Radical progeny: The tale of two revolutions

A number of readers have wondered why we have wasted so much ink on all this philosophical mumbo jumbo. What is the point of the philosophical ruminations of some thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries who had little connection with or influence on the vast majority of the ordinary people of their times. Well, as has been noted earlier, "Ideas have consequences." Former Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick added, "And good ideas have good consequences and bad ideas have bad consequences."

In his introduction to the Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, professor Alan Kors defines the Enlightenment as "a set of tendencies and developments of European culture from the 1670s to the early nineteenth century (including in the American outposts of that culture)." Nevertheless, when most people think of the Enlightenment, they think primarily of the French Enlightenment and its direct result, the French Revolution.

In her book, "The Roads to Modernity, the British, French, and American Enlightenments," noted American historian Gertrude Himmelfarb takes direct aim at the notion that there was a single Enlightenment. In particular, she seeks to redefine the Enlightenment to embrace at least two Enlightenments, each of which had important and very different consequences for systems of government and how we live our lives today. "For the past two centuries, the paradigm of popular revolution, like the paradigm of the Enlightenment, has been that of France. 'The sad truth of the matter' Hannah Arendt has said, 'is that the French Revolution, which ended in disaster, has made world history, while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful, has remained an event of little more than local importance.'"

One of the sharpest disputes between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson was over the relative merits of the French Revolution and its relation, if any, to the ongoing American Revolution. Notwithstanding the great efforts of modern day revisionists to take God out of the American Revolution, John Adams, consistent with his fellow founders, regarded the American Revolution as "founded entirely in the Christian doctrine that we are all children of the same father, all accountable to him for our conduct to one another." The disaster of the French Revolution, in Adams' mind, was its complete rejection of the reality of a God-ordained system of human liberty. "If the empire of superstition and hypocrisy should be overthrown, happy indeed will it be for the world; but if all religion and all morality should be overthrown with it, what advantage will be gained?" ("John Adams" by David McCullough)