God’s Economy
This is a precis of the author’s book God’s Economy (University of Chicago Press, 2009).
New York City, New York. “The transition of an oppressed nation to democracy,” proclaimed the French First Republic’s Committee of Public Safety, created in 1793 during the Reign of Terror, “is like the effort by which nature arose from nothingness to existence. You must entirely refashion a people whom you wish to make free, destroy its prejudices, alter its habits, limit its necessities, root up its vices, purify its desires.” With their vision of an almost plastic human nature, purifiable in the cause of creating a new society, these extraordinary lines were a focal point for Robert Nisbet’s assessment of revolutionary liberalism in his masterwork The Quest for Community. Nisbet also marveled at the French revolutionaries’ fury toward traditional forms of association and loyalty, with their desire, instead, for a new social order based on “free conventions between individual and individual,” as Turgot had put it a decade earlier. This was “one of the most explosive outbursts of individualism in the whole history of the world,” Nisbet concluded.
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