Philosophy of the 19th century - Systems period (1800-1850) - The traditionalist movement

The revolutionary experience, which had enchanted Kant’s old age with the example of a great people who chose their own constitution, appeared at the beginning of the 12th century as a purely destructive, critical work, incapable of creating anything; the essential part of the Revolution was, for Kant, the Constituent Assembly, the people who freely created their own laws; for Auguste Comte, it was not the Constituent Assembly, with its vain effort to adapt in France the English constitution that did not correspond to its needs, it was the Convention, and not even that of Robespierre who undertook absurd religious restorations, but that of Danton, the dictatorship which, in full awareness of its provisional role, destroyed every vestige of the political past.

This idea of the purely negative character of the revolution, following moreover all the negations of the philosophy of the eighteenth century, is the common postulate of almost all philosophies up to 1848: all give themselves the mission of seeking a positive, constructive principle, capable of rebuilding a solid society. For all also, and by the very conditions of the problem, this principle must be a reality independent of human arbitrariness and of the reflective will; it is therefore not a question of creating it and bringing it into being, but of discovering it and announcing it.

All the errors attributed to the thought of the eighteenth century and to the Revolution come from the same source, from this false belief that principles, whether intellectual or political, are of human institution and can be constructed from an elementary fact such as sensation or needs: these principles are, on the contrary, rebellious to analysis and transcend the puny power of human reason.