Conceptual Sources of the Terror

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION was such a striking happening that the word can never again be simple in the Western vocabulary or in the language of peoples engrafted to the Western political tradition. However, the present essay will attempt to explore antecedents of the and not its special historical afterglow. Still, in this vein, a preliminary observation is in order because many today, conditioned by historicist ways of thought and by the multiple terrors of a revolutionary world, tend to visualize terror as an inevitable vehicle of political and social development. In a celebrated livre de circonstance, Merleau-Ponty wrote, of History culminates in Revolution and History is because there is contingency. 1 But such a notion was quite alien to the eighteenth century. The closest we come to it is Saint-Just's sibylline remark: That which produces the general good is always terrible, or it seems utterly strange [bizarre] when it is begun too early. 2 This suggests an apology for the timing of the and a step in the direction of Hegel's and Marx's developed interpretations of the as an abstract mismatch with history that was bound to abort. But in fact, for the men of 1793, the was neither historical triumph nor historical contingency. It was a grim detergent process designed to return France as far as possible to nature, on whose foundations the just city could be built. As Saint-Just also wrote, Terror can rid us of monarchy and aristocracy; but what will deliver us from corruption? . . Institutions.. . . 3 The idea was to purge and to save; but to save man for the politics of the city not from the metapolitics of history

Political science · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Violence, Religion, and Philosophy

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