How leftism emerged from the French and German versions of the Enlightenment. By Stehen Soukop in American Greatness.
In truth, the Enlightenment can be divided into four segments:
- the English Enlightenment, led by men like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Isaac Newton;
- the French Enlightenment, which featured Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau;
- the Scottish Enlightenment, highlighting Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Dugald Stewart; and
- the German Enlightenment, the irresistible force of which was Immanuel Kant.
All segments of the Enlightenment shared certain characteristics — a break (of varying extremities) from the moral foundations of civilizational history up to that point, a preoccupation with reason as a guiding moral and intellectual force, and a belief in the authority of carefully ordered empiricism.
Differences:
- The English and the Scottish Enlightenments focused on reform, gradualism, and the advancement of existing institutions.
- The French Enlightenment and the Kantian-led German Enlightenment, by contrast, were radical, focused on universalism, and on the destruction rather than the reform of institutions. …
Rubio’s address to the Munich Security Conference two weeks ago pretended that the Entitlement was a single thing, and overlooked their common origin:
In the micro sense, Rubio was … mistaken about Europe being the site where “the ideas that planted the seeds of liberty that changed the world were born.” Those ideas were, in fact, born thousands of years previously, not in Europe, but in ancient Israel.
The English and the Scottish Enlightenments, which influenced many aspects of the American Revolution and its founding documents, did not break entirely from these historical influences. They updated them and modified their language, adding additional flair, but they nevertheless maintained the moral and political ideas that had animated the West for millennia. For example, one can draw a fairly straight line from Jeremiah 1:5—“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you”—through Sophocles’s Antigone to Cicero’s De Legibus; through Augustine’s De Trinitate to Aquinas’s Summa; through Locke’s Two Treatises of Government to Jefferson’s declaration that it is self-evident “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The seeds of liberty that changed the world, in short, were not planted in Europe. They were planted in the ancient Middle East, cultivated in the Mediterranean, harvested in Britain, and shipped to the nascent United States. This sequence of moral and intellectual stewardship matters immeasurably. …
Europe lost the seed of liberty because it’s version of the Enlightenment went left:
The principal philosophical and political influence on the continental branch of Western civilization was and is inarguably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the intellectual godfather of “the Left” and, in my estimation, the designer of the “modern world.” …
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and political theorist. He introduced the concept of the general will — a collective will aimed at the common good. He argued that legitimate political authority arises from a social contract where individuals collectively agree to surrender some freedoms in exchange for protection and equality. Rousseau claimed that humans are naturally good and free, but society — particularly the institution of private property — corrupts them, fostering competition, pride, and inequality. This breaks with the Christian notion of original sin (which expresses the biological truth that we are a human cortex on top of a mammalian brain on top of a selfish reptilian ancient brain) and the empirical observation that societies that don’t respect private property are always poor.
In brief: Rousseau offered “the West” a social contract that was almost entirely opposite to that synthesized by Locke and favored by the American Founders. Rousseau’s Social Contract rests on the idea that the state exists to guarantee the liberty of the individual, and that this liberty can only be expressed and understood within the context of something called the “general will” of the people. … It empowers small and radical factions to govern as if they represent the will of the entire people, as if the “general will” and nothing more guides their actions. Additionally — and, perhaps, more importantly — it allows them to do whatever they want in defense of this general will, as Rousseau himself recommended …
When French president Emmanuel Macron declares that “free speech is pure bullsh*t,” he is articulating, in his own puerile way, the Rousseauian influence on the continental understanding of freedom. Similarly, German law mandates Sozialpflichtigkeit (that property ownership be tempered by a social obligation), which is Rousseau’s “general will” and disdain for private property, filtered through Hegel and historicist economists like Gustav von Schmoller. And most tragically, when Keir Starmer’s government arrests grannies for tweeting unacceptable memes, it is demonstrating Britain’s loss of faith in its intellectual traditions and its acceptance of continental influences in their stead.
There lies exposed the leftist trick: A small radical group claims it is implementing the “general will” of the people, and in the traditions of the French and German Enlightenment that is sufficient to justify leadership — and whatever it takes to gain and retain power.
But Christain and the Anglo traditions says no, individuals and private property must be respected, and you need elections to ratify policy.
