A Deep Dive into Jacques Ellul's "Autopsy of Revolution" pt. 2: The Rational Bourgeoisie State.
The rise of the bourgeoisie demanded a rational society. In their hands, revolution is transformed into a force for a positive future as instantiated in the modern rational state.
Ellul argues that the French Revolution marked not so much a transformation in France, although it was that; rather it brought a change to the entire West. It was decisively influential on Karl Marx, who made it a paradigm through which he wanted us to understand all of human history. 1789 marked the division between the old kind of revolution and the new kind of revolution which took shape in the mind of Marx. But his thinking is not something which occurred in a vacuum. Marx was giving expression to currents within the culture brought about by the rise of the bourgeoisie. Let’s look at these changes.
To begin this discussion, Ellul draws on the thinking of Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just, a key player in the French Revolution, an organizer and thinker. Saint-Just says this:
“Passion is the soul of liberty; in time it withers and fades forever, for we are only virtuous once…when a liberated people has established sound laws, its revolution is achieved.” L’Esprit de la Revolution 1791
Saint-Just argued that if liberty prevails it must become corrupted. The passion for liberty would remove all restraint and in so doing it would destroy liberty. This is vital to understand, argues Ellul. This move from an outburst of liberty to its institutionalization must necessarily result in the undermining of liberty itself. This, he asserts, is why Hanna Arendt’s understanding of revolution is flawed, because she confuses liberty with with the institutions which are supposedly set up to safeguard liberty, at the heart of which are organizing documents like the Constitution. Ellul argues that once instituted, these structures and frameworks essentially kill off the liberty won through the revolt, but in so doing prevents the revolt from consuming and destroying society. As we noted in part one, this betrayal of the revolution is essential for the success of the revolution. It is one of the fundamental contradictions in the concept of “the revolution.”
Up to the time of French Revolution it must be seen that revolutions were primarily conservative, reactionary, a revolt against history. In the process of the French Revolution the myth began to emerge that a new world could be obtained without new men. All that would be required was new institutions. All that would be needed to change the life of the nation would be a new plan to be instantiated in a new state. It would be enough simply to declare that there was a new republic with a new constitution. This fact alone would usher in a new era of liberty and well-being for the whole of society.
We have to see that this was part of the “conservatism” of the French Revolution (And the American Revolution as well. We must remember that Ellul is a French author and his focus is often first of all close to home). The revolution was a desire to return to nature, to first principles, to go back to the beginning and re-found society on a basis that was uncorrupted by all the intervening history. Everything needed a fresh start. It would be a return to a new beginning, a more authentic foundation for society. At the time, the aim was to take people back to the pure beginning of which we had lost sight.
In this regard, traditionalists actually get in the way. In order to get back to the primal beginning, the true, pure first order, those that cling to what is here today must be swept away. If they will not yield, it must be that these traditionalists lack true virtue. They must have ill intents. Therefore, in order to uphold the principle that the pure law reigns supreme—equitably and impartially giving justice to all—any who dared to cling to tradition would have to be eliminated. Those who prevented the return to the dawn of the pure society, who embodied tradition, had to be swept aside. Of the American Revolution, in this regard, Ellul says this:
“Chief among them was the American Revolution. The single goal of which was to correct the abuses of the colonial government. Paine…only wanted to return to an era before men had been dispossessed of their rights and freedoms.”
So while the revolutions of this time were essentially conservative in their desire to return to a fresh first beginning, they reached to the tool of reason in order give their vision shape. This attachment to reason was an expression of the reality that all the revolutions of this era were accomplished by the bourgeoisie.
A case could be made that the bourgeoisie were the first revolutionary class in history. As a broad group one of their strengths was their vast managerial talent. They had the capacity to design, create and develop a vision of a future society based upon “first principles.” It must be acknowledged that without the bourgeoisie there would have been no movement beyond revolt in either America or France. These revolutions marked a change in the concept of revolution. Though they followed the normal pattern of a revolt against history, their aspirations were to advance society towards its absolute betterment. In the desire to reach back to first principles, they did so with the intent of creating history. Ellul argues this emerges out of the inherent nature of the bourgeoisie themselves. As a group they are both conservative and revolutionary.
Liberty as an ideal was merely an alibi to advance bourgeoisie interests. As a class, a group with aligned interests within society, they were overwhelmingly rational, progressive and pragmatic. There was a practical materialism, in that they focused on dealing primarily with the material world without adornment or metaphysical entanglements. They set aside the old teleological understanding of the world for one of cause and effect. The main actors in the revolutionary spirit were men focused on the practical realities of the material world, not given to speculation or metaphysics. They sought power in order to reconcile political realities with economic realities.
“The bourgeoisie was a rational class and wanted rationality to prevail in every sector, corresponding to its faith in science (and the advent of scientific development) as well as the theory of progress.”
In this sense, the main drivers of revolution at this time were all progressives. “Progress” is the bourgeoisie ideology. Marx merely represents the most radicalized version of this same ideology. Marx is the radical expression of the bourgeoisie desire for human progress. Thus it is the bourgeoisie, including its most radical form in Marx, which typifies the revolutionary impulse as it emerges in this time. As the bourgeoisie came into its own through these revolutions, they did so with an eye to building for the future, a history not yet written. A positive vision which held an optimistic view that tomorrow will be better than today. But there was also an idea that their efforts could bring endless rewards for society without sacrifice. The idea of asceticism or austerity ran counter to the great optimism of the time. Revolution was seen as the way to accelerate this process. By sweeping away the current order, and rebuilding society on first principles, universal ideals, this better future could be more quickly obtained for all.
In this, revolution is no longer the rejection of the intolerable, hopeless present. In the hands of the skilled, managerially minded bourgeoisie, revolution becomes an unstoppable force which will remake the future of society. The cultural idea of human progress, which was expressing itself powerfully through the members of the bourgeoisie class, was thought of as having a kind of inevitability. In this sense, Marx was not so much introducing a new idea, but was giving intellectual expression to a general feeling present in the culture. Marx resonated with people because he drew upon the feelings they already had about themselves and the direction of their society. Progress towards utopia was inevitable. In this sense, argues Ellul, the cultural idea of human progress, and the cultural optimism which gave birth to it, preceded the general idea of “history.”
Ellul directs our attention to the rationalizing influence of the bourgeoisie. It was first and foremost applied to economic relations, the efficient production and distribution of goods and finances. This embrace of rationalism in business, led to greater religious skepticism and a general desire for knowledge, science and technology. Overall, it led to a general rationalization of society as a whole. What this meant in practice is that ideas about society and the general running of things were conceived of abstractly and then applied to society. People began breaking down the components of business, commerce, governance and society, abstracting and rationalizing them and then reapplying them as plans for the betterment of society. Everything about society, from the people, to its institutions, to the idea of liberty itself, shifted from organic, socially embedded, particular things, to ideas that were abstract, conceptual, rational and universal in character. It was under the bourgeoisie that society becomes technologized and rationalized. Ellul draws a direct line from the progressive rationalism active during the period of the French and American Revolutions to the more complete rationalization of society in the modern administrative state. His argument is that once you begin the process of rationalization, it must work itself out to its eventual conclusion: the rationalization of everything.
“Abstraction ultimately embraced the homogeneity of the social organism: one man was the equal of another, whatever the differences in their social status, their power, or their levels of poverty. But a body composed of abstract units required a regulatory agency. The bourgeoisie envisioned the state itself, apart from what form it would assume, as a rationality. … They recognized the desirability of the state: abstract, rigorous, perfectly designed, a supreme authority, dispassionate and impartial, vested neither in perpetually fallible man nor in a too remote deity; precise as a scale, yet simple as a squaring tool; a state that functioned in society as the brain in a human organism—a recurring theme throughout the period.”
Whether it was stated in just these terms or not, the bourgeoisie made the revolution to seize power, but also to institute a transition from an older form of governance to a new form, that of the rational state, so as to achieve at last a well ordered society.
“In the eyes of those masterly bourgeoisie administrators and managers, the unpardonable sin of the old monarchic government was its incoherence and ineffectuality.”
The rationalism of the bourgeoisie merchant and business class required a new form of governance, the rational state. In France, the revolutionaries were not so much bothered by the fact of The Bastille, but that the justice process was irrational, haphazard, without proper due process or established rights. In this sense, a system of high taxation is fine, as long as the system itself is a rational one. The Monarchy, with its long years of service, unwritten laws and embodied traditions is an obstacle to rationality. The transition was slow as the merchant class gained a grip on the levers of power from the decentralized and varied feudal form of governance, to a gradually centralized monarchy, to an absolute monarchy and finally to a rational state but we must see this is a single gradual transition in the style of government necessary to accommodate the needs of the commercial class.
By the time the French and American Revolutions are complete and the new institutions have been put in place, the notion of liberty had shifted from a release from the intolerable situation, to a thing which is mediated through the institutions of the state and its rationality as embodied and symbolized in the Constitution. What is interesting is that the very organically formed institutions which were instrumental in giving birth to the revolt which led to the revolution now became counter-revolutionary nodes of resistance to the rationalized state. The irony is that the apparatus of the state, formerly the means of oppression, now had been transformed into an instrument of liberation. Power, rather than being the enemy of liberty, was seen as its champion and guarantor. Liberty became associated with the institutions of the state and it is this innovation that then developed into modern liberalism.
“It was an extension of the idea that freedom resided in the application of the Constitution. Thus liberty was the victim of both rationalism and an abstraction.”
Because of the centrality of a document like the Constitution in the formation of the new revolutionary reality, it required a state apparatus to administer and properly apply its provisions. The growth of the role of the state in society can be traced back to the rationalization which led to the constitutional solution itself. Rather than guaranteeing the limiting and circumscription of the role of the state in society, in ensured that the state would continue to expand until all aspects of society had been put under rational control.
This rationalization was the unique innovation of the French and American revolutions. Prior to this, the problems of society and governance had not been subject to this kind of abstract rationality. This was change in thinking, from seeing the state as the oppressor—thus liberty being a release from state oppression—to the state as the manager of society’s wellbeing, the guardian of its rights and freedoms. The application of rational solutions to the problem of governance, its structures and forms, marks a turning point in history. From this point forward rebellion and revolution are no longer about liberty, but rather they are preoccupied with social conditions. This is an extension of the rationalized and abstract nature of the revolution itself. The managers were put in charge to develop a system which then began the incremental task of rationalizing the whole of society. In practice, what this means is that to eliminate injustice, it is necessary to establish increasingly oppressive institutions.
“Owing to the event of the revolution, the state assumes the sole responsibility for securing human welfare, for establishing the reign of virtue and for implementing the supreme standards of values.”
Revolution, argues Ellul, because of the essential role of the managers in instantiating the revolutionary plan, tends to place society on the path to totalitarianism. Once they begin the quest to make the revolutionary plan a reality through revolution, they seek to instantiate the revolution’s universal values universally. This embrace of universal values means that the revolution must embrace everything. The nation—or even trans-national entities—as this expression of universal values is now the true religious reality. The state is the instantiation of the divine, the universal, the Forms, the metaphysical, in the life of the society.
Because of this essential religious nature, after the American and French Revolutions, the idea of revolution becomes romanticized, mythologized. It is no longer a means to an end, but an end in and of itself. There is the perpetual revolution, the constant instantiating of the revolutionary plan throughout society. The revolution becomes symbolic of human progress, a glorious dynamic which ushers in these divine universals and makes them a living reality in the laws and institutions of society. But the mythology of revolution could not form without the fact of the revolution. It becomes the decisive event which forms and births society. The revolution requires a functionally secular and progressive society, locked in on the idea of history centered on human beings who cannot be allowed to have refuge in God, and thus must turn to the state and to politics, to the revolutionary, process for escape from the current situation. The state becomes the object of comfort and solace for the masses.
“Thus a progressive outlook, a relatively secular society, and the direct experience of individualism had to manifest themselves, culminating in such faith in progress that the act of revolution represented no more than a pen stroke eliminating every obstacle to progress.”
As the mythology of the revolution grew, it took a waning Christianity and made it historical. The revolution becomes the final judgement, the passing through of which would allow tyranny to be punished, society to be cleansed and regenerated thus preventing sin from ever emerging again. The final judgement of the revolution would establish paradise. Even in its less radical and more staid institutional forms, this is the established end goal of revolutionary thinking and the instantiation of the abstract, rationalized plans of the bourgeoisie managers.
When confronted with the religious nature of revolutionary thinking, whether in its infancy or in the more mature forms which we see today, to break free of the prison of the habits of revolutionary thinking, it is important that we turn away from the historicized rational all encompassing religious presence of the state, towards a transcendent and supernatural God. The same God rejected by the revolutionaries. Our struggle is essentially a religious one.
What is crazy is that this is the exact opposite of how people who consider themselves conservative and friends of the American founding see things. This is the ultimate frame break.