18th century

The 18th century enters the book most concretely through late-century France before the French Revolution: a world of salon debate, freethinking, artistic protest, and political unrest. Its significance lies in the reversal that follows. The energies of dissent are not treated as an alternative to political order so much as a force that may be transformed into one, making this period a historical point of departure for the book’s account of revolution and its aftermath.

Late-century France and revolutionary reversal

In the book’s account, prerevolutionary France offers an alluring image of freedom in motion. Libertarians debate in salons, freethinkers inhabit their own inconsistencies, and artists protest against power even as they amuse those who wield it. This varied unrest is difficult to endorse once the French Revolution turns it toward the severe new order of the revolutionary Terror. The contrast is not simply between freedom and repression: it asks whether revolutionary disorder can become the basis of a new system of liberty, rather than remain an ongoing gesture of resistance to an existing system.

That reversal also sharpens the book’s criticism of revolutionary Beautiful Souls who celebrate the flowering of freedom but refuse to recognize its relation to the order that follows. The historical point is not that the Terror should be approved; it is that revolutionary ideals cannot be understood only through their emancipatory beginnings. The later political form, however disturbing, must be considered in relation to the aspirations and upheavals that preceded it.

A comparison with the October Revolution

The discussion of late eighteenth-century France belongs to a wider comparison with the October Revolution. The book similarly distinguishes the creative unrest of the revolution’s first years—among suprematists, futurists, and constructivists—from the later attempt to establish a new social order. In this comparison, the forced collectivization of the late 1920s is presented as an effort to translate revolutionary fervor into a positive institutional form, not as an episode unrelated to the earlier revolutionary opening.

The Soviet chronology is further elaborated through Sheila Fitzpatrick’s argument that collectivization and rapid industrialization formed part of the October Revolution’s internal dynamic, extending the revolutionary sequence until 1937. The years 1917–1921 are described as an emergency in which society was in motion; the New Economic Policy period consolidated Soviet state power while leaving much of society’s existing texture intact. The thrust beginning in 1928, by contrast, aimed directly at changing that texture: peasants were liquidated as a class of individual owners, and the old intelligentsia was replaced by a new one. Fitzpatrick’s comparison of Moscow in 1914, 1924, and 1934 makes the scale of the change legible: a visitor returning in 1924 might still recognize the city and many of its authorities, while one returning in 1934 would encounter a social world transformed beyond recognition.

The argument does not reduce this history either to an accidental deviation from the October Revolution or to proof that the Communist project was totalitarian from the outset. It asks readers to hold together the revolution’s emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome. Isaac Deutscher’s account supplies a causal frame: when revolution could not expand beyond the Soviet Union, its dynamic turned inward, with industrialization and collectivization serving as substitutes for revolution abroad. In this reading, the contrast with eighteenth-century France helps establish a recurring question about how revolutionary energy is redirected, institutionalized, and made to reshape society.

The period within an account of modernity

The 18th century is also part of the book’s broader historical analysis of modern European political forms, although the account does not identify the century with a single institutional model. Its discussion of Lacan’s four discourses distinguishes absolute monarchy as an early figure of modernity from the later forms that emerge out of the instability of direct mastery: bureaucratic expert rule and a capitalist social order driven by continual self-revolutionizing. This framework places political transformation within a longer history rather than treating the revolutionary moment as a self-contained rupture.

The book’s comparisons therefore connect the French revolutionary sequence to later revolutions without equating their circumstances. In its treatment of the October Revolution, revolutionary creativity and the creation of a new order are historically entangled; in its account of modernity, bureaucratic administration and capitalist dynamism are distinct but connected ways of reorganizing social life. The 18th century matters as the earlier historical case through which the book makes visible the tension between liberation from an established system and the difficult formation of a new one.