touchstone archives
Commonplaces
Piquant excerpts lifted from Touchstone editors' own reading & listening.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man [France, 1789] could only provide a positive principle for social reconstruction if it was based upon a true conception of Man himself. That of the revolutionaries is well-known: they perceived in Man nothing but abstract individuality, a rational being destitute of all positive content.
I do not propose to unmask the internal contradictions of this revolutionary individualism nor to show how this abstract "Man" was suddenly transformed into the no less abstract "Citizen," how the free sovereign individual found himself doomed to be the defenseless slave and victim of the absolute State or "Nation," that is to say, of a group of obscure persons borne to the surface of public life by the eddies of revolution and rendered the more ferocious by the consciousness of their own intrinsic nonentity.
—Vladimir Solovyev
Russia and the Universal Church,
Introduction (trans. Herbert Rees; 1948)
— Society — Commonplaces #48 — May/June 2019 —
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