On the Reactionary Character of Every Revolution

Political revolutions have always existed, but they only acquire ideological meaning with modern liberalism; and this is because of the transcendent (ideological) justification that never before they needed, in their eminently economic determination. These would have occurred as a more or less violent adjustment of society to its founding principles, corrupted in political development; hence its reactionary and fundamentalist character, which emerges as revivalist and puritanical in religious movements; hence they did not need ideological support, if it was provided by religion in its substructural function.

This would be what change with the modern revolution, which is no longer popular but populist as bourgeois; but this bourgeois character does not refer to the petty bourgeoisie but to the upper bourgeoisie, which functionally replaces the traditional aristocracy. This would occur because of the contradictions of that traditional aristocracy with the monarchy, to which it supplied by capital; but with what it pressured that monarchy in its structural function, conditioning its power of determination.

From the absolutism of Louis XIV —with the Richelieu-Mazarin doctrines— this would be solved with Louis XVI; who turns to the financial bourgeoisie, to solve the need for capital caused by this absolutist tradition of Lous XIV; establishing that bourgeoisie as a de facto aristocracy, which displaces the traditional one, changing the nature of capital from military to financial. This not only generates the resentment of that traditional aristocracy, but also provides them with the necessary resources for their rebellion; by concentrating them in the controlled environment of Versailles, with time and money for their intellectual (ideological) specialization; apart from creating the consumer culture that ends up distorting modern industrialism, with the creation of a middle class.

In England, on the other hand, the industrial revolution avoids this contradiction between the aristocracy and the gentry; due to the traditional weakness of the monarchy, which fails to overcome the aristocracy in its contradiction. It should be noted that this weakness of the English monarchy is traditional and intrinsic, given its very conformation; not only in the tribal struggles in which England was formed, but even in its ultimate maturation as part of the Angevin empire; which integrating the Norman nobility since the eleventh century, failed to stabilize a solid and sufficient monarchy; not even in modernity, when the House of Stuart culminates in violent succession, from Cromwell's revolution to the House of Orange.

As a general crisis of Western civilization, this resolves the initial religious nature in its ideological function; and it would be here that, as a new aristocracy, that high bourgeoisie becomes populist, with the generational declassing of the petty bourgeoisie; which integrates the proletariat, through its representation in the middle class, with its specialization in the administration of the state. It would be with this derivation to an intellectually specialized class, that this other ideological one is consummated; establishing the utopia as the abstract principle on which the social structure is founded, and its opposition as reactionary.

However, it would be this first establishment of the false liberalism of the aristocracy that occurs as reactionary; even conventionally, insofar as it responds to the classical determinations of the revolution, in this puritanical and revivalist nature. However, again, it is at this moment that the hermeneutical parameters for the understanding of reality are set; from the historical transcendentalism of the idealist tradition, deriving in this inversion of terms, which ideologically determines this understanding.