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Y

"legitimate," no basis for agreement exists. Adjustments may occur but they will be conceived as tactical in order to consolidate positions for the inevitable showdown or as tools in the primary task of undermining the pattern of legitimacy of the antagonist.

This has nothing to do with the label of political parties. There have been societies, such as the United States or Britain in the nineteenth century, which have been basically conservative, so that existing parties could be considered at once conservative and progressive. There have been others, such as France for over a century, where all issues have been basically revolutionary, however the parties consider themselves, because of the existence of a fundamental social schism. The motivation of a stable social order is a concept of *duty* — the assertion of the self-evidence of the social maxims — where an alternative to the existing order is, not rejected, but inconceivable. The motivation of a revolutionary period is a concept of *loyalty*, where the act of submitting the will acquires a symbolic and even ritualistic significance because alternatives seem ever present. An ethic of duty involves a notion of *responsibility* which judges actions by the orientation of the will. It is for this reason an ethic of *motivation*, striving to achieve identification of the individual code with a standard of morality which, no matter how rigid, must become individually accepted in order to be meaningful. An ethic of loyalty involves a notion of *orthodoxy*, because it is a means to achieve a group identity. It is therefore an ethic of relation to group standards which may be validated in any number of ways: by rationality, tradition, charisma, etc. It does not exclude the identity of the individual with the social code, but it does not require it. "Right or wrong my country" — this

-4-

conservative reply, so that if the answer must be given it will transcend
the will, so that the contest occurs at least on a plane beyond the
individual, so that obligation can become duty and not loyalty. To fight
for conservatism in the name of history, to reject the validity of the
revolutionary challenge because of its denial of the temporal aspect of society
and the social contract, this was the answer of Burke. To fight for
conservatism in the name of reason, to deny the validity of the revolutionary
question on epistemological grounds, as contrary to the structure of the
universe — this was the answer of Metternich.

The difference between the two conservative positions, although in many
respects a question of emphasis, proved fundamental in application. To Burke
the ultimate standard of social obligation was history; to Metternich it was
reason. To Burke history was the expression of the "ethos" of a people;
to Metternich it was a force to be dealt with, more important than most social
forces but of no greater moral validity. Burke denied the revolutionary's
premise that reason supplied the sufficient basis for social obligation and
his challenge was therefore destined to have no immediate effect. Metternich
fought his battles in the name of the very Enlightenment that had produced
his opponents and his was therefore a mortal challenge. To Burke, a revolution
was an offense against social morality, the violation of the sacred contract
of a nation's historical constitution. To Metternich, it was a violation of
the dictates of reason, to be combatted not because it was immoral, but because
it was disastrous. Historical conservatism abhors revolution as undermining
the individual expression of a nation's tradition; rationalist conservatism

-6-

which lacked the logical rigor of a call to action. Afterwards it was
because the French Revolution, unlike the British, had produced a fundamental
social schism. Cohesive societies can regulate themselves through custom
which reveals that disputes are peripheral. Societies which contain
fundamental schisms must rely on law, the definition of a compulsory relationship.
Thus Kant and Rousseau, not Locks, were the representatives of the
Continental version of liberty which sought freedom in the identification of
the will with the general interest and considered government freest not when
it governed least, but when it governed justly. To the British conservative,
the social problem was one of adjustment, to protect the social sphere by
timely political concession. But to his Continental counterpart the problem
was one of conservation in the literal sense, because to him political
concession was equivalent to social surrender. For one can make concessions
only to something. When state and society are two different entities, this is
no problem. But when they are identical, a concession is a confession of
failure, an avowal of the end of the conservative structure, a recognition of
an unbridgeable social schism. Thus even at the end of his life, after his era
had long ended, Metternich could still object to a speech by a British Peelite,
Sir James Graham, that the statesman's wisdom consisted of recognizing the
proper moment for making concessions: "My conception of statesmanship differs
completely. The true merit of a statesman...consists of governing so as to
avoid a situation in which concessions become necessary." Therefore, too,
Metternich's characteristic pose of the philosopher-king who stood above the plane
where personal feelings rule, cool, composed, superior.

2. Metternich, Aus Metternich's Nachgelassenen Papieren (Vienna, Wilhelm Braumueller, 1881), Vol. VIII, p. 562. Coded as N.P.

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[Y]

7

It was thus that the Enlightenment retained its last champion deep into the nineteenth century, who judged actions by their "truth," not by their success, an advocate of reason in an age of philosophical materialism, who never surrendered his belief that morality could be known and that virtue was teachable. "These maxims have been proved true," he maintained in 1822. "Policy is based not on novels, but on history; not on faith, but on knowledge." "The world," he wrote to the Tsar in 1817, "is suffering from a very special disease, which as all epidemics will pass away, that of mysticism...It would be easier today to renew the sermons of Peter the Hermit, than to make clear to the afflicted that God demands another service than the shedding of blood and that no man can judge the conscience of his fellows."

When another Napoleon appeared on the scene, thirty-five years after the defeat of his great predecessor, Metternich did not consider this a personal failure but as the illustration of a philosophical insight: "The millions of votes for Louis Napoleon are only the expression of an instinctive feeling, that without order there can exist no social life, and without authority no order. Today this truth calls itself Napoleon; so old has the world become that truth must assume a personal name, because all other roads have been closed to it." Truth must assume a personal name — this is the tragedy of the rationalist conservative, just as history with a personal name is that of the historical conservative. And the anonymity of the truth was also the paradox of the Enlightenment. When truth is strong its foundation is faith, if only in a theory of knowledge. When truth is challenged, it becomes a dogma.

6. N.P. III, p. 542.

7. N.P. III, p. 52f.

8. N.P. VIII, p. 197.

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So it came about that Metternich in his never-ending battle against revolution went back to the doctrines of the age in which he had been brought up, but interpreted them with an inflexibility totally unnecessary when they were still taken for granted and which distorted their essence in application. He was still of the generation to whom the "great clockwork" of the "golden age" was more than an idle dream. There was a fitness in the universe which corresponded to man's noblest aspirations; a well-ordered mechanism the understanding of which insured success and whose laws could not be violated with impunity: "States, just as human beings often transgress laws, the only difference is the severity of their penalty." Society has its laws just as nature and man. It is with old institutions as with old men, they can never be young again....This is the way of the social order and it can not be different because it is the law of nature....the moral world has its storms just like the material one." Metternich used these truisms of eighteenth century philosophy to oppose revolution and liberalism not because they were wicked, but because they were wrong; not only because he did not wish to live in the world his opponents attempted to create but because this world was doomed to failure. Revolution was an assertion of will and of power, but the essence of existence was proportion, its expression was law, and its mechanism an equilibrium.

For these reasons the conservative statesman was the supreme realist and his opponents the "visionaries." "I am a man of prose," Metternich insisted in his political testament, "and not of poetry." "My point of departure is the quiet contemplation of the affairs of this world, not those of the

9. N.P. I, p. 35.

10. N.P. III, p. 322.

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other of which I know nothing and which are the object of faith which is in
strict opposition to knowledge.... In the social world... one must act cold-
bloodedly based on careful observation and without hatred or prejudice....

I was born to make history not to write novels and if I _guess_ correctly
this is because I _know_. Invention is the enemy of history which knows
only discoveries, and only that which exists can be discovered."

12
Statesmanship was the science of the interests of states subject to laws
entirely analagous to the laws of the physical world. The statesman was a
philosopher who understood these maxims, who performed his tasks but
reluctantly for they deflected him from the source of the only real enjoyment,
the contemplation of truth, who was responsible only to his conscience and
to history — to the former because it contained his vision of truth, to the
latter because it provided the only test of its validity.

13

14

11. N.P. VIII, p. 184.

12. N.P. I, p. 33.

13. See N.P. III, p. 342, or N.P. III, p. 357, among many examples.

14. That Catholic Austria should have as its First Minister an intellectual
contemporary of Kant and Voltaire may appear a paradox. But the relationship
of the Holy Roman Empire to the Pope was not uninfluenced by the memory of
five hundred years of struggle. Nor had the reforms of Joseph II who had expelled
the Jesuits and broken the political influence of the Church everybeyn repealed.
Finally the Pope was to Metternich not only a spiritual ruler but a second-class
Italian prince and Metternich was determined that Austria, dominate the Italian
peninsula. At the Congress of Vienna his treatment of the Papal Secretary of
State was peremptory and in 1817 he even toyed with the idea of making an Austrian
arch-duke a Cardinal, the better to cement his position at the Vatican. Not
religious ties but philosophical and political agreement characterizes Metternich's
correspondence with the Papal Secretary of State when the Church and Austria
marched hand in hand. (See Metternich et Consalvi, Correspondence, edited by
Charles van der Lausain, 1899.) The following letter by Metternich to
Nesselrode, the Russian Foreign Minister, will make clear his attitude towards the
Church: "....No Catholic power is more independent,...of the views of the
Court of Rome than we. The heir of so many Holy Roman Emperors and the nephew
of Joseph II knows what he owes God and what to his honor; our ecclesiastical
departments may extend their dogma regarding the rights of the Crown too far,
and if it is too far it is surely not in favor of the Court of Rome that they tip
the scale." (N.P. III, p. 57.) Metternich was not irreligious, but he admired
the Church more for its utility and its civilizing influence than for its "truth".

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II

What then were the insights which Metternich's maxims revealed to him?
They showed a universe governed by law, not in the modern sense of an *inter-
pretation* of events but as their *attribute*. To disregard the law and its
dictates of harmony and equilibrium was not so much morally wrong as physically
disastrous. "Isolated states exist only as the abstractions of so-called
philosophers. In the society of states each state has interests...which
connect it with the others. The great axioms of political science derive
from the recognition of the true interests of *all* states; it is in the general
interests that the guarantee of existence is to be found, while particular
interests — the cultivation of which is considered political wisdom by restless
and short-sighted men — have only a secondary importance. Modern history
demonstrates the application of the principle of solidarity and equilibrium....
15
and of the united efforts of states...to force a return to the common law."
And just as in the political world the equilibrium reflected a balance between
the forces of aggression and the forces of resistance, so the social order
revealed an uneasy tension between the conserving and the destructive tendencies
inherent in any body social. It was the task of statesmanship to distinguish
the form and the substance of this contest and to create the moral foundation
of an order on which only time could confer spontaneity. This led to another
distinction, so often considered by the rationalist as the solution and not
the definition of a problem: Man can only create Chartes, which have the
value of programmatic announcements; it is time which makes constitutions. 16

15. N.P. I, p. 334.

16. N.P. VII, p. 636; VIII, p. 525.

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force when they emerge in the form of arbitrary pronouncements... The mania of law-making is a symptom of the disease which has ravaged the world for sixty-two years... Natural, moral or material forces are not fit subjects of human regulation. What would one say of a Charte which side by side with the rights of Man exhibited the laws of gravitation?... If there is no God, he will not be created by pronouncements; if He exists, He will not require human recognition to achieve divinity... Objects mistakenly made subject to legislation result only in the limitation, if not the complete annulment, of that which is attempted to be safeguarded."

Here, then, was the rationalist belief in rights as an attribute of the universe, the aristocrat's vision of the inseparability of power and responsibility, the Enlightenment's faith in the connection between order and freedom. While it asserted the existence of "rights" transcending any human construction, indeed from which human construction could only detract, it emphasized a fundamental contradiction of democratic theory: The view of human nature which insisted on man's capacity for self-government was combined in the same theory with another view of human nature which limited the scope of this government. Why if man is conscious of arbitrary oppression should he wish to oppress others? Why should universal rights be guaranteed? This has, of course, never been a problem in Anglo-Saxon countries where the relation between state and society have had a juristic, not an ethical foundation. In such cases constitutional guarantees have had the value of the difference between explicit and implicit limitations on a government in any case understood as limited. But in an "ethical state" an explicit limitation on government is meaningless. If the state justifies itself, not by its utility, but by its morality, there exists

19. N.P. VIII, p. 557f.

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[N]

no tribunal before which to appeal its measures. If the sanction is not
juridic but ethical, limitation can come about only by self-restraint, not
by constitutional guarantees.

This was the challenge of the conservative statesman to his liberal
opponents: If the conservative became an unwilling symbol of a revolutionary
period by being forced into a definition of the nature of authority, the
liberal contradicted himself by answering his own question about the nature
of freedom. To be sure, Metternich did not have an answer of his own to the
query regarding freedom, because he thought it inseparable from the notion
of authority. But, equally, his opponents had not really dealt with the
problem of authority which they thought exhausted in the definition of
freedom. And yet they were closer than they realized: For had one asked
Metternich as to the limits of authority and his opponents as to the limits
of freedom, they would have both answered with one word which indicated
that to them the question was essentially meaningless: reason, self-evident,
and sovereign, which contained its applicability in its very conception,
would trace the boundary of freedom as well as of necessity. That the
categorical imperative was capable of contingent interpretation was inconceivable
to Kant. That a Sovereign should substitute force for law was not inconceivable
to Metternich, but he considered it suicidal and therefore unlikely. It is this
which gave the dispute between Metternich and the liberals the bitterness of
a civil war, at least on the "democratic" side. For Metternich was an opponent
who fought liberalism in the name of the very universality it claimed for
itself, whose mode of argument represented as much of a challenge to his
opponents, as their existence to him. It is difficult, indeed, for a rationalistic
philosophy to survive the demonstration that the same premise can lead to two
diametrically opposed conclusions.

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III

If Metternich considered the quest for formal constitutions chimerical,
he saw in revolutions a physical disaster. In a universe characterized by
the balance between the forces of conservation and those of destruction,
revolution was due to a disturbance of the equilibrium in favor of the latter.
But since the equilibrium was the "natural" condition, a revolution could
achieve no more than a dislocation straining towards a new integration.
The disorders attendant on revolutions were therefore symptoms of a transi-
tional period and their violence a reflection of the ignorance of their
advocates: "Revolutions are temporary disturbances in the life of states...
Order always ends up by reclaiming its own; states do not die like individuals,
they transform themselves. It is the task of statesmanship...to guide this
transformation and to supervise its direction." The difference between a
conservative and a revolutionary order was not the fact of change, but its
mode: "A consideration the liberal spirit usually ignores...is the difference
in the life of states, as of individuals, between progress by measured steps
or by leaps. In the first case, conditions develop with the consequence of
natural law; while the latter disrupts this connection.... Nature is
development, the ordered succession of appearances; only such a course can
eliminate the evil and foster the good. But leaping transitions wind up by
requiring entirely new creations — and it is not given to man to create out
of nothingness." Civilization, then, was the degree to which change could
come about "naturally," to which the tension between the forces of destruction
and of conservation was submerged in a spontaneous pattern of obligations. Thus
true civilization had come only with the advent of Christianity which made

20. N.P. VIII, p. 468.

21. N.P. VII, p. 638.

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All this gave rise to a type of individual who symbolized the
revolutionary era: the presumptuous man, the natural product of a too-rapid
march of the human spirit towards seeming perfection: "Religion, morality,
legislation, economics, politics, administration, all seem to have become a
common good and accessible to everyone. Science appears intuitive, experience
has no value for the presumptuous; faith means nothing to him and he substitutes
for it the pretense of a personal conviction, to arrive at which, however,
he dispenses with analysis or study, for these seem too subordinate activities
to a mind which believes itself capable of embracing at one blow the whole
ensemble of issues. Laws have no value for him because he did not contribute
to their preparation and it is below the dignity of a man of his quality to
recognize limits traced by ignorant and brute generations. Power resides in
himself; why submit to what can have use only to men deprived...of insight?
That which was appropriate for an age of weakness is no longer adequate for that
of reason...All this] tends to an order of things which individualizes all the
elements which compose society..."

It would be difficult to find a more tragic statement or one more symbolic
of the nature of revolutions. For its significance did not lie in its content
but in the fact that it was beside the point. What was intended as sarcasm —
the exhibition of an incommensurability between pretense and reality — amounted
to no more than the description of the objectives of his opponents. That which
Metternich believed he merely needed to exhibit to reduce to absurdity, his
opponents thought required only an affirmation in order to be validated. It
was the inevitable revolutionary misunderstanding, the reluctance to admit that
"truth" may not be self-evident. While Metternich desperately attempted to

-18-

protect "reality" against its enemies, the issue became increasingly a debate
about its nature and the nature of "truth". Had "reality" still proved
unambiguous, he would not have needed to affirm it. By the increasing
insistence of his affirmation, he testified to its disintegration.

Metternich next distinguished the presumptuous man by type and by
origin. They were composed of levellers and theoreticians: the former, men
of powerful wills and strong determination; the latter, abstract theoreticians
living in a world of their own. But if the levellers were to be feared on
the day of action, the doctrinaires were most dangerous during the calm
preceding the storm. Always dedicated to abstractions, they did not cease
to agitate the people with their imaginary fears and to arouse the governments
to deviate from their proper route. But whatever guise presumption assumed,
its place of origin was the middle class. The revolutionary aristocrat was
a lost soul, destined to become the victim of the Revolution or to be degraded
by being forced to play the role of courtier to his inferiors. And the mass
of the population always distrusted change and craved only the equal protection
of laws in order to pursue their hard calling. But the middle class, the lawyers,
the writers, the bureaucrats, the half-educated, owning the means of communication,
ambitious but without goal, dissatisfied but unable to offer an alternative,
this was the real organ of revolution. It was no accident, concluded Metternich,
that the revolution occurred not in the poorest, but in the richest country
of Europe, not in the most backward but in the most advanced state, so demoralized
that "the revolution had already triumphed in the palace of the kings and in
the boudoirs of the towns before it even began to prepare itself in the mass
of the people."

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28

29

symbolized the possibility of yielding to pressure: "Where everything is tottering, it is above all necessary that something, no matter what, remain steadfast, so that the lost can find a connection and the strayed a refuge."

This accounted for the preference of Napoleon over the Bourbons, despite the "legitimacy" of the latter, because to Metternich legitimacy was not an end but a tool and, when it conflicted with the requirements of stability, it had to yield. Therefore, paradoxically, Metternich became a defender of existing institutions, however much he might deplore them, because their overthrow would be an even more dangerous symbol. When in the panic of 1820 the Grand-Duke of Baden offered to abolish his constitution Metternich replied: "Every order lawfully established bears within itself the principle of a better system...A Charte, in any case, is not a constitution. It is up to the government to separate good and evil, to strengthen public authority and to protect the repose and the happiness of nations against hostile attack."

It was a futile contest, a tour de force leading to self-destruction, this effort to bring about change through order and to identify order with tranquillity in the middle of a revolutionary period. It was really, despite its protestations to the contrary, an effort to recapture a lost innocence, a quest for a period when obligation was spontaneous, an aristocratic notion of government as the reciprocal execution of duties. The "Metternich system" answered the question of the cause of the revolution but it gave no indication of a solution once it had occurred. It spoke abstractly of its readiness to reform, but it never discussed what specific measures it would consider appropriate. As late as 1851, Metternich could give no better advice to his successor, Schwarzenberg, than to strengthen the landed aristocracy, as if

28. SRBIK, Metternich (2 vols.) I, p. 354.

29. N.P. III, p. 375.

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It was only appropriate, therefore, that the last act of the conservative statesman was of a symbolic nature, a plea for the anonymity which alone could justify his maxims. When, in 1848, a deputation of the victorious revolution called his resignation "generous," the aged Metternich replied: "I protest solemnly against this term. Only a Sovereign can be generous; my action is the result of my sense of right and my concept of duty." Thus the final gesture of the "doctor of Revolutions" was a last desperate assertion of order, of the precedence of right over will even in defeat after half a century of struggle. And when one of the deputies insisted on using the term "generous" Metternich replied: "In resigning I anticipate another claim, that I have carried the monarchy away with me. But this is not the case. No individual has shoulders strong enough to carry an Empire; if states disappear, it is because they lose faith in themselves." This was also the final symbolization of the conservative tragedy: that it is the task of the conservative not to defeat but to forestall revolution, that a society which can not prevent a revolution, the disintegration of whose values has been demonstrated by the fact of revolution, will not be able to defeat it by conservative means, that order once shattered can be restored only by the experience of chaos.

35. N.P. VII, p. 626; VIII, p. 212.

[c]

THE CONSERVATIVE DILEMMA: REFLECTIONS ON
THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF METTERNICH

HENRY A. KISSINGER

Harvard University

I

The conservative in a revolutionary period always represents somewhat of an anomaly. Were society still cohesive, it would occur to no one to be a conservative for a serious alternative to the existing structure would be inconceivable. But a revolutionary period is a symptom precisely of the fact that the self-evidence of the goals of the social effort has disintegrated, that a significant segment of society holds values which either cannot or will not be assimilated. What had been taken for granted must now be defended and the act of defense introduces rigidity. The deeper the fissure, the more inflexible the contending positions and the greater the temptation to dogmatism. Were the "legitimate" structure still universally accepted, it would not be necessary to demonstrate its validity; but the act of defense exhibits the possibility of an alternative.

Once the existing legitimacy has been challenged, no real discourse between the contenders is possible any longer, for they cease to speak the same language. It is not the adjustment of differences *within* a political system which is now at issue, but the political system itself. Henceforth stability and reform, liberty and authority, come to appear as antithetical, and political contests turn doctrinal instead of empirical. When there is no consensus on what is considered "legitimate," no basis for agreement exists. Adjustments may occur but they will be conceived as tactical in order to consolidate positions for the inevitable showdown or as tools in the primary task of undermining the pattern of legitimacy of the antagonist.

This has nothing to do with the label of political parties. There have been societies, such as the United States or Britain in the nineteenth century, which have been basically conservative, so that existing parties could be considered at once conservative and progressive. There have been others, such as France for over a century, where all issues have been basically revolutionary, however the parties consider themselves, because of the existence of a fundamental social schism. The motivation of a stable social order is a concept of *duty*—the assertion of the self-evidence of the social maxims—where an alternative to the existing order is not rejected, but inconceivable. The motivation of a revolutionary period is a concept of *loyalty*, where the act of submitting the will acquires a symbolic and even ritualistic significance because alternatives seem ever present. An ethic of duty involves a notion of *responsibility* which judges actions by the orientation of the will. It is for this reason an ethic of *motivation*, striving for an identification of the individual code with a standard of morality which, no matter how rigid, must become individually accepted in order to be meaningful. An ethic of loyalty involves a notion of *orthodoxy*, because it is a means to

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THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW

achieve a group identity. It is therefore an ethic of *relation* to group standards which may be validated in any number of ways: by rationality, tradition, char-isma, etc. It does not exclude the identity of the individual with the social code, but it does not require it. "My country right or wrong"—this is the language of loyalty. "So act that your actions could become by your will universal laws of nature"—this is the language of duty. Duty expresses the aspect of universality, loyalty that of contingency.

But what is the conservative to do in a revolutionary situation? A stable social order lives with an intuition of permanence and opposition to it is either ignored or attempted to be assimilated. The fundamental conservative position, therefore, involves a denial of the validity of the revolutionary's question re-garding the legitimacy of authority, but the question if capable of exacting a reply has indicated a kind of validity. Thus conservatism, whenever it ceases to be a way of life and emerges as a political movement, runs the risk of becom-ing the symbol of a revolutionary period. For what does it profit a conservative to emerge victorious in a battle of wills, in a struggle which only deepens the fissures and accelerates the revolutionary development? It is no accident that in revolutionary contests the conservative position comes to be dominated by its reactionary—that is, counterrevolutionary—wing, the group which fights in terms of will and with an ethic of loyalty. For the true conservative is not at home in social struggle. He will attempt to avoid an unbridgeable schism, because he knows that a stable social structure thrives not on triumphs but on reconciliations.

How then can the conservative rescue his position from the contingency of conflicting claims? How can that which *is* persuade when its self-evidence has disintegrated? By fighting as anonymously as possible, has been the classic con-servative reply, so that if the answer must be given it will transcend the will, so that the contest occurs at least on a plane beyond the individual, so that obliga-tion can become *duty* and not *loyalty*. To fight for conservatism in the name of history, to reject the validity of the revolutionary challenge because of its denial of the temporal aspect of society and the social contract—this was the answer of Burke. To fight for conservatism in the name of reason, to deny the validity of the revolutionary question on epistemological grounds, as contrary to the structure of the universe—this was the answer of Metternich.

The difference between the two conservative positions, although in many re-spects a question of emphasis, proved fundamental in application. To Burke the ultimate standard of social obligation was history; to Metternich it was rea-son. To Burke history was the expression of the "ethos" of a people; to Metter-nich it was a force to be dealt with, more important than most social forces but of no greater moral validity. Burke denied the revolutionaries' premise that rea-son supplied the sufficient basis for social obligation and his challenge was there-fore destined to have no immediate effect. Metternich fought his battles in the name of the very Enlightenment that had produced his opponents and his was therefore a mortal challenge. To Burke, a revolution was an offense against so-cial morality, the violation of the sacred contract of a nation's historical consti-

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THE CONSERVATIVE DILEMMA: POLITICAL THOUGHT OF METTERNICH 1019

tution. To Metternich, it was a violation of the dictates of reason, to be com-
batted not because it was immoral, but because it was disastrous. Historical
conservatism abhors revolution as undermining the *individual* expression of a
nation's tradition; rationalist conservatism fights it as preventing the imple-
mentation of *universal* social maxims.

It was this rationalist conception of conservatism which imparted the rigidity
to Metternich's policy and to his interpretation of the complementary issues of
the nature of freedom and the meaning of authority which shape all political
thought. The West has produced two basic replies: freedom as the absence of
restraint and freedom as the voluntary acceptance of authority. The former
position considers freedom to reside outside of the sphere of authority; the latter
conceives freedom as a *quality* of authority. The negative version of freedom is
the expression of a society transcending its political structure, a society which,
as in Locke, exists prior to the state and whose political organization becomes
like a company of limited liability organized for the achievement of determinate
goals. In such a society the issue of conservatism against reform tends to appear
as a question of emphasis, of greater or lesser change on problems of determi-
nate form and content. Since the significant field of activity occurs outside the
governmental sphere, politics has a utilitarian, but not an ethical function; it is
useful, not moral. A society implementing Locke's concept of freedom is always
conservative, whatever form its political contests take. Were it not, it could not
operate a system whose strength resides in its social cohesiveness, in the things
which are "taken for granted." Burke's defense of conservatism had for this rea-
son no applicability to the British domestic scene, but was directed against its
misapprehension by foreigners.

But the Continent has never been able to accept the Anglo-Saxon version
of freedom. Before the French Revolution, this was because Locke's became the
philosophy of an *accomplished* revolution, a doctrine of reconciliation which
lacked the logical rigor of a call to action. Afterwards it was because the French
Revolution, unlike the British, had produced a fundamental social schism. Co-
hesive societies can regulate themselves through custom which reveals that dis-
putes are peripheral. Societies which contain fundamental schisms must rely
on law, the definition of a *compulsory* relationship. Thus Kant and Rousseau,
not Locke, were the representatives of the Continental version of liberty which
sought freedom in the identification of the will with the general interest and
considered government freest not when it governed least, but when it governed
justly. To the British conservative, the social problem was one of adjustment,
to protect the social sphere by timely political concession. But to his Continen-
tal counterpart, the problem was one of conservation in the literal sense, be-
cause to him political concession was equivalent to social surrender. For one can
make concessions only *to* something. When state and society are two different
entities, this is no problem. But when they are identical, a concession is a con-
fession of failure, an avowal of the end of the conservative structure, a recogni-
tion of an unbridgeable social schism. Thus even at the end of his life, after his
era had long ended, Metternich could still object to a speech by a British

1020

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Peelite, Sir James Graham, that the statesman's wisdom consisted of recognizing the proper moment for making concessions: "My conception of statesmanship differs completely. The true merit of a statesman . . . consists of governing so as to avoid a situation in which concessions become necessary."¹ Therefore, too, Metternich's characteristic pose of the philosopher-king who stood above the plane where personal feelings rule, cool, composed, superior.

Had Metternich been born fifty years earlier, he would still have been a conservative, but there would have been no need to write pedantic disquisitions about the nature of his conservatism. He would have moved through the salons of the fashionable world with his undeniable charm and grace, subtly conducting his diplomacy with the fine indirection which is itself the symbol of certainty, of a world in which everybody understands intangibles in the same manner. He would still have played at philosophy, for this was the vogue of the 18th century, but he would not have considered it a tool of policy. But in a period of permanent revolution, philosophy was the only means of rescuing universality from contingent claims. It was for this reason that Metternich fought so insistently against the identification of his name with his period, an attitude seemingly so inconsistent with his vanity. If there was a "Metternich system" his achievements would be personal, his battle meaningless. "My 'system,'" he maintained, "is nothing but the dictates of right reason."² And at the end of his life, he still could write:

> For thirty-nine years I played the role of rock from which the waves recoil . . . until finally they succeed in engulfing it. They did not become calm however, afterwards, for what caused their turmoil was not the rock but their inherent unrest. The removal of the obstacle did not alter the situation, nor could it have. . . . I would like to call out to the representatives of social upheaval: "Citizen of a world that exists but in your dreams, nothing is altered. On March 14³ nothing happened save the elimination of a single man."⁴

It was thus that the Enlightenment retained deep into the nineteenth century its last champion, who judged actions by their "truth," not by their success, an advocate of reason in an age of philosophical materialism, who never surrendered his belief that morality could be known and that virtue was teachable. "These maxims have been proved true," he maintained in 1822. "Policy is based not on novels, but on history; not on faith, but on knowledge."⁵ "The world," he wrote to the Tsar in 1817, "is suffering from a very special disease, which, as all epidemics, will pass away, that of mysticism. . . . It would be easier today to renew the sermons of Peter the Hermit than to make clear to the afflicted that God demands another service than the shedding of blood and that no man can judge the conscience of his fellows."⁶ When another Napoleon appeared on the scene, thirty-five years after the defeat of his great predecessor, Metternich considered this not a personal failure but the illustration of a philo-

¹ Metternich, *Aus Metternich's Nachgelassenen Papieren*, 8 vols. (Vienna, 1881), Vol. 8, p. 562. This collection will be hereinafter cited as *NP*.

² *NP*, Vol. 8, p. 235.

³ March 14, 1848, the day of Metternich's resignation as Staatskanzler.

⁴ *NP*, Vol. 8, p. 232.

⁵ *NP*, Vol. 3, p. 542.

⁶ *NP*, Vol. 3, pp. 52ff.

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THE CONSERVATIVE DILEMMA: POLITICAL THOUGHT OF METTERNICH 1021

sophical insight: "The millions of votes for Louis Napoleon are only the expres-
sion of an instinctive feeling that without order there can exist no social life
and without authority no order. Today this truth calls itself Napoleon; so old
has the world become that truth must assume a personal name, because all
other roads have been closed to it."⁷ Truth must assume a personal name—this
is the tragedy of the rationalist conservative, just as history with a personal
name is that of the historical conservative. And the anonymity of the truth was
also the paradox of the Enlightenment. When truth is strong, its foundation is
faith, if only in a theory of knowledge. When truth is challenged, it becomes a
dogma.

So it came about that Metternich in his never-ending battle against revolu-
tion went back to the doctrines of the age in which he had been brought up, but
interpreted them with an inflexibility totally unnecessary when they were still
taken for granted and which distorted their essence in application. He was still
of the generation to whom the "great clockwork" or the "golden age" was more
than an idle dream. There was a fitness in the universe which corresponded to
man's noblest aspirations, a well-ordered mechanism the understanding of
which ensured success and whose laws could not be violated with impunity:
"States, just as human beings, often transgress laws; the only difference is the
severity of their penalty."⁸ "Society has its laws just as nature and man. It is
with old institutions as with old men: they can never be young again. . . . This
is the way of the social order and it cannot be different because it is the law of
nature . . . the moral world has its storms just like the material one."⁹ Metter-
nich used these truisms of eighteenth-century philosophy to oppose revolution
and liberalism not because they were wicked, but because they were wrong; not
only because he did not wish to live in the world his opponents attempted to
create, but also because this world was doomed to failure. Revolution was an
assertion of will and of power, but the essence of existence was proportion, its
expression law, and its mechanism an equilibrium.

For these reasons the conservative statesman was the supreme realist and his
opponents the "visionaries." "I am a man of prose," Metternich insisted in his
political testament, "and not of poetry." "My point of departure is the quiet
contemplation of the affairs of this world, not those of the other of which I know
nothing and which are the object of faith, which is in strict opposition to knowl-
edge. . . . In the social world . . . one must act cold-bloodedly, based on careful
observation and without hatred or prejudice. . . . I was born to make history,
not to write novels, and if I *guess* correctly this is because I *know*. Invention is
the enemy of history, which knows only discoveries, and only that which exists
can be discovered."¹⁰ Statesmanship was the science of the interests of states¹¹
subject to laws entirely analogous to the laws of the physical world. The states-
man was a philosopher who understood these maxims, who performed his tasks
but reluctantly, for they deflected him from the source of the only real enjoy-

⁷ *NP*, Vol. 8, p. 197.

⁹ *NP*, Vol. 3, p. 322.

¹¹ *NP*, Vol. 1, p. 33.

⁸ *NP*, Vol. 1, p. 35.

¹⁰ *NP*, Vol. 8, p. 184.

1022

ment, the contemplation of truth,¹² who was responsible only to his conscience and to history—to the former because it contained his vision of truth, to the latter because it provided the only test of its validity.¹³

II

What then were the insights which Metternich's maxims revealed to him? They showed a universe governed by law, not in the modern sense of an *interpretation* of events but as their *attribute*. To disregard the law and its dictates of harmony and equilibrium was not so much morally wrong as physically disastrous:

> Isolated states exist only as the abstractions of so-called philosophers. In the society of states each state has interests... which connect it with the others. The great axioms of political science derive from the recognition of the true interests of all states; it is in the general interest that the guarantee of existence is to be found, while particular interests—the cultivation of which is considered political wisdom by restless and short-sighted men—have only a secondary importance. Modern history demonstrates the application of the principle of solidarity and equilibrium... and of the united efforts of states... to force a return to the common law.¹⁴

And just as in the political world the equilibrium reflected a balance between the forces of aggression and the forces of resistance, so the social order revealed an uneasy tension between the conserving and the destructive tendencies inherent in any body social. It was the task of statesmanship to distinguish the form and the substance of this contest and to create the moral foundation of an order on which only time could confer spontaneity. This led to another distinction, so often considered by the rationalist as the solution and not the definition of a problem: Man can only create *Chartes*, which have the value of programmatic announcements; it is time which makes constitutions.¹⁵

¹² *NP*, Vol. 3, p. 242, or p. 357, among many examples.

¹³ That Catholic Austria should have as its First Minister an intellectual contemporary of Kant and Voltaire may appear a paradox. But the relationship of the Holy Roman Empire to the Pope was not uninfluenced by the memory of five hundred years of struggle. Nor had the reforms of Joseph II, who had expelled the Jesuits and broken the political influence of the Church, ever been repealed. Moreover, the Pope was to Metternich not only a spiritual ruler but a second-class Italian prince and Metternich was determined that Austria dominate the Italian peninsula. At the Congress of Vienna his treatment of the Papal Secretary of State was peremptory and in 1817 he even toyed with the idea of making an Austrian archduke a Cardinal, the better to cement his position at the Vatican. Not religious ties but philosophical and political agreement characterizes Metternich's correspondence with the Papal Secretary of State when the Church and Austria marched hand in hand. See *Metternich et Consalvi, Correspondence*, ed. Charles van Duerem (Louvain, 1899). The following letter by Metternich to Nesselrode, the Russian Foreign Minister, makes clear his attitude towards the Church: "... No Catholic power is more independent, ... of the views of the Court of Rome than we. The heir of so many Holy Roman Emperors and the nephew of Joseph II knows what he owes God and what to his honor: our ecclesiastical departments may extend their dogma regarding the rights of the Crown too far, and if it is too far it is surely not in favor of the Court of Rome that they tip the scale." *NP*, Vol. 3, p. 57. Metternich was not irreligious, but he admired the Church more for its utility and its civilizing influence than for its "truth."

¹⁴ *NP*, Vol. 1, p. 334.

¹⁵ *NP*, Vol. 7, p. 636, Vol. 8, p. 525.

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THE CONSERVATIVE DILEMMA: POLITICAL THOUGHT OF METTERNICH 1023

Metternich therefore opposed the efforts of his contemporaries to construct ideal constitutions for two reasons. They overlooked the factor of time, not in Burke's sense of an almost hallowed entity, but as one of the most potent social forces. And they were unrealistic because they took no account of the differing requirements of the national character:

> That constitution is best which most completely corresponds to the material and moral requirements of the national character. ... There is no universal recipe for constitutions, any more than for the advancement of health. ... That constitutions influence national character is undeniable truth, but its counterpart is no less true, that lasting constitutions must be a product of this character, and not of an excited, and therefore fleeting, public opinion.¹⁶

The whole discussion about constitutions was in any case beside the point. Anything that existed was subject to law and the expression of law in the political world is a constitution: "A state without a constitution is an abstraction just as an individual without a corresponding psyche."¹⁷

It was for this reason contradictory to attempt to achieve freedom by means of constitutional guarantees: "Rights," according to Metternich, could not be created, they existed. Whether they were affirmed or not was an incidental, essentially technical, question and had nothing to do with freedom. Nobody could transgress laws, not even kings—reminiscent of Grotius' classic phrase that not even God could make two plus two equal five. To guarantee rights was therefore a paradox; it was to clothe in the language of power what can only be a statement of fact, to endow with an arbitrary existence what has eternal validity:

> Things which ought to be taken for granted lose their force when they emerge in the form of arbitrary pronouncements. ... The mania of law-making is a symptom of the disease which has ravaged the world for sixty-two years. ... Natural, moral or material forces are not fit subjects of human regulation. What would one say of a *Charte* which side by side with the Rights of Man exhibited the laws of gravitation? ... If there is no God, He will not be created by pronouncements; if He exists, He will not require human recognition to achieve divinity. ... Objects mistakenly made subject to legislation result only in the limitation, if not the complete annulment, of that which is attempted to be safeguarded.¹⁸

Here, then, was the rationalist belief in rights as an attribute of the universe, the aristocrat's vision of the inseparability of power and responsibility, the Enlightenment's faith in the connection between order and freedom. While it asserted the existence of "rights" transcending any human construction, indeed from which human construction could only detract, it emphasized a fundamental contradiction of democratic theory: the view of human nature which insisted on man's capacity for self-government was combined in the same theory with another view of human nature which limited the scope of this government. Why, if man is conscious of arbitrary oppression, should he wish to oppress others? Why should universal rights be guaranteed? This has, of course, never been a problem in Anglo-Saxon countries where the relation between state and society has had a juristic, not an ethical foundation. In such cases constitutional

¹⁶ *NP*, Vol. 7, p. 637.

¹⁸ *NP*, Vol. 8, p. 557f.

¹⁷ *NP*, Vol. 7, p. 635.

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1024

guarantees have had the value of the differences between explicit and implicit limitations on a government in any case understood as limited. But in an "ethical state" an explicit limitation on government is meaningless. If the state justifies itself not by its utility but by its morality, there exists no tribunal before which to appeal its measures. If the sanction is not juridic but ethical, limitation can come about only by self-restraint, not by constitutional guarantees.

This was the challenge of the conservative statesman to his liberal opponents: if the conservative became an unwilling symbol of a revolutionary period by being forced into a definition of the nature of authority, the liberal contradicted himself by identifying freedom with constitutional guarantees. To be sure, Metternich did not have a solution of his own to the query regarding the nature of freedom, because he thought it inseparable from the notion of authority. But, equally, his opponents had not really dealt with the problem of authority which they thought exhausted in the definition of freedom. And yet they were closer than they realized, for had one asked Metternich as to the limits of authority and his opponents as to the limits of freedom, both would have answered with one word which indicated that to them the question was essentially meaningless: reason, self-evident and sovereign, which contained its applicability in its very conception, would trace the boundary of freedom as well as of necessity. That the categorical imperative was capable of contingent interpretation was inconceivable to Kant. That a sovereign should substitute force for law was not inconceivable to Metternich, but he considered it suicidal and therefore unlikely. It is this which gave the dispute between Metternich and the liberals the bitterness of a civil war, at least on the "democratic" side. For Metternich was an opponent who fought liberalism in the name of the very universality it claimed for itself, whose mode of argument represented as much of a challenge to his opponents as their existence did to him. It is difficult, indeed, for a rationalistic philosophy to survive the demonstration that the same premise can lead to two diametrically opposed conclusions.

### III

If Metternich considered the quest for formal constitutions chimerical, he saw in revolutions a physical disaster. In a universe characterized by the balance between the forces of conservation and those of destruction, revolution was due to a disturbance of the equilibrium in favor of the latter. But since the equilibrium was the "natural" condition, a revolution could achieve no more than a dislocation straining towards a new integration. The disorders attendant on revolutions were therefore symptoms of a transitional period and their violence a reflection of the ignorance of their advocates: "Revolutions are temporary disturbances in the life of states . . . . Order always ends up by reclaiming its own: states do not die like individuals, they transform themselves. It is the task of statesmanship . . . to guide this transformation and to supervise its direction."¹⁹ The difference between a conservative and a revolutionary order was not the fact of change but its mode:

¹⁹ *NP*, Vol. 8, p. 468.

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THE CONSERVATIVE DILEMMA: POLITICAL THOUGHT OF METTERNICH 1025

A consideration the liberal spirit usually ignores . . . is the difference in the life of states, as of individuals, between progress by measured steps or by leaps. In the first case, conditions develop with the consequence of natural law; while the latter disrupts this connection. . . . Nature is development, the ordered succession of appearances; only such a course can eliminate the evil and foster the good. But leaping transitions wind up by requiring entirely new creations—and it is not given to man to create out of nothingness.²⁰

Civilization, then, was the degree to which change could come about "naturally," to which the tension between the forces of destruction and of conservation was submerged in a spontaneous pattern of obligation. Thus true civilization had come only with the advent of Christianity, which made authority inviolable, obedience sacrosanct, and self-abnegation divine²¹—the rationalist's functional interpretation of religion.

It is expressive of the conservative dilemma that Metternich's pronouncements on the nature of authority are truistic—because a conservative takes it for granted; and that those on the meaning of freedom are skimpy—because he considered the question meaningless. But his analysis of the nature of revolutions is lucid and powerful. In 1820, while arranging the series of congresses designed to defeat revolutions in Germany and Italy, Metternich wrote a "profession of faith" which coupled an analysis of the nature of revolution with a philosophy of history.²² Up to the sixteenth century, Metternich maintained, the forces of conservation and of destruction had been in an increasingly spontaneous balance. But then there occurred three events which, in time, caused civilization to be supplanted by violence and order by chaos: the invention of printing, the development of gun powder, and the discovery of America. Printing facilitated the exchange of ideas which thereby became vulgarized; the invention of gun powder changed the balance between offensive and defensive weapons; and the discovery of America transformed the situation both materially and psychologically. By the influx of precious metals it produced a sudden change in the value of landed property, which is the foundation of a conservative order, and by the prospect of rapid fortunes it brought about a spirit of adventure and a dissatisfaction with existing conditions. And then the reformtion completed the process by overturning the moral world and exalting man above the forces of history.

Religion, morality, legislation, economics, politics, administration, all seem to have become a common good and accessible to everyone. Science appears intuitive, experience has no value for the presumptuous; faith means nothing to him and he substitutes for it the pretense of a personal conviction, to arrive at which, however, he dispenses with analysis or study, for these seem too subordinate activities to a mind which believes itself capable of embracing at one blow the whole ensemble of issues. Laws have no value for him because he did not contribute to their preparation and it is below the dignity of a man of his quality to recognize limits traced by ignorant and brute generations. Power resides in himself; why submit to what can have use only to men deprived . . . of insight? That

²⁰ *NP*, Vol. 7, p. 638.

²¹ *NP*, Vol. 8, p. 242.

²² *NP*, Vol. 3, pp. 400 ff.

1026

which was appropriate for an age of weakness is no longer adequate for that of reason . . . [All this] tends to an order of things which individualizes all the elements which compose society. . . .<sup>23</sup>

It would be difficult to find a more tragic statement or one more symbolic of the nature of revolutions. For its significance lay not in its content but in the fact that it was beside the point. What was intended as sarcasm—the exhibition of an incommensurability between pretense and reality—amounted to no more then the description of the objectives of his opponents. That which Metternich believed he merely needed to exhibit to reduce to absurdity, his opponents thought required only an affirmation in order to be validated. It was the inevitable revolutionary misunderstanding, the reluctance to admit that “truth” may not be self-evident. While Metternich desperately attempted to protect “reality” against its enemies, the issue became increasingly a debate about its nature and the nature of “truth.” Had “reality” still proved unambiguous, he would not have needed to affirm it. By the increasing insistence of his affirmation, he testified to its disintegration.

Metternich next distinguished the presumptuous by type and by origin. They were composed of levellers and theoreticians: the former, men of powerful wills and strong determination; the latter, theoreticians living in a world of their own. But whatever guise presumption assumed, its place of origin was the middle class. The revolutionary aristocrat was a lost soul, destined to become the victim of the Revolution or to be degraded by being forced to play the role of courtier to his inferiors. And the mass of the population always distrusted change and craved only the equal protection of laws in order to pursue their hard calling. But the middle class—the lawyers, the writers, the bureaucrats, the half-educated, owning the means of communication, ambitious but without goal, dissatisfied but unable to offer an alternative—this was the real organ of revolution. It was no accident, concluded Metternich, that the revolution occurred not in the poorest, but in the richest country of Europe, not in the most backward but in the most advanced state, so demoralized that “the revolution had already triumphed in the palace of the kings and in the boudoirs of the towns before it even began to prepare itself in the mass of the people.”

The Revolution could not have triumphed then but for the weakness of the government and for having at its disposal a myth whose literal application proved ruinous: the attempt to transplant British institutions to the continent. “Among the causes of the tremendous confusion characterizing present-day Europe,” wrote Metternich in later life, paralleling his “profession of faith,” “is the transplantation of British institutions to the Continent, where they are in complete contradiction to existing conditions, so that their application becomes either illusory or distorted. The so-called ‘British school’ has been the cause of the French Revolution and the consequences of this revolution, so anti-British in tendency, devastate Europe today. The concepts of freedom and order are so inseparable in the British mind that the last stable-boy would laugh in the face

<sup>23</sup> NP, Vol. 3, p. 405.

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THE CONSERVATIVE DILEMMA: POLITICAL THOUGHT OF METTERNICH 1027

of the reformers if they appeared by preaching his freedom. . . This is because the English are only concerned with the substance, never with the form.”²⁴ The wars of the French Revolution had spread these principles across Europe and only the hatred of Bonaparte delayed, for a little while, their baneful impact, largely through a misunderstanding. For the war, fought by the kings against Napoleon, was fought by the people in part against their own masters in the hope of obtaining from them the realization of the promises of the French Revolution. The wise peace concluded in 1814 might have inaugurated a period of tranquility, but Napoleon's return from Elba undid in one hundred days his work of fourteen years of power. By unleashing the revolution in France, he exposed Europe to unending social strife.²⁵

IV

This was a powerful analysis of the cause of the unrest sweeping across Europe. But its power was at the same time its bane. For if the revolutionary spirit was so widespread, how could it be combatted? If the causes of the revolution were so fundamental, dating so far back in history, what possible remedy could exist? If the middle class was so potent, how could it be dealt with? By gradual integration, by learning moderation and the need for adaptation, a Burke might have answered. Even Castlereagh could still advise Louis XVIII that revolutionaries "are nowhere so little to be dreaded as in office, mixed up with other material. Tyrants may poison an obnoxious character but the only means a constitutional monarch has to restrain him is to employ him."²⁶ But to Metternich, the rationalist conservative, this solution was a dangerous evasion. To the product of the Enlightenment, political problems had to assume the precision of logical antinomies and he therefore sharpened the differences instead of smoothing them over. If the forces of destruction were rampant, it was the task of the conservative to strengthen those of order. If the cry for reform was universal, it was all the more imperative to resist in the name of authority.

In this manner the equation, freedom = voluntary submission to order, became in practice a definition of sterility and unexceptional maxims, justifications for inaction. So it happened that Metternich never tired of comparing concessions to popular clamor to squandering capital; therefore the basic maxim "that in the middle of agitated passions one can not think of reforming; wisdom in such situations confines itself to maintaining."²⁷ Therefore the increasingly rigid opposition to *any* change, for change symbolized the possibility of yielding to pressure: "Where everything is tottering, it is above all necessary that something, no matter what, remain steadfast, so that the lost can find a connection and the strayed a refuge."²⁸ This accounted for the preference for Napoleon over the

²⁴ *NP*, Vol. 8, p. 218

²⁵ *NP*, Vol. 3, p. 409.

²⁶ Charles K. Webster, *The Foreign Policy of Castlereagh*, 2 vols. (London, 1931), Vol. 1, p. 547.

²⁷ *NP*, Vol. 3, p. 415.

²⁸ Heinrich Sbrik, *Metternich, der Staatsmann und der Mensch*, 2 vols. (Munich, 1925), Vol. 1, p. 354.

1028

Bourbons, despite the "legitimacy" of the latter; to Metternich, legitimacy was not an end but a tool, and when it conflicted with the requirements of stability, it had to yield. Therefore, paradoxically, Metternich became a defender of existing institutions, however much he might deplore them, because their over-throw would be an even more dangerous symbol. When in the panic of 1820 the Grand-Duke of Baden offered to abolish his constitution, Metternich replied: "Every order lawfully established bears within itself the principle of a better system. . . A Charte, in any case, is not a constitution. It is up to the government to separate good and evil, to strengthen public authority and to protect the repose and the happiness of nations against hostile attack."²⁹

It was a futile contest, a tour de force leading to self-destruction, this effort to bring about change through order and to identify order with tranquility in the middle of a revolutionary period. It was really, despite its protestations to the contrary, an effort to recapture a lost innocence, a quest for a period when obligation was spontaneous, an aristocratic notion of government as the reciprocal execution of duties. The "Metternich system" answered the question of the cause of the revolution, but gave no indication of a solution once the revolution had occurred. It spoke abstractly of its readiness to reform, but never discussed what specific measures it would consider appropriate. As late as 1851, Metternich could give no better advice to the then Minister, Schwarzenberg, than to strengthen the landed aristocracy, as if the middle class could still be crushed. The assertion that revolutions were always the fault of governments, that only action could conserve, was unexceptionable. But in practice it led to a vicious circle because Metternich, although not opposed to reform in principle, wanted it as an emanation of order, while his opponents desired the same thing in the name of change. The result was a stalemate, a triumph of form over substance.

Metternich's thus became a never-ending quest for a moment of tranquility, for a suspension, if only for an instant, of the flux of life, so that what happened, perhaps inevitably, could be represented as a universal principle instead of an assertion of will and of indeterminacy. It was as if a physicist, unable to measure both position and velocity of the electron accurately, bent all his energies to making the electron hold still, if only a fraction of a second, because this would enable him to chart its course for eternity. Or like the driver of a car heading out of control in an unknown direction down a precipitate mountain road, too narrow for turning around; if he could but capture the wheel, he would still have to descend the mountain, but it would represent will and not chance. So it happened that Metternich's insights, however powerful, became increasingly dogmatic. While he might have been right in asserting that those who have never had a past cannot own the future, one must add that those who have had a past may doom themselves by seeking it in the future.

And still in all this obtuseness there was an element of grandeur. For Metternich had no illusions about the probable developments; he saw his task in ameliorating their inevitable consequences:

²⁹ *NP*, Vol. 3, p. 375.

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THE CONSERVATIVE DILEMMA: POLITICAL THOUGHT OF METTERNICH 1029

The existing society is on the decline. Nothing ever stands still... and society has reached its zenith. Under such conditions to advance means to descend... Such periods appear interminable to contemporaries, but what are two to three hundred years in the annals of history?... My life has fallen into a terrible period. I was born either too soon or too late. ... Formerly I would have enjoyed life, later I could have helped in the reconstruction. Now I spend my time shoring up decaying buildings.³⁰

He fought the revolution not because it was impossible but because it was "unnatural." And he combatted democracy because "authority is an expression of the power of permanence; while in [parliamentary government] power appears under the aspect of transitoriness... I understand that little minds like to think of themselves as the expression of power, but it is equally without doubt that the opponents of all authority like to see it reduced to personal terms, because it will facilitate their effort to eliminate it..."³¹ Because he considered order the expression of the equilibrium and equilibrium the reflection of the structure of the universe, he was certain that the "basic interests" of states would reassert themselves in the end. But he predicted that the revolutionaries would be horrified by the world they were bringing about.³² The greater the dislocation, the more violent the interregnum of chaos. Despotism, to Metternich, was not the absence of guaranteed rights, but government without universal maxims. Tyranny was not the cause of revolutions, but their likely result. And the more the forces of destruction succeeded in undermining the social order, the more authority—the inevitable expression of society—would have to assume personal shape, the conservative's vision of arbitrariness: "The word freedom," Metternich wrote in his political testament, "has for me never had the character of a point of departure but of a goal. The point of departure is order, which alone can produce freedom. Without order the appeal to freedom is no more than the quest of some specific party for its special objectives and will in practice always lead to tyranny. Because I have been a man of order, my efforts were directed towards the attainment of a real, not a deceptive freedom... I have always considered despotism of any kind a symptom of weakness. Where it appears it condemns itself; most intolerably where it appears behind the mask of advancing the cause of liberty."³³

It was thus that Metternich posed the conservative challenge as the need to transcend the assertion of exclusive validity of the will and as the requirement to limit the claims of power. It was a redefinition of the classic theological version of humility, "Thy will be done," with reason taking the place of God. It represented an effort to deal with the most fundamental problem of politics, which is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness. To "punish" the wicked is a relatively easy matter because it is a simple expression of public morality. To restrain the exercise of righteous power is more difficult because it asserts that right exists in time as well as in space; that voli-

³⁰ *NP*, Vol. 3, pp. 347 ff.

³¹ *NP*, Vol. 8, p. 467. He did not apply this to Great Britain, where he saw the permanence of authority expressed in the phrase "His Majesty's Government."

³² *NP*, Vol. 8, p. 235.

³³ *NP*, Vol. 7, pp. 633 ff.

1030

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tion, however noble, is limited by forces transcending the will; that the achieve-
ment of self-restraint is the ultimate challenge of the social order. Metternich
dealt with this problem by asserting that excess in any direction was disruptive
of society. The individual will was contingent because man was an aspect of
forces transcending him, of society and its historical expression, the state,
which were products of nature as surely as man himself, for they reflected his
basic needs for justice and order. Because they were "natural," states had a
life cycle just as human beings, only they were incapable of the ultimate human
solace: they could not die, they had to pay the price of all their transgressions.³⁴

It was only appropriate, therefore, that the last act of the conservative states-
man was of a symbolic nature, a plea for the anonymity which alone could jus-
tify his maxims. When, in 1848, a deputation of the victorious revolution called
his resignation "generous," the aged Metternich replied: "I protest solemnly
against this term. Only a Sovereign can be generous; my action is the result
of my sense of right and my concept of duty." Thus the final gesture of the
"doctor of Revolutions" was a last desperate assertion of order, of the prece-
dence of right over will even in defeat after half a century of struggle. And
when one of the deputies insisted on using the term "generous" Metternich
replied: "In resigning I anticipate another claim, that I have carried the mon-
archy away with me. But this is not the case. No individual has shoulders strong
enough to carry an Empire; if states disappear, it is because they lose faith in
themselves."³⁵ This was Metternich's personal tragedy: history can illustrate
logic but not prove it and although it teaches its lessons surely, it does not do
so in a single lifetime. And it was also the final symbolization of the conserva-
tive dilemma: that it is the task of the conservative not to defeat but to fore-
stall revolutions, that a society which cannot prevent a revolution, the disinte-
gration of whose values has been demonstrated by the fact of revolution, will
not be able to defeat it by conservative means, that order once shattered can be
restored only by the experience of chaos.

³⁴ *NP*, Vol. 1, p. 334.

³⁵ *NP*, Vol. 7, p. 626; Vol. 8, p. 212.