Pointless suffering

"Utopian Promises, Despotic Outcomes" is a review of The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin by Dan Edelstein. Excerpts from the considerably longer review:

The ninth of November, 1799—the 18th of Brumaire in the calendar of the French Revolution—is often remembered as the day the Revolution ended. Napoleon Bonaparte, conqueror of Italy and scourge of Egypt, engineered the dissolution of the executive committee of the French Republic. The following day he entered the lower house of the French Assembly with a military escort. The deputies, recognizing a coup, cried “down with the dictator” and roughly manhandled the great general until he retreated. But troops soon cleared the chamber. Napoleon was made first consul and granted expansive powers. A new constitution followed, animated—according to one of its authors, the powerful Abbé Sieyès—by the principle that “power must come from above and confidence from below.” Remarked Sieyès of this new order: “Gentlemen, we now have a master.” ....

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. ....

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. ....

The French philosophes, Mr. Edelstein argues, were the first to exchange “a vision of revolution as devastation for one of revolution as improvement.” Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet and others developed a perfectionist faith in accumulative human improvement. They introduced the belief that history progressed and that the “iron law of inequality,” as Mr. Edelstein puts it, could be overcome. Tradition and custom were recast as the tyranny of the dead over the living. Social classes would melt away beneath a future sun.

Crucially, these progressive philosophes also developed a confidence in the capacity of the central state to act as the engine of reform. ....

The Revolution to Come cleaves the much-celebrated “age of democratic revolutions” into two. The French Revolution embodied the new confidence in historical progress and enthusiasm for unchecked power. Its guiding spirit, Mr. Edelstein insists, was Voltaire, the enthusiast for enlightened despots, rather than the radically democratic Rousseau. Napoleon, perhaps even Lenin, emerge as the heirs of Frederick the Great: authoritarian, but no less revolutionary for that.

The American Revolution was of a different quality. It emerged from the British tradition of mixed constitutionalism and what Mr. Edelstein calls “radical conservatism.” “Rather than transforming their world,” he writes, Americans “wished above all to preserve the state.” For Adams, Madison, and Hamilton, pure democracy and revolution remained threats. The American constitution thus sought to manage class conflict and balance governmental powers, both federally and within the central government. ....

...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. Advocating historical progress was one thing; securing popular consensus on the nature of progress was something else entirely.

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. .... (more)

Jeffrey Collins, "The Revolution to Come Review: Utopian Promises, Despotic Outcomes," The Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2025.