Generative Principle of Political Constitutions

Joseph de Maistre had no doubt that the root causes of the French Revolution were intellectual and ideological. The degeneration of its first immense hopes into the Reign of Terror was not the result of a ruthless competition for power or of prospects of war. He echoed Voltaire''s boast that "books did it all." The philosophers of the Enlightenment were the architects of the new regimes; and the s...