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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.
Author’s Response by Dan Edelstein, Stanford University
Publishing a book sometimes feels like tossing a bottled message to the sea. It is heartening, then, when the sea—or in this case, the wonderful H-France Forum team, especially David Harrison and Hélène Bilis—sends messages back. These messages, by three exceptional scholars, engage with my book in the most rewarding way, by cutting to the heart of its arguments. If this book had what Umberto Eco called “model readers” in mind when I wrote it, these were the readers, and I’m fortunate and most grateful for their comments.[1]
As my own response must take the form of a written essay, rather than a meandering bistro conversation, I will pick up on one major question from each reader. I confess that I may have chosen questions for which I could think of a reasonable answer and also which serve to clarify my intentions in the book. Comments that go unanswered here will be ruminated for longer periods.
There is a great deal in Craige Champion’s response that merits thoughtful reflection, and I regret not having encountered his own scholarship while I was working on my Polybius chapters. On his specific point about the Cleisthenic reforms, however, the decision to leave these events out of my study was wholly intentional. Josh Ober’s book on the subject could not help but to have drawn my attention by its title (the author, a Stanford colleague, is also a friend and mentor).[2] The parallel that Ober draws between what he calls the “Athenian Revolution” and the later French one is essentially structural. In both instances, Ober argues, the people acted as independent revolutionary agents, and only afterwards appointed a leader. Indeed, Cleisthenes was not in Athens during the most revolutionary period of this affair, that is, the siege of the tyrannophile Isagoras and his Spartan ally Cleomenes in the Parthenon.[3]
My own reason for beginning with Corcyra instead relates to how the revolution was imagined, defined, and conceptualized in the late fifth and early fourth centuries B.C.E. Firstly and most importantly, the Athenian Revolution of 508-506 B.C.E. did not fit easily with this later Greek understanding of revolution. After all, the Athenian tyrants were expelled by an invading Spartan army, not by a popular insurrection. Thucydides himself highlights this difference in his brief account of this episode.[4] While recognizing that Hippias must have feared a revolution—after the assassination attempt, Hippias “began to turn his eyes abroad for a refuge in case of revolution (metabolés),” (6.59.2)—what actually befell the tyrant was something entirely different. In the end, the tyranny was “put down (katalutheísan) at last, not by [the people] themselves and Harmodius, but by the Lacedaemonians” (6.53.3; see again 6.54.3, katálysin té tyrannídi). From Thucydides’ perspective, the Athenian revolution did not fall into the category of (what he considered) revolutions.
Popular recollection of this episode, and of Cleisthenes’s own role, also appears to have been unclear. On two occasions, Thucydides laments the Athenian confusion about this period of their history: “The general Athenian public fancy that Hipparchus was tyrant when he fell by the hands of Harmodius and Aristogiton, not knowing that Hippias, the eldest of the sons of Pisistratus, was really supreme, and that Hipparchus and Thessalus were his brothers” (1.20.2; see again 6.54.2). Surprisingly, given this pointed critique, Thucydides does not even mention Cleisthenes at all, even though Herodotus had briefly recounted his role in the restoration of Athenian democracy (5.66-70).[5]
Thucydides’s silence set the tone for subsequent writers. The name of Cleisthenes is similarly missing from Plato. He makes only two passing appearances in the entirety of Aristotle’s Politics, and only once in relation to a revolution (Pol. 3.1275b34-36; see also 6.1319b20). The source which Ober relies on for his own argument is a text that seems to have been forgotten for most of Antiquity and was only rediscovered in 1870: the Constitution of the Athenians, possibly written by Aristotle himself. Here we find a detailed account of the lengthy sequence of events stretching from the assassination plot of Harmodius and Aristogeiton to the reforms of Cleisthenes. And Aristotle makes it clear that the majority of these events were the result of stasis: “For almost the chief initiative in the expulsion of the tyrants [tés ekbolés tōn tyránnōn] was taken by the Alcmaeonids [i.e., the family of Cleisthenes], and they accomplished most of it by party faction [stasiázontes]” (20.4). But this account, fascinating and important as it is for our own understanding of Athenian history, did not leave a mark on contemporary or subsequent writers.
Anne Simonin’s essay allows me to renew a scholarly conversation that we have enjoyed (and from which I have hugely benefited) over the past fifteen years. We were both, at the time, finishing books on the Terror, and Simonin’s legal analysis of how the Revolution lurched toward a violent regime was and remains a model for how I think about this period.[6] I therefore do not disagree with her argument that “La Terreur ne naît pas non plus des circonstances, mais plus prosaïquement d’une situation juridique : un état de guerre qui conduit à mettre en place un état d’exception.”
In the account of the French Revolution that I offer in this book, I ultimately sought to explore a question that lies upstream from the more immediate question of the Terror’s origins: how did the French revolutionaries end up at war with each other in the first place? What drove them to want to weaponize a legal state of exception to prosecute and persecute their political enemies? By tracing these tensions back to the start of the French Revolution, my goal is not to weave a teleological narrative that traces the September massacres or Great Terror back to the elections for the Estates General. But it is also the case that fissures started to develop as early as summer 1789. These fissures hardened and deepened as they wrapped themselves around institutional anchors at different levels of government (districts/sections, municipalities, departments, national assembly). And the accusations that fellow revolutionaries were really treacherous foes began to fly long before any shots were fired.
The specific form that the Terror took in France has a great deal to do with the legal and philosophical arsenal at the revolutionaries’ disposal, as Simonin brilliantly showed. But fratricidal violence was a feature of nearly all modern revolutions, and did not always adopt the same legalistic features. We must therefore distinguish between two separate questions: why do modern revolutions tend to descend into Terror, and why did the French revolutionary Terror take the form that it did?
In The Revolution to Come, I focus less on the second question than on the first. I argue that the doctrine of historical progress rests on the dangerous assumption that we are tending, as a society, towards greater justice and truth. This assumption is dangerous, because if it fails to occur, we must find reasons for this failure. If others disagree with you, it cannot simply be because (as Madison put it in Federalist 10), “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed,”[7] but rather because of error, superstition, or vice (as Condorcet insisted in the Esquisse d’un tableau historique).[8] The modern doctrine of progress is anti-pluralistic: it affirms, like Dostoyevsky’s ideologue in The Possessed, “There can be no solution of the social problem but mine.”[9]
Simonin’s essay ends with a more worrisome concern: what happens when we let go of the modern idea of revolution? Does longing for a better future doom us to revolutionary violence? Emma Planinc raises a similar challenge in her own essay, hinting that I may have painted myself into a corner. Am I just another Musset, pining about how “Everything that was is no longer; everything that will be has not yet come. Do not look elsewhere for the source of our woes”?[10] As she rightly surmises, I am dubious that modern society can be refashioned on ancient models. “We are too far gone as moderns; our conception of history has moved on,” she writes, and I concur.
Planinc has also wrestled with this dilemma, in a powerful and audacious book that deserves a Forum of its own. I find her own account intellectually thrilling and compelling, and in fact would not describe it as a “false return to anacyclosis” (as she fears). I admire how Planinc is willing to follow through on her commitments and believes we should allow people to renew or revise all their rights on a regular basis. Perhaps her solution is the genuinely modern one, without the optimistic delusion of earlier revolutionaries, and with the awareness—shared with Jefferson, perhaps the most modern (because French!) of the American Founders—that refreshing the tree of liberty can come at the price of some patriotic blood.
My conclusion may overstate the extent to which ancient institutions and modern sensibilities are antithetical. There can be tensions without contradictions. First, one can dismiss the modern doctrine of historical progress without denying the possibility of any progress at all. It is hard not to look back on human history and conclude that our societies, and not just individuals, have a capacity for some moral improvement. Wars in antiquity regularly concluded with a massacre of the vanquished troops. Entire cities were routinely enslaved. Torture was a formal part of criminal inquiries. We are still capable of callous and heartless atrocities towards our enemies, prisoners, and subordinates. And pressed by circumstances or scarcity, we may revert to such actions again. But as slow, uneven, and imperfect as change has been, it seems dogmatic not to say that progress has occurred. To hope that human societies may continue their moral improvement—if given the chance—is not delusional, and is certainly different from asserting that progress is the hidden law of history.
Second, there are aspects of ancient constitutional thought that may still be relevant, despite our modern historical tendencies. Polybius’s theory had two components, after all. A well-balanced constitution cannot prevent a state from failing if not supported by a set of moral institutions: quid leges sine moribus vanae proficiunt, asked Horace (“of what use are empty laws without good habits”)?[11] We are witnessing the revival—and perhaps even success—of this approach in the wave of civil discourse initiatives sweeping across the United States. We seem to have woken up to the idea that a liberal political order cannot sustain itself on autopilot. “Good habits” are also needed if we want, in Benjamin Franklin’s words, having had a republic, to keep it, too.
Timid optimism and improved civic habits are not exactly a panacea for our political ills. One is reminded of the joke about the pragmatists hitting the streets: “What do we want? Piecemeal social engineering! When do we want it? After peer review!” Not exactly rousing stuff. But more radical proposals also bring greater risks. The problem with revolutions is that they rarely deliver what was expected or desired. No matter how unsatisfactory the status quo can seem, revolutions can make it worse.
Dan Edelstein
Stanford University
danedels@stanford.edu
Notes
[1] Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).
[2] Josiah Ober, The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
[3] See Aristotle (or Aristotle’s student), Constitution of the Athenians, 20.3.
[4] Thucydides, The Landmark Thucydides, ed. Robert B. Strassler (New York: Free Press, 1998).
[5] Herodotus, Histories, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
[6] See Anne Simonin, Le Déshonneur dans la République: une histoire de l’indignité, 1789-1958 (Paris: Grasset 2008), from which I drew when writing my own The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
[7] Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist Papers, ed. Isaac Kramnick (London: Penguin Books, 1987).
[8] Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Paris: Agasse, 1795).
[9] Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Possessed, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005), 402.
[10] Alfred Musset, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; Paris: GF, 1993), 23.
[11] Horace, Odes and Epodes, trans. Niall Rudd (Cambridge: Loeb/Harvard University Press, 2004).
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H-France Forum
Volume 20 (2025), Issue 7, #4