throw ancient beliefs, could lead more easily to a reign of terror than to a reign of universal love and brotherhood. Not that the revolution represented in any simple or direct way the application of philosophical principles to politics. A fierce conflict of social classes, together with belated and half-hearted efforts to renovate an antiquated system of administration and finance, accounted for much of the turmoil that convulsed the French nation in the I790s. Revolutionary ideology, moreover, owed as much to the republican tradition, as reformulated by Rousseau, as it owed to the liberalism of the Enlightenment. Robespierre's reign of virtue, the complete subjection of all activity to politics, exposed the fanaticism lurking in the republican ideal of citizenship. By effectively abolishing private life, the terror helped to discredit republicanism in the same way that Stalinism later discredited socialism.

But the French revolution also discredited eighteenth-century liberalism, at least for those who traced it to the folly of ignoring experience and of attempting to create a new order overnight, one based on nothing more secure than airy speculation. For our purposes, the importance of the revolution lies in its contribution to the Romantic reaction against cosmopolitanism, political abstractions, and the search for the universal principles thought to govern politics and morality. The Romantic reaction in turn left as part of its intellectual legacy the basic categories of modern social thought—gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, "community" and "society," categories rich in ramifying meanings that continue to inform (or deform) political speculation even today.

Even before the terror brought the revolution to its grisly climax, Edmund Burke issued his classic defense of inherited wisdom against reckless innovation, "old establishments" against the "merely theoretical system" devised by "sophisters," "declaimers," and "metaphysicians." Burke urged the value of prejudice, which was "ten thousand times" to be preferred to the "evils of inconstancy and versatility." The Enlightenment condemned prejudice as the enemy of reason; but its usefulness as a source of moral restraint, Burke thought, was unmistakably revealed by the revolution—the work of men and women whose freedom from prejudice enabled them to carry out appalling crimes. Burke equated prejudice with common decency and "untaught feelings," spontaneous promptings of the heart. Thus a "wise prejudice" against patricide prompted Englishmen, as they contemplated the folly of their neighbors across the channel,

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