The political experiments, disasters, and successes—as well as the theories—produced in Europe between 1789 and 1848 remain extraordinarily relevant. The terms in which we criticize the E.U.’s bureaucratic politics or describe the populist politics of Poland, Hungary, or Italy would not have been alien to a statesman, aristocrat, or revolutionary leader from the early nineteenth century. However much this political language has mutated, and despite its contemporary trappings, we in the West are still speaking in a tongue created by the Enlightenment and the major revolutions it ignited. Presentism misleads its disciples into believing that our debates over technology and technocracy, public and private power, or collective and individual will, for example, are not merely repackaged forms of ancient and early-modern questions. The vulgar stream of alarmism (coming from the left and the right) in fact depends on lack of historical depth perception.
Matthijs Lok’s new book, Europe Against Revolution: Conservatism, Enlightenment, and the Making of the Past, makes a scholarly and damning case against the presentism of the chattering classes. While the book resists explicit prescriptive claims, its construction and conception indicate an interest in the deconstruction of contemporary political semantics, as well as a truer articulation of the radical, liberal, and conservative strains of thought. As Lok shows, the genealogies of these three philosophies are permeable and intertwined. Against Revolution is a welcome and useful tool for understanding the many points of overlap between these seemingly opposed political modes.
Lok’s history illuminates how reductive and historically oblivious the semantics of contemporary politics have become. He demystifies the complex genetic relationships between the European politics of today and the European politics of the tumultuous decades following 1789. The dialectic between revolution and counterrevolution—the wars, conferences, treaties, etc.—was not a cartoonish back-and-forth between pure idealists and nasty reactionaries, as it’s often been made out to be, but rather a nuanced political and ideological chess match played by the children of the Enlightenment. These thinkers pushed political thought and language beyond the realm of lazy, conventional labeling—a talent our times lack. For example, the current contest in Poland between Andrzej Duda and Donald Tusk is typically cheapened to a conflict between a “protofascist” and a “globalist”; but in reality Poland’s internal debates echo much older questions over European statehood and whether the Continent ought to be ruled by transnational elites. In the nineteenth century, those elites were members of the aristocracy; in the twenty-first, they’re by and large corporate, managerial elites—but the basic cast of the question is the same.
The revolutions and counterrevolutions between 1789 and 1848 wrestled over questions about how to govern a fractured, rapidly urbanizing, and industrializing population in ways that we can and should learn from. Take, for instance, the decades following the Battle of Waterloo (1815): far from a dark, reactionary moment in which the Holy Alliance snuffed out the embers of popular revolutionary will, these years were instead marked by tempered, artful governance influenced by the Enlightenment but with the lessons of revolution attentively earmarked. For the counterrevolutionaries who ruled during this time, bringing order to France and the rest of Europe was not merely coextensive with being conservative; they were required to accept the most urgent and recent imperatives of political rationalism, such as human rights. Prussia’s Frederick William IV, for example, was a romantic and devout Christian who obsessively managed the construction of his own neo-Baroque palaces; but with his ministers, he also carved a relatively moderate path between revolution and absolutism, allowing for a Prussian constitution and refusing the title of “Emperor of the Germans.” The term counterrevolutionary, therefore, must not be considered synonymous simply with total conservatism.
Thus, it would be unfair even to claim that counterrevolutionaries were against reform or progress writ large; they tended instead to be “synthesizers and moderates” in search of a “middle way,” Lok notes. Even more relevant to today’s political debates, counterrevolutionaries were neither anti-cosmopolitan nor protofascist in any way, and they objected to jingoism. If they were looking for anything, it was to leaven or temper the most extreme forms of liberal and revolutionary transformation, and to filter out the most extreme forms of atheism and individualism as well.
Figures such as Klemens von Metternich, an Austrian Empire diplomat, are thus subject to reevaluation, especially in the wake of modern-day populist movements and countermovements. Lok shows that it is unfair and untrue to label such figures as Metternich (or Bismarck, for that matter) as simply reactionary or arch-conservative: Metternich’s statecraft, however imperfect, is both more and less than simply “conservative”; it is what we might call wise—seeking balance between the estates, nations, and classes of Europe in the pursuit of peace.
Metternich—who was nowhere near as repressive as he has been made out to be—was not trying to reinstall feudalism; he was seeking to temper liberal reform with tradition, to balance the disparate demands of Europe’s stakeholders. By championing the Concert of Europe—a loose congressional system that solidified diplomatic ties and aimed to maintain the post-Napoleonic peace—Metternich exemplified moderation. He recognized the need for reform while yet upholding traditional authority, navigating the complexities of nationalism and imperialism with a studied pragmatism. In his system, nationalist politics coexisted with the politics of empire; politics of empire with aristocratic privileges; democracy with monarchy. He was forced to cobble together an entente among pluralist political institutions. Metternich dealt intelligently with what was rather than what could be. This was no easy feat. But it is one we must learn from.
All of this should resonate with anyone who finds it difficult to associate with a political party or movement in the contemporary West. It is an approach attractive to those looking to recombine whatever strands of political good sense are still available.
Lok’s analysis also reminds us that the liberalism and conservatism of the nineteenth century were not as flat or shallow as they are now. As Lok argues, a nineteenth-century conservative was animated by ideas of human dignity rooted in Greek and Stoic philosophy, and this was considered consistent with an attitude of openness and impartiality. This standpoint was amenable to progress but remembered the horrors of the French Revolution—and it managed to prevent further explosions of violence for almost another century.