The Action and the Actors

Even though we know that we should not expect a century to coincide with a historic period, we still tend to do so. We call the eighteenth century the Age of Reason, only to be thrown by the non sequitur of the French Revolution; surely it did not turn out to be what the Voltaires and Diderots—and even the Rousseaus—had wanted and expected. ¹ To fit that explosive surprise into the scheme of an ordained advance to ‘‘higher and higher heights,” the latter-day philosophers of history had to resort to Hegelian dialectics and to introduce the laws of contradiction and the concept of the sudden leap.