The political experiments, disasters, and successes—as well as the theories—produced in Europe between 1789 and 1848 remain extraordinarily relevant. The terms in which we criticize the E.U.’s bureaucratic politics or describe the populist politics of Poland, Hungary, or Italy would not have been alien to a statesman, aristocrat, or revolutionary leader from the early nineteenth century. However much this political language has mutated, and despite its contemporary trappings, we in the West are still speaking in a tongue created by the Enlightenment and the major revolutions it ignited. Presentism misleads its disciples into believing that our debates over technology and technocracy, public and private power, or collective and individual will, for example, are not merely repackaged forms of ancient and early-modern questions. The vulgar stream of alarmism (coming from the left and the right) in fact depends on lack of historical depth perception.
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