‘The Revolution to Come’ and ‘Revolutions: A New History’ review

Much of the world’s population lives under revolutionary regimes. Cambodia, China, France, Greece, Haiti, Iran, Ireland, Mexico, Nicaragua, the United States, even the United Kingdom, that distant descendant of the Glorious Revolution: all entered their modern histories with a revolution. And that’s not even to speak of decolonisation in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, the post-Soviet sphere after 1991, or the ambiguous aftershocks of the Arab Spring in 2011. Most countries have put their revolution behind them. Others simply cannot stop rehashing it, the US most conspicuously (and not just thanks to the semiquincentennial in 2026). All helped to make revolution a hallmark of what it means to be modern.

For much of the 20th century, revolution’s role in midwifing modernity rendered it a compelling subject for historians, sociologists, and students of politics. Some of social science’s greatest hits treated revolution comparatively, from Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution (1938) via Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) to Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions (1979). But then the field fell strangely quiet. So-called and often self-styled ‘revisionists’ shrank individual revolutions to merely national or local events. Grand causal accounts gave way to histories of accident and contingent conjunctures. And the growing awareness of revolution’s human toll – the Terror and the Great Leap Forward; Stalin and Mao’s famines; the camps and the killing fields – cast a dark shadow over the promises of revolution. As a result, big thinkers moved on to other topics. The great days of revolution – that most future-oriented of collective human projects – seemed to be firmly in the past.

And yet, if Dan Edelstein’s The Revolution to Come and Donald Sassoon’s Revolutions: A New History are anything to go by, revolution is back, and in a major way, spanning two millennia in Edelstein’s case but a mere four centuries or so for Sassoon. Sassoon writes in the great tradition of Brinton and Skocpol, lining up a rollcall of revolutions – English, French, 19th-century European, Russian, Chinese – for comparative inspection. Edelstein, meanwhile, masterfully combines the intellectual history of revolution with the experience of revolution all the way from the Peloponnesian War to our populist present. Sassoon points back to the heyday of revolutionary studies; Edelstein shows the way forward.

A conceptual revolution lies at the heart of The Revolution to Come. Edelstein convincingly demonstrates that revolution was defined by its critics until the early 18th century. From ancient Athens to the Enlightenment, revolution was unstintingly described as disastrous, unnatural, and to be avoided at all costs. To the Greeks, it was stasis; to the Romans, novae res: to both, and to their successors down to the Renaissance and beyond, it marked the worst of all political fates. The modern idea of revolution as liberatory and forward-looking, something to be actively pursued rather than to be fiercely opposed, only emerged, Edelstein argues, when its promoters yoked a positive conception of fundamental transformation to a progressive idea of the future. Marx expressed this notion memorably in ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’: ‘The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past but only from the future.’ By the time he wrote, in 1852, Marx was heir to a century of affirmative constructions of revolution. According to Edelstein, the break had happened in the 1750s, when the golden age of the past began to give way to an alluring vision of the future.

The presiding genius of the pre-revolutionary world was Polybius (c.200-c.120 BC). This Greek-speaking historian of Rome portrayed the anti-revolutionary ancien régime that modern conceptions of revolution would overthrow. Polybius famously described a historical cycle, or anacyclosis, that turned remorselessly from corruption to renewal and back again through a succession of constitutional forms. He proposed distributing power across multiple institutions as the cure for this dizzying churn. For centuries his followers refined that remedy into the familiar modern system of ‘checks and balances’. In this sense, Edelstein argues, the American Revolution, and especially its constitutional settlement, was ‘the last Polybian revolution’. Its consequences are still very much with us, even as America’s Polybian structure is now subject to unusual strain.

The first signs of a new revolutionary dispensation emerged alongside the preservative Polybian tradition. Classical Latin had not known the word revolutio: it was left to Augustine to coin it in late Antiquity. The capricious motions of Fortune’s wheel became not simply turnings but encompassed the overturnings, of princes. Revolution thereby acquired, at least potentially, a political meaning, though not yet one associated with the wilful overthrow of a regime. That became thinkable when humanists recovered the crucial sixth book of Polybius’ Histories where he laid out his account of anacyclosis in greatest detail. By the early 16th century, vernacular translations of Polybius Book VI could speak of rivoluzione, révolutions, and revolutions in states and commonwealths. (The Germans came late to this party in the 18th century.) Yet the idea of revolution still needed one more twist before this revolution in ideas could become a revolution in the streets in 1789.

That breakthrough came in the mid-18th century, when revolution became positively associated with cultural improvement. ‘C’est la faute à Voltaire’ (‘It’s Voltaire’s fault’) ran a satirical song of the 1810s, and Edelstein shows that it was, indeed, Voltaire who was responsible for that decisive conceptual shift. The stage was set for the French Revolution to cement that progressive vision of revolution into a ‘new attitude towards the future’, as wide open, full of possibility, and ready to be shaped by human action. By 1789 ‘all the threads of modern revolution [were] woven together here for the first time’, including a reliance on reason, resulting in a lack of tolerance for pluralism. History in the future perfect can only have one, rational destination with a seemingly unavoidable orientation towards violence, encapsulated forever in the warning words of the Girondin Pierre-Victurnien Vergniaud in 1793: ‘The Revolution, like Saturn, successively devours all its children.’ Revolutions opened the way not to sunlit uplands but instead to the Terror and the rule of what Edelstein calls ‘the Red Leviathan’.

The Revolution to Come brilliantly reveals the genealogy of the modern concept of revolution. After it, the study of revolution will never look the same again and no historian of revolution will be able to overlook the force of ideas in understanding the phenomenon. Sassoon’s ‘new history’ immediately seems old-fashioned by comparison. It may seem unfair to judge Revolutions in light of a book its author could not have read, but Edelstein trailed the thesis of The Revolution to Come in previous publications that would have helped. Revolutions deliberately fails to offer a definition of revolution, with the result that its selection of case studies feels at once random and familiar. The French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions are inescapable comparisons; the English Civil Wars (as Sassoon calls them, overlooking a generation of scholarship on the Wars of the Three Kingdoms) and the American Revolution perhaps less so, especially because Sassoon cannot decide whether the American Revolution was revolutionary or not. His narrative accounts of the causes, course, and long afterlives of his various revolutions are rambling and may try some readers’ patience: certainly, he has no scholarly breakthrough on the scale of Edelstein’s to offer. And his choice of cases raises more questions than it answers: why the national(ist) ‘revolutions’ of 19th-century Europe – most of which were hardly revolutionary by the modern yardstick – but not the anti-imperial revolutions in Spanish America? Where are the Haitian, Cuban, or Iranian revolutions? And what about that global revolution we call decolonisation? Sassoon peppers his accounts with well-chosen quotations and enticing anecdotes but his lack of an argument, or even any clear principle of inclusion, makes Revolutions a disappointing grab-bag, with little that would be new for most historians but likely too much unmotivated detail for more general readers.

Both books prompt the question: whither revolution? Sassoon’s conclusions about our present discontents may not inspire confidence in his predictions about the future, as when he judges that the US president is ‘weaker than the British prime minister’ or notes that the rise of the Right across the Western world has not yet ‘seriously threatened’ the ‘vainglorious claims of American liberalism’. More convincingly, Edelstein suspects that the coming revolution might arrive quietly, through democratic backsliding, the corrosion of institutions, the gradual acceptance that freedom of speech and association may need to be contained and even suspended.

The revolutions of the past – at least those after 1789 – followed a script in which a brighter future was the prize for overturning history and breaking a few heads (or even cutting them off): ‘A revolution is not a dinner party’, Mao warned. That was the ‘progressive’ version of revolution played out in Russia, China, and a host of imitative revolutions across the world. But what if the seeming counter-revolutionaries are the new revolutionaries? Will revolution in future come from above and from the Right rather than – at least in theory – from below and from the Left, as history may have led us to expect? Only time will tell if we are entering a new age of revolutions of this novel and unheralded kind. Until we find out, The Revolution to Come stands as the most enlightening guide to the past, present, and even future of revolution.

• The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin
  Dan Edelstein
  Princeton University Press, 432pp, £30
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

• Revolutions: A New History
  Donald Sassoon
  Verso, 432pp, £35
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University. His most recent book is Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Yale University Press, 2017).