Political thinkers from Plato to John Adams saw revolutions as a grave threat to society and advocated for a constitution that prevented them by balancing social interests and forms of government. Stanford Professor, Dan Edelstein is one of the world’s leading scholars on the intersection between culture, politics and philosophy. He has spent years studying the history of the enlightenment, and the role of revolutions in shaping society. In his latest book, The Revolution to Come he traces how evolving conceptions of history ushered in a faith in the power of revolution to create more just and reasonable societies.
Taking readers from Greek antiquity to Leninist Russia, Edelstein describes how classical philosophers viewed history as chaotic and directionless, and sought to keep historical change—especially revolutions—at bay. This conception prevailed until the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment thinkers conceived of history as a form of progress and of revolution as its catalyst. These ideas were put to the test during the French Revolution and came to define revolutions well into the twentieth century. Edelstein demonstrates how the coming of the revolution leaves societies divided over its goals, giving rise to new forms of violence in which rivals are targeted as counterrevolutionaries.
Q: What is (and isn’t) a revolution?
[Dan Edelstein]: I always like to preface answers to this kind of question by saying I don’t want to become the revolution police—saying ‘this counts, this doesn’t.’ What’s confusing is that there are a lot of things that certainly look like revolutions, sound like revolutions, and probably it’s a bit of a fool’s errand to try to draw a red line where, on one side, things are revolutions and on the other, they’re not. If you go back through the long intellectual history of revolution, it’s actually quite interesting how, in Greek, there are two different terms that we’ve since conflated into one. There’s stasis, which refers to the violence—the outward-facing Sturm und Drang of revolution. But then there’s metabole, which is more like what we might define as regime change. I think some of the confusion today comes from seeing things that have a revolutionary shape but don’t necessarily lead to regime change—so we’re left asking, well, what do we call this? On the other hand, there are also cases where a regime does change, but without the violence in the streets that makes it feel, to us, like a revolution.
Q: Why should we study revolutions to understand the present?
[Dan Edelstein]: I think it was recognising that revolution was, in a way, the original problem of political thought. And it came from taking a class—actually, I audited a class by my colleague Josiah Ober at Stanford on the origins of Greek political thinking. I’m not trained as a classicist—I was trained as a literature professor and then moved into international history, but more focused on the modern period. And it was sort of coming back to classics—or arriving at classics—from this early modern/modern perspective, and realising that the problem of revolution has been at the heart of so much Western political thinking. And also seeing the way it shaped things I hadn’t really thought of as part of the revolution in question—namely constitutionalism. But in fact, constitutionalism is a Greek answer to the problem of revolution. You want to avoid revolution? Then you need to design a constitution in a certain way—so that it’s balanced and less likely to be overturned by revolution. So it was this recognition of just how central that problem was. And also, the period I happened to work on—the French Revolution, which is what I wrote my first book on—is this incredible hinge in the story of Western political thought. And I think that’s something I’d always sort of felt. For a long time, it was just taken for granted that the French Revolution was the starting point of political modernity. But it was almost as if we’d forgotten why—or all the older answers, whether Marxist or liberal, no longer really seemed to make sense anymore. So I wanted to see if I could come up with a more compelling argument for why the French Revolution really is this hinge.
Q: Why does the direction of history matter to our understanding of change?
[Dan Edelstein]: I think what’s hard for us to appreciate today is that, for thousands of years of human history—let alone pre-history—there was never this sense, so common to us now, of a future likely to be radically different from the present. Even if we don’t buy into what I’d call the strong versions of human progress—where there’s going to be some perfect end of history and everyone will like strawberries and cream—even if most of us recognise that’s kind of naïve, we still sort of hold on to a softer version of progress that we do, at least unconsciously, imagine. If you asked a random person what they think the world will be like in 2300, they’re unlikely to say, ‘I think it’ll be kind of like today.’ But that’s a very recent development in human thought that really only dates back, as I argue in the book, to the 18th century. As far as we know—at least as far back as the ancient Greeks, and possibly earlier—we just don’t have written records that suggest otherwise. There was really a sense that humanity had already reached its peak, and so the question wasn’t what comes next that’s better, but rather how to prevent decline and loss. If you had a good state—or even just an okay one—your main concern was to keep it, to stop it from falling apart. Because there wasn’t anything better you could reasonably expect.
Q: How instrumental was the enlightenment in shaping modern political and social narratives?
[Dan Edelstein]: I wrote a book about a decade ago called The Enlightenment: A Genealogy. And in that book, I argued that the Enlightenment is perhaps best understood as a new historical narrative in its own right. It’s this narrative that, in fact, looks back to what we today call the scientific revolution—they would have called it more like the new science or natural philosophy. But they’re looking back to people like Descartes, Galileo, Francis Bacon, ultimately Newton, and saying, wow, we’ve made so much progress, we’ve discovered so many things—Harvey discovering the circulation of blood, for example. So in the 18th century, they’re kind of taking stock of how, in just about 100 years, all this classical learning had been overturned. Because that’s really what happened in the 17th century. People like Bacon—or Hobbes, even—they’re very explicit about going beyond Aristotle and going beyond Galen. And so, looking back on everything that’s happened, they construct this narrative of how human reason has progressed. Then there’s this silly little quarrel that happens in the French academies called The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, which really starts off as a literary debate—like, is Sophocles greater than [some modern author] or vice versa—but it’s kind of a silly quarrel in the sense that the stakes are very small. But actually, it does serve as a catalyst for thinking in these broader historical terms: in what ways might the moderns have advanced over the ancients? And it gets them thinking about just the sheer fact of time—and that if given enough time, things happen. We make discoveries. And then we build on those discoveries. So it’s out of the combination of that quarrel and this awareness of recent advances in the natural sciences that historians actually begin to come up with this idea that human history is ever so slowly progressing in a gradual way.
Q: Are there any precursors or patterns to revolution?
[Dan Edelstein]: I’ve noticed that there’s a whole field of political sociology and political science that has really tackled that question: looking back on revolutions, can we identify patterns? Someone like Jack Goldstone has done a lot of work in this area. I’m a little bit sceptical, because these scholars have ended up identifying so many different factors that it starts to feel a bit like the story of the blind men and the elephant—everyone thinks it’s a snake, no, it’s a tree trunk. And I think there are almost too many answers, which makes it very hard to come up with a single account. It gets even more complicated if you broaden the question beyond political revolutions to include technological or climate revolutions. I’d be very surprised—and very sceptical—if you could find a single model that explains all of those. That said, going back to political revolutions, there are certainly some common conditions or factors that do seem necessary. I think I write in the book: no one’s expecting a revolution in Switzerland. There has to be some major degree of discontent, and probably also a sense that central powers have lost a lot of authority—that’s probably a big part of it. But then again, we see those conditions in various countries, and we still don’t see revolutions.
Q: What are your views on the concentration of power in technology firms?
[Dan Edelstein]: I think the recent brouhaha between Trump and Musk perhaps reminds us that political leviathans still have a lot of power. Even if they don’t have the wealth or the visionary status that technological leviathans can command, they do still hold the power of the state—the power of taxation, the power of the purse. So I wouldn’t write political leviathans off quite so quickly. In my book, the reason I call figures like Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc., red leviathans is that they’re actually serving a role that’s necessary in a modern progressive revolution: they’re the ones who say what is revolutionary and what isn’t. Because it turns out that’s not an easy question to answer. After Lenin’s death, what counted as revolutionary? Was it Trotsky’s view—pushing straight ahead toward full-blown socialism, which sounds revolutionary? Or was it Lenin’s more cautious path: slowing down, letting the economy recover after the civil war? These are policy questions, and there’s no clear right or wrong answer to which is more revolutionary. In the end, you need someone to say, “That’s revolutionary, and that isn’t.” I think there’s a parallel in technology. You see this with AI today—how we look to certain figures and trust them to tell us what the right direction for AI should be. And we can definitely see leviathan-like figures monopolising political parties too, in the way Trump arguably has a hold on the Republican Party today. Whatever he says seems to become Republican doxa, even if it contradicts what GOP policy had been for the last fifty years.
Q: How does technology shape revolution?
[Dan Edelstein]: The moment that really stuck with me was during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Before Mubarak steps down, he turned the internet off for five days. And that was kind of a moment where it was like, wow—actually, in this hyper-technological world we live in, states can control it in ways they couldn’t control printing presses or other forms of written technology as easily. I think there was a moment around 2009 to 2011 when states got caught off guard a little. They didn’t realise social media had the potential it did. There was a lot of excitement in the West around the Iranian elections—I believe it was 2009. People called it the Twitter Revolution, when Ahmadinejad—clearly after some electoral fraud—faced the Green Movement in Iran. Everyone got really excited that Twitter was going to bring down the regime, and of course, it didn’t happen. And then I think it didn’t take very long for authoritarian regimes to get smart and realise they could actually use these tools to stay in power. I’d say the best example of that is China. The Chinese government is incredibly savvy in how it monitors social media use, how it influences discourse by paying trolls to comment in pro-government ways. And I think it’s hard to feel like the rapid increase in technology in China is pushing things in a more democratic direction. If anything, it really feels like the opposite right now.
Q: How does the porousness of national borders impact revolution?
[Dan Edelstein]: You start to see this in the French Revolution, where in 1789 one of the demands is for free movement—the sense that a liberal state should allow people to come and go as they please. But then, within a couple of years, it completely reverses course and it becomes illegal to leave the country without permission. I think what happens in that moment is that if your goal is to have a revolution that ushers your country into the future, it becomes difficult to maintain the permeability of borders. One of the things that happens when states adopt this modern, progressive view of history is they start to see themselves as moving in different directions at different times. The best example of this is the last chapter of The Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels basically score different countries on how modern they are. France, of course, is way ahead; Germany is way down here—Germany’s not even a state yet. And the idea is that everyone’s headed in the same direction, but it’s like a race—some are behind, others are ahead. And if that’s your framework, then you don’t want people from the slower nations coming into yours and messing things up. But vice versa—Marx gets kicked out of France—so it ends up lending itself to a vision of history that closes borders and clamps down on what, in early modern times, was actually a much more mobile world.
Q: Have you examined the role of charismatic leaders in revolution?
[Dan Edelstein]: I think that there are maybe different ways in which charismatic leaders are needed. In the modern progressive revolution, I think the charismatic leader—as I was saying earlier—really plays this important role of determining the course, of plotting the revolution. So Robespierre and later Bonaparte—the role they play, I’d say, is actually kind of different from someone like Cromwell or Washington, in that they’re looked to as people who can predict the future and say, this is where we’re heading, I know how to get there. That’s why Mao’s nickname was The Great Helmsman. There’s this idea that we need somebody to steer us into the future. But if you don’t think there’s some future out there that’s fundamentally different from the present—something we have to discover—then you need a different model of leadership. So Washington and Cromwell, really their most important roles were as generals who were making good on the promise of revolution. After 1649, or even after 1787, Cromwell and Washington—their roles in actual governance weren’t what defined their reputations. We don’t look back on Washington and say, oh yeah, it was that moment in his presidency that really made him. If anything, the moment he stepped down was the most defining part of his presidency. His role as commander-in-chief before becoming president—that’s where his legacy was forged. Likewise with Cromwell—the decade of republican-ish rule ends up tarnishing his reputation, especially once he becomes Lord Protector and reverts, essentially, to quasi-monarch status. So even though there’s a similarity between Cromwell, Washington, Bonaparte—and my friend David Bell wrote a wonderful book on this called Men on Horseback, which looks at the role of charisma in revolutions, especially in democratic societies—I do think there’s an important difference. They’re kind of needed at different moments of a revolutionary transition.
Q: What are your thoughts on momentum and the pace of change as it impacts revolution?
[Dan Edelstein]: I think we’re in this moment—and in the West maybe we’ve been in it since the end of the Cold War, in other places maybe earlier—where we’ve kind of lost faith in the progressive version of revolution. There aren’t many people out there who really believe a revolution is going to solve all our problems. We’ve learned from the history of the 20th century that it doesn’t tend to be a great bet. On the other hand, we haven’t completely given up on our softer view of progress, and I think we still carry a lot of the illusions that came with the modern revolutionary idea. Take the Egyptian revolution again—there was this incredible sense of coming together, of consensus, “the people want the fall of the regime,” as the chant went, and of course it’s all very exciting. There’s an emotional dimension—seeing all those people on Tahrir Square, it’s hard not to get swept up in the enthusiasm. But what happened there is what has happened in so many earlier revolutions: it turns out that this sense of consensus among the people is just an illusion, and in fact there are huge differences of opinion. And that’s probably just how things are. As Madison writes in The Federalist, “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed”. So I think we are, just left to our own devices, going to disagree about a lot. We’re not going to naturally agree on the future of society, and that means we’re always going to end up a little disappointed with a pluralistic form of government that doesn’t give us everything we want—especially if our historical expectation is for government to deliver on promises and do a great job. And I think this is one reason why so many recent revolutions end up spinning their wheels—almost in this polybian way of going back, like in Egypt, to where they started: with a military strongman. Because the expectations don’t match the solutions. If you end up with a mixed constitution—with a separation of powers, with a pluralistic system—it’s not going to deliver the kind of rapid societal change some people want to see. And it might be that, again to stick with Egypt, most of the population is a lot more conservative than the urban leaders of the revolution. And that’s how you end up with the Muslim Brotherhood. So I think part of what we’ve seen since the end of the Cold War—especially with the colour revolutions that often end up ushering in another authoritarian regime—is this cycle where we’re still clinging to the modern hopes of a transformed future. And yet, when we use the more classical constitutional means to establish government, it’s never going to deliver that.