Tuesday 15 July 2008

The French Revolution: good or bad?

At the Austrian Economists blog Frederic Sautet asks Should We Celebrate the French Revolution? A good question. Sautet writes
Today is Bastille Day (la FĂȘte Nationale, as the French say), the celebration of the beginning of the French revolution in 1789. Most French people and many others outside France, have a good opinion of the revolution and its legacy for the history of the world. It is fascinating that they remain blind to the negative impact it has had on the development of political and economic ideas in the West. The French Revolution spread the wrong ideas about individualism, promoted statism, and perverted the concept of liberty.
Sautet continues
The French revolution was the primary event that gave social reformers and progressives the idea that societies can be designed by the human mind. In contrast, the "true" individualistic tradition discussed in Hayek’s Individualism: True and False is one of "humility toward the processes by which mankind has achieved things which have not been designed or understood by any individuals and are indeed greater than individual minds."
He adds a warning from Hayek
Following the Hayekian view, should we think that all revolutions are bad? Hayek warned us: "While it may not be difficult to destroy the spontaneous formations which are the indispensable bases of a free civilization, it may be beyond our power deliberately to reconstruct such a civilization once these foundations are destroyed."
Sautet ends by saying
Perhaps we should conclude that some revolutions will always be necessary not as tools for social rebuilding, but as remedies against the excesses of the state. In other words, Hayekian revolutions may be desirable, not Jacobin ones. That's how we should commemorate the day the Bastille was destroyed.
This does raise the question, Can we control the state so that "remedies against the excesses of the state" are not needed? Or are we doomed to be forever suffering the excesses of government no matter how are try to constrain it?

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