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Dan Edelstein, The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025. viii+419 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00 (cl) ISBN: 978-0-691-2318-3. $24.50 (eb) ISBN 978-0-691-2318-46.
Review Essay by Craige B. Champion, Syracuse University
I cannot imagine a student of revolutions who could come away from reading this book without having learned a great deal. In a history of this range, the author must make difficult decisions. How can one minimize historical distortion when the subject, in this case a political idea, is tracked over vast temporal and geographical distances, employed in various political constellations, represented in different cultural traditions, and expressed in several languages? How does one avoid the charge of having made Procrustean operations to forge an unhistorical, seamless entity as object for analysis, thus committing a sin of the “mythology of coherence”?[1] More fundamentally, how does one choose spatial restrictions and chronological parameters?
Edelstein’s analysis has a Eurocentric orientation, perhaps inevitable given his area of expertise. That said, he does a fine job in interweaving the American Revolution, the Maoist Chinese Cultural Revolution, Castro’s Cuba, Simón Bolívar’s Bolivia, and other non-European revolutionary movements into his narrative (from a European perspective, even the Russian Revolution is an outlier, given Russia’s cultural history as a tertium genus between East and West). With this choice having been made (the book’s structural girders are a centuries-long Polybian aversion to revolution and a quasi-Foucauldian rupture point in revolutionary France), it is almost inescapable that the book should begin with the world of the ancient Greek citizen-states and their socio-economic disturbances, or stasis (p. l), that was one of their endemic features.
It is also almost inevitable that Athens should take center stage in the early narrative, and that Thucydides’ famous description of stasis in Corcyra should figure prominently. But Edelstein’s starting point misses a golden opportunity of a revolutionary moment of the greatest consequence. This event in Athens ca. 508 B.C.E., when the People took matters into their own hands, led to the Kleisthenic reforms and establishment of dēmokratia. Indeed, Josiah Ober once compared the chaotic popular insurrection at Athens directly to events in the French Revolution.[2] Not a revolution to be overlooked, one should think, as it led to the first fully blown western direct democracy that we can know about in any detail.
Selecting an effective beginning and a suitable conclusion is extremely important, and ultimately, there is little reason to criticize Edelstein’s selections, as they are undoubtedly dramatic. Even Polybius had trouble getting it right, after all, prefixing two introductory books known as the prokataskeuē, to give a sweeping history of the First Punic War (264–241 B.C.E.) before settling into his real beginning, the Hannibalic War (218–202 B.C.E.). As for an ending, in Polybius’s original conception it was to be the decisive Roman victory at Pydna (168 B.C.E.), when the Republic claimed mastery over Polybius’s known inhabited world, or oikoumenē. But then he changed his mind, appending another ten books, bringing the narrative down to the year 146 B.C.E., so that readers could evaluate how the Romans used their interstate supremacy (in that year they destroyed the cities of Corinth and Carthage).
The book’s basic architecture is dichotomous: 1) a centuries-long period in which “revolution” was an evil to be avoided at all costs, with Polybius and his ideas about the stabilizing mixed constitution serving as a guide for maintaining the status quo and averting that nadir point, and 2) a sharp break in France ca. 1750, when the idea of a revolution’s fortunes changes, now denoting progress and closer and closer approximations to a just society based on reason through the strong medicine of abrupt upheavals. For me, one glaring lacuna is the short shrift Hegel gets. To fill in the gap for Hegel’s reactions to the French Revolution and the importance of revolutions for him, one will have to turn to Richard Bourke’s Hegel’s World Revolutions.[3]
The ancient Achaean historian Polybius casts a long shadow in this book, appearing repeatedly in the Introduction, mentioned regularly throughout, and making a curtain call on the final page. Regarding the historian himself, there are inaccuracies. The year 208 B.C.E. is most certainly too early for his birthdate (p. 47), and more glaringly, Polybius did not spend “most of his life in Rome” (p. 5). Rather, he had already established himself as a leading politician within the Achaean Confederation before he was brought to Rome as a political hostage in the aftermath of the battle at Pydna; he then spent some sixteen years in a kind of house arrest in Rome, with increasingly lax oversight and expanding privileges; and he was repatriated around 150 B.C.E., spending the rest of his long life in his homeland, according to tradition dying after a fall from his horse while out on a hunting expedition at the age of 82.[4]
But these inaccuracies are quibbles. Edelstein does a good job in recounting how Polybius’s text in Latin translation entered Europe and transformed political thought (pp. 62-75). He shows how Polybius’s theory of the mixed constitution, sometimes refracted through Machiavelli’s Discorsi, provided European and early American political thinkers with a road map for plotting a course to mitigate socio-economic class tensions and avoid catastrophic political anomie and violent societal collapse. This nostrum is the famous formula of separation of powers, tricameral governmental structure, and checks and balances. For centuries the Greek historian’s political theory served as a reputed prophylactic against what the Greeks called stasis or tarachē, for the Romans seditio or res novae.
Presuppositions about historical processes—cyclical or linear—necessarily undergird ideas about the nature of revolutions. Cyclical historical processes characterize some ancient Greek historiography, including Polybius’s notion of anacyclosis. As a foundational presupposition, cyclical structuring belongs to a different conceptual universe than progressive, linear foundations of post-1789 revolutionary preconceptions posited by Edelstein. While linear premises are also present in Polybius’ thinking, as in his statement about the unprecedented scope of geographical knowledge in the wake of Alexander’s conquests (Polyb. 3.59.3–5) or his repeated stress on the unique quality of the Roman dominion, the contrast is worthy of consideration. One might also note that in the anacyclosis, each revolutionary mini-cycle (for example, from kingship to tyranny to aristocracy) leads to a time of reason or logismos, though the mixed polity can stave off the violent upheavals for longer periods, if not permanently.[5] The role of chance, the Black Swan effect, in Polybius’s historical thinking is deeper and more pervasive than Edelstein’s treatment suggests, as shown by Felix Maier’s important Expect the Unexpected Everywhere: Contingency in Historical Processes in Polybius.[6] Finally, at least one ancient Greek thinker subscribed to a permanent revolution of improvement, without desire to curtail or prevent it: Phaleas of Chalcedon with his proposals for debt cancellation and wealth equalization (Aristotle, Politics 1266a31–67b21). These are details an ancient historian is likely to think about in reading Edelstein’s book; they do not challenge his main points.
I’ll close with a bit of historical contextualization, not to be expected in a book of Edelstein’s aims, but nonetheless worth pointing out for the reader’s edification. Returning to Polybius’s anacyclosis, the final and most horrid change, or metabolē, in the Achaean historian’s representation is the transition from democracy to ochlocracy or mob rule. It is here that lawlessness becomes ubiquitous, when communal values are lost, irrationality and brutality reign supreme, and human beings are reduced to beasts. Rhetorical expansion of this transition from civilization to savagery was part and parcel of the arsenal of Greek statesmen of the second century B.C.E. in their struggles with one another in the presence of Roman authorities. Charges of demagoguery and proposals for debt cancellation and schemes for property redistribution were common weapons of Greek politicians against their rivals. I have argued elsewhere it is highly likely that Polybius’s political enemies within the Achaean Confederation brought such charges against him, the efficacy of which may have had a great deal to do with the abrupt ending of Polybius’s political career in Greece and house arrest at Rome.[7] In this historical context, Polybius’s theory of the mixed constitution, his condemnation of extreme democracy, and his routine castigation of demagogues throughout his history begin to look like political apology. One can then ask, with speech act theory in mind, about the illocutionary force of Polybius’s representations of anacyclosis and the mixed constitution; or to put it more simply, what he was doing in presenting these things in this way. Such focus on the practical objectives of Polybius’s historical writing and the political circumstances of his work’s composition render his Historiae an endlessly fascinating historical document. But for Edelstein’s admirable study, it is not the historian but his political theory that matter.
Craige B. Champion
Syracuse University
cbchamp@syr.edu
Notes
[1] See collected essays in Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and His Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), passim.
[2] Josiah Ober, The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 32-52.
[3] Richard Bourke, Hegel’s World Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023).
[4] Arthur M. Eckstein, “Notes on the Birth and Death of Polybius,” American Journal of Philology, vol. 113 (1992), pp. 387-406.
[5] Catalogue of passages for logismos in Polybius’s history in Craige B. Champion, Cultural Politics in Polybius’s Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 255-59.
[6] Felix K. Maier, «Überall mit dem Unerwarteten rechnen»: die Kontigenz historischer Prozesse bei Polybios (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2012).
[7] Craige B. Champion, “Polybian Demagogues in Political Context,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology, vol. 102 (2004), pp. 199-212.
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Volume 20 (2025), Issue 7, #1