330 Chapter XIV
the end of the eighteenth century. They do not explain the form which this distur-
bance took. They explain everything except the Revolution itself. The Revolution
was not simply a chaotic upheaval, but a purposeful political movement accentuat-
ing certain recognizable if not always very definite concepts—“feudalism,” “aris-
tocracy,” “constitution,” “citizen,” “sovereignty of the people,” “nation,” “law,” “lib-
erty,” “equality,” “nature,” and “natural rights.”
These words have the value at least of suggesting what the men of the French
Revolution thought they were doing. We come, therefore, to the role of “ideas” in
the Revolution, and to “psychological” explanations of its origin and course. The
importance of ideas as a cause has long been stressed on all sides of the question.
From a point of view favorable to the Revolution, from the profundities of Hegel
to the quick assumptions of those engaged in the struggle itself, it has been sup-
posed that men carried out a revolution because they had lived through the En-
lightenment, or desired to realize liberty because they had formulated the idea of it
in their minds. The argument that ideas cause revolutionary troubles has always,
however, been especially congenial to persons less favorable to revolution, or even
to change, always with the corollary that ideas, or the ideas in question, are im-
practical in character, unrelated to actual problems, Utopian, visionary, or millen-
nial (sometimes they are compared to a religion), and at any rate are the notions of
mere intellectuals (philosophes before 1789) without experience of real human na-
ture or real affairs. The effect is to reduce revolution to nonsense, or to the realm of
the impossible, though it is of course the very possibility of revolution, or fear that
it may be possible, that motivates this line of argument. It is an old and yet ever-
living theory. In 1783 Mr. George Ponsonby dismissed the proposal for Irish par-
liamentary reform as “system mongering,” and Burke used the same argument
against parliamentary reform in England before applying it to the Revolution in
France; and in 1957, in the learned Political Science Quarterly, an American histo-
rian called Robespierre’s idea of the good society a “syllogistic paradise.”
If we know anything of human psychology, however, we know that men’s behav-
ior is not fully explained by their ideas, in the sense of their concepts, and that we
must look not only to the manifest but to the latent content of their minds. What
really lay behind the magic words—“liberty,” “equality,” “nation,” “sovereignty,” and
the others? Bourgeois interests, according to one widely diffused school of thought.
Nationalism, according to another. Incipient totalitarianism and fateful trust in the
omnipotent state, according to a third. Vanity, according to Talleyrand. A desire for
better government appointments on the part of frustrated lesser officials (ötez- vous
de là que je m’y mette) according to Metternich—to which Professor Alfred Cobban
in one mood seems to subscribe. Fanaticism, according to J. F. La Harpe. Error and
confusion, according to F. L. C. Montjoie, who in 1797 published a discussion of
twenty- one terms, including liberté, égalité, volonté générale, and pouvoir constituant,
the misunderstanding of which he thought had unfortunately brought about the
French Revolution. Nothing at all lay behind these expressions, according to still
another observer—not a sophisticated twentieth- century logical positivist, but an
angry counterrevolutionary of 1792—who wrote in an early semantic treatise:
“Aristocrat: arrangement of syllables which produces strange effects on the animal