This is Gertrude Himmelfarb in a brief but clever essay at Standpoint on the preference for the second-best (in terms of thinkers, their thoughts, and their politics) over the best:
Leo Strauss once observed that in the 19th century, Germany's politics were "a mess" while its thinkers were "first-class". England's politics, on the other hand, were "fine", and its thinkers "second-class". The implication (which Strauss did not have to spell out to his disciples) was clear: there may be an inverse relationship between philosophy and politics. Grand philosophies of the Germanic order - abstract, systematic, comprehensive, engaging all aspects of nature, aspiring to create a whole that would subsume all contingencies and rationally construct (or reconstruct) the world - such philosophies were not only irrelevant to the mundane affairs of social and political life but also fatally distracting and disruptive. Conversely, the modest philosophies favoured by the English (a German philosopher might say of Mill, as Churchill said of Clement Attlee, that he had much to be modest about) were attuned to a culture that was practical and prudent and thus conducive to a polity that was humane and responsible.
Of course, the preeminent historian of 19th-century England would side with an unglamorous prudence against Romantic perfectionism. It is worth noting, however, that her intellectual lodestone in this essay is none other than Alexis de Tocqueville, a non-French Frenchman if ever there was one, who first glimpsed the scuffed genius of American society for what it was, even if his continental heirs have lately had a hard time doing the same.
Himmelfarb's last sentence in that paragraph was echoed by Robert Conquest, who once pointed out the telling statistic that if one took all of the recorded casualties of the notorious Peterloo Massacre of 1819 -- an incitement to radicalism like none other in the country -- one would find that they didn't amount to a single day's butcher's bill at the barricades of revolutionary Paris. This was for good reason. The "law-and-liberty" tradition, though less sexy (and bloody) in its reliance on empiricism and organic modes of association, was a distinctly Anglophone invention, which is why all major upheavals of the post-Enlightenment English period were parliamentary in nature. Although even Albion was by no means immune to the lures of utopianism, as Conquest was quick to add:
The "Western" culture has always implied the absence of absolutes, disbelief in perfect political wisdom, in readily predictable futures. But the avoidance of the extreme, ideologized way of thinking does not in itself save the political entity concerned from a milder, but still potentially dangerous, form of the affliction. And these less malignant varieties have to some extent taken hold--with uncritical devotion to various quick-fix solutions by humans and their states to the problems facing them. As in the medical usage we speak of "-itis" in a real ailment and "-osis" in merely a morbid condition, we might speak of "ideitis" in the totalitarian countries and "ideosis" in certain Western cases.
The Russian intelligentsia who influenced or became Bolsheviks were themselves pro-Western (with particular affinities toward Germany and France), and so one appreciates the built-in escape clause of this observation. However, the -itis/-osis dichotomy is rather brilliant, and it reflects something the late (and much misunderstood) Samuel Huntington said about the United States. Our political fever dreams are rare and short, but they do have the ability to initiate incremental or gradual changes in a deeply conservative culture. It was therefore much more difficult for this country's lasting institutions to be overhauled dramatically, or eradicated entirely, in moments of what might be called punctuated societal equilibrium. What Huntington called them, in fact, was "creedal passion periods" (the Communist tendency of the 1930's, the antiwar movement of the 1960's, etc.), which would flare up during times of national trauma, but then give way again to historic consensus.
This is second-best-ism at its best, which is one of the reasons I think rumors of the coming century of American declinism are wildly exaggerated.
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