#53: Why Did The American Revolution Not Lead to a Dictatorship?

With only one exception, every revolution since 1776 has led either directly or indirectly to a dictatorship. The sole exception, of course, is the first one, the American Revolution. And it is not as if there have not been a fair number of revolutions since then. This prompts (NOT “begs”!!!) two questions: 1) why is it that revolutions lead to dictatorships?, and 2) why was the American Revolution an exception to this rule? I’ll take these two questions in order.

That revolutions should regularly lead to dictatorships is prima facie counter-intuitive. After all, revolutions are by definition “mass” actions and one might reasonably expect that masses who are reacting against oppression would not easily submit to further oppression. It seems odd, therefore, on the face of it, that revolutions should ever, much less regularly, lead to dictatorships. So, why have they led to dictatorships? I look for an answer to this puzzle in the notion of “anomie,” whose concept and whose term was first introduced into the intellectual lexicon by Emile Durkheim (April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917).

We find societal anomie whenever existing norms are suddenly and violently rejected. Durkheim introduced the idea when dealing with the phenomenon of individual suicide, but I want here to extend it so as to apply also to whole populations who suddenly reject their entire cultures. For that is what revolution leading to dictatorship has always involved; not merely the rejection of a system of power relations, but a rejection of the entire culture that was host to those power relations.

The French 18^th C, for example, began its rejection of its own Christian theological past in the 17^th C, in the work of Rene Descartes, but also arguably earlier in the work of Galileo Galilei. But the real fruit of these rejectionist impulses was not to be fully ripe until the 18^{th c}, the “high” Enlightenment. And it is only in the late 18^th C in France, of course, that we find the bloody, deranged societal paroxysm called the French Revolution (1787), whose character was totally determined by the new faith of “reason,” whose role it was to quite literally replace Christianity in France. Christopher Hitchens mentions that there was a move afoot to make an actual divinity of Reason and that it was to be worshipped as such under the new regime (though he doesn’t give a reference). The revolutionary French hoped to found a “brave new world” on the foundation of a new state religion of “reason.”

What the post revolutionary French actually found was anomie, a kind of norm vacuum into which flooded every previously repressed murderous, sadistic, atavistic, savage human impulse. Marx told the workers of the world that they had nothing to lose but their chains – he didn’t mention that those chains also kept their most anti-social cravings under control. The ancien culture being rejected in the French Revolution was actually the internalized superego of which Freud was to write over a hundred years later. When cultural norms (the superego) are rejected, the individual is left only with two resources: a mass of unfiltered impulses, on the one hand, and reason, on the other. Unfortunately, reason is hardly competent against the power of impulse, since reason as such contains no values with which to keep the excesses of impulse at bay. What is required is an internalized system of civilizing intuitions that are carried forward from generation to generation. In other words, a civilizing culture. Contrary to Kant (and later to Rawls), Reason alone is always conditional, never categorical, and cannot yield any guidance whatsoever. Relying only on Reason, without the guidance of civilizing social norms, the French revolution led to bloody chaos, which, in turn, led to Napoleon’s dictatorship.

The same thing happened after the Russian revolution of 1917, which led to the replacement of Tsarist Russia with the new workers’ paradise. It happened after the German revolution of 1918, which led in the short term to the democratic Weimar Republic, but ultimately to Hitler. And it happened after Mao’s takeover of China, which led to the Cultural Revolution in the late sixties. Examples can be multiplied from smaller states, most notably from North Korea and Iran, among others. All of these are or were or became dictatorships.

It’s no accident that all of these revolutions led to dictatorships. Populations relying only on “reason” are easy prey for opportunistic “rational” theories. The reason is that people robbed of their social norms have no intuitions that raise alarms against charismatic leaders spinning “large” and wonderful theories. Sometimes, the revolutions lead directly to dictatorship, sometimes indirectly. Weimar probably had the longest interval of democracy, lasting 15 years (1918–1933), but one could argue that the Russian revolution also had an interlude of democracy, albeit a very short one. There was the “first” revolution of Feb 1917, which was a democratic workers’ revolution, but ultimately also a third one on the following October. The October revolution was emphatically not a “workers’” revolution, it was a classic putsch in which the Bolsheviks assumed absolute power. And with the Bolsheviks came the Cheka and its reign of terror under Felix Dzerzhinsky, the viciously insane Pole of Lubyanka Prison.

And so why did not America follow this same pattern? Why did not America lapse into dictatorship? I believe it is because the American revolutionaries were unique in not rejecting the culture of their oppressors. The American revolutionaries had an issue with taxation, not initially with the British monarchy per se, nor with British traditions. A very large number of the American revolutionaries went only very reluctantly into revolution, forced there by very ham-handed, arrogant, and stupid foreign policy coming from the reign of King George III. The intellectuals who were to be the creators of the new nation acquired their backgrounds and their theories from the accumulated wisdom of Britain and the continent, they were not rejecting all the values and traditions holus bolus of the old world: only monarchy. There was thus no anomie after the revolution, no value vacuum into which a dictatorship could flow. I think it’s as simple as that.

Some very impressive people have been fans of the Enlightenment, the so-called “Age of Reason”. One notable example is Peter Gay, a polymath of a writer with a major biography of Freud to his credit as well as numerous books on the Enlightenment as well as on the Weimar Republic. Though his interests are broad, they are actually instructively linked. He is, whether he knows it or not, an enthusiast of anomie, the state of “normlessness.”

While Durkheim thought of anomie as a kind of social-psychological “illness,” there are those who actually admire the condition without recognizing precisely what it is. I think that Gay and the multitude of Enlightenment admirers are exactly like this. They admire the Enlightenment for its many achievements, but fail to recognize the price that was paid for them and continues to be paid.

Writers like Gay appreciate the artistic and intellectual flourishing that sometimes occurs when anomie is (briefly) married to democracy. Normlessness is indeed a kind of freeing and thus does encourage creativity. My friend T.L. brought it to my attention that Thomas Kuhn's thesis in The Structure of Scientific Revolution is precisely that scientific revolutions occur when there exists a norm vacuum of the kind I have been describing. It is, perhaps, anomie that torments Ivan in the Brothers Karamazov and what he means when he asserts that if there is no God, then virtue does not exist (attributed to him by Smerdyakov). I think there is some truth in this, though not a literal one.

It isn’t the death of God that is freeing, it is the death of a system of authoritative norms in which God was understood to have a place. But, as Sartre tiresomely insisted, this freedom comes at a price: it is a “dreadful” freedom. The reason is not really that if there is no God, then everything is permitted, it is rather that if the belief in God has died, then there is no limit to what people will allow themselves to do.

But, most important, what is also means is that a freedom acquired at the price of a civilizing culture is most of all a vulnerability to specious theoretical populist narratives that lead directly or indirectly into the murderous maw of dictatorship. Thus, the freedom acquired from revolution is indeed a dreadful, terrible freedom that carries an appalling cost.