Above: Francesco Cossiga and Henry Kissinger pictured in 1990.
This article was written by John O'Sullivan (Wikipedia here) during his time with National Review, for the 20 July 2009 edition which is online here. His 2009 context was Iran – very fitting for the moment in which we live now.
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“...This was explained, not long after the “velvet revolutions” of 1989 and 1991 [in Czechoslovakia], by the Italian president (and distinguished classical liberal) Francesco Cossiga (Wikipedia here), at a New York dinner party given by Henry Kissinger. He astonished the assembled guests, including some Wall Streeters expecting to hear a plea for greater investment in Italy, by presenting a brilliant and passionate analysis of modern history around the theme of five revolutions of world-historical importance.
He divided them into three liberal and two anti-liberal revolutions.
The first liberal revolution was England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688. This revolution was, in effect, the founding constitution of the modern British state. It defeated Stuart autocracy, established the supremacy of Parliament over the crown, and entrenched a bill of rights, habeas corpus, and the principle of no taxation without the consent of Parliament. It was a liberal rather than a democratic revolution, but it opened the way to the gradual democratic evolution of the British polity. The Glorious Revolution used to be a central episode in British constitutional self-understanding, but it is now so neglected that its tricentenary in 1988 was celebrated by Margaret Thatcher’s government as “300 years of Anglo-Dutch friendship.”
1688 may be better remembered in America—it is certainly more discussed. In particular, Michael Barone wrote, in 2007, a fresh history of 1688 with the significant title Our First Revolution. His book was widely and favorably reviewed. It argued that the American Revolution of 1776 was the continuation of 1688 and thus, as Cossiga also had argued, the second great liberal revolution. The principles and even the words of 1776 are the same liberal ones first heard in 1688—no taxation without representation, freedom from arbitrary arrest, no cruel and unusual punishment—but they are universalized as the birthright of all.
To be sure, the 1776 revolution, though compromised by slavery, was more democratic and even more liberal that that of 1688. Its endorsement of religious toleration, for instance, included Catholics—something that would not happen in Britain’s case until decades later. The circumstances of America as an open land with more abundant economic opportunities also made it easier to fulfill the material promises of both revolutions. Essentially, however, the two revolutions are the same liberal thing.
That is emphatically not true of either the French Revolution of 1789 or the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. As Cossiga pointed out, these revolutions were anti-liberal revolutions hostile to the liberties, both real and procedural, central to 1776 and 1688. That is less clear in the case of 1789, because the early French revolutionaries thought they were introducing into France the same reforms they had admired in England and America. But as several scholars have observed, most recently Portuguese professor Joao Espada in his essay “Edmund Burke and the Anglo-American Tradition of Liberty,” very different conceptions of liberty underlay their reforms.
Whereas the Anglo-Americans saw liberty as a system of government that allowed people to pursue different ways of life, their Continental imitators saw it as a particular way of life that, if necessary, might have to be imposed on those mistakenly enslaved to tradition, religion, inequality, or whatever. Eradicating tradition, religion, inequality, or anything else to which people are strongly attached, however, requires abolishing their freedom, usually bloodily. Hence the revolution of 1789 became more plainly anti-liberal and more violent as it ground relentlessly on.
By 1917, the Bolsheviks had seen the logical necessities that flowed from imposing perfect freedom. They were anti-liberal even before the revolution began and brutally violent once in power. No system of government has ever been given such a free hand to reshape its subjects. Yet, after more than 70 years of such government, their subjects rose up in the velvet revolutions of 1989 and 1991 waving the Federalist Papers and quoting the 1688 Declaration of Rights. That was Cossiga’s third liberal revolution.
Where does the Iranian Revolution of 2009 fit into this picture? Is it liberal, anti-liberal, or in some third category we cannot now see? Ultimately these are questions that can be answered only in retrospect. But there are certain litmus tests that allow us to make an educated guess. The most important of these are violence and orthodoxy.
Both before and after taking power, anti-liberal revolutions tend to use and even to idealize violence. Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh—the list of anti-liberal revolutionaries who gloried in violence, employing it against their comrades as well as against “enemies of society,” is all but endless. Anti-liberal writers from Sorel to Fanon justify violence on almost romantic grounds. Their regimes rely on it fundamentally, since it is required to coerce reluctant subjects to embrace their ideas. For that reason, there is no obvious stopping point for it other than the exhaustion of the ruler...”
