The three Revolutions of the Age of Enlightenment

I have long been fascinated by the three revolutions birthed through the Age of Enlightenment ideals of natural rights and liberties, equality of man, reason, etc. Those three revolutions occurred within twenty years of one another; The American Revolution (1776-1783), the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), but each with dramatically different outcomes.

The American Revolution came at the cost of seven years of war, some 10,000 American deaths and the subsequent loss of some 70,000 loyalists who left the colonies at the conclusion of the war. What was gained, beyond independence, was the first nation conceived through the idea of liberty and not simply a nation of blood or ethnicity. The conception was manifested in that most remarkable product of human imagination, the Constitution, which sought to enshrine the ideas of liberty in a self-sustaining and evolving model that precluded through checks-and-balances and the rule-of-law, the easy oppression of minority interests. It was a remarkable effort at a time when all the world was subject to savagery or rule by monarchies and aristocracies and when most people lived lives circumscribed by suppression, serfdom or slavery.

But it survived its inauspicious beginnings, growing and shaking off most of the early features we now find so incomprehensible - women without votes, working class without votes, African-Americans without citizenship.

The other two revolutions of the Age of Enlightenment were not so successful.

The French Revolution saw ten years of war across all of Europe. The Reign of Terror saw some 10-20,000 executions and the subsequent Napoleonic regime witnessed a bloodbath that flooded all Europe with perhaps two million killed in the various wars, perhaps 500,000 of those being French.

The revolution failed, the Napoleonic empire collapsed, the monarchy was restored and France rebuilt itself though with permanent scars of failure and instability.

The final revolution inspired by the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment was the slave rebellion of the Haitian Revolution. Despite the early idealism, the struggle quickly devolved into brutal genocidal extirpation of all white settlers (some 25,000 dead) along with battles between and among the Haitian revolutionaries, the French revolutionaries and the British with an aggregate butcher's bill in excess of some 300,000. While Haiti became an independent republic, the wars and destruction of the revolution, the slaughter of all whites, and the imposition of a new racial caste system mired it in two centuries of poverty and dysfunction.

Why were there three such dramatically different outcomes? I have read many books on the matter and there is little consensus. There are many credible stories for the outcomes but nothing that is robust and convincing.

I came across an interesting observation this morning in an article that has some bearing - Tim Kaine Is Wrong about America and Slavery by Dan McLaughlin. McLaughlin's essay is a good one but not directly dealing with the mystery of the three revolutions of the Enlightenment. But he does have this observation:

Kaine, echoing today’s left-wing writers, would damn the Founding Fathers for their optimistic faith in the American promise. But the revolutionaries of France tried to tackle all of society’s ills simultaneously, and ended up on a Reign of Terror. We should not be so quick, from the distance of history, to condemn the Founders for making a world that was better than the one they knew just because the job was unfinished.

McLaughlin is rebutting the accusation among postmodernists that the Founding Fathers were irredeemably evil because they failed to create in 1784 a model of 2017 and he wishes to acknowledge that the Founding Fathers laid the foundation for 2017 to become possible through the compromises made in 1784.

Fair enough, I think that is quite correct.

But I am intrigued with that ancillary insight - "But the revolutionaries of France tried to tackle all of society’s ills simultaneously, and ended up on a Reign of Terror."

I suppose one could make the argument that the reason for the three dramatically different outcomes of the three Revolutions of the Enlightenment was because of different approaches to compromise and accommodation.

That the Americans tried to salvage as much of their cultural, institutional, economic and social capital as possible through compromise. That they sought to change only as much as was necessary to get to the next stage of system evolution. That they adopted the old English cultural habit of muddling through. Incrementalism.

That the French under Robespierre, the Jacobins, the Committee of Public Safety, the Reign of Terror and ultimately under Napoleon, sought perfection over pragmatic incremental improvement. That their logical and rational reach exceeded their effective grasp. Perfectionism.

That the Haitians sought not to build from the past but to destroy everything old and to create anew. That their revolution foundered at the point of eliminating the past and that that effort precluded them from moving into the construction of a new future. Utopianism.

Incrementalism versus Perfectionism versus Utopianism. An interesting proposition.