Mani Basharzad is a junior research associate at the IEA and an Asia Freedom Fellow at LSE.
“For the average person, all problems date to World War II; for the more informed, to World War I; for the genuine historian, to the French Revolution”, writes the philosopher Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in Leftism Revisited (1990). I would add a line to that: it all starts with the French Enlightenment.
There are two ideals of the Enlightenment: the Scottish and the French. One could add other traditions, such as the German one, but these two explain what Thomas Sowell called a “conflict of visions”, one that shaped modern political thinking.
The Scottish tradition teaches us that institutions are not the product of human design, but of human action. Adam Ferguson, one of the giants of the Scottish Enlightenment, wrote that “nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design”. This idea influenced Hayek’s notion of spontaneous order.
But the French Enlightenment had a different view of human institutions. In Bourgeois Equality, the final volume of her trilogy The Bourgeois Era, Deirdre McCloskey writes: “The French Enlightenment, by contrast, admired rationality extravagantly and therefore the rule of experts, a rule which Adam Smith so deprecated.” In this tradition, institutions are the product of human design. The conclusion that follows is that, if institutions can be easily designed, they can also be easily changed to achieve the vision of planners.
This difference in thinking is reflected in the distinct traditions of common law and civil law. The Economist magazine wrote: “Hayek argued that common law is a better basis for a legal system than civil law for similar reasons that markets are a better foundation for an economy than central planning.” The decentralised knowledge of different judiciaries, together with the embedded knowledge contained in previous court cases, is superior to the centralised system of civil law.
But this distinction also manifests itself in political traditions. The British system is one of the greatest models of how to combine change with tradition. And that is the main challenge of any political order. As the famous legal scholar Aharon Barak wrote: “Stability without change is decline. Change without stability is anarchy.”
The art of a political system lies in finding the middle ground, and France’s problem is that it is particularly bad at it. Since the French Revolution, France has followed a tradition of wholesale change, transforming institutions, laws and class relations all at once.
That is the weakness of revolutionaries. They erase the blackboard of history, and, as time goes by, rewrite the old, familiar lessons with shaking hands.
Tradition is not what Karl Marx described as “a nightmare on the brains of the living”. Rather, it is the accumulated knowledge of generations: all the trials and errors that have helped produce the civilisation we have today. And, as I stated at the beginning, no single person designed it, nor can anyone design it. Consider language: who designed the English language?
The Newbolt Report on The Teaching of English in England (1921) concluded: “[It is] impossible at the present juncture to teach English grammar in the schools for the simple reason that no one knows exactly what it is.”
Who remembers Esperanto? Designed by L. L. Zamenhof as a simple international second language, free of linguistic hierarchies, it was meant to be spoken by the whole world. It did not succeed, just as the French Revolution did not succeed. You cannot design things that are inherently spontaneous and the product of centuries of evolution.
But France has not learned this lesson. Protesters in the streets still demand a state that does more, not less. They want even more money to be distributed by a state whose spending, as a share of GDP, is among the highest in the developed world. But what is pushing France’s economic model to the brink of collapse, with government spending at 57 per cent of GDP and borrowing costs at a 24-year high, is precisely the French tradition of thinking that the state should solve all problems.
That is the difference Tocqueville saw, in Democracy in America, between the United States and France. In France, everyone looked to the government to solve their problems, while in the United States, scepticism towards government overreach empowered citizens to solve their own. It was the power of decentralised communities, solving their own problems and working together through a free-enterprise system, rather than looking for the next technocrat or general promising to solve all their problems.
This tradition also helps to explain what we have seen in France’s second-most populous city, Marseille, which has become one of the centres of the protests of October 2026.
President Emmanuel Macron had his own answer for Marseille: more money from Paris. In September 2021, Mr Macron announced an ambitious plan, Marseille en Grand, which promised €5bn in state spending to improve the city’s public services.
In October 2024, as RTL reported, France’s Court of Auditors published a scathing assessment, saying that the government had spent only 1.31 per cent of the funds announced. France is once again learning the hard way that you cannot simply throw money at your problems, especially when it is other people’s money.
Pairing Ferguson's line about nations stumbling upon establishments with McCloskey's point about the French love of expert rule makes the divide unusually clear. Once you believe institutions were designed, it follows that they can be redesigned at will, and a lot of modern European politics still runs on that assumption. The Barak quote about stability and change is a nice touch too, since Britain's knack for reforming without tearing everything down has long been its quiet advantage. It would be interesting to see this applied to the EU, which often looks like the French instinct for rational design scaled up to a whole continent, with Brussels cast as the planner.
See News from Uncibal (David McGrogan), "I'm on the pavement thinking about the government" for an explanation linking France's predicament straight back to Hobbes.