To what do these intellectuals desert? To another and better world than that of the corrupt and inefficient old regimes. From a thousand pens and voices there are built up in the years before the revolution actually breaks out what one must now fashionably call the foundations of the revolutionary myth--or folklore, or symbols, or ideology. Some such better world of the ideal is contrasted with this immediate and imperfect world in all the ethical and religious systems under which Western men have lived, and notably in Christianity. It is not quite accurate to assert that for medieval Christianity the other, ideal world is safely put off to heaven. Yet it is clear that with the Reformation and the Renaissance men began to think more earnestly about bringing part of heaven, at any rate, to this earth. What differentiates this ideal world of the revolutionaries from the better world as conceived by more pedestrian persons is a flaming sense of the immediacy of the ideal, a feeling that there is something in all men better than their present fate, a conviction that what is, not only ought not, but need not, be.
We shall later meet these revolutionary ideals in their fully developed forms. Here we need only notice that in the writings and preachings of the English Puritans--and to a lesser extent the constitutional lawyers--in those of the eighteenth-century _philosophes_, in those of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Marxists, the evil, and indeed illegitimate existing regime is very effectively contrasted with the good, and indeed inevitable, rule of right to come. In England, America, and in France, the essential principle to which men appealed against present conditions was Nature, with its clear and simple laws. Ship Money in England, Stamp Act in America, patents of nobility in France, were all contrary to the law of Nature. Even in England and America, where there was also much appeal to rights to be found in Magna Charta or the common law, the final appeal was always to a law of Nature “engraved in the hearts of men.” As the Puritan Henry Parker wrote in England, the common courts were “furnished only with rules of particular justice, which rules being too narrow for so capacious a subject [the relation of Crown to People] we must refer to those that the original laws of Nature hold out to us.” By the eighteenth century this kind of language had become almost universal among intellectuals. That Nature always counseled what the intellectuals in revolt wanted is an observation we must in these days feel bound to make. It seems likely, however, that for most of those who appealed to her Nature was as definite and explicit as God had once been, and as dialectical materialism was to be.
For the Russian writers and agitators of the Czarist regime, Nature did not play so prominent a part. Not that Nature is lacking in the pages of Tolstoy and his fellows, and the contrast between “artificial” society and “natural” instincts was not disdained even in Socialist propaganda. But the official ideology of most of the Russian radicals was Marxism, and Marxism finds that the existence of capitalists, the rule of the bourgeoisie, is altogether natural. Only, its destruction by the proletariat is also natural, and this destruction is determined by forces quite beyond capitalistic control. The inevitable march of economic forces would then for the Marxists accomplish what the English Puritan expected from God and the French _philosophe_ from Nature and Reason. The essential thing all these pre-revolutionary agitators have in common, the essential ingredient, intellectually at least, in the revolutionary myth, is this abstract, all-powerful force, this perfect ally.
One special point is here worth our attention for a moment. Not only does God, Nature, or dialectical materialism make the victory of the present under-dog certain. The present upper-dog can be shown--perhaps for propaganda purposes _must_ be shown--to have acquired his preponderance by an accident, or a particularly dirty trick, while God or Nature was temporarily off duty. Thus in the English revolution the royalists and indeed the gentry as a whole were labeled “Normans,” descendants of a group of foreign invaders with no right to English soil. John Lilburne, the Leveller, goes so far as to assert that the whole common law was a badge of slavery imposed upon the free people of England by the Norman Conquest. American hatred of absentee British government hardly needed such artificial fanning. The French were told by no less a person than Siéyès that all their trouble came from the usurpations of the Franks over a thousand years ago. French nobleman in 1789 were descendants of barbarous Germans, while French commoners were descendants of civilized Gauls and Romans. Revolution was but restoring the conditions of 450 A.D. Marxism explained the exploiting class without recourse to such pseudo-historical notions. And yet there is plenty of reference in Russian revolutionary agitation to the usurpation of land by the nobles, to their Varangian, or Tartar, or Western, or at any rate foreign origins.
Finally, a great deal of energy has been expended on the question as to whether this revolutionary ideology “causes” revolutionary action, or whether it is merely a sort of superfluous decoration with which the revolutionists cover their real acts and real motives. Most of this discussion is in the highest degree futile, since it is based on a crude notion of causation altogether untenable in fruitful scientific work beyond a very simple level. There is no more point disputing whether Rousseau made the French revolution or the French revolution made Rousseau than in disputing whether egg or chicken came first. We note that in our pre-revolutionary societies the kind of discontents, the specific difficulties about economic, social and political conditions that hard-boiled moderns focus on are invariably accompanied by a very great deal of writing and talking about ideals, about a better world, about some very abstract forces tending to bring about that better world. It is, indeed, the _expression_ of ideas, rather than particular ideas--which may vary enormously in different revolutions--that makes the uniformity. We find that ideas are always a part of the pre-revolutionary situation, and we are quite content to let it go at that. No ideas, no revolution. This does not mean that ideas _cause_ revolutions. It merely means that they form part of the mutually dependent variables we are studying.
_IV. Classes and Class Antagonisms_
Certain groups in our four societies of the old regimes nourished feelings of dislike, mixed or unmixed with contempt, for other groups. If we avoid the narrow economic connotations of the term, we may call these groups classes; if we realize the struggle was not simply one between two contending classes, feudal vs. bourgeois or bourgeois vs. proletariat, we may even speak of class struggles. This type of struggle in one form or another seems as endemic as many other kinds of violence in the stablest of Western societies. Here again we must not postulate for the normal society with which we contrast our pre-revolutionary societies, a lying down together of the lion and the lamb. But even so, it will soon appear that these class hatreds are stepped up, exacerbated in a noticeable degree in the old regimes. Class distinctions are seen, not as barriers the clever, brave, or ambitious can cross, but as unnatural and unjust privileges, established by wicked men against the express intention of Almighty God, Nature, or Science. These class struggles are by no means simple duels; there are groups within groups, currents within currents. We must try and analyze some of these currents.
In the first place, what may be called the ruling class seems in all four of our societies to be divided and inept. By ruling class we understand, it may be too generously, the people who run things, the people in the public eye--the politicians, the important civil servants, the bankers, the men of affairs, the great landowning nobles, the officers, the priesthood, perhaps even some of the intellectuals. Formal nobility of the blood has in the Western world usually been a much too narrow test of membership in a ruling class. Even in early modern times, the ruling class was something like what we have outlined above, the minority of men and women who seemed to lead dramatic lives, about whom the more exciting scandals arose, who set the fashion, who had wealth, position, or at least reputation, who, in short, ruled. Indeed, in a socially stable society it seems likely that the great masses of poor and middling folk, as also the obscure and unsuccessful people who by birth and training might seem to be in the ruling class, really accept the leadership of those at the top of the social pyramid, and dream rather of _joining_ them than of _dislodging_ them.
Now the ruling classes in our societies seem, and not simply _a posteriori_ because they were in fact overthrown, to have been unsuccessful in fulfilling their functions. It is unlikely that short of Sparta or Prussia the simpler military virtues alone are enough for a ruling class. Such a class ought not, however, to shrink from the use of force to maintain itself, and it ought not to value wit and originality in its own members too highly. Wit, at any rate, it can usually hire adequately enough from other sources. A mixture of the military virtues, of respect for established ways of thinking and behaving, and of willingness to compromise, is probably an adequate rough approximation of the qualities of a successful ruling class--qualities clearly possessed by the Romans of Punic War times, and the English of the eighteenth century, though the latter failed in relations with America.