The Remaining Western Illusion
by
TED MCALLISTER
Lies, Passions and Illusions: The Democratic Imagination in the Twentieth Century -
by François Furet.
By his own admission François Furet was a Tocquevillian. The label is important and elusive and, for a historian (and Furet was a leading French historian), a peculiar challenge when confronting the historical rise of a “passion for the universal.” He must confront the causes and sources of this passion, explain the resulting evil of “democratic universalism,” and do this without slipping into his own species of universalism. The historian brings to subjects like this a skepticism and sense of limits borne of his devotion to a granulated account of the past. To be Tocquevillian, however, is to find persuasive a rather sweeping and theoretical claim about a turn in human history—a transformation in the governing assumptions and desires of the West, if not of humanity. The democratic “passion for the universal” marked a new era.
A great many people in both France and America wear Tocqueville’s badge while legions more strip-mine his work for useful epigrams. In America particularly, our civic discourse is littered with Tocqueville’s quotations of a sort that conceal his ominous claims about the direction of history. For an American the dark prognostications of democratic universalism might look like another species of the Continental penchant for grand synthesis—even, perhaps, a gnostic claim about the end of history.
From the post-Communist French perspective, however, Tocqueville’s historical argument about the triumph of democratic universalism looks more self-evident—the real interpretive dividing line being between those who treat Tocqueville’s fears as issuing from aristocratic alienation and those who see in his warnings the defining characteristics of modern totalitarianism. Furet has belonged to both sides of this divide, but he died on the right side.
Lies, Passions, and Illusions: The Democratic Imagination in the Twentieth Century is a slim volume published seventeen years after Furet’s death. He is probably best known for his magisterial works on the French Revolution and for his sharp critique of the Annales School of history. He began his adult life and his professional career as a Marxist who saw historical development in terms of material conditions and class struggle. His break with Marxism meant a break with materialism and a new career devoted to understanding the imagination, ideas, passions, and human experiences that shape and give direction to history.
A great many people in both France and America wear Tocqueville’s badge while legions more strip-mine his work for useful epigrams. In America particularly, our civic discourse is littered with Tocqueville’s quotations of a sort that conceal his ominous claims about the direction of history. For an American the dark prognostications of democratic universalism might look like another species of the Continental penchant for grand synthesis—even, perhaps, a gnostic claim about the end of history.
From the post-Communist French perspective, however, Tocqueville’s historical argument about the triumph of democratic universalism looks more self-evident—the real interpretive dividing line being between those who treat Tocqueville’s fears as issuing from aristocratic alienation and those who see in his warnings the defining characteristics of modern totalitarianism. Furet has belonged to both sides of this divide, but he died on the right side.
Lies, Passions, and Illusions: The Democratic Imagination in the Twentieth Century is a slim volume published seventeen years after Furet’s death. He is probably best known for his magisterial works on the French Revolution and for his sharp critique of the Annales School of history. He began his adult life and his professional career as a Marxist who saw historical development in terms of material conditions and class struggle. His break with Marxism meant a break with materialism and a new career devoted to understanding the imagination, ideas, passions, and human experiences that shape and give direction to history.
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