The history of the secularization of modern culture has yet to be written, and the reasons for this are easy enough to understand. For on the one hand, the mind of the secularized majority has been so deeply affected by the process of secularization that it cannot view that process in an objective historical manner, while on the other, the religious minority has been forced into an attitude of negative opposition which is no less unfavorable to dispassionate study. Nevertheless, it is emphatically a problem which requires an historical approach. The process of secularization was a historical movement no less than the Reformation, a minority movement which was gradually transmitted to wider circles until it eventually won the key positions of social and intellectual influence through which it dominated European society. This movement, which was already known as the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, and the accompanying ideology, which later acquired the name of Liberalism, have long been studied by historians chiefly in Germany and France, though in a somewhat piecemeal fashion; but their work has not hitherto been fully assimilated by educated opinion in England and America. Here the tendency has been to concentrate attention on political and economic change, and above all on the American and French revolutions. But we have not paid enough attention to the intellectual revolution that had already taken place before there was any question of a political one. Yet it is this intellectual revolution that is responsible for the secularization of Western culture. This intellectual movement, like most of the movements that have changed the world, was religious in origin, although it was anti-religious in its results. It owed its dynamism to the resistance of a religious minority and its diffusion to the illjudged and unjust, though sincere, action of religious orthodoxy. It is indeed, the supreme example in history of the way in which religious persecution and repression defeats its own object and serves the cause it is attempting to destroy.

Modern totalitarianism combines appeals to both nationalism and internationalism. Of course this statement applies with much greater force to Soviet than to Nazi totalitarianism. The latter was primarily a national movement, but with international ideological overtones, and with some elements of an international elite cadre and even of an international mass following. Soviet communism began as a faction of the Russian affiliate of international social democracy, and then acquired the territorial base which has given it the national characteristics it now possesses.

The biographers of Alexander Hamilton have been almost unanimous in absolving him from any complicity in the enactment and enforcement of the Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798. Most of them deny that he supported those now discredited laws and portray him as a defender of civil liberties who stood against the whole Federalist party. One writer asserts that by passing the laws the Federalists “mutinied” against Hamilton's recommendation of moderation. In the only thorough study of the acts, John C. Miller concludes that they “were passed by Congress against the advice of Alexander Hamilton.” Praising him as one not easily “led into error by the anxiety or the excitement of stirring and perilous times,” an early biographer describes the Federalist leader's position as “sensible and moderate.” Two of Jefferson's most widely read biographers credit Hamilton with opposing the law, and Albert J. Beveridge pictures him as an earlier and stronger opponent of the bills than Jefferson.

Literature was never central to Brownson's interests; indeed at times it was something he tolerated somewhat impatiently.* He wrote about it regularly, however, and during his career filled over a thousand closely packed octavo pages on the subject. He could even use the cant of the journalist reviewer with professional facility. Of a novel called Thorneberry Abbey, for instance, he says, “It has one or two literary faults … efforts at fine writing, and wearisome descriptions of natural scenery, which … only interrupt the narrative.” With variations in the details, this kind of formal gesture is repeated almost every time he reviews a novel. Moreover, the passage on Thorneberry Abbey appears towards the very end of a long review, introduced by the following candid admission: “But we have forgotten the little book before us.” What precedes the remark is not primarily a literary discussion but rather a warning to Catholics against the dangers of unwary compromises with Protestantism. What follows the remark is literary in a perfunctory and conventional way and is quickly dropped in favor of more polemic discussion. Although this procedure is not true of every piece of criticism by Brownson, something like it happens often enough to make it characteristic. When he was accused of such irrelevance later in life, he defended himself vigorously: “The book introduced is regarded as little more than an occasion or a text for an original discussion of some questions which the author wishes to treat.… Books are worthy of no great consideration for their own sake, and literature itself is never respectable as an end, and is valuable only as a means to an end.” In spite of this method, however, Brownson raised important critical questions and left a substantial amount of literary material.

Even before they had fully secured representative government with universal suffrage and frequent elections, the most ardent English democrats had already grown quite sensitive to the drawbacks of democracy. By the middle of the nineteenth century a number of them had become seriously disturbed about the difficulty of combining popular government with efficient government. They believed that ordinary men should rule but were learning that only extraordinary men could rule well. They opposed government by an aristocracy because it sacrificed the good of all to the interests of a few but they were discovering that the people could disregard or violate the common good as easily as the aristocracy. The defects of democracy became a heavier burden still for English socialists at the end of the century. Convinced that government should take over control of economic life, and persuaded by its achievements in other realms that modem science was the most efficient means of control, they wanted the real work of governing to be done by scientific experts; yet the democratic tendencies of both the English and the socialist traditions obliged them to favor constitutional forms that would preserve the principle, or at least the appearance, of government by the people.