Every Great Revolution Is a Civil War

Originality and novelty define the modern script of revolution.That script was original in the sense that it had identifiable beginnings that have been precisely located in France in 1789 when "revolution was revolutionised".And it was novel because in that year "the French imagined a radical break with the past achieved by the conscious will of human actors, an inaugural moment for a drama of change and transformation projected indefinitely into the future."After 1789, revolution in the singular replaced revolutions in the plural.What had been understood before 1789 as unavoidable features of nature, as predetermined astronomical cycles, or as eternal recurrences in human affairs became instead voluntary, transformative, and repeatable: revolution as fact gave way to revolution as act.With that daring feat of collective imagination, revolution became ineluctably political, covering primarily but not exclusively fundamental changes concerned with the distribution of power and sovereignty.In the years after 1789, revolution also developed into an authority in its own right, in whose name political violence could be legitimated.Taken together, these features made up "the script for modern politics invented in 1789"

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• What's the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée

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