On his book Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism
Cover Interview of October 16, 2019
In a nutshell
Protestants won in Northern Europe in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The narrative produced by the winners was and largely
remains triumphalist: Protestantism won because it foreshadowed the liberal
order. It promoted the growth of individuality, now that each Christian had
unmediated access to a personal God; liberty of conscience; rationality; the
right to interpret scripture for him or herself; equality through the democratic
priesthood of all believers; toleration; constitutionalism, and national
independence. Winners make history.
In Permanent Revolution I argue that this argument is
both wrong and right. It is wrong because most varieties of sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century Protestantism were the opposite of liberal. They
were illiberal in remarkably extreme, soul-crushing, violence-producing ways.
The triumphalist argument is right insofar as the 150
years following 1517 witnessed a historical process whereby many Protestants
ended up repudiating the initial, founding doctrines of Luther and Calvin. Democracy;
division of political powers; separation of church and state; free-will;
toleration for minorities; liberty and privacy of conscience; artistic
liberties; liberty of textual interpretation: all these cardinal features of
the Enlightenment emerge from Protestant polities. They do so, however, by repudiating
Lutheran and Calvinist Protestantism.
In sum, Protestant triumphalism is wrong with regard to the
beginning of the Reformation centuries, and right with regard to the end of
that historical period.
How did the process of repudiation occur? I make sense of
that historical process by defining three broadly applicable periods of the
Reformation centuries in Britain: (i) 1517-1560, the revolutionary,
carnivalesque, fun period of smashing the Catholic Church and all its
practices; (ii) 1560-1625, the decidedly unfun period when many Protestants
discover that they are violence-producing, iconoclastic hypocrites likely
damned by predestination; and (iii) 1625-1688, the period in which
Protestantism divides into its illiberal, Presbyterian, Calvinist wing on the
one hand, and its proto-Enlightenment, proto-liberal wing on the other.
I substantiate the argument with sections devoted to the
following topics: despair; hypocrisy; iconoclasm; theater and the pursuit of “witches”;
reading; and liberty.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Protestants won in Northern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The narrative produced by the winners was and largely remains triumphalist: Protestantism won because it foreshadowed the liberal order. It promoted the growth of individuality, now that each Christian had unmediated access to a personal God; liberty of conscience; rationality; the right to interpret scripture for him or herself; equality through the democratic priesthood of all believers; toleration; constitutionalism, and national independence. Winners make history.
In Permanent Revolution I argue that this argument is both wrong and right. It is wrong because most varieties of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestantism were the opposite of liberal. They were illiberal in remarkably extreme, soul-crushing, violence-producing ways.
The triumphalist argument is right insofar as the 150 years following 1517 witnessed a historical process whereby many Protestants ended up repudiating the initial, founding doctrines of Luther and Calvin. Democracy; division of political powers; separation of church and state; free-will; toleration for minorities; liberty and privacy of conscience; artistic liberties; liberty of textual interpretation: all these cardinal features of the Enlightenment emerge from Protestant polities. They do so, however, by repudiating Lutheran and Calvinist Protestantism.
In sum, Protestant triumphalism is wrong with regard to the beginning of the Reformation centuries, and right with regard to the end of that historical period.
How did the process of repudiation occur? I make sense of that historical process by defining three broadly applicable periods of the Reformation centuries in Britain: (i) 1517-1560, the revolutionary, carnivalesque, fun period of smashing the Catholic Church and all its practices; (ii) 1560-1625, the decidedly unfun period when many Protestants discover that they are violence-producing, iconoclastic hypocrites likely damned by predestination; and (iii) 1625-1688, the period in which Protestantism divides into its illiberal, Presbyterian, Calvinist wing on the one hand, and its proto-Enlightenment, proto-liberal wing on the other.
I substantiate the argument with sections devoted to the following topics: despair; hypocrisy; iconoclasm; theater and the pursuit of “witches”; reading; and liberty.