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The Great Subversive. The British and American conservatives held their ground—or much of it—against Jacobinism, but Author Kirk points out that Rousseau had intellectual grandchildren more successful in the English-speaking world than his child, the French Revolution. Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), a recluse, knew little of men; but his mind was sparked by rising industrialism. The machine seduced him, and he contemptuously swept aside Burke's "world of spirit and imagination." From Bentham to Lipomann, the vocabulary of social and political thought has been dominated by metaphors drawn from the science of mechanics. Quantity replaced quality, and statistics replaced history. Bentham set up new standards of decision: 1) utility —determined by a mechanical weighing of "pains and pleasures," and 2) absolute power of majorities. John Stuart Mill called Bentham "the great subversive/' Some hundred-odd years later, Lord Keynes blamed Bentham's Utilitarianism for paving the way for Marxism. Writes Kirk: "Twentieth century political and judicial 'realism' and pragmatism, triumphant now in the Supreme Court of the U.S. and throughout nearly all the world, are derived from Bentham."
It was to the spirit of Bentham that the perceptive Alexis de Tocqueville (whom Kirk calls "the best friend democracy ever had") offered a conservative misgiving in 1840. "I think," wrote De Tocqueville, "that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world . . . The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and all alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives . . . Above this race of men stands a [government] which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild . . . Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range, and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things; it has predisposed them to endure them and often to look on them as benefits."
This is long-range prophecy, gently put. At shorter range, George Orwell has described the drab brutality of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and of the Animal Farm, where "all animals are equal" but, as John Adams foresaw, inevitably "some are more equal than others."