James F. Penrose reviews A New World Begins: The History of the French Revolution by Jeremy Popkin, Crois ou meurs: Histoire incorrecte de la Révolution française, by Claude Quétel, and Le Tribunal révolutionnaire: Punir les ennemis du peuple, by Antoine Boulant, at The New Criterion.
#revolution
'What the Bolsheviks learned from the French'
Daniel Beer reviewed The French Revolutionary Tradition in Russian and Soviet Politics, Political Thought, and Culture, by Jay Bergman, at The Times Literary Supplement.
"As Jay Bergman emphasizes, Marx himself had venerated the French Revolution for the same reason Edmund Burke reviled it: radicals had brought an entire country to reject the 'accumulated experiences, traditions and patterns of life that had existed for centuries'. But Marx also left Russian revolutionaries 'a diverse menu to choose from when it behoved them to invoke the French Revolution'. The more ideologically orthodox [Bolsheviks] stressed the iron laws of history and the dangers of political overreach before the conditions for successful revolutions had been fulfilled; others, of a more impatient disposition, insisted on the power of humans to force the pace of change."
#revolution
The latest issues of The Great Ideas Online, the Centers weekly, discussed this work by Mortimer Adler and John Deely.
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"Join host Steve Allen as he welcomes Cleopatra, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Paine, and Theodore Roosevelt to a discussion of questions of enduring significance. Topics include the merits and evils of imperialism, the American Revolution, the possibility of nobility in war, certitude of religious doctrine, and the best form of government. Hear Cleopatra and Aquinas react to the first lines of the Declaration of Independence, Cleopatra defend the rule of divine emperors, and Aquinas comment on Paine’s argument for equality."Video of Season 1, Episode 2, linked at The Imaginative Conservative.
#equality #government #religion #revolution #war
"In an 1841 essay endorsing the 'pacification' of Algeria, Tocqueville wrote: 'Men in France whom I respect, but with whom I do not agree, find it wrong that we burn harvests, that we empty silos, and finally that we seize unarmed men, women and children … These, in my view, are unfortunate necessities, but ones to which any people that wants to wage war on the Arabs is obliged to submit.' Fanon, who believed that what had been removed by force should be taken back by force, did little more than turn Tocqueville on his head."
#Revolution
"We live in an age when the very foundations of society are threatened in almost all countries by a secret conspiracy of crime, when arson and murder are employed as political weapons by the miserable and half-witted instruments of organisations which arrogate to themselves high-sounding names, and persuade youthful enthusiasts that the end justifies the means, and that the most cowardly and bloodthirsty murders are heroic exploits, worthy to be sung with the deeds of Harmodius or Brutus."
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