Just two centuries on, an echo of Edmund Burke and his most celebrated book has opportunely come out of Oxford.

It is by Sir Ralf Dahrendorf, a German-born political scientist who is now warden of St. Antony’s College there; and it is called Reflections on the Revolution in Europe in a Letter Intended to have been sent to a Gentleman in Warsaw (1990).

Two hundred years ago Burke called his famous pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France in a Letter Intended to have been sent to a Gentleman in Paris, so the echo is knowing and deliberate. Like Burke, Dahrendorf is a constitutional liberal, full of the Magna Charta tradition, of James Madison’s Federalist papers, of the centuries-old tradition of civil society and the need for the eternal vigilance that liberty requires. “Freedom does not just happen,” he writes warningly to his Polish friend of recent events in Eastern Europe, mindful of the dangers of disenchantment. “It has to be created; it has to be defended at every point of the process; the attempt can fail.” That is blunt talk. Both he and Burke, what is more, are immigrants and Anglophiles rather than English, since Burke came from Dublin and Dahrendorf from Hamburg and Berlin after a period, in the early 1970’s, as a European Commissioner in Brussels.

So the conscious echo of Burke is a fitting and timely one, after just two centuries; but there the resemblance ends. The French Revolution of 1789 and the East European one of 1989 are in truth not much alike. Burke, who hated what the French were at, would surely have welcomed what has just happened in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the Baltic states. There are huge differences of scale, in any case, and all of them in favor of the 20th century. The French Revolution understandably looked to the last century like the most epoch-making event of modern history, but it was a rather minor affair compared with what the world has just witnessed in the death of communism. It was largely confined to one continent, for one thing; for another, it always looked reversible, and at Waterloo in 1815 it was reversed. But as Dahrendorf rightly insists, there can be no return in Europe to the corrupt and arthritic sway of the old Soviet nomenklatura. He has no truck with the easy excuse that the Soviet system was not what Marx or Lenin meant or that socialism was misapplied: he calls 1989 the death of socialism. “The old politics is spent.” There will be no Waterloo to bring back this ancien régime—the cozy world, as he calls it, of the dacha, the armored limousine, and the 99 percent “vote” for the party leadership. It is Marxism that has failed, not a misunderstanding of Marxism. “Communism is gone, never to return.” The very parties that once sustained it have splintered and collapsed. So the 20th century, just before its close, has at long last outlived its strange obsession with reliving the bloody fantasies of early Victorian thinkers about class war and race war. A dream ended in a nightmare; and now the dreamer, frightened by his own imagination, has woken up.

The great issue now, at once speculative and practical, is whether one can have a competitive economic system without democracy or democracy without a competitive economic system.

Is there any connection between the two—or rather, is that connection a tight and unconditional one? As an ex-sociologist as well as an ex-socialist. Dahrendorf is by now bracingly skeptical of immutable historical laws; and in a post-utopian age like this, laws of social evolution, whether Marxist or other, are no longer the wear, whether in or out of academia. But, in their place, there may now be a renewed chance for some close political observation of historical cases linked, as in Burke himself, less to laws of history than to moral principle. The notion of an objective morality is now back. “Why should we not make moral judgments?” an academic philosopher remarked defiantly the other day, impatient of the easy, fashionable view that all morality is personal or communal and ultimately no more than a matter of social conditioning. Like facts and statistics, moral views can be right or wrong, as anyone who contemplates the age of Hitler and Stalin must surely know; and the number of those ready to say so is now growing. Hence the return from laws to principles, from Marx to Madison and Samuel Johnson, from theory to commitment.

That commitment is based not on scriptures but on instances. Mankind learns political lessons from events, above all, both corporate and private, as Central Europeans once learnt from Nazism and its failure. It listens, watches, and apprehends; it acquires knowledge of human affairs as a child learns to walk, by falling down and picking itself up.

So not all knowledge is propositional, as the case of the learning infant illustrates: it knows what it knows about walking without hearing any account of it and without being able to give any account of it. But propositions can still prove useful as provisional supports. And one momentous lesson of 1989 is that democracy, for the moment, and the free market, whether linked or apart, look far more practical and durable than dictatorship and a command economy.

That is a surprising discovery, and one never before clear in human affairs. Even the most dedicated partisans of democracy or the free market have seldom dared advance it in our time; and on a long view, the pioneers of free institutions have usually been more cautious than bold. The first Constitution of the United States, though elective, was not democratic; nor, for that matter, were the first fitful attempts at constitutions by the French after 1789, and in any case those attempts quickly collapsed. Burke, too, who died in 1797, was nothing of a democrat; and the British system, like the American, evolved only cautiously in that direction, and by stages, between the 1830’s and the 1880’s. There are no sudden leaps to total liberty: none, at least, that survive. The law of gradualism here seems well-grounded on instances. Indian democracy, which is the largest on earth, was founded in 1947 on a succession of parliamentary enactments that began in the late 19th century, advancing step by step through the 1920’s and 1930’s, and its success celebrates the Whig principle of broadening precedent, not the claims of violent revolution.

So the durability of democracy is above all surprising because events of our own century have not prepared us for it. The First World War ruined four empires—the German, the Austro- Hungarian, the Russian, and the Turkish—but the democratic hopes that succeeded them had no lasting life, and the Second World War saw the spread of dictatorship across Eastern and Central Europe that, by the 1950’s, had achieved every appearance of permanency. No wonder democracy was seen by our grandparents as idealistic and fragile. Liberals in that age profoundly underestimated the power of their own ideas, it is now clear, under what looked like the irresistible march of events. The one-party states that arose in Afro-Asia soon after, and in Cuba, imitated the seeming success of the October Revolution, and single-party rule based on a command economy was widely supposed to be the way the world was irreversibly moving, for better or worse. Democracy in those days looked no more than the sad remnant of a Victorian dream; so did free trade and free enterprise. Like a cornered animal, it survived in parts of Western Europe, in Australia, and in North America, but even to its loyalists it seemed at best noble, fragile, and endangered. “We cannot afford a multiparty state” was the confident word from many emerging nations, and there was talk of harnessing the energies of all the people by total effort and making a Great Leap Forward.

With 1989 all that has changed. It was the one-party state that collapsed, its military strength eroded by its ruined economies; and now it is multiparty democracy that looks rich, practical, and tough. Democratic Germany, which has the most advanced free economy in Western Europe, is swallowing what once called itself the German Democratic Republic with less effort than a boa constrictor would take to swallow a lamb; Mengistu’s Marxist dictatorship in Ethiopia, faced with total collapse through poverty and civil war, has disavowed socialism; and Castro’s Cuba, as Soviet aid runs out, is trying to save its skin by building luxury hotels for Western tourists. All highly astonishing to those who remember the day when Stalin, like Hitler before him, conquered democratic neighbors with an ease that sometimes looked derisory. The age of marching feet has given place to an age of ballot boxes and cash registers, even in Outer Mongolia. Democracy has proved practical: it is dictatorship, as many can now see, that in terms of modern economics is unworkable and visionary.

All this is the triumph of an idea. “When we realized that we were slaves,” said Adam Michnik, the Polish dissident, in a remark quoted with approval by Dahrendorf, “we knew that we had become citizens.” Some slaves, of course, never realize what they are, and die as slaves. So 1989 illustrates Burke’s conviction that liberty is above all a tradition and a sense of tradition—a memory of liberty, perhaps prehistoric, that cannot be erased. Burke spoke of “the great primaeval contract of eternal society,” and in that momentous phrase he may have given the hint of an answer to the great question of the day: can one, in the end, have free institutions without a free market, a free market without free institutions? Is freedom divisible, as between economics and politics?

The rulers of China, at least, seem to think not. After the massacre in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, when the ruling party rejected the Gorbachev way and reasserted its hold by force, the shift towards a competitive economy was halted too, as if the connection between the two, real or imaginary, was seen as strong enough to be dangerous; and since then contracts to private entrepreneurs have been issued only sparingly as the old elite in Beijing has tightened its political grip. That may be blind instinct rather than reflection, but the instinct may be sound. Competition means winners; the winners are likely to constitute a moneyed class; and such a class can have dangerously independent views on how the state is to be run and, what is more, the funds and the leisure to advance them. History shows few instances of a revolutionary proletariat, whatever Marx may have hoped; but revolutionary bourgeoisies are rather common, and they have a way of succeeding. All that is far from tight, as an argument, but the Chinese government may still be right to hesitate. Presumably it knows that economic growth is sacrificed when it halts competition. But at least, for a time, it hopes to save itself.

Burke’s speculative remark about the great primeval contract of eternal society bypasses two familiar objections to the Whig idea of constitutional liberty. One is that, as an Anglo-Saxon idea, it arrogantly forbids civic rights to all but a few societies, namely those that have already begun to enjoy them. The other is that it leaves the rest of the world with a Catch-22. If you cannot achieve liberty without a tradition of the Anglo-Saxon sort, it may be objected, then how do you begin? That problem is not hypothetical, as many in the African states and in Latin America know. Burke’s bold answer is that liberty belongs to humanity as a species, at least from the birth of settled societies—the great primeval contract by which anarchy was exchanged for order—and that there is a human as well as a national tradition of the free.

That, in its controversial way, makes of the human past the urgent business of the new age. There is work here for historians, beyond a doubt; but Burke sought to widen the consciousness of past events far beyond what historians do. The past, he believed, was indispensably commemorated not only in books but in the rites and ceremonies of legislatures, presidents, and constitutional bodies, and it exists in ritual actions as well as in chronicles. The point is ingenious and persuasive. Coronations and inaugurations, in that view, are a species of historiography, and to watch them is to be reminded of a national past as surely as to read the history of a nation. In that case the dignity of institutions is an essential attribute of freedom; and in his first major pamphlet, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), he charged George III and his supporters, as a young member of Parliament, with a concerted attempt to degrade the dignity of Parliament by seeking to efface its traditional ceremonies. Members, he complained, were “to be hardened into an insensibility to pride as well as to duty,” and forced by stages to abandon “those high and haughty sentiments which are the great support of independence.” It is unusual to hear a moralist speak up for high and haughty sentiments—pride is commonly supposed to be a sin—and Burke, when he wrote that, had been a member of the Commons for less than five years. But if it is the business of tyrants to erase the past, as he believed, then it is equally the business of free men to cherish and restore it. So they have a public duty as well as a right to stand on ancestral dignities and insist on what he calls “points of honour.” The modern instances would have interested him. Bolsheviks, like Jacobins, have tried to defame history and to blacken all ages before their own. It is established tyrants, then, and not radicals, who hate the past, and have good reason to distrust tradition.

The point, which is central to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as much as to Burke, is still not universally accepted, and there are still those who see a reverence for tradition as a conservative attribute and contempt as natural to the radical. They are mistaken. A recent political broadside, for example—Conservatism (1990) by Ted Honderich, a professor of philosophy at London University—has reviled Burke in familiar terms; and in a defiant letter to the London Times (July 26, 1990), the author has returned the attack, calling him “the exemplar of the tradition of Conservatism” and “a partisan of a party of self-interest lacking a moral rationale.” Burke, as it happens, never called himself a Conservative or a Tory, and never was one; and since he ardently supported the English Revolution of 1688 and believed in prudent concessions to the American colonists in the 1770’s, it is hard even to see him as consistenriy anti-revolutionary. But he worshiped ceremonial and tradition, and the association of tradition with conservatives, of conservatives with tradition, is by now so automatic in Western political thought that it can mislead even a professor of philosophy.

So the East may have something to teach the West, and the light that comes from the East may illumine a great truth. For in Warsaw, Budapest, and Prague, tradition is not seen as conservative.

In fact, it has just made a revolution, or rather a series of revolutions; and as civil society is rediscovered in lands laid waste by decades of socialist inertia, it is the past that looks subversive and exciting, and socialism, for decades, that has proved the supremely conservative force in Eastern Europe. It has promoted and defended the interests of a ruling caste, it has suppressed deviation and pornography, it has distrusted as decadent any modern spirit in the arts, built architectural facsimiles of ancient monuments, and banned the criticism of a free press. Its conservative credentials are unimpeachable. Now that it is dead, the past suddenly looks potent, and the end of Marxism is not the end of history but a new beginning. The secret toast of Orwell’s hero in Nineteen Eighty-Four was not “To the future” but “To the past,” since, to anyone of radical sentiment, “the past is more important.” It is by interpreting and reinterpreting the past that present and future are radically reshaped; by a sense of the past that change looks possible, practical, and desirable. That is the opportunity of the age. There will now be a brief pause in which historians, and above all historians east of what was once an armed fortification of tyranny known as the Iron Curtain, ponder what to do with the freedom that is suddenly theirs.