The Roots of Capitalism and Statism in the West

Editor’s note: The following is chapter 4 of Michael Dahlen’s book Ending Big Government: The Essential Case for Capitalism and Freedom (Minneapolis: Mill City Press, 2016). Because this chapter is from a published book, it has not been edited by TOS. Ending Big Government is available in Kindle and paperback formats through Amazon.com.

[Philosophy] . . . determines the destiny of nations and the course of history. It is the source of a nation’s frame of reference and code of values, the root of a people’s character and culture, the fundamental cause shaping men’s choices and decisions in every crucial area of their lives. It is the science which directs men to embrace this world or to seek out some other that is said to transcend it—which directs them to reason or superstition, to the pursuit of happiness or of self-sacrifice, to production or starvation, to freedom or slavery, to life or death. It is the science which made the difference between the East and the West, between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, between the Founding Fathers of the new continent and the Adolf Hitlers of the old. —Leonard Peikoff

Philosophy, as Peikoff points out, moves human history. What does that mean? History is the aggregate of past human actions. How people, nations, and cultures act follows from what they think and believe, from the fundamental values and ideas they choose to accept. Philosophy determines broad trends, not specific events. Chance crises, accidents, and disasters beyond human control undoubtedly affect history. But how a nation responds to its problems follows from its philosophy. Its politico-economic system also follows from its philosophy.

The core values of Western culture are reason and science, individualism and the pursuit of happiness, freedom and representative government. Although the West has failed to apply these ideas consistently, they nevertheless define it. Why? Because such ideas originated in the West and distinguish it from all other cultures. When the West embraced these ideas, it flourished; when it embraced opposite ideas, it languished.

Chapters 2 and 3 outlined the basic philosophies underlying capitalism and statism. This chapter will show the connection between philosophy and politics in practice. It will survey the history of Western civilization, showing that the politico-economic system of a given era followed from the dominant philosophy of that era.

Primitive Man and the First Civilizations of the Ancient Near East

Man’s first approach to understanding the world was unavoidably pre-rational. He had no concept of an inanimate world governed by natural, immutable, impersonal laws. He believed everything—rocks, trees, rivers, mountains—was enchanted or animated with spirits. As historians Henri and H. A. Frankfort point out, when primitive man tried to identify the cause of something, he looked not for the how, but for the who:

He does not expect to find an impersonal law regulating a process. He looks for a purposeful will committing an act. If the rivers [don’t] . . . rise, it is not suggested that the lack of rainfall on distant mountains adequately explains the calamity. When the river does not rise, it has refused to rise. The river, or the gods, must be angry with the people who depend on the inundation.¹

To understand the gods and to understand his place in the world, primitive man invented mythical stories based not on reason and logic, but on emotion and imagination. He also looked to priests, shamans, and witch doctors—those who claimed to communicate with the gods by means of chants, rituals, and incantations—to answer his questions. Primitive man served, obeyed, and worshipped the gods to curry their favor and to gain their protection. One way of serving the gods was to sacrifice humans and animals.

Given his primitive development, man had not yet discovered rational ethical and political principles to guide his social interactions. In dealing with others, he frequently resorted to physical force. A leading cause of death was murder,² and the best-developed skill was war.³ Archeological evidence shows that ancient warfare was twenty times more lethal (adjusted for population) than the wars of the twentieth century.⁴

Primitive man was organized not in states or nations, but in bands, tribes, and chiefdoms. These tribal societies sought to protect their members from the brutality of outsiders, but individuals were not protected from their leader, the tribal chief. Recognizing no rights of the tribe’s members, the tribal chief held life-and-death power over them. They were his subjects, and his right to sacrifice them was unquestioned. The tribal chief’s authority to rule, moreover, was based on his divine descent.⁵

Primitive man led a subsistence-level existence. Because the tribal chief ruled man’s body and because the witch doctor ruled man’s mind, there was no room for the creator and the producer, the scientist and the innovator—those who created wealth and discovered new knowledge.⁶

Fortunately, some thinking individuals, whose identities are unknown, carried mankind forward. Ten thousand years ago they discovered agriculture. Five thousand years ago they built the first civilizations, Egypt and Mesopotamia, in the ancient Near East. These civilizations developed cities, built monumental architecture, and created sophisticated art. They invented the wheel and the sailboat, facilitating long-distance trade. They also made rudimentary advances in mathematics and astronomy. The Sumerians, creators of Mesopotamian civilization, invented a form of writing with pictograms on clay tablets, cuneiform, used mostly for record keeping. The Egyptians developed a similar form of writing, hieroglyphs. Later, the Phoenicians invented the first alphabet. Law codes were also developed, the best known of which was the code of Hammurabi, ruler of the old Babylonian empire.

Despite these achievements, the first civilizations inherited the vices of their tribal predecessors: force and superstition. Warfare was pervasive, slavery became widespread, and religion permeated everything. These cultures viewed reality in the same mythical-magical way that primitive man did. The gods owned the cities, animated the world, and determined all events. In these cultures, human beings existed solely to serve the gods.

Because the authority to rule derived from the gods, the political system that logically followed was theocracy, or divine monarchy. Priests ruled the early Mesopotamian city-states.⁷ Kings succeeded the priests, but they, too, ruled by divine right. In Egypt, the pharaoh was considered a god. In Israel, the Hebrews, the first monotheists, also established a divine monarchy.

The first civilizations could progress only so far. They were held back by their primitive intellectual development. They had no concept of reason, of science, of natural law, of individual rights, of political freedom. Before man could make such discoveries, he had to surpass his pre-rational approach to understanding the world.

The Dawn of Reason and Secular Politics: Ancient Greece and Rome

Ancient Greece was the first civilization to overcome the pre-rational, pessimistic fatalism of the Near East. This shift in vision and temperament began in the eighth century BC with Homer. His epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, widely read throughout antiquity, imbued Greek culture with the values of honor, glory, heroism, and practical intelligence. Homer’s epics also inspired ancient Greek humanism. This was later expressed in other forms of Greek art, from drama to sculpture, depicting human strength, beauty, and nobility.

Homer and another poet, Hesiod, shaped ancient Greek mythology, a mythology essentially different from earlier religions. The Greek gods didn’t create the universe, and they couldn’t override cause and effect. They shared a common ancestry with man, and unlike the Near Eastern gods, they lacked the same unquestioned right of ownership over man.⁸ Greece, consisting of independent city-states, had no established hierarchy, no constituted authority, and no official body of priests to dictate and enforce religious dogma. This intellectual freedom opened the door for reason.

In the sixth century BC, the first philosopher in history, Thales, contemplated the nature of the universe. He asked whether there is one basic principle underlying everything, a primary unifying substance of which all things were made. His answer? Water. Thales’s successors came up with different answers. Anaximenes thought the primary substance was air. Anaximander thought it was “apeiron,” an indeterminate boundless mass. Although their conclusions were wrong, these early philosophers took a momentous step forward in their basic approach. Rather than seeing the world as ruled by gods, they looked for naturalistic explanations. Conceiving the universe as lawful and intelligible, they inaugurated the rudiments of a scientific approach to knowledge. “Nature,” intellectual historian Richard Tarnas points out, “was to be explained in terms of nature itself, not of something fundamentally beyond nature, and in impersonal terms rather than by means of personal gods and goddesses.”⁹

A plethora of original thinkers followed. Heraclitus said everything is change. Parmenides said nothing changes. The Pythagoreans believed “all things are numbers,” that mathematical forms shaped the world. Empedocles said the world consists of four basic elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Democritus said the world consists of countless tiny, indestructible atoms. Then came the Sophists, who argued that because everyone disagrees, everything is relative; therefore, knowledge and certainty are impossible. Opposing the Sophists’ relativism, Socrates championed objective ethical principles. He thought that you must live a moral life to have a healthy soul.

Besides its philosophers, Greece had many scientists. Aristarchus proposed a heliocentric model of the universe in which the earth revolves around the sun. Eratosthenes estimated the circumference of the earth with remarkable accuracy. Euclid developed and codified the science of geometry. Hippocrates, originator of the “Hippocratic Oath,” was the father of medicine. Herodotus carved out the study of history. Another historian, Thucydides, focused mainly on human acts, thus dispensing with the gods as causal, historic agents.

The two intellectual giants of ancient Greece were Plato and Aristotle. Whereas earlier thinkers theorized about isolated topics, Plato and Aristotle formulated complete philosophic systems.

Plato devised an otherworldly philosophy, which was opposed in many ways to the basic spirit of Greek culture. True reality, he said, is a higher, immaterial world of perfect Forms or ideal archetypes. The reality man perceives, by contrast, imperfectly reflects the higher, immaterial world. Real knowledge, therefore, is of the Forms, not the physical world. Such knowledge is gained through deduction, recollection, and mystic insight, not observation. Only an elite group of men, the “philosopher-kings,” can gain knowledge of the Forms. This knowledge entitles them to rule.

Diametrically opposing Plato, Aristotle formulated a worldly philosophy, the pinnacle of classical Greek thought. The world we perceive, he argued, is the only world that exists. The base of knowledge is observation. We must then apply logic, the rules of which Aristotle discovered, to arrive at valid conclusions. We must also follow reason and logic to live virtuously, a precondition of achieving happiness, the ultimate end and purpose of human life.¹⁰

The relative intellectual freedom of Greece fostered the birth of abstract, rational thought. But reason and freedom are reciprocal. Respect for reason led to greater political freedom. Three political leaders—Solon, Cleisthenes, and Pericles—transformed Athens into a democracy. Historian Marvin Perry points out:

Athenian democracy embodied the principle of the legal state—a government based not on force but on laws debated, devised, altered, and obeyed by free citizens. This idea of the legal state could have arisen only in a society that was aware of and respected the rational mind. In the same way that the Greeks demythicized nature, they also removed myth from the sphere of politics.¹¹

Though an improvement over previous systems, the Athenian democracy had its shortcomings. Only adult males were citizens, so only they could vote. The democracy was direct—citizens, not representatives, voted on laws. It was also absolute—without limits on what could be voted for, it often degenerated into mob rule, the tyranny of the majority. (Socrates, for example, was executed for “corrupting the youth” with his ideas.) Despite these flaws, direct democracy surpassed the theocracies of the Near East. In Athens, political authority was based not on divine right, but on human intelligence.

In secularizing art, thought, and politics, classical Greek culture laid the foundations of Western civilization. Its art glorified human virtues. Its philosophy and science showed confidence in reason while brushing myth and religious mysticism aside. As a result, men enjoyed considerable political freedom. Greek culture had several flaws, such as sexism, conquest, and slavery. But in defining the values of reason, freedom, and humanism, it left posterity the tools to combat such flaws.

The Greeks heavily influenced the Romans. Through conquests and territorial expansions, Rome inherited and absorbed Greek ideas. According to historian Jackson Spielvogel, “Virtually every area of Roman life, from literature and philosophy to religion and education, was affected by Greek models.”¹²

Whereas the main Greek achievements were intellectual, the main Roman achievements were legal and political. In 509 BC, the patricians overthrew the Etruscan theocratic monarchy and created a republic. Rather than concentrating power in the king’s hands, they divided power among the consuls, the senate, and the Roman people, represented by assemblies. This division of power ensured checks and balances. In 450 BC, Roman law was codified in the Twelve Tables, posted in the Roman forum for all to see. Besides establishing civil and criminal law, the Twelve Tables protected property rights, enforced contracts, prohibited fraud, and banned government from granting special privileges to individuals.¹³

Politics and religion were at first intertwined in the Roman Republic. They became disentangled, though not completely separated, as the study and interpretation of law passed from priests to professional jurists. This paralleled the Greek achievement of secularizing the political system.¹⁴

Cicero, a statesman and philosopher who popularized Greek thought among the Romans, prominently defended property rights, the rule of law, and the republican form of government. He argued that the man-made laws governing nations should be derived from natural law. In the Roman view, natural law is law embedded in the nature of reality, authored by God yet discernible through reason. Quoting Cicero:

There is a true law, a right reason, conformable to nature, universal, unchangeable, eternal, whose commands urge us to duty, and whose prohibitions restrain us from evil. . . . It is not one thing at Rome and another at Athens; one thing to–day and another to–morrow; but in all times and nations this universal law must for ever reign, eternal and imperishable.¹⁵

Besides their legal innovations, the Romans excelled at engineering, building roads, bridges, aqueducts, amphitheaters, and sewage systems. Thanks to its political system, moreover, Rome enjoyed considerable economic freedom, becoming the most prosperous city in the world.

Diverting much of its wealth to the military, Rome established an empire encompassing the entire Mediterranean world. But maintaining an empire, combined with internal problems such as civil war, weakened Rome’s stability. The people increasingly supported demagogues who promised to redistribute wealth while centralizing political power. In 44 BC, Julius Caesar became permanent dictator, a move that led to his assassination. Then in 27 BC, the Republic ended when Octavian became the first Roman emperor. He was named Augustus, “the revered one,” a title that later emperors retained.

The Roman Empire was fortunate that most of its emperors were benign before 180 AD, a period called the Pax Romana—the Roman peace. Rome’s fortunes, though, were bound to end. Ominous cultural trends were emerging, and later emperors abused their power.

The Resurgence of Faith and the Decline of Reason: The Rise of Christianity and the Fall of the Roman Empire

Though thinkers such as Galen and Ptolemy continued the Greek legacy, the Romans’ commitment to Greek ideals faded. In the early Empire, mysticism became increasingly common, from cults and magic to astrology and eastern mystery religions, such as Gnosticism and Mithraism. But one new religion emerged triumphant: Christianity.

The values and ideals of Christianity clashed with those of classical Greek culture. Whereas the Greeks upheld reason, pride, happiness, and worldliness, Christians preached faith, meekness, sacrifice, and otherworldliness. “Let us prefer the simplicity of faith to the demonstrations of reason,” declared Basil, bishop of Caesarea; “To spend time on such points would not prove to be to the edification of the Church.”¹⁶ Some Christians condemned the Greeks, recognizing that Greek values were incompatible with their own values. Saint Paul, a missionary who transformed Christianity from a small Jewish sect into a widespread religious movement, said, “Their thoughts were pointless, and their misguided minds were plunged into darkness. While claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1: 21–22). Another Christian, Tertullian, described Aristotle as “wretched” and asked, “What then has Athens to do with Jerusalem? . . . We do not need this kind of curiosity now that we have Jesus, nor do we need inquiry now that we have the gospel. If we believe this, we need believe nothing besides.”¹⁷

Christian apologists did approve one Greek philosopher: Plato. His philosophy of metaphysical dualism (subordinating this world to a higher, immaterial world) fit well with Christian theology. Many religious thinkers, such as Philo, a Jewish theologian, adapted Plato’s theory of Forms, arguing that they can’t be self-sufficient entities. Forms can exist only in a mind, and because they are otherworldly, they must be God’s thoughts.¹⁸ Church Fathers, including Origen, Justin Martyr, and Clement of Alexandria, further developed Christian theology on a Platonist metaphysical base.

Plotinus, too, influenced Christian theology. His philosophy, Neo-Platonism, a more overtly mystical, religious version of Platonism, became dominant in the Late Empire.¹⁹ It “is not our reason that has seen,” Plotinus said, “it is something greater than reason.”²⁰ According to philosopher Walter T. Stace, “To exalt intuition, ecstasy, or rapture, above thought—this is death to philosophy. . . . In Neo-Platonism, therefore, ancient philosophy commits suicide. This is the end. The place of philosophy is taken henceforth by religion.”²¹

By the fourth century, the influence of Christianity had become firmly entrenched. Emperor Constantine converted to the religion, giving it favored status. Christians had been persecuted under Diocletian and earlier emperors, but in 313 Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, which granted toleration toward Christians.

Constantine also influenced religious doctrine. At first, bishops of the Church chose which gospels and letters to include in the official Christian canon, the authorized books of scripture. But Christians disagreed over its interpretation. The Church tried to squelch disagreement by imposing orthodoxy. It condemned certain Christian factions as heretics, including the Arians, the Donatists, and the Manicheans. Arius, a presbyter and originator of the Arian heresy, disagreed with the Trinity—the doctrine that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one. Instead, Arius argued that Jesus is subordinate to God. To settle this controversy, Constantine stepped in, calling the first ecumenical council of bishops in 325 at Nicaea. The result? Arius was condemned. The Nicene Creed was formulated, upholding the Trinitarian viewpoint. And any Christian not embracing the Trinity was excommunicated. Fellow Christians then killed thousands of intransigent Arians.

Coercive enforcement of orthodoxy escalated, which stifled independent thought. Constantine, as historian William H. McNeil points out, “took active part in formulating creeds and used the power of the state to repress heresies.”²² Constantine enacted a law in 326 stating, “Heretics and schismatics shall . . . be bound and subjected to various compulsory public services.”²³ An edict in 379 declared, “All heresies are forbidden by both divine and imperial laws and shall forever cease.”²⁴ In 385 the Roman state executed Priscillian, bishop of Ávila, for heresy. Then in 392, Emperor Theodosius I banned all pagan religions while decreeing Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire.

Besides suppressing religious and intellectual freedom, the Roman government suppressed other freedoms. In the third century, several problems beset the Empire: plagues, invasions, civil wars, and economic dislocations caused by emperors inflating and debasing the currency. Diocletian, Constantine, and other emperors responded by transforming the Empire into a regimented, bureaucratic, fiscally irresponsible state. To finance their spending, emperors raised taxes while using oppressive methods to collect them. When taxes failed to cover spending, they confiscated wealthy citizens’ assets. They also imposed wage and price controls in a futile attempt to combat inflation. These policies crippled the Roman economy. Towns and cities disintegrated as people fled to the countryside in order to escape the plundering and the crushing tax burden, further straining the state’s budget.

In 395 the Empire split into the Greek-speaking East and the Latin-speaking West. With the Western Empire already declining, several barbarian invasions hastened its demise. The Visigoths sacked the city of Rome in 410, then the Vandals sacked it in 455. The West’s military was insufficiently financed due to budgetary problems; consequently, it failed to adequately defend its borders.²⁵ Because of the declining population and lack of manpower, emperors recruited barbarians into the military, men who had no loyalty to Rome.

Though the fall of the Roman Empire was a long process, not just one event, it officially ended in 476 when a barbarian chieftain deposed Romulus Augustulus, the last Western emperor.

With the influx of barbarian tribes, several Germanic kingdoms replaced the Western Empire. The Church, too, filled the political vacuum, taking over many governmental functions. It also converted the new Germanic states to Christianity, starting in 496 with Clovis, king of the Franks. The papacy, claiming to be superior to kings and emperors, assumed the authority to anoint or excommunicate them but often lacked the power to enforce its decrees. Despite the conflicts and power struggles that followed between popes and kings, the Church became the principal institution of medieval Europe.

The Supremacy of Faith: The Dark and Middle Ages

As the Roman Empire declined, one prolific thinker combined Christianity with Platonism and Neo-Platonism. That thinker was Saint Augustine. His Platonist-Christian philosophy dominated medieval culture.²⁶

Platonists had argued that only an elite, select few (the “philosopher-kings”) could grasp the ultimate truth. This view conveniently rationalized Church authority, unquestioning obedience to its decrees, and papal supremacy in all doctrinal matters.²⁷ The Church is divinely inspired and thus infallible. Man, by contrast, is tainted with original sin; he is “crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous” in Augustine’s words.²⁸ Because man’s life belongs not to himself, but to God, the Church is justified in keeping him on a tight leash. To save souls, Augustine argued, the Church must suppress heretics and stop them from spreading unorthodox ideas.²⁹

The will of God, Augustine believed, causes every thing and every event. “For the Christian,” he wrote, “it is enough to believe that the cause of all created things, whether in heaven or on earth, whether visible or invisible, is nothing other than the goodness of the Creator.”³⁰ This view, combined with the Platonist-Christian conviction that true reality is a higher, immaterial world, led to utter disinterest in the physical world and man’s life in it. The result was the collapse of science. If man had any desire left to discover the laws of nature, Augustine quashed it:

There is yet another form of temptation still more complex in its peril. . . . curiosity, seeking new experiences . . . out of a passion for experimenting and knowledge. . . . This malady of curiosity is the reason . . . why we proceed to search out the secret powers of nature—those which have nothing to do with our destiny—which do not profit us to know about.³¹

In his seminal work, The City of God, Augustine said history is a conflict between two cities, the City of Man (this world) and the City of God (heaven). Because the City of Man is trivial compared with the City of God, the fate of Rome did not matter.

Augustine marked the culmination of a centuries-long trend: The worldly, rational, humanist ideals of Greco-Roman culture were abandoned, replaced by Christian faith and otherworldliness.

The fall of the Roman Empire, the absolute authority of the Church, the elevation of faith above reason, the lack of interest in the “City of Man”—all of this led to the Dark Ages. Centuries of barbarism, economic regression, and intellectual backwardness ensued. As historian Bryan Ward-Perkins observes, “The mass of archeological evidence . . . shows a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries. . . . it was decline on a scale that can reasonably be described as ‘the end of a civilization.’”³²

Entire markets and industries disappeared. The vast Roman infrastructure, from roads to bridges, deteriorated. Agricultural output dropped, as shown by the shrinking size of livestock.³³ Everyday violence was pervasive, and population declined due to wars, famines, and epidemics. Literacy and education fell, as books were hard to find. With superstition replacing knowledge, innovation almost vanished. The Dark Ages, historian William Manchester summarizes, were marked by “. . . incessant warfare, corruption, lawlessness, obsession with strange myths, and an almost impenetrable mindlessness.”³⁴

Monks, having no interest in the “City of Man,” best symbolized medieval Christian otherworldliness. Seeking a life divorced from this world, monks devoted themselves entirely to God. They lived together in monasteries, spending most of their time praying, worshipping, and proselytizing. Besides practicing the Christian virtues of poverty, chastity, and obedience, monks practiced extreme asceticism. This consisted of strenuous fasts and self-inflicted torments, including flogging, wearing spiked corsets, and standing in ice-cold water.

In the eighth century, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne emperor. Unifying the West under one government, Charlemagne consolidated the Germanic kingdoms by military conquest into the Carolingian Empire. Relatively short-lived, the Empire ended due to a wave of new invasions from Muslims, Magyars, and Vikings. The West then splintered into small principalities while political power became diffused among the landed aristocracy. This trend toward feudalism began when the Roman Empire fell and accelerated after the fall of the Carolingian Empire. Individuals were bound to local lords and vassals, forced to work on the lords’ manors as serfs, leading a subsistence-level existence. The Church, moreover, owning about a third of Western lands, was linked to the feudal system. Peasants had to pay the Church a tithe, and many clerics were feudal lords.³⁵

The medieval political system was thus a combination of feudalism and theocracy. Church and state formed one body. As George H. Sabine explains:

There was not one body of men who formed the state and one which formed the church, for all men were included in both. There was only a single Christian society, as St. Augustine had taught in his City of God. . . . Under God this society had two heads, the pope and the emperor, two principles of authority, the spiritual rule of priests and the temporal rule of kings, and two hierarchies of governing officials, but there was no division between two bodies or societies.³⁶

After the turn of the millennium, medieval Europe showed modest signs of economic recovery. Agricultural production increased, fueling the growth of population and leading to a revival of towns and trade. The Church, however, ruthlessly condemned those flourishing most in the towns: traders, merchants, and especially moneylenders.³⁷ What motivated such condemnation? The Christian animosity toward worldliness, which damned the “love of money” as “the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10).

The Church disliked towns for another reason: They were hotbeds of heresy. In 1208 Pope Innocent III called for the annihilation of the Cathars, a heretical sect in southern France. A brutal war ensued against them for more than two decades. Arnald-Amalric, the papal emissary, wrote to the pope after the siege of Béziers, declaring proudly, “Nearly twenty thousand of the citizens were put to the sword regardless of age and sex. The workings of divine vengeance have been wondrous.”³⁸

In 1229 Pope Gregory IX established the papal Inquisition, or Holy Office, a formal court to prosecute heretics—those daring to question Christian orthodoxy. A person accused of heresy was barred from confronting his accusers. If he refused to confess, he was tortured. If he still refused, he was silenced, excommunicated, then turned over to temporal authorities for punishment, including burning at the stake.

Whereas the Church started the Inquisition to combat heretics, it called for the Crusades to combat infidels. The goal of the First Crusade was to reclaim Jerusalem, the Holy Land, from the Muslims. In 1099 the city capitulated, and the crusaders massacred its people. Fulcher of Chartres, a firsthand observer, wrote, “In this [Solomon’s] temple almost ten thousand were killed. Indeed, if you had been there you would have seen our feet colored to our ankles with the blood of the slain. But what more shall I relate? None of them were left alive; neither women nor children were spared.”³⁹ In 1144 Muslim leaders called for their own holy war. Over the next century and a half, Christians responded with seven more Crusades that were mostly unsuccessful.

Although religious faith and papal authoritarianism dominated medieval Christendom, an epochal intellectual shift began when the works of Aristotle and other Greco-Roman thinkers were rediscovered. These works were lost in the West after the fall of Rome but were preserved in the Eastern Empire (Byzantium). The works then spread to the Islamic world in the ninth and tenth centuries. In the twelfth century during the Reconquista—a centuries-long battle to retake the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims—Western Europeans found classical Greco-Roman literature written in Arabic in the libraries of Cairo, Baghdad, Toledo, Cόrdoba, and other cities. With the help of Jewish and Muslim scholars, they translated Greek and Arabic versions to Latin.⁴⁰

These translations of Aristotle’s works spread to the new European universities, including Oxford, Bologna, and the University of Paris.⁴¹ The Church, theologians, and university faculties, however, were ambivalent about Aristotle. Saint Bonaventure, among others, vigorously opposed him because many of his ideas, such as the eternity of the universe and the mortality of the soul, conflicted with Christian dogma. In 1277, for example, Bishop Étienne Tempier condemned 219 mostly Aristotelian propositions. But not everyone opposed Aristotle. He was embraced by Peter Abelard, Albertus Magnus, and the Scholastics. Reason ought to serve faith, they argued, not challenge it.

The most pivotal thinker of the Middle Ages, Saint Thomas Aquinas, tried to reconcile faith and reason by combining Christianity with Aristotelianism. Divine truths require faith, Aquinas said, but reason can clarify those truths while also discovering truths of the natural world. We have truths known through faith and truths known through reason. Yet, Aquinas argued, “It is impossible for the truth of faith to be contrary to principles known by natural reason.”⁴²

This marriage of faith and reason was short-lived. The university theology faculties relied heavily on Aristotelian reasoning, but the arts faculties taught Aristotelian natural philosophy while ignoring the implications for theology.⁴³ In the fourteenth century, moreover, such thinkers as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham argued that faith and reason are incompatible, often reaching conclusions that contradict each other. The “Aristotelian outlook,” Tarnas points out, “was increasingly recognized as a naturalistic cosmology not readily combined with a straightforward Christian outlook.”⁴⁴ Despite Aquinas’s masterly, ambitious efforts, the gulf between faith and reason could not be bridged.⁴⁵

The Rebirth of Reason: The Renaissance and the Shattering of Medieval Christendom

In making Aristotle palatable to the Church, Aquinas opened the door for reason to assert its independence. The Church tried to contain Aristotle in the service of Christian ends, to subordinate reason to faith, but failed.

The revival of classical Greco-Roman thought fueled the Renaissance, marking the beginning of the end of the all-encompassing stranglehold of religion over man’s life. Whereas the leaders of the Middle Ages embraced God and His heavenly city, the leaders of the Renaissance embraced humanism. Artists and intellectuals once again glorified man and this world, as they had in ancient Greece. The “greatest writers,” Charles Van Doren observes, “wrote about man, not God, placing man in the center foreground, exalting him, praising him, questioning him, criticizing him, but not despising him and his worldly city as the Augustinians had been doing for a thousand years.”⁴⁶

The Renaissance began in the late fourteenth century in the north Italian city-states of Milan, Venice, and Florence. Francesco Petrarch and Giovanni Boccaccio, the first Renaissance leaders, welcomed the entire corpus of Greco-Roman literature, searching monastic libraries throughout Europe to find forgotten Greek and Latin manuscripts. In contrast to the medieval Scholastics, however, Renaissance humanists didn’t subordinate Greco-Roman ideas to Christianity. They embraced such ideas on their own terms.

Humanists stressed the importance of education and personal achievement while celebrating genius, excellence, and creativity. Humanist values were also expressed in Renaissance art, which focused more on worldly themes, depicting human nudity and human heroism. Humanists rejected the otherworldly, Christian ideal of the self-tormenting ascetic monk who spent most of his time praying. Instead, they embraced the worldly ideal of the “Renaissance man,” an educated, accomplished, well-rounded individual of thought and action. Leonardo da Vinci—painter, sculptor, scientist, engineer, inventor—was the model Renaissance man. He was also a writer who explored a variety of subjects, from botany and anatomy to architecture and philosophy.

In the mid-fifteenth century, Johannes Gutenberg developed the printing press, which hastened the spread of the Renaissance. Most Greco-Roman manuscripts were soon in print, and tens of millions of vernacular books were distributed throughout Europe.⁴⁷ With the rapid growth of inexpensive books, the Church’s control over education crumbled. By the sixteenth century, the Renaissance had spread from Italy to England, France, Spain, and Germany.

The Renaissance coincided with several related developments. Trade and commerce grew, while serfdom and feudalism disintegrated. As the power of the feudal aristocracy waned, the power of absolute monarchs waxed. The magnetic compass and full-rigged sailing ship enabled overseas trade and exploration. Spain and Portugal took the early lead, supporting the voyages of Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Vasco da Gama. Because of the pioneering, worldly spirit of this period, it became known as the Age of Discovery.

Most Renaissance thinkers were Christians, but religion was not the center of their lives. Faith, otherworldliness, asceticism, and original sin no longer held a monopoly over man’s mind. These Christian doctrines now had a bold, secular competitor: reason, worldliness, achievement, and humanism. Such ideas found their way into art and literature, politics and economics. Subjugated for centuries, man finally began to free himself from the leash of the Church.

Religion, however, was still widely influential. Martin Luther, an Augustinian monk, clashed with the Church on many theological issues. He also protested corrupt papal activities such as the sale of spiritual indulgences (remission of punishment due for sin). In 1517 he posted his “Ninety-Five Theses” to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany. This started the Reformation, the Protestant revolt against the Catholic Church.

Luther challenged the notion that only the Church could interpret scripture. He advocated a literalist interpretation of the Bible and argued that the individual could decipher its meaning for himself, dismissing the Church as an unnecessary intermediary between the individual and God. Luther held that faith alone, rather than good works, was necessary and sufficient for salvation. And, unlike Aquinas, Luther detested reason. “For reason is the greatest enemy that faith has: it never comes to the aid of spiritual things, but—more frequently than not—struggles against the Divine Word, treating with contempt all that emanates from God.”⁴⁸ He added, “Therefore keep to revelation and do not try to understand.”⁴⁹

The Reformation spread rapidly. Part of its success was politically motivated; some monarchs and noble families embraced it to escape Church authority. Europe then split along religious lines—Protestant nations in the north, Catholic nations in the south.

Protestants disagreed among themselves over interpreting scripture. As further schisms arose, Protestantism splintered into many sects. To impose religious conformity, Protestant leaders took a page from the Church’s playbook, adopting its repressive tactics. John Calvin, founder of his own Protestant sect (Calvinism), imposed a totalitarian theocracy in Geneva, executing heretics and apostates.

In response to the Renaissance and the Reformation, the Church desperately tried to reassert its authority. In 1502 it ordered the burning of all books questioning papal legitimacy.⁵⁰ In 1521 Pope Leo X excommunicated Luther. In 1542 Pope Paul III established the Roman Inquisition in Italy. (Back in 1478, the Church had approved the Spanish monarchy’s request to establish its own Inquisition.) With the Council of Trent, the Church composed the Index of Prohibited Books, forbidding Catholics from reading such books, including many written by Protestant theologians. Most Catholic nations cooperated with the papacy and outlawed those books on the Index.⁵¹

The irresolvable feuds, conflicts, and disputes among Protestants and Catholics led to a century of religious wars. These included the Thirty Years’ War, the English civil war, and the French Wars of Religion. As the religious zeal of this period rose, so did the persecution of witches. Throughout Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, about 110,000 people were prosecuted for witchcraft, and 60,000 were executed.⁵²

All of these developments—the Renaissance, the printing press, the proliferation of books, the feudal breakup, the rise of absolute monarchies, the Age of Discovery, the Reformation, and a century of religious warfare—contributed to the declining power and authority of the Church. The unity of Western Christendom was broken, and the medieval worldview was hanging by a thread.

Although Luther intended to restore religion to the center of people’s lives, the Reformation had the opposite effect. Neither Luther nor Calvin advocated liberty, yet in opposing the authoritarianism of the Church, the Reformation inadvertently moved Europe toward greater religious and intellectual freedom. It also fostered greater religious doubt, as claims to religious infallibility were no longer credible. The “failure of Europeans,” McNeill observes, “to agree upon the truths of religion, within as well as across state boundaries . . . opened the door to secularism and modern science.”⁵³

The Triumph of Reason: The Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Emergence of Capitalism

In the Middle Ages, the Church borrowed some ideas from the ancient Greco-Roman thinkers and formed a geocentric view of the world based on scripture, Ptolemy’s astronomy, and Aristotle’s cosmology. In this view, the earth stood motionless at the center of the universe; the celestial bodies revolved around the earth in perfect circles; and the heavens existed in a higher world above the earth. Ptolemy and Aristotle probably would have changed their views in the light of new evidence. The Church, however, turned their ideas into dogma, clinging to them despite new evidence. “In every important field of scientific research,” J. B. Bury points out, “the ground was occupied by false views which the Church declared to be true.”⁵⁴

Nicolaus Copernicus dealt the first blow to the Church’s view of the cosmos. In his book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres (1543), Copernicus proposed a heliocentric model: the idea that the earth and planets revolve around the sun. Though his theory had flaws, the virtue of this model was its mathematical simplicity. Copernicus’s successors worked out the kinks. Tycho Brahe recorded a mass of astronomical data. Johannes Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion, including the law that planets move in elliptical, not circular, orbits. Galileo Galilei constructed a telescope, and with it he made many original observations that lent strong support for the heliocentric theory. These scientific advances, among many others, fueled the seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution.

Protestants and Catholics opposed the new scientific discoveries. “This fool [Copernicus] wishes to reverse the entire science of astronomy,” Luther said, “but sacred scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and not the earth.”⁵⁵ The Church decreed the heliocentric theory “philosophically absurd and false, and formally heretical, for being explicitly contrary to Holy Scripture.”⁵⁶ The Church also added the works of most modern scientists and philosophers, including Copernicus and Galileo, to its Index of Prohibited Books. In 1633 the Roman Inquisition forced Galileo to recant his support for heliocentrism, sentencing him to house arrest for life.

After the Church silenced Galileo, scientific progress continued mainly in Protestant nations, as they were less hostile to science than Catholic nations.⁵⁷ The pinnacle of the Scientific Revolution came in England with the brilliant discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton. Building on the work of Kepler and Galileo, Newton discovered the law of universal gravitation. He showed in the Principia (1687) how gravity governed the motions of all objects, including planets. Widely considered the greatest scientist ever, Newton decisively proved the heliocentric theory. He demonstrated that natural laws govern the universe and that reason can grasp such laws.

The Scientific Revolution paralleled a political revolution. Unlike most of Europe, England was not ruled by absolute monarchs. Instead, it developed a political system—Magna Carta, common law, and separation of powers—that limited royal power. In 1688 the Glorious Revolution officially established a constitutionally limited monarchy. John Locke defended the Glorious Revolution and formulated a compelling philosophic justification for individual rights in his seminal book Two Treatises of Government (1690). The individual has a right to his life and property, Locke argued, and the purpose of government is to protect individual rights. “The great and chief end, therefore, of men uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their . . . lives, liberties, and estates, which I call by the general name—property.”⁵⁸

The Scientific and Glorious Revolutions fueled the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, the culmination of the secular rationalist trend. Inspired by Locke and Newton, the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment—Voltaire, Denis Diderot, Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu in France, and Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson in America—passionately endorsed a program of reason and freedom. They boldly condemned all authorities and institutions, traditions and irrational beliefs contrary to those ideals. The scientific method, they argued, should be applied not only to the physical world, but to all fields of knowledge. “We think that the greatest service to be done to men,” Diderot proclaimed, “is to teach them to use their reason, only to hold for truth what they have verified and proved.”⁵⁹ Leonard Peikoff points out:

The development from Aquinas through Locke and Newton represents more than four hundred years of stumbling, tortuous, prodigious effort to secularize the Western mind, i.e., to liberate man from the medieval shackles. It was the buildup toward a climax: the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment. For the first time in modern history, an authentic respect for reason became the mark of an entire culture; the trend that had been implicit in the centuries-long crusade of a handful of innovators now swept the West explicitly, reaching and inspiring educated men in every field. Reason, for so long the wave of the future, had become the animating force of the present.⁶⁰

Whereas Renaissance thinkers shifted the focus away from religion, most Enlightenment thinkers explicitly denounced religion. They pointed out that doctrines from the virgin birth to the resurrection defy logic. “The Christian system of religion,” Paine argued, “is an outrage on common sense.”⁶¹ Enlightenment thinkers were appalled at what religious dogma led to when taken seriously: censorship and repression, the Crusades and the Inquisition, witch hunts and religious wars. “Those who can make you believe absurdities,” Voltaire pointed out, “can make you commit atrocities.”⁶²

Some Enlightenment thinkers were atheists, but most were deists. They believed in God, yet they viewed the universe as orderly, governed only by natural, immutable laws. As such, they rejected miracles, revelation, and divine intervention. They also rejected original sin and held an optimistic view of human nature. Man’s mind at birth, as Locke pointed out, is “tabula rasa” (a blank slate), and with a good education he can improve his moral character. Though man is not perfect, Marquis de Condorcet argued that he is “perfectible.”

Politically, Enlightenment thinkers championed the equal rights of man and denounced everything that oppressed the individual. This included slavery, Church censorship, state-sanctioned monopolies, clerical and aristocratic privilege, and absolute monarchy, along with its groundless justification: the divine right of kings. Societies emerged for the first time in history calling for the abolition of slavery, in America in 1784, in England in 1787, and in France in 1788.⁶³

To protect the individual’s rights and freedom, the power of government must be limited. Montesquieu argued in The Spirit of the Laws (1748) that this requires a separation of powers. Government should also be limited in the economic realm. The French Physiocrats and Scottish economist Adam Smith endorsed laissez-faire. In his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations (1776), Smith showed that free trade and free markets allow the individual to pursue his economic self-interest, which maximizes wealth creation.

In Europe, Great Britain came closest to realizing the ideals of the Enlightenment. (Voltaire and Montesquieu visited Britain and admired its institutions, developing some of their views from what they had observed there.) The Glorious Revolution limited royal power. The government mostly respected intellectual freedom. And by the nineteenth century, under the influence of Locke and Smith, Britain had established a near free-market economy.

The nation founded on Enlightenment principles, however, was the United States of America. In composing the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson relied heavily on Locke’s political philosophy, proclaiming that every man has the inalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The genius of Jefferson and the Founding Fathers consisted of translating this philosophy into political reality. The result was the greatest political achievement in history, the Constitution of the United States, which specifically defined and limited the power of government. Incorporating Montesquieu’s separation of powers principle, the Founders designed a system of checks and balances that divided power within the federal government and between the states and the federal government. The Bill of Rights, moreover, barred government from violating individual rights, protecting the right to property, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion.⁶⁴

For the first time, the individual was sovereign. The government was considered a servant of the people rather than their ruler. “In Europe,” James Madison observed, “charters of liberty have been granted by power. America has set the example . . . of charters of power granted by liberty.”⁶⁵

The Dark and Middle Ages, dominated by faith and force, led to poverty and misery. The goal of the Enlightenment, by contrast, was human happiness and progress. Enlightenment thinkers thought scientific knowledge was important, not for its own sake but because it could be used to develop technology and create wealth, solving man’s problems, enriching his life, and improving his well-being.

The Enlightenment delivered: It promised progress and it achieved progress. In the nineteenth century, slavery was abolished throughout the Western world, the right to vote was granted to more people, and a full century of relative peace ensued. Other than a few minor conflicts, no major international wars were fought from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.⁶⁶ Scientists from Louis Pasteur and Charles Darwin to Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell made extraordinary discoveries. Enlightenment ideals also fueled the Industrial Revolution, marking the historic advent of sustained economic growth. The near-capitalist systems established in Britain and America unleashed the wealth creators. Inventors, engineers, and entrepreneurs applied the discoveries of the Scientific Revolution. The result was an outpouring of new goods, technologies, and industrial machines, which led to an unprecedented rise in living standards. The Industrial Revolution, in short, unequivocally demonstrated the practicality of science and capitalism.

Despite these magnificent feats, intellectual and political trends that opposed the ideals of the Enlightenment were emerging.

The Rejection of Reason: The Counter-Enlightenment, World War, and Totalitarianism

Whereas scientists showed the power of reason, early modern philosophers struggled to give a valid account of its nature. The philosophers split into two camps. The rationalists (René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza) emphasized deduction from self-evident propositions. The empiricists (Francis Bacon and John Locke) emphasized induction grounded in observation. Bacon, Locke, and others were on the right track, but their shortcomings paved the way for the naked skepticism of David Hume. The only thing man can know, Hume says, are fleeting sense impressions. Man is not justified in drawing abstract, general conclusions. Although he can observe that A leads to B, he can never be certain that A caused B. Hume argued that inductive inference, the basic method of science, is illegitimate.

Immanuel Kant then stepped in. The most influential philosopher since the late eighteenth century, Kant wanted to save reason and science from Hume’s skepticism. But he also wanted to save religion from the onslaughts of the Enlightenment. In essence, he wanted to save religion from reason and to save reason from skepticism. These two goals were incompatible. To save religion, Kant undermined reason; yet in doing so, he reinforced skepticism. “I have therefore found it necessary,” Kant declared, “to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”⁶⁷ Kant argued that reason and science can’t grasp reality in itself, which he called the “nuomenal” world. Reason and science can only grasp “appearances,” which Kant called the “phenomenal” world—a world created by the human mind. All “objects of any experience possible to us,” Kant argued, “. . . have no independent existence outside our thoughts.”⁶⁸ Because reason can’t know reality (skepticism), and because it can know only what the human mind creates (subjectivism), man is justified in having faith.

Just as Enlightenment thinkers enshrined reason but failed to define a valid theory of its nature, they also enshrined the pursuit of happiness but failed to define a morality that could justify such a goal—a morality of rational self-interest. Kant closed the moral door to the pursuit of happiness. The “principle of one’s own happiness,” Kant said, “is the most objectionable of the empirical principles. This is . . . because this principle supports morality with incentives which undermine it.”⁶⁹ Upholding an undiluted Christian ethic, Kant advocated abject selflessness and self-sacrifice.

Kant is the main philosopher behind what a few historians have called the “Counter-Enlightenment,” the revolt against Enlightenment values and ideals.⁷⁰

The Counter-Enlightenment encompassed many thinkers, movements, and ideologies. One of these was the nineteenth-century movement called Romanticism. Romanticists, such as Johann Herder, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Friedrich W. J. Schelling, elevated feelings above reason. The knowledge gained by reason, Romanticists argued, is shallow and superficial. Only faith or intuition, passion or emotion, can discover deep, meaningful truths. The father of Romanticism, Jean Jacques Rousseau, said, “Man’s worth depends not on his intelligence, but on his moral nature, which consists essentially of feeling.”⁷¹

Rousseau despised civilization and private property, arguing that they corrupted man and led to greed, selfishness, and inequality. His solution? Create a new society based not on reason but on feeling, not on private property but on economic equality, not on individualism but on collectivism. In this new society, Rousseau argues, the “general will” of the collective “is always right,” and it “alone can direct the State according to the object for which it was instituted, i.e., the common good.”⁷² Thus, the state has “absolute power over all its members . . . under the direction of the general will.”⁷³ What about the individual’s will? “Every service a citizen can render the State he ought to render as soon as the Sovereign demands it.”⁷⁴ And if he refuses? “Whoever refuses to obey the general will,” Rousseau writes, “shall be compelled to do so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.”⁷⁵

Although Romanticism originated independent of Kant, the limits he set on reason made Romanticism respectable. As intellectual historian John Herman Randall Jr. points out:

By claiming that science is limited in scope, however valid within those limits, [Kant] opened the door to a host of other methods for arriving at religious, moral, and philosophic beliefs. . . . [Most] men welcomed Kant’s “critical philosophy,” as it was called, as the open door to the freedom to believe almost anything they sincerely wanted to believe. In the next generation dozens of different proposed roads to reality were offered by enthusiastic poets, philosophers, and theologians. Kant’s own road was not so important as the license he seemed to have given men to blaze new trails of their own through the irrational wilderness of faith and intuition. . . . Kant . . . stimulated romanticists to a flood of special systems founded on faith. . . . Kant’s arguments seemed epoch-making; more than any one intellectual factor they saved the day for religious belief, and made possible the religious revival of the first half of the nineteenth century.⁷⁶

Another Counter-Enlightenment philosopher, Georg W. F. Hegel, argued that reality is a dialectic thought process in which the “Absolute Spirit”—Hegel’s version of God—unfolds itself in history, synthesizing opposing forces into ever-greater wholes. In one stage, the Absolute Spirit manifests itself as the state, superior to the individual. Quoting Hegel, “A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole. Hence if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it.”⁷⁷

Karl Marx secularized Hegel’s notion that reality is a dialectic process. Whereas Hegel considered this process spiritual, Marx considered it material (thus “dialectical materialism”). He thought that material, economic forces alone determine history and human behavior. A person’s beliefs are never based on independent reasoning; instead, his economic class determines his beliefs. Marx despised capitalism for its alleged class conflict and exploitation but thought it was a necessary stage in history. Eventually, disgruntled workers (the proletariat) would revolt, overthrowing capitalism, replacing it with socialism. “The proletariat,” Marx wrote, “will use its political supremacy to wrest [read: steal], by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State. . . . this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property.”⁷⁸

Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx were the main figures of the Counter-Enlightenment, but many other intellectuals contributed. Conservatives such as Edmund Burke denounced the Enlightenment confidence in reason, stressed the importance of the community over individual rights, and praised medieval traditions. “We fear God,” Burke said, “we look up with awe to kings . . . with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility.”⁷⁹ Utopian socialists, such as Henri Comte de Saint-Simon, and Fabian socialists, such as George Bernard Shaw, railed against private property and capitalist competition. J. G. Fitche, Auguste Comte, and Jeremy Bentham rejected inalienable rights. Instead, they held the good or happiness of society as more important than the individual. “Natural rights is simple nonsense,” Bentham said, “natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense,—nonsense upon stilts.”⁸⁰ Søren Kierkegaard conceded that Christian beliefs are irrational, yet said they should be embraced anyway. Henri Bergson considered “intuition” superior to science as a way to discover truth. Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Sigmund Freud argued that man is governed not by his intellect but by an irrational will. Finally, Social Darwinists and other intellectuals, such as Georges Sorel, glorified conflict, violence, and revolution.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Europe’s leading philosophers and intellectuals abandoned the Enlightenment ideals of reason, the pursuit of happiness, individual rights, and limited government. Instead, they embraced irrationalism, sacrifice, collectivism, and the omnipotent state.

What did this intellectual transformation lead to?

The French Revolution, which toppled the ancien régime, was inspired by both the Enlightenment and the Counter-Enlightenment. But the Counter-Enlightenment influence, via Rousseau, was more decisive and the main reason the French Revolution took a wrong turn. Although The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) purports to protect individual rights, it actually subordinates the individual to the collective. “Law can only prohibit such actions as are harmful” not to the individual, but “to society” (Article 5). “Since property is an inviolable right, no one shall be deprived thereof except where public necessity . . . shall clearly demand it” (Article 17). Echoing Rousseau, “Law is the expression of the general will” (Article 6). Maximilien Robespierre and the Jacobins, Rousseau’s self-proclaimed disciples, gained control of the government and imposed the Reign of Terror, killing tens of thousands of people. After Robespierre was deposed, Napoleon Bonaparte took over. A military dictator, Napoleon wielded the sword at home and abroad, dominating continental Europe until his downfall in 1815.

Culturally and politically, the French Revolution and the Counter-Enlightenment led to the rise of modern nationalism. Romanticists such as Herder revered the cultural myths, traditions, and native sentiments of the Volk: the race, people, or nation. By the late nineteenth century, this cultural nationalism evolved into a militant, anti-Semitic jingoism. Nationalists rejected Enlightenment ideals. They glorified the strength and prestige of the nation-state while claiming that their nation is superior to other nations. They also proclaimed that the individual is subordinate to the nation and must sacrifice on its behalf.

Forsaking free trade, many nations foolishly imposed trade barriers to protect their economic “interests.” National rivalries also fueled a new imperialism, as Europe scrambled to colonize parts of Asia, Africa, and the Near East. Nationalism, a Europe-wide trend, was most prevalent in Germany.⁸¹ (Except Rousseau, the leading Counter-Enlightenment philosophers, including Kant, Hegel, and Marx, were German.)

By fueling hostility among nations, nationalist passions paved the way to World War I. The war started between Austria and Serbia over the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. It senselessly escalated from there as more nations were drawn in.

Before the conflict, Europeans glorified war. A 1912 survey of French college students concluded, “War, in their eyes, is the occasion for the most noble of virtues, those which they exalt above all others, energy, mastery, and sacrifice for a cause which transcends ourselves.”⁸² German historian Heinrich von Treitschke wrote, “The grandeur of war lies in the utter annihilation of puny man in the great conception of the State, and it brings out the full magnificence of the sacrifice of fellow-countrymen for one another.”⁸³ When the war broke out, Europeans welcomed it. “As never before,” Austrian writer Stefan Zweig observed, “hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peace time, that they belonged together. . . . [They] felt that they were participating in world history . . . and that each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass, there to be purified of all selfishness.”⁸⁴

Europeans wanted sacrifice and they got it: Ten million people were killed.

In the aftermath of World War I, totalitarian dictatorships emerged in those nations most influenced by the Counter-Enlightenment—a socialist dictatorship in Russia under Vladimir Lenin, a fascist dictatorship in Italy under Benito Mussolini, and a Nazi dictatorship in Germany under Adolf Hitler.⁸⁵ Spain, Portugal, and most of central and eastern Europe also succumbed to fascist or authoritarian regimes.

In his quest to dominate Europe, Hitler started World War II, which resulted in about six times as many casualties as World War I. The Allies defeated Nazi Germany and fascist Italy. But after the war, the Soviet Union imposed socialist regimes in most of Eastern Europe—Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany. The East then became separated from the West by an “iron curtain.” Socialism also emerged in China, Cuba, North Korea, North Vietnam, and Cambodia. Most of these regimes, too, were supported by the Soviet Union.

The Enlightenment led to a century of relative peace and established rights-respecting, near-capitalist systems, which made possible the extraordinary achievements of the Industrial Revolution. The Counter-Enlightenment, by contrast, led to two World Wars and the mushrooming of totalitarian dictatorships that enslaved a third of the world’s people.

Totalitarianism literally embodied the Counter-Enlightenment philosophy. The philosophers elevated feeling above reason; dictators subordinated reason to will, blood, feeling, instinct. The philosophers said the “general will” of the collective supersedes the individual’s rights; dictators did not recognize individual rights. The philosophers preached the “virtue” of sacrifice; dictators sacrificed millions of people.

The Counter-Enlightenment Infiltrates America

After World War II, a “Cold War” ensued between the two superpowers: America, the nation of the Enlightenment, and the Soviet Union, a product of the Counter-Enlightenment.

America, however, wasn’t immune to the influence of the Counter-Enlightenment. Though it lagged behind Europe, America had moved in a similar intellectual direction. In the late nineteenth century, many American students went to Germany to earn their PhDs, bringing back with them the ideas of Kant, Hegel, Marx, and others.⁸⁶ These imported Counter-Enlightenment ideas undermined the commitment of Americans to their nation’s founding principles of individual rights and limited government.

Prominent American Leftists fawned over the Soviet experiment.⁸⁷ These “fellow travelers” included Walter Duranty, Upton Sinclair, John Dewey, and Anna Louise Strong. The Left started losing hope, though, when unsettling news about the Soviet Union kept piling up: the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the Soviet military brutally suppressing peaceful dissent in Hungary, and Nikita Khrushchev’s public revelations in 1956 of Joseph Stalin’s monstrous crimes.⁸⁸

Despite their Counter-Enlightenment roots, Marxists had postured as exponents of reason and science. But after the tyranny of the Soviet Union was exposed, the Left fell into disarray—and its veneer of reason cracked. Emerging from this ideological wreckage were the irrationalist voices of the far Left. They argued that science and technology are destructive, leading to wars, gas chambers, atomic bombs, and environmental degradation. This anti-reason, anti-science, anti-technology sentiment fueled a mass movement in the 1960s—a movement characterized by student protests, sit-ins, and violent rage; a movement that decried the emptiness of “consumerism”; a movement that left behind the Soviet experiment while placing its faith in new socialist experiments in Cuba, China, and North Vietnam; a movement that hypocritically preached pacifism, yet idolized tyrannical revolutionaries, such as Mao Tse-tung, Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro; a movement that rebelled against everything American. That movement was the New Left.

The Old Left focused on helping the workers, or the “proletariat,” as Marx called them. The New Left expanded its focus to marginalized groups such as women, homosexuals, racial minorities, and Third-World cultures. The Old Left believed capitalism impoverishes the masses. The New Left complained that capitalism made the masses too comfortable, inducing them to accept the system that supposedly exploits them.⁸⁹ The Old Left advocated “equality of opportunity.” The New Left demanded equality of results despite work, merit, or achievement.⁹⁰ That is, the New Left embraced egalitarianism, a doctrine later articulated by philosopher John Rawls in his influential book A Theory of Justice (1971).

Many student leaders and activists of the New Left went on to pursue teaching careers in the universities. These radical, academic Leftists were united by the subjectivism, relativism, and egalitarianism of postmodernism.⁹¹ Postmodernism is a philosophy that rejects philosophy itself.

Led by Michael Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty, postmodernism followed from the main schools of twentieth-century thought: existentialism (Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre), pragmatism (William James and John Dewey), logical positivism (Ludwig Wittgenstein and A. J. Ayer), and linguistic analysis (Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore). All these philosophies, including postmodernism, descended from Kant.⁹²

Whereas Kant undermined reason while paying lip service to it, his postmodern heirs dropped all pretenses and brazenly reveled in irrationalism. “It is meaningless,” Foucault said, “to speak in the name of . . . Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.”⁹³

Postmodernists argue that language is a self-referential system. It doesn’t refer to reality; it creates reality. Postmodernists thus “deconstruct” objectivity and universal truth.⁹⁴ They argue that objectivity is a myth: There are only subjective “texts,” “discourses,” “perspectives,” and “narratives” of competing groups. Universal truth, too, is a myth: There is only truth relative to one’s race, class, gender, or culture. Each group thus subjectively creates its own truth. Victimized groups, however, speak with a “special voice.” Postmodernists urge these groups to construct historical discourses (that is, rewriting their own histories) to empower themselves.⁹⁵

Postmodernism has many offshoots, including multiculturalism, “science studies,” critical theory, deep ecology, radical feminism, and crossbreeds of such -isms (for example, “ecofeminism”). The proponents of these ideologies argue that values such as reason, science, and knowledge are nothing but wealthy white male Eurocentric constructs. Such constructs, moreover, are used to rationalize the oppression of the poor, the earth, women, minorities, and non-Western cultures. To combat this, postmodernists embrace egalitarianism and cultural relativism. They tell us that all cultures are equal—except Western culture. They insist that the West is racist, sexist, elitist, and thus irredeemably corrupt.⁹⁶

By the 1980s, postmodernists had firmly entrenched themselves in the humanities and social science departments of American universities, professing an ideology that undercuts the entire Enlightenment project on which America was founded.⁹⁷ “Those who find Foucault and Heidegger convincing,” Rorty points out, “often view the United States . . . as something we must hope will be replaced, as soon as possible, by something utterly different.”⁹⁸

How influential is postmodernism? In 2007 Foucault was the most cited scholar in the humanities; Derrida, third; Kant, thirteenth; Heidegger, fourteenth.⁹⁹

With the failure of socialism, the masks have come off the far Left, revealing them as abject nihilists. Because they no longer advocate any positive political program or system, they’re motivated only by what they oppose: capitalism and Western culture. This includes the West’s core values, from reason and science to individualism and the rule of law. In 1987 protesters at Stanford University chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western culture’s got to go!”¹⁰⁰

Postmodernists and their Leftist ilk also want to destroy everything that capitalism and Western values make possible, including wealth, industry, and technology. “We’re opposed,” deep ecologist Arne Naess says, “to further development for the sake of . . . an increased standard of living. The material standard of living should be drastically reduced.”¹⁰¹ Let that sink in for a moment. Here is a prominent environmentalist philosopher openly proclaiming that wealth should be destroyed, that we should all be poor.

The nihilism of the far Left did not go unanswered. A backlash in the 1970s led to the rise of the Religious Right. Many Southern Baptists, who were historically on the Left, switched sides.¹⁰² Several conservative Christian universities, such as Regent and Liberty, were founded. Robert Grant’s Christian Voice, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and later Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition mobilized evangelicals into political activism. Because of these groups’ efforts, the Religious Right significantly influenced American politics.

The Old Right upheld America’s founding principles of individual rights, limited government, and economic freedom. The Religious Right, having little interest in these principles, focuses on moral and social issues.¹⁰³ Rejecting the separation of church and state, Religious Right leaders and politicians want government to force their Christian “family values” on everyone else. They oppose teaching evolution and sex education in public schools. They also want to ban abortion and emergency contraception, pornography and gay marriage, euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, cloning and stem cell research.

Those who value liberty “have this idea that people should be left alone,” laments Republican Senator Rick Santorum, “be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. That is not how traditional [religious] conservatives view the world.”¹⁰⁴

A small yet influential faction of the Religious Right, Dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism, advocates transforming America into a theocracy.¹⁰⁵ In this medieval vision, popularized by R. J. Rushdoony and Gary North, biblical law would replace civil law. Every aspect of society would be Christianized, and Christian sins including apostasy, blasphemy, adultery, and homosexuality would be punishable by death. “God’s government prevails,” Rushdoony says, “and His alternatives are clear-cut: either men and nations obey His laws, or God invokes the death penalty against them.”¹⁰⁶

Although the postmodern Left and the Religious Right seem to be polar opposites, they share the same basic Counter-Enlightenment philosophy: irrationalism, altruism, and collectivism. “Several evangelicals,” theologian Stanley Grenz points out, “have . . . expressed sympathy for postmodernism.”¹⁰⁷ This is no accident. Despite their many differences, religion and postmodernism are philosophic soul mates. Quoting Grenz:

As Christians . . . we are in fundamental agreement with the postmodern rejection of the modern mind and its underlying Enlightenment epistemology. . . . Christians take a cautious, even distrustful stance toward human reason. . . . [We] can affirm the postmodern rejection of the Enlightenment assumption that knowledge is inherently good . . . [and] we must shake ourselves loose from the radical individualism that has come to characterize the modern mind-set. We must affirm with postmodern thinkers that knowledge . . . is not merely objective, not simply discovered by the neutral knowing self.¹⁰⁸

The original American system, capitalism, was founded on an Enlightenment philosophy. But no system can survive without the philosophy on which it is based. Capitalism has been undermined by the Counter-Enlightenment ideas that have infiltrated American culture. These ideas fomented the growth of the welfare state and big government, from the Progressive era to the New Deal, to the Great Society, to the Bush and Obama administrations.

In Europe, two epochal events marked 1989–91. The Iron Curtain disappeared with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Cold War ended with the fall of the Soviet Union. Although socialism imploded, its underlying Counter-Enlightenment philosophy lives on. The political result? Like America, many European nations have become insolvent welfare states, teetering on the brink of collapse. After decades of unsustainable entitlement spending, financed by fiat-money inflation and chronic government budget deficits, Europe and the United States are drowning in debt. The moral bankruptcy of welfare statism has brought the West to the verge of economic bankruptcy.

Philosophy Moves Human History

The relationship between philosophy and politics is not merely theoretical. History shows the connection between the basic ideas that people believe and how they act, between the dominant premises of a culture and where that culture is headed.

Primitive man had a pre-rational approach to understanding the world. His life, as a result, was dominated by superstition and chronic tribal warfare. The first civilizations of the ancient Near East, which inherited primitive man’s pre-rationalism, established theocracies. Ancient Greece discovered reason, and with ancient Rome, they made the first steps toward political freedom. With the resurgence of faith, intellectual freedom and other freedoms were stifled as Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire. The dominance of faith during the Dark and Middle Ages led to feudalism and theocracy. The rebirth of reason during the Renaissance undermined the power of the Church. Over the next few centuries, the influence of reason grew, climaxing during the Enlightenment. Rejecting royal and clerical authority, Enlightenment leaders championed individual rights and established the system that protects those rights: capitalism. The Counter-Enlightenment then rebelled against reason, paving the way for the totalitarian regimes and welfare states of the twentieth century.

The cultural influence of reason leads to freedom (capitalism). The cultural influence of irrationalism leads to tyranny (statism).

Because philosophy sets the direction of a culture, restoring freedom requires a philosophic revolution. The Enlightenment marked the triumph of reason as a cultural force. The only thing that can save capitalism in the West is a new Enlightenment.

About Michael Dahlen

Michael Dahlen is the author of Ending Big Government: The Essential Case for Capitalism and Freedom. He holds a Master of Science in finance and economics from Walsh College and a Bachelor of Science from Penn State University. His articles have appeared in Skeptic, Liberty, and American Thinker. He is a managed accounts administrator for SEI Investments.

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