ABSTRACT
In a few short months, in the year 1789, the people of France set their
stamp ineffaceably on a political idea which has loomed over the history of
the world ever since. Throughout its life, it has been an idea which promp-
ted bitter disagreement on its political merits. But today, for the first time in
more than two centuries, opinion divides sharply over whether or not it is a
political idea whose time has now gone forever. Depending on just what we
take the idea itself to mean, we are bound to continue to disagree vividly
with one another on the answers we give to that question. What should be beyond dispute is that the answer matters – and matters not just as the
prospective extinction of their very own endangered species might matter to
a zoologist, through the prospective loss of an extant professional subject
matter, but because the idea itself carries a heavy weight of political sig-
nificance. There are doubtless some perspectives on politics from which that
judgment could be coherently denied. But the least that one could say about
them is that they would have to be very eccentric perspectives, as well as
robustly indifferent to the texture of political experience: not just antiRomantic (which might be a political virtue), but hardened or disabused
enough to view the political hopes and fears, the pride and suffering of
immense numbers of human beings over many decades with relaxed indif-
ference or open contempt. To anyone whose experience of politics is more
direct and importunate, it is scarcely a perspective they could actively
entertain on their own behalf. They could think about it, of course, and even
register potential cognitive advantages of economy or precision it might
offer. What they could not do is to adopt it for their own. The very idea of a science of the social was largely shaped by the impulse
to take the measure of revolution as a collective experience: fathom its
causes, rein in its formidable powers of destruction, and discipline collective
judgment on how to seize the opportunities and forestall the dangers which
it threatened (Nisbet 1970; Hawthorn 1976). From Pierre-Louis Roederer’s
lectures in the summer of 1793 on the science sociale (Roederer 1853-1858,
VIII: 129-305; Scurr 2000, 2004) to Francois Furet’s decades long campaign
to lay the ghost of 1789 (Furet 1981; Furet 1999) and Francis Fukuyama’s sprightly invocation to bring its ‘‘history to an end’’ (Fukuyama 1992),
aspirants to subject political life to the rubric of professionalized cognition
and aspirants to change the human world forever on the vastest scale have
shared an involuntary common subject matter. For each of these markedly
discrepant groupings, it has long been a very nice judgment when it was wise to let go, to recognize a form of thought grown old or a style of poli-
tical aspiration which can be sustained further only in utter cynicism. Nei-
ther tragedy nor farce is ever far from the human condition. Each has run
through this history prominently, marking it indelibly throughout. It has
always been hard to judge the balance between tragedy and farce at all
accurately, even in retrospect. But it is hard today to resist the suspicion
that over the last few decades the balance has shifted decisively in favor of
farce. Some venerable perspectives on revolution will be unaffected by that
shift. One, which has been very actively entertained ever since 1789 is a
realist focus on state threatening, state defense, state destruction, state
refashioning or even recreation. It was a perspective which long preceded
the events which turned this late eighteenth-century French word into a
global political cynosure, and altered its meaning dramatically in doing so.
What broke France’s ancien regime was a cumulative fiscal predicament
which it lacked the political capacity to escape, a predicament which itself arose from over a century of France’s impressive global self-aggrandizement
as a state (Sonenscher 1997). There was no better defined realist component
of state jeopardy by the last quarter of the eighteenth century than the core
logic of that predicament; and it had dominated the concerns of leading
French statesmen for decades (Hont 2005; Brewer 1989). In that sense,
nothing could be further from the truth than that France’s great revolution
was lightning from a clear sky. What was new in 1789 was the direct tie
between this objectifying and instrumental perspective on the French state, its situation and capacities, with an uncontrollably extended interrogation of
the population at large on just how it imagined and felt about its own
relations with the state to which it was subjected. It was that abrupt con-
junction, best expressed in the themes which run through Sieye`s’s three
great pamphlets (Sieye`s 2003; Forsyth 1987), which set the agenda of world
politics for the next two centuries, and in terms which may (or may not)
now have run their course.
