ABSTRACT
The majority of continental intellectuals later revolted against the oppression, stagnation, and inflation of their statists, ushering in the vastly complex drifts and protracted conflicts of The Age of the Democratic Revolution, as R. R. Palmer has so aptly described it. But even those living in nearby nations went off in different specific directions. Some, notably the Dutch, nearby neighbors of the French and long oppressed by the Hapsburg sacred-and-secular welfare state, drifted in the same general direction as the Americans and British. One other important factor is the very real increase in creativity that normally accompanies the early drift into statist powers, the proto-statist period, the period of the spring flowers of states. The conserving passion of human nature is the foundation for traditional legitimacy found in all human societies, even in the more futuristic modernist age. The revisionist, modernist historians have documented the faith in these myths, especially the myth of the vastly popular Horatio Alger "rags-to-riches" story.
