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Merker: Rousseau's Invention of the Revolutionary Radical
In his Perishing Promise, Bjorn Merker develops an understanding of the West, “divided down the middle by an ideational watershed” of a reformist Enlightenment versus a revolutionary Enlightenment.
I have boiled this down in my Maxims to Liberty vs. Liberté, and Equality vs. Egalité:
Anglo culture: Liberty is the right to be left alone by government, to live life as we have always lived it.
Continental culture: Liberté stands opposed to tradition in the emancipatory overthrow of the present way of life.Anglo culture: Equality means the ancient rights and liberties of Englishmen, and nobody is above the law.
Continental culture: Egalité means substantive equality. No social distinctions except to support the common good.
Rousseau was the guy that really set up the Continental revolutionary tradition, and “man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” It’s the secular analog to the Fall of Man. Only now it’s all the fault of society, not the fallen man. So Rousseau produced a “universal alibi.”
[A]nyone experiencing a lack of satisfaction with their lives… [could] treat their condition as one for which they bore no responsibility but which instead could be laid at the feet of “society”.
Thus society robs the frustrated individual of “a happiness they would have enjoyed by virtue of their nature.” Obviously there is only one thing to do: overthrow the society that has frustrated you.
The curious thing is that Rousseau wants to solve the frustration of the individual by the force of a societal “general will” that instinctively works to advance the “common good”. And how does this happen? Through the “great soul of the legislator”. And who is that “great soul”?
We know now. It is the Rousseau, or Marx, or Lenin, or Mao, or devoted activist that knows he holds the secret of the general will and common good in his soul and has the talent to express it. So what’s the difference between this “great soul” and the monster soul encoding in capitalists, robber barons, economic royalists and billionaires? Never mind. Anyway:
[T]he fasle alibi of Rousseau’s stance of blaming “society” (“civilization”) for his own subjective discomforts, combined with his totalitarian collectivist prescription for a cure, supplied the modern world with a permanent gate of recruitment to the banner of the partisans of overthrow[.]
No doubt our present generation of woke DSA kiddies exactly fits the mould. Encouraged by their woke university teachers and emboldened by the lack of completion in their young lives, the answer to their woes is obvious. Burn it all down.
For us, the point about Rousseau is that he helps us understand the revolutionary radical. He interprets his feeling of failure, of inadequacy, as the fault of society. If our radical feels he is in chains, because of lack of tenure, or lack of material success, it cannot be his fault, born free. It must be the chains that did it.
Interestingly, to me, Rousseau wants to understand the “general will” as magically imposed by a great soul. But anyone with half a brain understands that the “general will” is worked out every day in the market economy by the communication between buyer and seller in the price system. And the millions of transactions between millions of actors is what works out the “common good.” That is why we say that humans are social animals.
But that is the last thing that the educated sons of businessmen (Engels) or tippy-top lawyers (Marx) are willing to admit.
It’s obvious that the feeling of inadequacy is a fundamental experience of human life, whether it’s the feeling of Sin, that it’s all your own fault, or the feeling of injustice, that it’s all society’s fault.
And it seems there are two solutions. One is to build yourself up, despite discouragement and, willy-nilly, make yourself into a worthy person and contribute to society. The other is to build yourself up by destroying society.
With the example of Rousseau, Bjorn Merker helps us understand how the two solutions to the problem of inadequacy present themselves to people in the modern world.
| Thu, 13 Aug 2026 01:34:03 GMT |
Merker: Creating Two Enlightenments from One Christendom
Christianity as developed by the Catholic Church, writes Bjorn Merker in Perishing Promise, was founded on two bases: the reason of Plato & Co. and the saving sacrifice of Christ. With the recovery of Aristotle’s realism it turned out that things were not so simple. And that was just the start.
As the second Millennium progressed, the Renaissance humanists, while Christian, obtained an access and familiarity with texts of other religions and philosophies.
Christianity started to appear as one of many ancient religions… [with its] truth and “wisdom”… diluted by a willingness to recognize genuine value in other traditions.
Scholars started to discover errors and discrepancies in the various sacred texts, and the Donation of Constantine, the basis of papal power, was exposed as a forgery. It began to seem that the Christian faith was a product of history. And then began the wars of religion, from the German Peasants’ War beginning in 1524 to the Thirty Years War ending in 1648. Not to mention Gutenberg and his press in 1440.
Renaissance thinking developed the idea of the “dignity of man” and the notion of mankind occupying a middle ground between the divine and the animals. Instead of mankind in a state of sin needing the salvation of Christ, it seemed that humans were capable of an ascent of the soul towards divinity, drawing on individual and cultural “works of creativity.” Maybe mankind could understand the world by deciphering the Creator’s “book of nature,” the “rational order and harmony which has been imposed on [the world] by God”.
Then there was the dramatic expansion of the scope and possibilities of the world by the age of discovery, and the skeptic movement in the mid 16th century and “the uncertainty of all claims to knowledge, from science to religion.
The uncertainty of skepticism could be resolved by a resort to faith. Or a corpus of knowledge.
[Thus] Western philosophy acquired a long-term goal and agenda; that of arriving at a basis of certainty from which to overcome the crisis of skeptical doubt.
Thus we come into the age of Euclid, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibnitz, Gassendi.
But then came Newton, whose “mechanics created a ‘god-free zone’” from our domestic experience on Earth “to the ends of the solar system and beyond”. And he inspired thinkers to vault out of physical mechanism to the question of “human affairs, relations, and institutions”, in other words, a “science of man.” It gave rise to the concepts that we are squabbling over to this very day: “social contract”, “human nature”, “common sense of mankind”, “natural laws.”
On the Continent, this thinking led to the idea of revolution. Thus Robespierre, “convinced of the necessity of bringing about a complete regeneration… creating a new people.” And all who have followed him were able “to weather its failure with their revolutionary faith intact.”
But there was another strain in the Enlightenment, the “British” one. And the contrast can be understood by a comparison of Liberty and Equality.
In the British concept, Liberty is the right “to be left alone by government, to live life as they had always lived it.” In the Continental version liberté “stood opposed to tradition… It became identified with the dynamic of emancipatory overthrow… [of] an entire way of life.
In the British concept, Equality refers to the “ancient rights and liberties of Englishmen,” and nobody, “the king in particular, is ‘above the law’”. In the French concept egalité means that “social distinctions may be based only on considerations of the common good.” Equal treatment under the law versus “substantive equality.”
Thus the West arrived at a post-Christian culture “divided down the middle by an ideational watershed.”
On the one hand there is a more concrete, every-day, and reformist Enlightenment of the British Isles and America… and on the other, a more abstract emancipatory and revolutionary Enlightenment[.]
Building a life between these clashing ideologies is “a risky enterprise” as we can see in the aftermath of the Two Enlightenments.
More to come.
| Wed, 12 Aug 2026 01:19:04 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Lefties created the two greatest slave societies in history. In one century.
Hitler is the idiot you get when the usual idiots have screwed up.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: The Reality of Policing
