Still Scripting Revolutions?

David Bell offers an insightful response to the Egyptian revolution from the perspective of a historian of the French revolution http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/07/why_we_cant_rule_out_an_egyptian_reign_of_terror. Anyone sceptical of the relevance of 1789 to 2011 only has to read the accounts of the feelings and emotions of participants in Tahrir Square to hear the echoes of the "vainqueurs de la Bastille" http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/world/middleeast/12revolution.html?hp. The revolutionary experience of renewal not just of the national institutions but of the people and indeed the individual person, speaks across the centuries.

Our historical experience remains useful, but we need to use it with extreme caution if it isn't to prove a false friend. David uses a well-worn analytic distinction between "liberal" revolutions, such as the Glorious Revolution and "utopian" revolutions such as the French and cautions that the Egyptian revolution may fall into the second category. In this scenario Islamism possibly provides the utopian ideology driving toward Terror in the manner Jacobinism drove the French Revolution.

This distinction between two different kinds of revolution is a dangerous model, since it predisposes policy makers to look for evidence for which "track" the Egyptian revolution is following in order to adapt themselves to the predicted outcomes. Leaving aside all the divergent views on whether or not the Glorious Revolution was a radical, modern revolution (Steve Pincus might have views on this http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/884) or the view that the premises of Jacobinism had causal force in the origins of Terror, which many of us would strongly contest, or any other purely historiographical disputes, the strong categorical distinction between types of revolution is very weakly supported. It describes a distinction in contemporary political opinion, and so is important in the Western public sphere, but it does not have analytical purchase. Using the narrative of any revolution as a model for a theory of revolution is inherently wrong-headed because revolutions, by their very nature, are discontinuous and open to contingency. We can hope to characterise the elements of a revolutionary situation, and actors can and have modelled themselves on previous moments of revolution, but there are no inherent dynamics in revolutions that predispose them to particular outcomes (behind paywall sorry http://the.sagepub.com/content/97/1/64.abstract).

The point here is not about who is right about the French Revolution, rather it is to argue for a Socratic moment. We don't know what the possible elements of a revolutionary settlement in Egypt might be, and David is absolutely right to point out that whatever arrangement is arrived at in the next few weeks might turn out to be totally unsustainable. We need to be able to see the situation that will unfold before us though and our vision will be obscured by unhelpful extrapolations from historical analogies.