Progressives are rediscovering old truths about the sexes
Modern revolutions — those we know to have failed — share an impractical conceit. In the minds of their architects, the establishment of a wholly new social contract has meant renovating human nature itself.
France’s revolution, which begat the utopian tradition, was predicated on the assumption that humanity unshackled from superstition and guided by pure reason would enter a new epoch of Enlightenment. That utopian ideal was carried forward by the Paris Commune and, eventually, the Soviets, who sought to erase from the human experience concepts such as property, enterprise, and individuality. Throughout, the revolutionaries’ ambition was matched only by their contempt for the world as it was. Robert Owen, the founder of one similarly ill-fated experiment in utopian design, in America, professed that the social reformer’s goal is to stamp out “that greatest of all errors, the notion that individuals form their own characters.”
