The French Revolution and the American Revolution are two of the most important and enduring legacies of the Enlightenment. As [Isaiah] Berlin says, they have almost nothing to do with Romanticism:
…the principles in the name of which the French Revolution was fought were principles of universal reason, of order, of justice, not at all connected with the sense of uniqueness, the profound emotional introspection, the sense of the differences of things, dissimilarities rather than similarities, with which the Romantic movement is usually associated.(However, as I hope to show later, there is a track that leads direct from the Enlightenment to Romanticism – another case of there being a smooth transition from one hemisphere's agenda to the (in reality quite opposed) agenda of the other hemisphere, which I have argued for in the case of the Reformation.)
After the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the first conservatives asked themselves whether the turmoil, suffering, and criminal excess had been due to liberty or to its perversion. Burke mildly and Maistre savagely had blamed modern liberty, that is, liberty understood in the wrong way.
In order that there should be chronicle, there must first be history: for chronicle is the body of history from which the spirit has gone; the corpse of history.
By 1969, the year Johnson left office, the poverty rate was down to 12.1 percent—a reduction of more than 12 million people and more than one-third of the impoverished population at the time Johnson had taken office.
Start by considering the end. Visualise both the road to personal fulfilment and the destination. Consider what behaviour would thwart that fulfilment and do the opposite. Thinking about the route to avoid helps reveal the more rewarding road.
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