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THE
FRENCH REVOLUTION AND THE BIRTH OF MODERNITY
Volume 56 No. 1 (Spring 1989) Arien Mack, Editor Ferenc Feher, Guest Editor |
Table of Contents Notes on Contributors Ordering information
When the editors made the decision to publish a special issue to celebrate the bicentennial of the French Revolution, they did not have in mind either a collection of laudatory speeches of an array of specialized academic research. Rather, they intended to address the living spirit of the Great Revolution, this watershed event whose legitimate heirs we all are, regardless of our social and political views and respective citizenships. The latter term has special emphasis. For the editors were convinced that the French Revolution cannot be construed as an exclusive national property. It belongs to all men and women of modernity.
The universalist claim that the French Revolution as our common heritage gained special significance against the backdrop of the fairly cacophonic domestic celebration of the bicentennial year in France. Although the philosophical, sociological, and political appraisal of the dumbfounding reaction of at least a considerable part of French public opinion to France's epochal contribution to the birth of modernity needs special treatment, the editors obliquely commented on it by the very gesture of publishing this special issue. The message of the gesture can be briefly summed up. Even if the country whose cultural and political significance remains perpetually connected with the revolutionary drama turns a cold eye to its own "great narrative," no doubt merely temporarily, the French Revolution will nevertheless remain the eternal master of modernity in political theory and practice.
The ambiguous character of our celebration has attracted contributors from inside and outside of the New School for Social Research, some of whom gained their reputations as academic scholars and public theorists precisely through their works on the French Revolution or other revolutions. However, each and every contributor without exception addressed the topicality of the revolutionary tradition.
This common trend, which has provided strong internal cohesion in this special issue despite the diversity of scholarly interest, did not imply partisanship, not to mention censorship, in the process of selection. On the contrary, it was the editors' preliminary determination and consistently applied policy that every conceivable position making a relevant comment on the living heritage of the French Revolution, provided it is presented with competence, has a legitimate place in the discussions of the bicentennial.
The Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research has its own traditions in the continuous reappraisal of the French Revolution, a tradition not only independent from the French research but one which represented a serious challenge to it. We have in mind one of the most celebrated intellectual masters of the Graduate Faculty, Hannah Arendt, and her famous and controversial book, On Revolution. Despite the explicit and implicit disagreements of several contributors with Arendt's well-known interpretation, the special issue well serves the editors' intention to continue the Arendtian tradition of the dialogue with the French Revolution.
Ferenc Feher
Guest Editor
Table of Contents
Notes on Contributors
(at time of publication)
Miguel Abensour is professor of political science at the University of Paris and author of La philosophie politique de Saint-Just.
Ferenc Feher senior lecturer in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, wrote The Frozen Revolution (1988).
Patrice Higonnet is professor of history at Harvard University and the author, most recently, of Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism (1988).
E. J. Hobsbawm is emeritus professor of history at Birkbeck College, London University. His most recent book is The Age of Empire, 1875-1914 (1989).
Gary Kates is associate professor of history at Trinity University and author of The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution (1985).
Harvey Mitchell is professor of history at the University of British Columbia.
Brian C. J. Singer is assistant professor of sociology at York University in Toronto and author of Society, Theory and the French Revolution (1986).
Theda Skocpol is professor of sociology at Harvard University and author of States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (1979).
Steven B. Smith is associate professor of political science at Yale University. His most recent book is Hegel's Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context (1989).
Charles Tilly is distinguished professor of sociology and history and director of the Center for Studies of Social Change at the New School for Social Research. His most recent book is Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (1985).
Immanuel Wallerstien is distinguished professor of sociology and director of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economics, Historical Systems, and Civilizations at the State University of New York at Binghampton. He is the author of The Modern World-System 3 vols. (1974-88).
