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Dan Edelstein, "The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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Professor Dan Edelstein
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Marshall Po
Hello, everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the new New Books Network.
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Moteza Hajizadeh
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Moteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today I'm talking with Professor Dan Edelstein about his most recent book that he has published with Princeton University Press. And it's a very topical subject, the Revolution to Come, A History of an Idea From Thucydides to Lenin. Professor Dan Edelstein is a professor of French and also professor of political science and history at Stanford University. His many books include on the Spirit of Rights and the Terror of Natural Republicanism, the Cult of Nature and the French Revolution. Dan, welcome to New Books Network.
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Professor Dan Edelstein
Thanks so much for having me.
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Moteza Hajizadeh
It's a fascinating topic. Wonderful cover and wonderful topic. I'm a wonderful title as well. Revolution to Come. Before talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself, your field of study and your field of expertise, I mean, and then tell us how the idea of the book came to you?
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Professor Dan Edelstein
Sure. So I'm a professor, primarily actually of French literature. That's what my PhD was in. And I'm in a literature department at Stanford. Already when I was working on my PhD though, I sort of fell into the French Revolution. I was at the time more. More interested in the legacy of the French Revolution and trying to understand its role in 19th century French culture. But to do that of course required at least some familiarity with the Revolution itself. And the more I started learning about the French Revolution, just the more I became kind of obsessed with how incredibly dynamic it was, how transformative, how quickly things change, how things that were said in 1793 would have been unimaginable in 1792 and et cetera. So it just became obvious to me that this was such a fascinating object of study. And so already my first book, as you mentioned, the Terror of Natural Right was in large part a historical study of the legal and philosophical foundations of the Terror, at least those that the Jacobins put forward. And so my career sort of ever since drawn me more into history and then of late more into the history of political thought. And that's really what brought me to this book, which actually I started thinking about when I finished my first book, book on the Terror. And so this book has been kind of a long time in the works. I really had to mull it over.
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More than a decade to really figure out what I was trying to say and how to say it.
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Moteza Hajizadeh
Fascinating, I think. And you cover vast, vast.
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And the scope of the book is kind of huge. And there are, if I'm not mistaken, there are 14 chapters. But I was really interested in the way you structured the book it in four parts. So you have the first part is Fortunes, Revolution, second part, Constitutions and Revolutions in the British World. Then the third part is Modern Times and fourth part, the Progress of Revolution. Can you tell us about how you structured the book? Very, very briefly, in a nutshell, maybe what each section covers.
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Professor Dan Edelstein
Sure. So the book, really, the structure of it, it looks a bit like these other langue durer or sort of long histories of an idea. And I was certainly inspired by some of those, notably by Darren McMahon, David Armitage or Annalene Dejean. But actually that's not how I set out to write this book. I didn't sit down and say, oh, wouldn't it be fun to write a long history of the idea of revolution? I was really trying to more tell the story downstream from the French Revolution. So. So in a sense it was supposed to only be parts three and four, but as I was working on those parts, which indeed some of this later stuff is in fact what I wrote first, like the chapter on Marx was, I think, one of the first published parts of the book. But it's only when I realized it, to really tell the story of why the French Revolution is such a transformative event in modern history, and by extension, modern political history. That's when I realized that I really had to explain what came before to understand why the French Revolution was so different and marked such a departure. And I'd done a little bit of work on sort of the comparison between the American and French Revolution, which is a kind of.
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Traditional subject of study in the field. Um, but I realized as I worked more and more on this, that really what I was dealing with, with the American Revolution was what in French we call a faux amis. Sort of a. Literally means a. A false friend, but two things that look and. Or sound like they should be the same, but actually are quite different.
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And I think one of the moments that really stuck out for me in understanding why they're so different was when I was.
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Doing some research on John Adams and his defense of the Constitution of the United States. And in the preface of that book, he has this lengthy passage where he's talking about the horrors of revolution and how all we need to know about how horrible the revolution is is going back to ancient Greece. And he starts to. He starts to quote Thucydides. And it was just one of these moments where I was scratching my head thinking, why are you, John Adams, first of all, why is he dissing revolution, given that he just participated in one? And why does he have to go back to Thucydides to make his point? And so that's, in a way, what ended up giving the book the structure that it has, which is beginning with the ancient Greeks and both ideas of history and ideas of political change that really emerge around the. The turn from the 5th to the 4th century BC both the time of Thucydides and then the age of Plato and Aristotle. And that's sort of when the classical conception of revolution, I think, takes shape. Revolution is seen in Thucydides, especially the famous description of the stasis in Corcyra. It's the worst possible catastrophe that can befall a city state, a revolution. There's nothing good that can come of it. It's destruction, it's death, and it's also this upheaval of all civilized values. And so that's really the way in which revolution gets encoded in classical Greece and also in classical Rome and will remain to a really large extent for most of European history. Indeed, I would argue, all the way up until Adams.
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But the other really crucial piece of this is that the reason why revolution has such a bad rep in classical and post classical times is because of the vision of history that is most widely shared. So from Thucydides onwards and again all the way up to Adams, history is not seen as something that's really going anywhere. There's a lot of chaos, there's a lot of movement, but it ends up being somewhat cyclical, it's somewhat mercurial, it's the wheel of fortune. And so in this model, really what you want to do is try to keep history at bay, prevent revolutions, prevent in a way, prevent anything from happening. And that's where there's this real fascination with the well balanced constitution, which is seen as the political mechanism for preventing change. And so that's what I talk about in the first two parts of the book. How this conception of revolution takes shape and then how throughout the early modern period and through what John Pocock calls, and I steal his title, the Three British Revolutions of the 1640s, the Glorious Revolution of 1688, and then what we call the American Revolution, that these are really the still part of this more classical conception, both of revolution and history. And then modern times is not so much a statement that, you know, the. The world in a social and technological sense becomes modern in the 18th century, but more that the idea of. Of a modern moment that is in advance of a classical past. That's what emerges in the 18th century along with this idea that history is in fact a story of progress. That's the modern doctrine or the modern understanding of history. And in its wake you get a new conception of revolution where in order to make historical progress, sometimes we need these moments of revolutionary transformation to get us up to the next level of history.
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Moteza Hajizadeh
And that was a part that. I'm glad you mentioned that idea that more recently we tend to conceive of revolution as a progressive movement or progress marked progress, let's say. But in the Greek and Roman times, obviously ancient Greek and Roman thinkers tended to think of it as a threat rather than opportunity. Can you expand on this point, please?
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Professor Dan Edelstein
Absolutely. So I think the reason why classical thinkers had almost phobia of revolution is twofold. One is that they had two words for revolution. And I do a lot of philological work in the book of tracing the history of these terms and even the history of when does the word revolution emerge? The Greek words were stasis, which usually referred to the kind of fighting, the violence, the conflict that often accompanied revolutions. But sometimes did not result in an actual revolution. So you could have stasis, which usually would be like fighting between social groups that didn't actually lead to any fundamental changes in the way a city state was organized. But when you did have a change in the constitution, this is what the Greeks usually called a metabole, sort of almost a metamorphosis, a changing of the shape of the constitution. And it's actually kind of interesting how the way that there, you could almost argue that this vocabulary is more helpful than sort of lumping everything together into a single word, as we do with revolution, because they could recognize the ways in which these two phenomena could occur together or they could occur independently.
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Now for your question of why was there so much concern, why was there so much fear around revolution? A lot of it had to do with stasis being just a really negative thing. I mean, stasis is in. In Thucydides famous description of the stasis and Corcyra, it's, you know, completely unhinged violence and violence that knows no limit. He talks about fathers killing sons. It's, you know, rejecting any norms of religious faith, you know, killing people in temples. And so what revolution unleashes is this sort of terrifying force.
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That just looks like everything opposite to what you want a civilized state to resemble. So that's one reason why they're so opposed to it. But the other is that even when you do get a change in the constitution, when you have the metabola.
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Because they don't see history as progressing, they viewed these constitutional regime changes as simply being, you know, a kind of chaotic movement, a wheel of fortune. And indeed, Polybius, who's the thinker I really focus on in the first half of the book, he describes it as a circle. And the word he uses, Anasyklosis, it's kind of an unusual Greek word. That's where we're going to eventually get our word for revolution. So this cycle. But it means that there's a deep instability to revolutions. They're just kind of like a Sisyphean wheel that is not getting us anywhere. So it's not like we have a metabola from, say, a democracy to an oligarchy or vice versa. And that solves any problems. It just means that we're kind of perpetuating this dysfunctional system. And so that's why, in the classical mode, the ideal is designing a constitution that does not shift, that does not constantly move from one state to the next, but can somehow resist all of these pressures to be in A state of inconstancy and can have a certain degree of permanence.
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Moteza Hajizadeh
Let's move to the second part of the book. That's where you talk about the revolution in British world. Do you think that.
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American and British and English revolutions were fundamentally conservative revolutions, despite the fact that they caused some radical changes in their respective countries?
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Professor Dan Edelstein
So I would start by saying that our distinction between conservative and radical or progressive only really starts to make sense around the time of the French Revolution, because what we mean by that is that some people want to change society, work towards progress, work towards a more just, more fair society, and others actually believe that the problems that we're facing would be resolved if we sort of went back to an older version. And I would say, by and large, like, that's not a distinction that really would be meaningful to somebody in the 17th century. So to some degree, everybody was conservative in the sense that they did not really think that there was this better future in the sense of a different future that was accessible. The future ideally was just going to be.
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You know, the best version of the past that we could imagine. So from a historical perspective, like, nobody really thought of the future as being this totally different.
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New and improved version of, or transformation of what we already knew.
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So I think really what we're talking about, like, especially with the 17th century, are different conservative arguments.
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The Parliamentarians had a certain conception of the English constitution that they were trying to preserve. And all of their arguments were precisely about this, which of course put them in a bit of a bind because, you know, there's always been a king at least as far back as they go. And so there was like a built in limitation to their kind of parliamentary conservativism. It didn't really help them much when they had to deal with a king who was absolutely inimical, inimical to their, to their efforts. And you see this again in the. You see this actually during the Commonwealth period, the way in which by the end of the Commonwealth, you've got a Lord Protector who looks a heck of a lot like a king who even now has the right to name his son as his heir. Cromwell was about to bring back an upper chamber because the House of Lords had been abolished in 1649. So as Locke points out, even though, oh, the English went through this massive transformation during the 1650s, they kind of were heading back to the same place where they started. And it's a very similar story with the Glorious Revolution, where really the way in which the Glorious Revolution is defined and understood is as A restoration of the true English constitution. Now, yes, they do. They do some pretty radical things like they disrupt the natural order of succession. That's not supposed to happen in a traditional constitutional monarchy, but the rhetoric is very much a rhetoric of conservation. And throughout the 18th century, sort of both Whigs and Tories are often warning about the need, like the fear of corruption, the fear of losing the, the revolution principles of 1688, 89. I think the American Revolution, it's a little bit more complicated, but I would still argue, and I draw here a lot on Erik Nelson's book.
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On the way in which the English returned to monarchic thinking, that yes, the U.S. constitution is not an exact copy of the, of the English or by then British constitution, but it's really similar, it has a very similar structure. The, the bicameralism, the, the role of the executive both in the legislative and some of the individual functions of the executive.
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And sort of the very idea of a well balanced constitution where you have these different parts of government that are checking each other through the checks and balances, which is a phrase actually that comes out of these translations of Polybius. So I think American constitutional lawyers in particular, they focus mostly on the differences and they like to think that this is some kind of incredible novelty. But you want to see real novelty, look at some of the French constitutions of the 1780s and 90s, which they don't last, but they're a completely different constitutional theory that's underpinning them. And that's I think when we can start to really talk about in a meaningful or rather in a way that makes sense to us today, using our categories of conservative and progressive. My name is Percy Jackson. Getting in trouble is like breathing for me. The hit series returns to Disney.
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Moteza Hajizadeh
In your book, there's something you discuss as revolution principles. And I'm interested first to know what do you mean by revolution principles and understand how the persistence of these principles, what they tell us about the idea of liberty and stability in more or less Anglo American political culture.
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Professor Dan Edelstein
So it's a very specific phrase, revolution principles, and it's one that emerges in 18th century British constitutional thought and the, the revolution that is in this word refers back to the Glorious Revolution. So very simply, revolution principles are the principles that people believe are enshrined in the Glorious Revolution and in some of the documents like the Bill of Rights that are produced at that time. Adams then picks up on this phrase in 1775 when he's starting to write about what's going on in the, in the colonies. And of course, remember, Adams is in Massachusetts, which at this point really is the epicenter of the struggle between the, the American colonies and, and Britain. And he starts to invoke the revolution principles to justify some of the actions of the, the Massachusetts colony, especially after the King suspends their colonial government and so other parliamentary or assembly that starts to meet illegally, really, in Massachusetts, illegally, from, you know, the British perspective. And he's saying, really by invoking these revolution principles, hey, we're no different than all of our ancestors. Because of course, Adams sees himself as, you know, as a British citizen, we're no different than our ancestors were in 1688, 89. We are just, we are the ones who are staying true to these principles that were enshrined in the Glorious Revolution. Whereas you, Parliament, and soon King George iii, you're the ones who are violating these principles. And what's kind of interesting about that is that that's a super British thing to do. I mean, meaning that all throughout the 18th century, sort of the disgruntled Whigs and Tories who were constantly complaining about.
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Government and complaining about corruption in government, this is what they would always say. So even Wilkes would make, John Wilkes would make exactly the same criticism of the Parliament when they refused to seat him. So it's really part of English political thought, English political discourse. And it's kind of interesting that Adams is the only one that I've been able to find of sort of the leading and early American revolutionaries who's actually talking about a revolution. None of the others are calling this a revolution. But he's only doing it because he thinks that there's this really important parallel to be drawn with the Glorious Revolution that gives a lot of the American colonists legitimacy.
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Moteza Hajizadeh
Let's move to the Enlightenment period and how the Enlightenment notions of progress and transformation impacted the idea of revolution from beings as a threat or a calamity to being a moral imperative.
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Professor Dan Edelstein
So I found it really fascinating the way in which this modern idea of progress emerges in the Enlightenment, because it comes out of a fairly trivial quarrel called the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns. It's known in England as the Battle of the Books by one of Swift's titles. And really, this is a moment where it's literally an academic quarrel in the sense that it's taking place in the French Academies, both the Academy of Sciences and the French Academy, which is the literature center and language. And it boils down to this kind of silly question, which is, is Racine greater than Sophocles? Do we have an equivalent to Homer Austin, we being the moderns, of who was better at.
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Rhetoric, who was better in science? And I say it's kind of silly because everyone kind of recognizes that, in fact, the moderns have made a lot of progress in science.
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It's kind of hard to say who's better between Racine and Sophocles. And so some of these debates feel very. Just kind of untruthful. But what this literary quarrel does is that it forces people to start to really have to make some historical claims and to think about the role of history itself in the development of culture and knowledge. And so one of the things that happens in the kind of. In the aftermath of the Corel is that you get these French scholars who are trying to come up with a more theoretical justification for, you know, well, why is modern science improving on the ancients and what they knew? And they end up pointing to something fairly obvious to us, but that, you know, has a pretty, you know, considerable impact, which is that just with the mere passage of time and the accumulation of accidents and discoveries, we are going to acquire more and more knowledge and understanding about the world. And so by virtue of coming after the classics or the ancients, the moderns just have this built in Advantage. We've been around for longer. More people have had the chance to stumble upon new ideas or to test old ones. And this then gets turned into kind of a meta level theory of historical progress by a number of French thinkers. One of the most prominent is not particularly well known, the Abbe de Saint Pierre.
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Who really just describes it as I did that by virtue of time and the accumulation of discovery, we are making progress. And he then projects this into the future. We've made a fair amount of progress over the ancients, and in the next thousand years we're going to make even more progress. And so progress starts to look like this inevitable law of history.
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That maybe occasionally it's disrupted by a barbarian invasion, but overall it just continues its march forward and forward. Now, at first, a lot of the French philosoph, the early Enlightenment figures like Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, they think this is absurd. They're actually much more classical in their own outlook. They identify with classical figures and they don't think that the moderns have really improved much at all. They still see themselves kind of as the students of the ancients. But as the 18th century progresses, you can really start to see a shift in thinking. And I focus in the book a lot on Voltaire, both because he's so prominent, but also because he lived so long and he wrote so much. He's a great person to use if you kind of want to track the evolution of ideas. And so Voltaire starts out very much in this classicist view that, you know, history has no purpose. It's revolution is just a story of destruction and of devastation. But then by the 1860s, he's really changed his tune and he's starting to see the Enlightenment as this sort of cultural revolution that's bringing about reason and knowledge not only among the people, but among the rulers of Europe.
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This is a very obviously self glorifying story because he of course has a starring role in this Enlightenment narrative. But then he starts to project it into the future as well. And in his correspondence he's telling his friends nothing can prevent this incredible revolution from coming in a few years. And it is starting to take on kind of millenarian tropes. Although I argue in the book that I don't think the origins of this modern theory of historical progress are in a literal sense millenarian in that meaning. I don't think they come from sort of a secularized version of Christian apocalypticism. But as I said, I think it has this different genealogy that comes really from this historical quarrel that Being said, this is really why when the revolution does break out in 1789, the French are prepared and are thinking about revolution in a way that is completely different than the Americans were, you know, just 10 or 15 years earlier. The French are greeting this revolution as really the dawn of a new age, and as the beginning of this amazing new society that is going to be more reasonable, is going to be more just, and in a way, all their problems are just going to disappear.
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Moteza Hajizadeh
I'm most interested in modern times. You know, especially in the past, let's say 20, 25 years in the Middle east, there have been lots of revolutions that didn't really live up, let's say, to the promises or ideals they had.
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And maybe the revolutions were successful, but they resorted to some kind of, again, authoritative regimes. Again, I'm interested to know in your analysis of revolutions, what structural changes in modern revolutions make them more or less vulnerable to authoritarian outcomes, despite all those democratic ideals that the revolutionary forces have.
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Professor Dan Edelstein
So I think the big problem with modern revolutions is this belief that there is a law of history that is simply going to lead more and more people to be rational, to be just. Now, the problem with that is less that maybe you can work on education to improve levels of understanding. I mean, I think that's not irrational. But the part that does become problematic, and I think empirically is not true, is this belief that as we all become more rational and we work towards a more just society, we're all going to agree on what the proper course of action is for the state. That's the piece of the modern belief in progress that I actually think is the most pernicious one, because it creates this illusion of unanimity, this illusion of consensus, which when it's broken by reality or just by the fact that turns out people don't all agree on what the right course of action is. It can lead to a real sense of betrayal. And it leads people then to look for reasons why we are not all in agreement about the next steps for the revolution or for the state. So on the one hand, it leads people to start to develop a lot of suspicions about the people who disagree with them. It's not just that we disagree about this, it's that, no, no, I have the truth. Therefore you must be intentionally misleading people, and therefore you have a sinister role that you're playing. And probably the best way to deal with you is to cut your head off. So that's one way in which it can fuel the kind of violence that does tend to accompany modern revolutions. And I do want to emphasize that I'm not saying that, you know, classical revolutions are less violent per se. You know, Thucydides himself is the one who, you know, put the fear of God into Adams and many people before him, that revolutions are horribly violent. But I think what's distinctive about modern revolutions is that the violence is often turned against other revolutionaries. So it's not just that it's a conflagration of violence between, you know, those who are defending the revolution and those who are opposed to it. But, you know, the revolutionary, to paraphrase Hobbes, like a wolf devours other revolutionaries. And that I think is not something that you really see in these classical examples of revolution, at least not nearly as much. So that's one reason why we see these modern revolutions kind of going off course. The other is that if you're in a situation where you believe that there really should just be one proper way forward, one way, one rational way to make society more just. It's a very anti pluralist vision, this sort of modern progressive idea. There's a great line in a Dostoevsky novel, the Possessed, which is a kind of satire of the modern revolutionary, where the ideologue of this little revolutionary group says, you know, there can only be one solution to the social problem and it is mine. And I think Dostoevsky nailed it right there. That's really sort of the logic of the modern revolutions. There can only be one solution. But people disagree. So what do you do? Well, you often end up saying, well, it's the person who clearly has the best understanding, is most tapped into.
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The true nature of revolution, the least corrupt. That person should be the one who makes our decisions. And that's why I argue that these modern revolutions crave a leviathan, a red leviathan, a kind of a Hobbesian like figure who makes the decisions because somebody has to make the decisions and because there's an expectation that is not met that everyone is going to naturally converge on the same ideas. When that doesn't happen, there's this desire to find somebody who's just going to tell us what to do.
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Moteza Hajizadeh
Sorry, just on that. Yes. Yeah, I was still on mute just in that. I have another question that is something I've been thinking about for some time. You know that we have the rise of right wing populace more or less everywhere in the world, most countries in the world, and by that I mean most liberal democracies, United States, countries in Europe.
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And we know what's happening in the United States right now. But do you think that it's conceivable to think of a revolution in countries like the United States or it's still because of the.
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Democratic institutions that have been in place for some time. Their revolution is completely unthinkable. There might be some drastic changes, but not really a revolution. Do you think even a country like the United States is vulnerable or prone to revolution?
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Professor Dan Edelstein
I think that every country is prone to revolution and I think that it's wishful thinking to imagine that some countries are revolution proof. I think that it's not right now a huge likelihood, I would say, in the United States, but I would also say it's probably more likely than it has been in really ever since the Civil War. And I think this is where going back to the classical distinction between, the classical distinction between stasis.
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And metabolae is quite helpful because.
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I think that what's hard to imagine today in the United States is a revolution on the model of 1789 or 1917 for that matter, or even like on the model of the Arab Spring. You know, I don't think that crowds of people on, you know, the, you know, Lincoln Memorial or around the Washington Memorial are going to bring down the government. That seems very unlikely. I don't actually think that crowds in any city are going to do that. So sort of a stasis driven revolution today and in a large and also kind of decenter a country like the United States seems pretty unlikely. However, metabole the regime change can happen without people demonstrating in the streets. And I think what's most worrisome today and where there is the higher likelihood of a potential revolution, and again, I'm not too nervous about this, but I think I'm certainly more nervous than I would have been, you know, in my lifetime, is that you can bring about regime change sort of from within.
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Marshall Po
An.
- [40:47]
Professor Dan Edelstein
Auto gulpe, as was sometimes referred to in sort of Latin American countries. And I think what we've seen is that the, you know, Even the, the U.S. government and the U.S. constitution are really not as resistant as a lot of people believe they would be. I think that what we're seeing, especially in the legislative branch is a remarkable degree of complacency and willingness to simply follow the orders of the executive. So the idea that the legislative would serve as a check on the executive right now is certainly not feeling like that's really happening so far. I do think that the judiciary has been living up to its constitutional role, but it's not unimaginable that that could change. So I don't think any country is resistant to revolution, or at least to attempts to revolutionize. I don't really think that we're on the verge of one right now. But you know, there but by the grace of God, you know, it could, it could easily. I think we are in a kind of dangerous moment where somebody who was more hell bent on transforming the state instead of just making a lot of money while in office could do a lot more damage.
- [42:21]
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- [42:51]
Professor Dan Edelstein
This is a real good story about.
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Professor Dan Edelstein
We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Captain Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat. I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.
- [43:09]
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- [43:11]
Professor Dan Edelstein
These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever. That's how good leads the way. Hablas espanol spries to Deutsch.
- [43:23]
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- [43:53]
Moteza Hajizadeh
I think at the beginning of the interview you mentioned that your chapter on Marx was one of the first things you wrote in this book.
- [44:02]
I'm keen to know about the socialist and Marxist theories of revolution and how they redefined the purpose and permanence of revolutions. I know I'm kind of jumping back and forth between different parts of the books, but I'm kind of asking questions about sections that interest Me more.
- [44:18]
Professor Dan Edelstein
I think it's a. No, it's a great question, and it's quite fascinating.
- [44:24]
It's interesting. I don't think that there's as much work on Marx as a political thinker as there is on Marx, obviously, as an economic thinker. And I think that, you know, in many respects, I guess I would say that I don't think Marx is as original as a political thinker either. He has a real knack. He has a knack for sort of simplifying and schematizing situations. So, you know, famously dividing all society between bourgeois and proletarians. You know, that's kind of a catchy way of doing it. Although, in fact, Blanqui had kind of done it before him. But when it comes to revolution, what Marx is picking up on is really a problem that was there ever since the Jacobins, which is that if you want, through a revolution, to transform society, then you are faced with this conundrum, on the one hand, your.
- [45:28]
Rational vision of the future, and I put it in scare quotes because I think that's part of the problem, is that it's believed to be the only possible solution and that the only rational solution is the one that the revolutionary ideologues have. You've got this idea of where society should go, but your only means of getting there is through democratic processes. And the Jacobins decide, you know, in 1793, in August 1793, after they've written this new constitution, that actually they don't want to hold elections, because if they hold elections, they lose power, or they could lose power. And then their vision of where they want, you know, France to be is in jeopardy. And so it creates this real tension that you see throughout sort of the early 19th century with. With the conspiracy of equals of Gracchus Babeuf and then later, other socialist thinkers, where there's this almost this problem of how do you bridge that time between the present moment and this idealized future where everything's going to be great, but how do we get there? And this is where many of these socialist revolutionaries end up in what I sort of jokingly think of as an Augustinian position, where they're sort of saying, give me democracy, but not yet. They want, of course, the future to be democratic, but the way to get there has to end up being kind of dictatorial. And so Marx is not the first to talk about the dictatorship of the proletariat or permanent revolution. That actually has a slightly different genealogy, which goes back to the French Revolution. But there's this sort of what I call a retrospective or a prospective retrospective justification. Like you look ahead to the future, to this perfect society you've created. And then retrospectively, that's going to justify the fact that you had to use a dictator to get there. And that's pretty common, actually, among many of the socialist revolutionaries of that age, where you're going to need to have this temporary interruption, a dictatorship. I mean, Marx is not mincing his words when he uses that term before you could then eventually get to a true democracy.
- [47:55]
Moteza Hajizadeh
That's right. And that this famous dictatorship of the proletariat you're referring to.
- [48:03]
Professor Dan Edelstein
Yeah, that comes. And it's interesting because it's not in the Communist Manifesto. That's in when he's writing about the Revolution of 1848 in France and after the June days of 1848, when the workers are crushed by the National Guard of this sort of more new, conservative, democratically elected assembly that has come into power after the revolution. And that really changes how Marx thinks about how you can bring about a socialist revolution. That's when you start to see these, you know, through the arguments about revolution impermanence, which really. He means sort of a mobilization.
- [48:47]
Of the workers. That's what permanence meant in the French Revolution. Like, we're going to stay armed, we're going to stay on duty, on call. We're not going to let our guard down. That's actually what he means by en permanence. It's actually not like permanent in the sense of continuously ongoing.
- [49:09]
Moteza Hajizadeh
And just a couple of more questions, which is more or less. I'm trying to bring it all to an end.
- [49:16]
Given the historical scope that you have analyzed in this book, what lessons do you think 20th century revolutions offer? The 20th century was the century of revolutions. I'm originally from Iran myself. I was born a couple of years after Iran's revolution.
- [49:34]
And, you know, we had again, all these ideas which really didn't work out. And we see the same pattern more or less in most Middle Eastern countries, maybe not so much in Europe during Cold War, but anyhow. But I'm keen to know what lessons do 20th century revolutions offer for understanding the fragility of pluralism and also transformative politics.
- [49:57]
Professor Dan Edelstein
So the 20th century really witnesses the first truly modern revolutions. I mean, maybe leaving the French Revolution aside, but the sort of the strong, hard version of a progressive revolution that's successful. You could say that the first example of that is 1917. It's the Bolshevik Revolution. And then.
- [50:26]
By 1985, maybe with the revolution in the Philippines, you really start to see the deflation of that model. And even the Iranian revolution, I would say, is starting to show some signs of this in the fact that there actually is a constitutional referendum that happened in Iran. Now. It's kind of unfortunate because it all happened so fast that my understanding of this is that most people did not really realize that the clerics had carved out such a powerful role for themselves. And so it was a bit of, of a Trojan horse in that respect. But there was already this sense that, you know, when you seize power, it's not enough. You actually have to justify your hold on power by appealing back to the people and, you know, just, you know, like the Cuban revolution just, you know, like two decades earlier, they didn't do that. You know, Castro comes to power, he's claiming actually that he's going to bring back the, the Constitution of 1940. And he just says, you know what, we changed our mind. And people, you know, people go along with it. They didn't really have much choice, but, but that's, that's still a possibility.
- [51:41]
I think therefore, that the, the high water mark of the hard modern progressive revolution has definitely passed. And we've sort of gone back now to what in the 19th century would have been called the liberal model of revolution, where you overthrow a authoritarian government, you might have a provisional government in place for a while, then you write a new constitution, you might have a new Bill of Rights, and then you have a parliamentary democracy now. And you could say that's what we've seen over and over in the late 20th and early 21st century. 21st centuries. That's also the Arab Spring model. Now interestingly though, that hasn't turned out so well either.
- [52:34]
I had started with the Philippines, and it's kind of ironic that today the president of the Philippines is the son of the general who was thrown out by the 1985 revolution. Neo Marcos. There's a way in which it feels a little bit like we've gone back to these cycles or these anacyklosis, as Polybius would say. Egypt is another example of you go from one strong man through a aborted attempt at democracy which looked like it might lead in fact not to what the original revolutionaries wanted to, but towards a more Iranian style religious government. And now we have another other strong man. So it's not like the older model is delivering in ways that, you know, the hard progressive model wasn't either. And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that, as I say in the conclusion to the book. You know, I think all of us are kind of modern, but we're trapped in these political models that were developed by ancients. You know, the liberal constitutional model is still very much one that derives from the theories of a well balanced constitution, checks and balances rights. It's really all about how can you slow things down, prevent the tyranny of the majority and try to work or encourage people to work towards compromise and consensus building. But often it just turns out that it leads instead to gridlock. There's no desire to try and compromise. And so these forms of government really are pretty poor in delivering any kind of results for people. So I think we're in this really tricky place where there's a sense that the old models don't really work anymore, but all the new models we've tried have been terrible and even more destructive. And so I don't really know where that leaves us. Obviously it's very hard to generalize sort of at a global level. But as you pointed out, there are some interesting similarities that are happening all over the world in Turkey, India.
- [55:01]
And of course the United States as well. So it's not like this is only limited to a particular.
- [55:08]
Cultural or historical trajectory.
- [55:14]
Moteza Hajizadeh
And the final question.
- [55:17]
Again, as we have I guess alluded to, the idea of revolution is still around. There is a lot of there's this backsliding of democratic backsliding, there's this rise of populist movement. Do you think that the history of revolution suggests that positive systematic change today in 21st century is more likely to be emerge through.
- [55:41]
Let'S say participatory democracy, through constitutional reform, or through disruptive upheaval and changes which could lead to faster changes. But I don't know if we could bring about the ideal result. And what are the risks that accompany each path?
- [55:57]
Professor Dan Edelstein
I think they're all risky and I think that probably the greatest risks come from the last version, because as soon as you put everything on the table and as soon as you're.
- [56:14]
Willing to just blow up the old system and hope that you're going to get something better in exchange, you really are risking it all because you have no idea where it's going to land. You have no idea which groups in power are going to take advantage of that situation. And there, I think the Egyptian revolution is a great example of this. You know, I don't think the people in Tahrir Square had any sense that they were perhaps facilitating an Islamic takeover of the state. So, you know, there's a real watch what you wish for. Element to this. Now, on the other hand, I have a colleague at Notre Dame, Emma Planick, who just wrote a book called Regenerative Bodies that really kind of argues that if we're going to be true to our liberal commitment to rights, we have to, you know, recognize that people actually have a right to determine their rights and they have a right to revise their government. And, you know, one of the problems that people complain about a lot, especially in this country, but I think it's pretty common elsewhere as well, is this sort of sense that we're trapped in this political system. I mean, it's become almost impossible to amend the Constitution.
- [57:41]
Even in cases that feel to many people to be absurd. And is that really, is that democratic? Is that truly an emancipatory political system that we're living in, if we're stuck with it? So I recognize all those, I think those are really good arguments for making change.
- [58:07]
I think, though, that my own, not that this matters, but my own diagnosis of all this is that I think we've come to expect too much from politics. We've come to want politics to do things for us and for society that I actually just don't think are possible. And by that it's not because I'm arguing from a libertarian perspective at all, but more that I think there's just so many differences of opinion and what should happen. There's such, and I think Madison was kind of onto something when he writes in Federalist 10 that as long as the reason of man continues fallible and he is at liberty to use it, different opinions will be formed where we're just not going to all naturally converge on the same solutions for society. And so if you expect government to really make a lot of changes and you expect the state to be more active, then someone's always going to be pissed off and someone's always going to feel like the state is doing the wrong thing because we don't agree on what the state should do. And so it almost feels that any kind of future looking solution in my mind, has to find a way to also set expectations or reset expectations differently so that we are more looking towards compromises.
- [59:49]
More looking towards finding common ground, and not constantly trying to pull the whole blanket in one direction or the other. Which it kind of feels like we're falling into that trap right now. Like, you know, the Republicans are in power, they're going to do everything they can to completely overhaul the state in one direction. Then the Democrats get back into power, if they are allowed to. But and then maybe they'll just try to completely undo everything that happened and pull the blanket and in the other direction. And that, to me, seems like a really destructive way of trying to keep a republic.
- [60:31]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Dr. Dan Edelstein, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us on New Books Network about your wonderful book. I wish we could talk more about the book. It's such an expensive book that, unfortunately, we don't have much time. But I think we've been able to give our listeners abroad overview of different topics that we cover in the book. The book we just discussed was the Revolution to Come, A History of an Idea From Thucydides to Lenin, published by Princeton University Press. Thank you very much.
- [60:58]
Professor Dan Edelstein
Thanks so much. It was a real pleasure talking with you.