Marc Allen Goldstein Books

The French Revolution was the culmination of the preceding three centuries and the inspiration or, alternatively, the whipping boy of the two centuries that followed. This is understandable enough, for it was the crucible wherein was forged the ideologies that continue to define political discourse - liberalism, conservatism, democracy, communism, anarchism, nationalism, and terrorism all enter the political arena with the Revolution. This anthology brings together the texts that cover the spectrum of French revolutionary social and political thought. The writings presented range from debates over the rights of man through proposals to equalize the distribution of property in society, to efforts to justify privilege and the corporate state.

Using the idea of the people as a point of focus and as a scalpel to dissect the thought of the counter-revolutionaries, this study in intellectual history moves from an analysis of their formal political theory with its rejection of popular sovereignty through their treatment of legitimate and illegitimate forms of representative government to their perceptions of political economy. While the effort throughout is to understand counter-revolutionary thought in its own terms, the book does more than recreate their picture of their world. It demonstrates the bases upon which their thought rests and the problems their thought encountered when confronted with the challenge posed by the changing relations of class and wealth that they saw leading to the Revolution.