Lynn Hunt on the French Revolution
You make a revolution because you don’t have the institutions that support a democratic political life. You do it in order to get a democratic political life, but you don’t have the infrastructure in place to make that possible. So the question becomes how do you get from the desire to the reality of democratic political life? What Tocqueville loves about the United States is that they have this infrastructure already, because of the forms of local representative government that had already developed before they broke from Great Britain.
.. He basically says that countries develop a style of governing and that it’s extremely difficult to get away from that style of governing.
.. He wanted to argue that the problem with communism was that it was a false and contradictory ideology, and that you can’t change the world through ideology. You have to change the world through concrete political programmes.
.. It reveals that if you try to push for democracy without having an adequate institutional basis for it, you will end up with terror, violence, and the suppression of dissent. In short, you will end up with totalitarianism. So he’s taking the Tocqueville argument even further: Democracy can lead not just to despotism, but to totalitarianism.
.. One fact he mentions that surprised me, given the number of people he sent to their death, is that Robespierre started out as an opponent of capital punishment.
.. What the revolution showed is that it would, in future, be impossible to ignore the vast mass of the people. There will be many solutions to that problem. Some of those solutions won’t be so great. One could argue that fascism and communism are both different answers to, “What do you do about incorporating the mass of the people into the polity?” But representative forms of government will also be one very important example.