ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the French Revolutionary period’s intellectual legacy and suggests that enlightened historical theorizing about progress was rooted in the brute need to find some meaning in the sheer destructive violence that became the Revolution’s legacy. It traces this tendency to excuse political violence up through the German thinker Georg Hegel and links Hegelian thought to the broader “anthropologizing” tendency that the other chapters have analyzed. It discusses, among others, Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794), Georg Hegel (1770–1831), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Thomas Paine (1737–1809), Johann Christoph Woellner (1732–1800), and William Wordsworth (1770–1850).
