ABSTRACT
Norman Cohn is thinking of John Ball, the insurrectionary violence of the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381, and the whole naive revolutionary eschatology of the later Middle Ages. The abstract globalism of the revolutionary vow—its total commitment to all men and to change everywhere—is constantly vitiated by an assortment of local difficulties which persist in exposing the fragile nature of such ideological integrity. The French revolutionaries despise the English; the Germans have contempt for the Russians; the Americans are considered an "exceptional" and hence a hopeless case; and everywhere "the Jews" in the movement are darkly suspect. Friedrich Gentz had translated Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, and John Quincy Adams translated Gentz's The French and American Revolutions Compared and had it published in Philadelphia in 1800. French history is littered with broken harnesses; the English story is knotted, but whole, all of one piece.
