ABSTRACT
From the time of the great exchanges between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke over the sanctity or barbarism of the French Revolution, scholars have disagreed fundamentally over what John Dunn calls the 'two faces of revolution'. For an activist like Paine, revolutions were 'a renovation of the natural order of things, a system of principles as universal as truth and the existence of man, and combining moral with political happiness and national prosperity.,2 Revolutions symbolized the march of progress and rationality, of irresistible and irreversible change. But for Burke, a staunch critic of the events of 1789, the revolution was nothing more than a 'monstrous, tragic-comic scene' with potentially fatal consequences for the future ofEurope.3
