For two full centuries the experience of France in 1789 turned the relatively anodyne category of revolution into a mandatory axis of political judgment across the world. Throughout that long traverse it served more insistently and effectively to define political allegiance than to direct political agency towards well defined and potentially accessible ends. What equipped it to do this was a picture of the comprehensive and imperious requirements of human reason within the collective life. But it is dubious today that those claims are still able to offer a massive basis of solidarity for reconstructing society and polity in the aftermath of regime collapse or overthrow.
Revolution and political theory; The Russian Revolution; The French Revolution