Après et à Cause de Nous, le Déluge

From the Wall Street Journal, a fine review of an interesting book (albeit the "history of an idea" book currently is trendy enough to be approaching the point of saturation--a kind of academic press version of histories of mundane products or "...in 10 objects" books) on the history of revolution as a concept and political project. A generous and timely excerpt:

“The Revolution to Come” is a trenchant intellectual history of the modern revolutionary project, seeking to explain both its tendency toward slaughter and its fatal attraction to despotism....What interests [author Dan Edelstein] are not [violent] upheavals per se, but the willingness of moderns to evaluate them in a positive, approving manner as stages in the upward ascendance of history.

For the ancient Greeks, and for millennia thereafter, political turmoil was “revolutionary” in that it was a perennial pathology of cyclical history, bringing only pointless suffering. A model case was the civil war in the ancient city of Corcyra in the fifth century B.C., recounted by the Greek historian Thucydides. The war saw oligarchic and democratic factions engage in unspeakable butchery. “Reckless audacity” and “fanatical violence,” Thucydides wrote, “came to be considered the courage of a loyal ally.” Moderation “was held to be a cloak of unmanliness.” Ghastly bloodletting followed, with no hope of a breakthrough for justice or progress.

To the ancients, Mr. Edelstein writes, “the state in revolution was a perversion of the state, a social hell in which the trappings of society remained in place only to mask the unbridled violence and greed… that really governed human affairs.” Revolutions were calamitous “mutations” to no purpose, adding only tragedy to the affairs of men....

“Modern revolutions crave a Leviathan,” Mr. Edelstein writes. They owe[ ] more to Thomas Hobbes—a great enemy of mixed constitutions and an apologist for absolute sovereignty—than we may care to remember....

The American Constitution, in this interpretation, emerges as an antirevolutionary document designed to frustrate radical progressives. This echoes an anguished cry frequently heard from the political wings, both now and in the past. Mr. Edelstein is at times sympathetic. He writes of the “gnawing tension between our political structures and our political sensibilities” and of a constitution designed to inhibit “swift and extensive political change.” Americans are “moderns living in a world made by ancients.” One can imagine the likes of Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Steve Bannon nodding along.

But “The Revolution to Come” is still harder on the “modern” revolutionaries of the French dispensation. In his best chapters, Mr. Edelstein unfolds the despotism and pitiless violence that stains this tradition....

In place after place, disagreement over the question of what progress meant inevitably spawned factions, strife, conspiracies and atrocities. The drive to centralize power disabled any constitutional mechanisms that might have tamed this factionalism. The contest to control the single central power—through which the future would be defined—became increasingly ferocious. Purges targeted traditional counterrevolutionaries, but even more, false friends: the quisling moderates who might undermine the cause from within. The only solution was radical, reforming despotism. 

“The principle of popular sovereignty could be disregarded in the name of the people,” Mr. Edelstein writes. “It was in the name of a future, improved democratic government by people Y that the present, inferior democratic government by people X must be suspended.”...

This is not an optimistic book. Historical progress tempts but eludes us, Mr. Edelstein suggests. He seemingly regrets the circumspect realism of the American constitutional order, but he cannot applaud a rival revolutionary tradition of carnage and tyranny. He quotes Matthew Arnold’s lament at “wandering between two worlds, one dead, / the other powerless to be born.” In his suggestive final pages, Mr. Edelstein seems to sense a rising impatience for revolution.

“The inevitable compromises of democratic governance,” he writes of our present moment, “do not sit easily with either progressives or traditionalists. Liberal democracy gets worn down by historical expectations or regrets.” This general ennui produces perilous effects: a taste for centralized power, distain for procedural justice, aggressive ideological purity, contempt for moderation. Whatever his intentions, Mr. Edelstein may find that his study of revolutions induces in readers an appreciation for the age-old, Polybian balance of the U.S. Constitution, even as history threatens to overtake it. We should certainly hope so.

 I look forward to reading the book. The review certainly spotlights the timely point that it takes--well, what the hell, call it courage, I guess--to remain fiercely and firmly moderate, and dedicated to orderly and careful rather than revolutionary and swift government, and to resist pressure to do otherwise from vulgar mobs and jargon- or meme-spouting fashionable illiberal elites, in and out of government and academia, alike.