Yet another Frenchman who had a significant impact upon the thinking of the pre-war "revolutionaries". Volney was a key actor in the erratic evolution of democracy in France after the French king was beheaded. But, even in France he does not get much attention. Still, Volney also impacted American revolutionary thought by means of a book he wrote in France and was translated by Jefferson. It's title is: Les Ruines (in French), in English Jefferson titled the translation as "Meditation on the Ruins of Empires". Jefferson was so concerned about the impact of the book that he kept secret that he translated the book from French. (Or had it translated, whichever.) So,what's the big deal? The BD is this: Volney - a member of a political movement called "The Ideologues" - wrote the book as an "answer" to JJ Rousseau, a famous author at the time of the French Revolution. Rousseau - who promoted the revolution as "coming from the masses and for the masses" - was typical socialist dialog before even the word "socialism" had been invented. That argument did not work so well in France because Napoleon had risen to the top (by means of his conquests) and became "Emperor of France". (Not king, mind you, because the last one - 20 years earlier - had got his head sliced off.) What was Volney's prime reasoning in response to Rousseau? It went like this: I would like to suggest that we today are still in the midst of finding a way to maintain the harmony. Meaning a peaceful coexistence between the Haves-it-all and the Have-nothings. Now, as more than two-hundred years ago, the have-nothings must be very careful of upsetting entirely the present drastically unfair distribution of wealth in the US - one of the worst in any developed economy. And why has that happened? Because a president by the name of Reagan in the 1980s drastically lowered upper-income taxation, which has brought about America's awesomely bad national Income Disparity. (See here the worst of any developed nation.) Rectifying that unfair imbalance is the challenge - one that is unclear as regards the American people's wish to consider seriously. The rich have become our idols ...
