Revolution and Democracy

The specter of the French Revolution haunts modern politics.Was it an uprising that opened the path to modern democracy-toppling aristocratic privilege, proclaiming the rights of man and the citizen, and inaugurating popular sovereignty-or a durable setback to liberalism, its promise undone by the bloodbath of the Terror and Napoleon's Caesarism?From Michelet to Jaurès and Soboul, 1789 marks the opening act of a better world, while, from Burke to Furet and Schama, violence, Jacobinism, and authoritarianism reveal the dangers inherent in revolutionary politics itself.One might hope that rigorous historical work could settle this division.Historiography, however, suggests otherwise: interpretations of the French Revolution often reveal not the nature of modernity, but the political orientation of the interpreter.Any historian entering this arena must contend with that risk.Two recent books boldly accept this challenge and offer new perspectives on the enduring problem of the emancipatory possibility of revolutions for modern times.Stephen Sawyer's Demos Rising: Democracy and the Popular Construction of Public Power treats the French Revolution's heritage as a protracted administrative revolution through which the people seized a new mode of self-government.In contrast, Dan Edelstein's The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin locates the French Revolution as the tipping point in the history of the idea of revolution-arguing that the faith in progress characteristic of modern revolutions becomes the harbinger of authoritarianism.Whereas in Sawyer's view democratization itself is a revolution, Edelstein warns that modern revolutions are unlikely to bring about liberal and pluralist democracies.Both books are impressive in scope and ambition.Each proposes a new way of understanding how the French Revolution radically altered the way we think about revolution itself.