In fact, when reading The Revolution to Come, one can often hear the echoes of On Revolution, Arendt’s 1963 comparative study on the differences between the revolutions in America and France. Like Edelstein, Arendt insisted on a sharp contrast: Where the Jacobins were bent on a thoroughgoing makeover of “the social,” the American founders were satisfied with the more moderate and pragmatic task of reshaping “the political.” Much in the spirit of Arendt, Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries led France “from democracy to dictatorship” and thereby furnished a general model for revolution in the centuries to come.
But Edelstein gives this argument a singular spin. The idea of progress, he contends, encouraged a kind of determinism in both theory and practice, since it gave revolutionaries the highest claim on the unfolding of history, as if its movements were like those of an organism: metabolic, not political.
This argument is no doubt fascinating. But to accept it demands a rather teleological reading of intellectual history in which bad ideas prepare the way for future horrors
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/revolution-to-come-thucydides-to-lenin/#
Death to all Marxist-communists
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