The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization

by Arthur Herman

Robespierre is the first true modern dictator: the man who rules not as the living image of God, as the kings of old had, but as the living image of the will of the people. His virtue becomes unassailable, since it is identical with that General Will; just as he can have no flaws—Robespierre’s nickname was “the Incorruptible”—so can he have no opponents or rivals. And among Robespierre’s earliest victims were his fellow Rousseauians Monsieur and Madame Roland. They had begun to have doubts about where their former protégé was leading the Revolution. In the France of the Reign of Terror, the price of doubt was death. The husband chose suicide. The wife, who had shed tears when she first read The New Heloise, did not. She mounted the scaffold on November 8, 1793. Her fellow Rousseau enthusiast Marie Antoinette had gone to the guillotine a few weeks before. Madame Roland’s final plea, “O liberty! O liberty! what crimes have been committed in your name,” marked her belated realization that the utopian path to man’s freedom had opened the door to its opposite.48