“[W]e, near the end of the twentieth century, ought to recognize that the ideology of the so-called Enlightenment has proven largely outdated, that it has little to teach us. Much of the mechanical and of the educational philosophy, many of the institutions of the eighteenth century are now hopelessly antiquated, which is why so many of the institutions of the United States have become arteriosclerotic. Two hundred years after its birth the United States has been unable to avoid the degeneration of many of the vital vessels of its political and legal and administrative and educational institutions, the kind of degeneration that brought the states of Europe to their decay. In Adams’s time, in Tocqueville’s time, the United States was ahead of Europe — paradoxically because it was behind Europe. Bureaucratization and centralization has not yet affected its vitals, at least not during the first hundred years of its existence. During the last hundred years America and Europe became more alike; in many ways Americans caught up with the worst habits of Europeans. Within this devolution lies the portent of the dreary possibility which even Tocqueville did not state in the following terms, though he did recognize its meaning on occasion: for it is quite possible that in the history of mankind the democratic period may have been an episode, in some cases so brief as to be nearly illusory, and that the age of aristocracy is followed not by the age of democracy but by the age of bureaucracy.

“This is a universal phenomenon. The danger for the American resides in the historical condition that he has fewer defenses during the passing of the Modern Age than many Europeans have. Nothing in history passes away completely. The European man, as Ortega y Gasset once wrote, ‘has been “democratic,” “liberal,” “absolutist,” “feudal,” but he no longer is. This does not mean . . . that he does not in some way continue being all these things; he does so in the “form of having been them.”’ Most Americans, on the other hand, have been only democratic, their country and their society having been born in the eighteenth century — I repeat, in the middle of the Modern Age. Therein lies the danger: for the most painful and violent troubles of society are wont to occur near the end of an age, because it is then that masses of people are constrained to change their minds about essentials; and — all of the prevalent materialist conceptions of human life to the contrary — people will a thousand times more easily discard their material goods than change their essential beliefs, not to speak of their ways of thinking.”

— from John Lukacs, A New Republic: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 2004), an updated edition of Outgrowing Democracy (Doubleday and Company, 1984)

Related reading and listening

Tags: