French Egalitarianism had had only nominal influence in this country before the days of Popularism. The riotous onrush of industrialism after the War for Southern Independence and the general secular drift to the Religion of Humanity, however, prepared the way for a reception of the French Revolution's socialistic offspring of one sort of another. The first of which to find important place in our federal government was the graduated income tax under Wilson. Moreover the centralization of our economy during the 1920 s, the dislocations of the Depression, the common ethos of Materialism everywhere, all contributed in various ways to the face-lifting that replaced Mike Fink and the Great Gatsby with the anonymous physiognomy of the Little People.

However, it is important to trace the philosophy of the French Revolution to its sources to understand the common democratic origin of individualism and socialism and the influence of the latter on the former. That John Locke's philosophy of the social contract fathered the American Revolution with its Declaration of Independence, I believe, we generally accept. Yet, after Rousseau had given the social contract a new twist with his notion of the General Will, the same philosophy, it may be said, became the idea source of the French Revolution also.

The importance of Rousseau's twist has not always been clear to us, however. This notion of the General Will gave rise to the Commune of Paris in the Revolution and later brought Napoleon to dictatorship. And it is clearly argued by Lord Percy of Newcastle, in his remarkable long essay, The Heresy of Democracy, and in a more general way by Voegelin, in his New Science of Politics, that this same Rousseauan idea, descending through European democracy, is the source of Marx's theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is important to understanding the position that doctrinaire liberals found themselves in after World War 2, and our great democratic victory that brought no peace.