Quotation of the Week

The cry “Liberty, equality, fraternity or death!” was much in vogue during the Revolution. Liberty ended by covering France with prisons, equality by multiplying titles and decorations, and fraternity by dividing us. Death alone prevailed.

~~Louis de Bonald. Thoughts on Various Subjects. (1817)

Bénéton on Autonomy

Our liberal modernity has departed from nature by emptying its own principles – equality, democracy, and the rights of man – of all their substance. Why the rights of man? Not because of some common nature, but because individual wills are sovereign. Why equality? Not because the fact of being human carries with it some meaning, but because the humanity of man is reduced to his indeterminate liberty. Individuals are autonomous; they are sovereign. The principle has become almost official since the moral revolution of the 1960s, and it is unfolding logically before us. Against this principle and its consequences, counter-revolutionary thought offers some antidotes.

To the myth of autonomy, it responds that the man of the radical version of modernity, the perfectly autonomous man, is a fiction. The French counter-revolutionaries, after Aristotle, Saint Thomas, and Burke, ceaselessly insisted with arguments difficult to refute, upon the social dimension of human existence. Man does not make himself by himself; he receives from others (his relatives, his contemporaries, past generations) much more than he gives. Man does not live alone; he has a deep, fundamental need for others because he is a being constituted by relations. He who would exercise autonomous judgement in fact relies upon a thousand things he takes on authority of others: that the world is round, that Napoleon existed, that his parents are his parents, and so on. He who would attempt to live in an individualist manner leaves behind him ties that matter; particularly those of the heart. Full and complete autonomy is a dream and a pernicious one at that. The consequences of this dream has been that in the midst of modern society, strong ties among men have been discarded in favour of weak ones. Modern individualism loosens true social ties, which are ties of attachment, in favour of contractual and utilitarian relations. Solid attachments are those which are created in the midst of communities, whether they be familal, religious, local, political, or professional communities. A good society cannot be reduced to a collection of individuals.

More fundamentally, a radical autonomy founded upon an indeterminate liberty is at once unrealistic and dangerous. It is unrealistic because each man is supported by things that do not depend on himself alone. Each of us is in some sense free to think that two and two make five, that he will never die, that the past did not exist, and that hatred is the most beautiful thing in the world, but what would such a liberty signify other than the liberty to free oneself from the human race? An interminate liberty is also dangerous because the political world cannot be given order simply by appealing to the human will. The counter-revolutionary critique frequently underscored the truth that power cannot be regulated unless it submits to principles that are anterior to it and come from religion or nature. In a world in which indeterminate liberty reigns, political power will oscillate between the extremes of libertarianism and despotism, or will combine features of both.

~~Philippe Bénéton. Foreword to Critics of the Enlightenment : Readings in the French Counter-Revolutionary Tradition.