Rousseau, Revolutions and Egypt
Once again, the World is witness to the revolutionary aspirations of a people long suppressed. Today it is Egypt. Yesterday it was Tunisia and decades before that Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and Iran. The Russians endured their own revolution in the early 1900’s and the French in the 1800’s. We had our own in the century before and there have been others in between.
So what will become of Egypt? Will true democratic reform follow? Or will their aspirations be hijacked in an exchange of rulers more interested in their power than others freedom? While the courses of revolutions are rather unpredictable, the answer likely lies with the nature of Egyptian society.
Some transitions, whether catalyzed by an internal revolution or outside regime change, succeed and are witness to an enlightened new rule; others fail and either relapse into prior existences or merely exchange one set of rulers for what the French philosopher Voltaire would say were others, only less refined.
Another 18th Century French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was more stark when he wrote that
“People accustomed to masters will not let mastery cease … Mistaking liberty for unchained license, they are delivered by their revolutions into the hands of seducers who will only aggravate their chains …”
So why do some transitions succeed where others fail? The answer lies in the political and economic maturity of those who would rule and the disbursement of economic power. The French Revolution, which began the year after Rousseau’s death, featured great economic disparity between the rulings classes and an underclass that mistook their inspired but sudden liberty for unchained license. Unaccustomed to governing and with a limited commercial underpinning, the property they destroyed was not their own.
In the end, the divergence between their aspiration to govern and their ability to govern left them vulnerable to seducers. The chaos, which included the Reign of Terror and the deaths of thousands at the hands of “reformers,” was finally quelled by the order of another master in the form of Napoleon – thereby fulfilling Rousseau’s warning. The Russian Revolution followed a not dissimilar pattern and featured a similar, scarce middle/commercial class for whom self-governance was a stranger.
The fate of our own revolution was different. Buffered by an ocean and lacking the great economic class divisions of pre-revolutionary France and Russia, America had a burgeoning commercial class that distributed economic power more evenly than France or Russia. America was also afforded much greater degrees of self-governance for over 100 years. In that way, when they took battlefield, they sought not to destroy the wealth around them because, in many cases, it was their own and when they took the reins of power they could fall back more on their reasoned experience than rage.
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