The Centrality of the French Revolution
I fully share the assertion on the centrality of the French Revolution, in company with Marx and Hobsbawm (and quite a few others!), which today has become a minority current in historical thinking, contested by the contemporary postmodernist current that is devoted to devaluing the significance of the French Revolution, mainly to the advantage of the American and English Revolutions.
However, the French Revolution triggers the political trajectory of modern times far more than the others.The primary question, in my view, is the articulation between, on the one hand, the class struggles (in the broad sense of the term, i.e., perceived in all dimensions
1 Samir Amin’s books include The Liberal Virus, The World We Wish to See and most recently The Law of Worldwide Value (all on Monthly Review Press). This article was translated by James Membrez. This text was first published, in: Monthly Review, 63, 8 (Janaury 2012). The copyright for this text is owned by the author.
S. Amin, Samir Amin, SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice 16, 59
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-01116-5_7, © The Author(s) 2014 of their political and ideological expressions) and, on the other hand, the conflict between ‘nations’ (or states), in this case France and England, in the shaping of global history—understood as broadly coinciding with the development of the capitalist world economy. To simplify, the first dimension, the class struggle, could be described as an internal (to each of the two nations) factor, and the second dimension, the inter-state relation, could be described as an external factor. Wallerstein considers the second dimension to be determinant. The French Revolution, he says, is not a French event, but the product of the unfolding conflict between France and England for hegemony in the capitalist world economy. While he bends the stick too far in this direction, in my opinion, Wallerstein does have the merit, consequently, of giving full credit to the French Revolution for its role in building the modern world system.
I shall return later to the central articulation between class struggles and the making of globalized capitalism that, I believe, governs the evolution of the radical critique of capitalism, as much in the long-nineteenth century (the actual subject of this volume) as in the twentieth and undoubtedly the twenty-first century (on which Wallerstein expects to focus in his forthcoming volume).
The French Revolution substitutes the sovereignty of the people for that of the monarch, the very birth of modern politics and of democracy, which becomes con- substantial with it. Certainly, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States had already made the declaration of principle (“We, the people”).
Yet, the conclusions were not drawn from this principle. Quite the contrary, the efforts of the Founding Fathers were focused on the objective of neutralizing the impact of this declaration. The events that the French Revolution went through (its Jacobin radicalization followed by its reversal), on the other hand, are ordered around these central issues: how to understand and define the sovereignty of the people and how to institutionalize its implementation. The English Revolution of 1687 was even more clearly unconcerned with responding to these issues, which it did not even consider, being content with limiting the powers of the sovereign through the concrete assertion of the powers of the rising bourgeoisie, without thereby repudiating those of the aristocracy.Hence, I make a distinction between ‘great revolutions’, which project themselves far into the future, and ‘ordinary revolutions’, which are content to adjust the organization of power to the immediate requirements of evolving social relations. The French Revolution belongs to the first group, just like the later Russian and Chinese revolutions.
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