued in later revolutionary thinkers inspired by the French Revolution.  Marx wrote in the 1840’s: “We are not interested in a change in private property but only in its annihilation, not in conciliation of class antagonisms but in the abolition of classes, not in reforms of present society but in the foundation of a new one.”  About the same time, Proudhon declared: “I destroy in order to build.”  And Bakunin proclaimed, “[T]he joy of destruction is a creative joy.” 

The philosophical intellect—unless humbled by the reforms required by St. Augustine and Hume—is not interested in reforming the condition of man but only in world inversions and the dominion they make possible.  This is the very nature of philosophical thought, because the thinker seeks nothing less than an ultimate grasp of the topic at hand.  Given man’s limited experience, however, he can achieve this only by taking a part of experience and magically transforming it into the whole.  For example, the first philosopher, Thales, held that everything is really made of water.  Similarly, Marx taught that all history is the story of class struggle: Proudhon, that property is theft; Locke, that no government is legitimate unless founded on a contract; Rousseau, that man is born free but everywhere is in chains.  This is philosophical alchemy, and it is as destructive as the sad gift of King Midas, who was endowed with the power to transform everything he touched into gold.  

Rousseau, whose philosophy haunted the halls of the French Revolutionary assemblies, was masterful at exploiting the world inversions that are characteristic of philosophical hubris.  Burke left us an account of what Hume told him about Rousseau’s method of writing.  The public, Rousseau observed, is naturally drawn to tales of the miraculous, but modern thinkers have lost belief in the gods and in fairies and magicians.  Rousseau thought, however, that the marvelous could still be effected by philosophical paradoxes discerned in “life, in manners, in characters, and in extraordinary situations, giving rise to new and unlooked-for strokes in politics and morals.”  Hume, who knew Rousseau personally, described him as a “Prodigy of Pride and Ferocity” whose whole life “is to be regarded as one continu’d Lye and imposture.”  Of his writings, he said that their “general Tendency is surely rather to do hurt than Service to Mankind.”

Hume held that the first philosophers were atheists, by which he meant that philosophical autonomy can accept no authority outside itself.  When Thales taught that all is made of water, he included the gods.  The great 20th-century metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead argued that God cannot be an exception to the metaphysical categories.  In short, philosophy cannot be guided—without ceasing to be philosophy—by any revelation from the Divine.  If our concept of God is to be shaped exclusively by the philosopher’s own self-certifying reason, however, then that is only a step away from saying that the philosopher is God.  Aristotle taught that God’s activity is “thought thinking thought” and, in so doing, conceived of God as a pagan philosopher.  It would be left to Hegel to make explicit the atheism intimated in philosophy and to teach that, in his own philosophy, the Divine had achieved self-knowledge. ?Contemporary American philosopher Richard Rorty has claimed that, in a truly “enlightened” liberal society, “no trace of Divinity” would remain.

Cicero said Socrates brought philosophy down from the heavens and placed it in cities and homes.  It is also true, however, that pagan civil magistrates put Socrates to death for impiety.  Philosophy was tolerated in the ancient world but only in small, private sects on the margins of society.  In Christendom, however, philosophy had been united with biblical tradition in a speculative form of thought known as theology.  Since every Christian was, to a degree, a theologian, every Christian had the potential to philosophize.  The medieval Church had educated the masses, and the Protestant Church had taught them to read.  When pagan philosophy broke free of her theological stepparent, there were many in Christendom who greeted her as one with whom they had been—in some way—long familiar.  

For the first time in history, this made mass secular philosophical movements possible.  Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was the first philosophical best-seller, peddling Hobbes-ianism to the people.  At about the same time, the French philosophe Diderot called for raising the philosophical consciousness of the masses: “Let us hasten to make philosophy popular.  If we want the philosophers to march on before, let us approach the people at the point where the philosophers are.”  And, in the 1840’s, Marx could write to Ruge: “Philosophy has become secularized, and the striking proof thereof is that the philosophical consciousness itself has been pulled into the torment of struggle. . . . What we must accomplish is the ruthless criticism of all that exists.” 

Hume contemptuously described his own time as “this philosophic age.”  A lifelong student of the destructive power of philosophic errors, he did not think this a good thing.  Louis-Sebastien Mercier, however, who wrote a utopian novel, The Year 2440, anticipating the French Revolution, thought the opposite: “The flame of philosophy . . . has been lit and dominates Europe: the wind of despotism in curbing the flame can only stir it up and billow it into larger and brighter bursts.”  As the power of the state increased through ever-expanding centralization, industrialization, and technology, the ancient philosophic passion to dominion would be enflamed.  With the French Revolution, Plato’s fantasy that philosophers should be kings would become a political possibility.  Later, Marxists philosopher-kings would actually rule Russia and other places.

The foundation for the enduring political legacy of the philosophes was laid by Gracchus Babeuf’s “Conspiracy of the Equals.”  Babeuf was the first professional revolutionary.  Anticipating Lenin, he built up a system of cells and networks of communication designed not only to overthrow a regime but to transform society.  He concluded that the French Revolution had failed because the philosophes were not entirely emancipated from traditional society.  Mankind needed a second and final revolution as well as an entirely new kind of human being to create and manage it.  Babeuf’s associate Sylvain Marechal wrote the first revolutionary manifesto, “The Manifesto of the Equals.”  Another associate, Fillipo Buonarroti, wrote A History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy, which, after 1830, became the bible of professional revolutionaries throughout Europe and Latin America.  Marx called this movement “the revolution in permanence.”  The revolution, he says, is “not against any wrong in particular but against wrong in general.”  Babeuf asserted the same at his trial.  The revolution was meant to be the end of all “fences, hedges, walls, doorlocks, disputes, lawsuits, thefts, murders, of all crimes, of law-courts, prisons, gallows, pains, despairs, . . . of envy, jealousy, . . . and finally of all vices.”  Such a mind entranced by the seamless whole of the philosophic act would have no obligation to the system of total evil surrounding him.  Any act of terror would justify the final solution.  Babeuf’s followers were instructed to 

Kill the five, the seven ministers, the General of the Interior and his general staff, occupy the halls of the Five Hundred and of the Ancients, seize everyone who presents himself there, put to death every public official who exercises his functions, every foreigner who does not submit himself to provisional arrest, every citizen who, after a rigorous search of his house, is still found having flour, vegetables and other edibles he has not declared, every wine merchant who does not distribute his merchandise; hang on the first lamp post every baker who does not bake; persecute with fire and sword anyone who offers resistance.

Ordinary crime is directed at particular objects, leaving the rest of traditional society intact.  Philosophic crime is an act within an inverted world in which standards of truth and morality undergo the transformation of philosophical alchemy.  Such crime always presents itself as liberation and professes its innocence.

From the French Revolution—through total wars, totalitarian revolutions, and totalitarian power—to the end of the Cold War, the world has suffered at the hands of philosophic crime and murder.  Many think that the Revolution has exhausted itself and that we are entering a postideological age.  Such thinking betrays a failure to understand our condition.  What Marx called the “revolution in permanence” may no longer resort to violence, but world inversion and philosophical alchemy will necessarily continue as an essential part of a philosophically shaped culture.  Antonio Gramsci understood this and argued that Marxists should abandon violence for a “long march through the institutions.”  Traditional society can be subverted by controlling the institutions that shape culture.  This strategy has, in 40 years, succeeded in transforming America from a Christian-European culture into what can only be described as a kind of neo-Gramscian liberalism.  Our public leaders no longer describe America as a particular cultural inheritance built by peoples with historic identities but as a philosophical idea.  To be an American is simply to subscribe—in the manner of the philosophes—to abstract propositions about equality and liberty.  

In Hume’s “philosophic age,” everything touched by the philosophic act is transmuted into a superstition.  Even simple social changes are viewed in the light of world inversions.  Moral and political language enter the topsy-turvy world of the philosophic act.  Murderers are transformed into judges.  Innocence is called upon to defend itself.  The privileged exact the revenge of victims, and public discourse collapses into what Vico called “the barbarism of reflection.”

The first philosophic age is too recent to be well understood, and few even recognize its existence.  Our education has not prepared us to recognize the seductive character of the philosophic act, its peculiar errors, and the distinction between a corrupt and a true form of philosophic understanding.  David Hume was the first to work out a systematic critique of philosophy’s relation to society.  Yet he began his career seduced by a belief in philosophy’s primordial innocence.  As a young man, he wrote: “Generally speaking the errors of religion are dangerous, those of philosophy merely ridiculous”—a judgment he would, in time, come to question.  In the first philosophic age, the errors of philosophy are dangerous; those of religion, merely ridiculous.