REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

Extract

REVOLUTION entered modern politics in the form of a bold and ambitious political judgment, aimed both at grasping something momentous, which was unmistakably happening, and at gauging its limited susceptibility to intentional control. From the outset that judgment, and the term in which it was precariously embodied, picked out one key image: the necessitated and ineluctably hazardous resolution of a profound crisis within a particular society, which must and would transform through intense political and social struggle its forms of government and social organization, and very possibly also of economic life. Over time every element in that judgment has proved as vulnerable as it was always bound to be contentious. But for all its manifest exposure and inevitable provocation, for almost two centuries, it went a long way towards setting the agenda for modern politics the world over. The two most inflammatory elements in the judgment were clear from quite early on in the French Revolution. One was the sense of crisis as the working through of a clearly intelligible fatality. The other was the fond hope that, once compelled to begin, that crisis must in due course issue in a resolution of the acute strains which had occasioned it in the first place. Jeff Goodwin's title does not explicitly affirm either element; but it contrives to evoke both, and do so in their most politically insinuating form.