The founders of the United States were deeply influenced by republicanism, by Locke, and by the optimism of the European Enlightenment. George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson all concurred that laws, rather than men, should be the final sanction and that government should be responsible to the governed. But the influence of Locke and the Enlightenment was not entirely happy. Adams, who followed Washington as president, prescribed a constitution with a balance of executive and legislative power checked by an independent judiciary. The federal constitution, moreover, could be amended only by a unanimous vote of the states. Eager to safeguard state liberties and the rights of property, the founding fathers gave the federal government insufficient revenues and coercive powers, as a result of which the constitution was stigmatized as being “no more than a Treaty of Alliance.” Yet the federal union was preserved. The civil power controlled the military, and there was religious toleration and freedom of the press and of economic enterprise. Most significantly, the concept of natural rights had found expression in the Declaration of Independence (1776) and was to influence markedly political and legal developments in the ensuing decades, as well as inspire the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789).

Anarchism and utopianism

While a liberal political philosophy within a framework of capitalistic free trade and constitutional self-government dominated the greatest Western powers, mounting criticism developed against centralized government itself. Radical utopianism and anarchism, previously expounded mainly by religious sects, became secularized in works such as Political Justice (1793) by William Godwin, New View of Society (1813) by Robert Owen, and voluminous anticlerical writings by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

The English philosopher William Godwin, an extreme individualist, shared Bentham’s confidence in the reasonableness of humankind. He denounced the wars accepted by most political philosophers and all centralized coercive states. The tyranny of demagogues and of “multitudes drunk with power” he regarded as being as bad as that of kings and oligarchs. The remedy, he thought, was not violent revolution, which produces tyranny, but education and freedom, including sexual freedom. His was a program of high-minded atheistic anarchy.

The English socialist Robert Owen, a cotton spinner who had made a fortune, also insisted that bad institutions, not original sin or intrinsic folly, caused the evils of society, and he sought to remedy them by changing the economic and educational system. He thus devised a scheme of model cooperative communities that would increase production, permit humane education, and release the naturally benevolent qualities of humankind.

The French moralist and advocate of social reform Pierre-Joseph Proudhon attacked the “tentacular” nation-state and aimed at a classless society in which major capitalism would be abolished. Self-governing producers, no longer slaves of bureaucrats and capitalists, would permit the realization of an intrinsic human dignity, and federation would replace the accepted condition of war between sovereign states. Proudhon tried to transform society by rousing the mass of the people to cooperative humanitarian consciousness.

Saint-Simon and Comte

Another revolt against the prevalent establishment, national and international, was made by the French social philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon, who wanted to develop the Industrial Revolution so as to ameliorate the condition of the poorest classes. This would be achieved not through political revolution but through a government of bankers and administrators who would supersede kings, aristocrats, and politicians. If France were suddenly deprived of 3,000 leading scientists, engineers, bankers, painters, poets, and writers, he argued, the result would be catastrophic, but if all the courtiers and bishops and 10,000 landowners vanished, the loss, though deplorable, would be much less severe. Saint-Simon also demanded a united Europe, superseding the warring nation-states, with a European parliament and a joint development of industry and communication. He also invented a synthetic religion appropriate to a scientific phase of history, with a cult of Isaac Newton and the great men of science.

Saint-Simon’s disciple Auguste Comte went farther. His Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42; Course of Positive Philosophy) and Système de politique positive, 4 vol. (1851–54; System of Positive Polity), elaborated a “religion of humanity,” with ritual, calendar, a priesthood of scientists, and secular saints, including Julius Caesar, Dante, and Joan of Arc. Society would be ruled by bankers and technocrats and Europe united into a Western republic. This doctrine, backed by pioneering sociology, won much influence among intellectuals. Comte, like Saint-Simon, tackled the essential questions: how to deploy the power of modern technology for the benefit of all humankind; how to avoid wars between sovereign states; and how to fill the void left by the waning of Christian beliefs.

Hegel

Whereas the utopian reformers had discarded metaphysical arguments, the German idealist philosopher G.W.F. Hegel claimed to apprehend the totality of the cosmos by speculative cognition. Like Vico, he saw the past in terms of changing consciousness, but he viewed the historical process as one of “becoming” rather than as one of eternal recurrence. Hegel had no adequate historical data for his intuitions, since the whole of world history was less known then than it is today, but his novel sweep and range of theory proved an intoxicating substitute for religion. He divided world history into four epochs: the patriarchal Eastern empire, the brilliant Greek boyhood, the severe manhood of Rome, and the Germanic phase after the Reformation. The “Absolute,” like a conductor, summons each people to their finest hour, and neither individuals nor states have any rights against them during their historically determined period of supremacy. Many felt some sense of anticlimax, however, when he claimed that the Prussian state embodied the hitherto highest self-realization of the Absolute (see Hegelianism). Not since St. Augustine had so compelling a drama been adumbrated. Hegel’s drama, moreover, culminates in this world, for “the state is the divine idea as it exists on Earth.”

Marx and Engels

Hegel was a conservative, but his influence on the revolutionaries Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels was profound. They inherited the Hegelian claim to understand the “totality” of history and life as it progressed through a dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. But, whereas Hegel envisaged a conflict of nation-states, Marx and Engels thought that the dynamism of history was generated by inevitable class conflict economically determined. This was an idea even more dynamic than Hegel’s and more relevant to the social upheavals that were a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. Marx was a formidable prophet whose writings prophesied an apocalypse and redemption. He was a deeply learned humanist, and his ideal was the fullest development of the human personality. But, whereas Plato was concerned with an elite, Marx cared passionately for the elevation of whole peoples.

The Marxist credo was all the more effective as it expressed with eloquent ferocity the grievances of the poor while predicting retribution and a happy ending. For the state, once captured by the class-conscious vanguard of the proletariat, would take over the means of production from the capitalists, and a brief “dictatorship of the proletariat” would establish genuine communism. The state would wither away, and individuals would at last become “fully human” in a classless society.

The powerful slogans of Marx and Engels were a natural result of the unbridled capitalism of laissez-faire, but politically they were naïve. In Classical, medieval, and humanistic political philosophy, the essential problem is the control of power, and to imagine that a dictatorship, once established, will wither away is utopian. As the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin observed,

The revolutionary dictatorship of the doctrinaires who put science before life would differ from the established state only in external trappings. The substance of both are a tyranny of the minority over the majority—in the name of the many and the supreme wisdom of the few.

The revolutionaries would vivisect society in the name of dogmas and “destroy the present order, only to erect their own rigid dictatorship among its ruins.” (For a full account of Marxist philosophy, see Marxism.)