The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom

by James Burnham

The chief historical effects of the French Revolution were to break up the system of the older French monarchy, with its privileged financiers and courtiers, to remove a number of feudal restrictions on capitalist methods of production, and to put the French capitalists into a position of greater social power. It might well have been argued, prior to the Revolution, that these goals promised to contribute to the welfare of the French people and perhaps of mankind. Evidence for and against this expectation might have been assembled. However, this was not the procedure generally followed by the ideologists of the Revolution. They based their treatises not upon an examination of the facts, but upon supposedly fundamental and really quite mythical notions of a primitive “state of nature,” the “natural goodness of man,” the “social contract,” and similar nonsense.