Download this review as a Word document
Return to Issue 7
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 Emma Planinc, University of Notre Dame
Dan Edelstein’s The Revolution to Come presents itself in form as well as content as an engagement with the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” (p. 150). With his sweeping and impressively rigorous account of the transformation of the idea of “revolution,” Edelstein takes us from the worlds of Plato, Aristotle, Polybius and Cicero, to those of the Glorious Revolution, American founding, French Revolution, Karl Marx and Leninist Russia. Edelstein’s claim is that “Modern Times”—the title of Part III of The Revolution to Come—are marked not by revolution itself, but by a drastic shift in how people understand the act and purpose of revolution. What is modern? Answering this question accounts for one of Edelstein’s most fundamental insights: modernity lies in revolution understood as detached from its ancient root, anacyclosis. Discussing the Polybian cycle of governments and revolutions, Edelstein describes anacyclosis as “a repeating circle, an endless cycle of change. . . It was from this word that our modern term ‘revolution’ derives. But the original meaning of anacyclosis was quite different. It did not refer to individual regime changes, but to the overall cycle through all six constitutions” characteristic of much ancient political thought: kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, ochlocracy (p. 50). For the ancients, anacyclosis was to be avoided. The Polybian focus of Edelstein’s analysis serves the useful end of establishing an ancient solution to this apparent disorder: the mixed or constitutional government, a means by which one might be capable of stopping this endless rotation and cycle of regime upheavals.
Edelstein masterfully demonstrates in the third chapter how transformative translations of Polybius precipitated changing ideas about what revolution was, moving it away from a concept that implied instability and political danger, to a more neutral term that “could be put to other uses by innovative authors. A new vocabulary opened up new possibilities in the history of ideas” (p. 75). It is in the French Revolutionary period that Edelstein locates the truly modern invocation of what we now call revolution. It is future-oriented, tied to historical progress, and about cultural as well as political transformation. Here again language offers a key to this shifted perspective, and in particular the French language lends itself to this conceptual leap: “the legitimacy that [the revolution] claimed . . .was prospectively retrospective. One had to look forward (prospectively) to the future state of affairs that the revolutionary government would bring about, in order for this coming achievement to authorize (retrospectively) the actions that had been taken to arrive there. This complex reasoning is nicely captured by the verb tense that best approximates its logic: the aptly named future perfect. Revolutionary government will have been justified once it delivered a perfect future” (p. 201). Edelstein tracks the need for the “seizure of meaning” as well as that of power through the revolutionary politics of Karl Marx and the “dictatorial solution” for the perfect future in Lenin and Mao. While rooted in the French Revolutionary period in a desire for a more rational, just, and democratic future, it is nevertheless the case, he argues, that “actual revolutions gave dictatorship a distinctive appeal” (p. 234).
What, then, is not modern in this account of the transformation of the idea of revolution? Edelstein’s argument takes intriguing departures from others who engage in philosophies of history regarding the ancient/modern divide. Contra Leo Strauss, Edelstein claims that Machiavelli is not modern. For Edelstein, Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy replicates Polybius’s account of anacyclosis: “He offered a transliteration of anacyclosis as a circle: ‘this is the cycle through which all states that have governed themselves or that now govern themselves pass’” (p. 66). So too is the American Revolution not modern—indeed, on Edelstein’s account, it is not even revolutionary in the modern sense of the term. He calls the American Revolution “the last Polybian revolution” (p. 87). It had “little to do with world historical progress” (p. 132), “if the framers found in Polybius the principles for establishing a lasting government, it was because they shared his vision of history. They, too, imagined that the future threats that their constitution needed to fend off would be the same as in the past. They did not hope for or imagine a future society that differed dramatically from the present” (p. 142).
Edelstein’s Polybian account of the American Revolution leads him to an extremely compelling diagnosis of contemporary political unrest, particularly in America. There is, he writes, “a gnawing tension between our political structures and our political sensibilities” (p. 292). Modern people have a revolutionary spirit. Critiquing Francis Fukuyama, who “considers human nature as essentially unchanging”, Edelstein writes that we must account for how “modern subjects experience history differently than their classical forbears” (p. 290). With regard to the American founding, Edelstein writes: “What the framers did not predict was the change in how most Americans understood history” (p. 142); “the Constitution of 1787, built on Ancient principles and English precedents, was not designed with progressive ideals in mind” (p. 143). In the contemporary political landscape, we are at odds with ourselves: “we are Moderns living in a world made by Ancients” (p. 292). On this view, restoring or reinvigorating Ancient modes of constitutionalism or virtue would not be solutions to our political discontent, as many current conservatives claim. We are too far gone as Moderns; our conception of history has moved on.
Those who engage in a consideration of the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” very often come to an idealism of the Ancient world. Despite their many differences, for example, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss agree that we have made Modern mistakes, and they hold the Ancient world in high regard. For them, we are disjointed from ourselves, disrupted in our human condition, because of the rupture that occurs when we begin to think of ourselves as world-historical beings. For this reason, Arendt presents the small Jeffersonian republics as an ideal in On Revolution. These small self-governing communities envisioned in the American founding were ideal according to Arendt because she claims that “freedom, wherever it has existed as a tangible reality, has always been spatially limited.”[1]While she thinks that many things about the human condition have changed since the time of Ancient Greece, Arendt nevertheless models her conception of spatially-limited political possibility on the historical example of the Athenian polis. Quoting Sophocles in the conclusion of her chapter on “The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure” she writes: “‘Not to be born prevails over all meaning uttered in words; by far the second-best for life, once it has appeared, is to go as swiftly as possible whence it came.’ There he also let us know, through the mouth of Theseus, the legendary founder of Athens and hence her spokesman, what it was that enabled ordinary men, young and old, to bear life’s burden: it was the polis, the space of men’s free deeds and living words, which could endow life with splendour.”[2]
In Natural Right and History, Leo Strauss also claims an ancient ideal over our modern missteps: that of natural right over “the modern historical view.”[3] He writes: “Natural right in its classic form is connected with the teleological view of the universe. All natural beings have a natural end, a natural destiny, which determines what kind of operation is good for them…The teleological view of the universe, of which the teleological view of man forms a part, would seem to have been destroyed by modern natural science” and “present-day social science rejects natural right on two different, although mostly combined, grounds; it rejects it in the name of History and in the name of the distinction between Facts and Values.”[4] Modern historicism denies, for Strauss, the fundamental “distinction between nature and convention, between physis and nomos”[5]: “Historicism assumes that modern man’s turn toward history implied the divination and eventually the discovery of a dimension of reality that had escaped classical thought, namely, of the historical dimension.”[6] In “The Three Waves of Modernity” Strauss writes that in remaining committed in principle to natural right, “liberal democracy, in contradistinction to communism and fascism, derives powerful support from a way of thinking which cannot be called modern at all: the premodern thought of our western tradition.”[7]
In setting up a divide between the Ancients and the Moderns, both Arendt and Strauss see something to be salvaged in the Ancient world—indeed, something to moderate our Modern proclivities. This cannot be Edelstein’s solution. His Ancient/Modern divide rests not on a departure in (Modern) historicism from a kind of (Ancient) universalism or naturalism, but on a rupture in modern revolutionary history from its Ancient idea in anacyclosis. It is history transforming the idea of history. Human beings have fundamentally changed how they view history, making its Ancient ideas and political modes incompatible with the contemporary world. Being Modern is an irreversible change in the human condition and in how history takes place.
In my own work, I begin in the same place as does Edelstein: taking modernity as it is, and trying to unfurl both its historical roots and the political consequences of its conception of history and human nature. I have argued in Regenerative Politics that a perpetual cyclicality is the only way to preserve political legitimacy in modernity, given that human beings see themselves as self-determinative and desire a participatory role in their own self-making.[8] Given the argument of The Revolution to Come, Edelstein’s view of my regenerative politics would, I think, be that this view is advocating for a kind of false return to anacyclosis; a rescuing of the Ancient idea that also lacks its necessary moderating force in the constitutional fix. But if we also cannot rely on this constitutional fix any more, given the displacement between how people feel about history and what their political history (in the American case) actually is, then what is there left for us to do? The potential virtue of Edelstein’s approach would be that we answer historical problems not with calls to nature or universalism but with alternative historical claims—more Ancient ones, and perhaps more effective. But this path is not available to us if the Ancient modes are lost to Modern minds.
To conclude, then, I ask Edelstein the Rousseauian question but in reference to his own historical model, rather than Rousseau’s natural one. If we cannot go back to the constitutional wisdom of the Ancients—to the Ancient mode of understanding history—then where else is there to go but into the future? Are we simply stuck now in modernity’s perpetual revolution?
Emma Planinc
University of Notre Dame
Notes
[1] Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), p. 275.
[2] Arendt, On Revolution, p. 281.
[3] Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History, Revised edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 11.
[4] Strauss, Natural Right, pp. 7-8.
[5] Strauss, Natural Right, p. 90.
[6] Strauss, Natural Right, p. 33.
[7] Leo Strauss, “The Three Waves of Modernity,” in What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), p. 98.
[8] Emma Planinc, Regenerative Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024).
Copyright © 2025 by the Society for French Historical Studies, all rights reserved. The Society for French Historical Studies permits the electronic distribution for nonprofit educational purposes, provided that full and accurate credit is given to the author, the date of publication, and its location on the H-France website. No republication or distribution by print media will be permitted without permission. For any other proposed uses, contact the Editor-in-Chief of H-France.
H-France Forum
Volume 20 (2025), Issue 7, #3