How strange and wondrous it is — that a phenomenon once held as the direst spectre haunting the chambers of political thought, should, with the passage of centuries, be reimagined not as a peril, but as a panacea for the world’s social afflictions.
From the contemplative heights of Plato’s Academy to the sober warnings of John Adams, wise men have long viewed revolution as a calamity — the very unravelling of the delicate fabric that binds a civilised society. For such men, the highest political artistry lay in forging constitutions of balance and moderation, instruments designed to temper the passions of mankind and guard against the tumults that revolutions unleash.
Yet in The Revolution to Come, Dan Edelstein leads us on a sweeping journey through the ages — from the sunlit agora of Greek antiquity to the storm-laden skies of Leninist Russia — tracing the curious transformation of this idea. The ancients, as Edelstein reminds us, saw history as a wild and wayward river, meandering without compass or destination, where revolutions signalled not hope, but disorder. This view held sway for centuries, until the Enlightenment dawned and cast its rational light upon the human story, reshaping the imagination of thinkers to see history not as a haphazard unfolding, but as a grand ascent toward progress — and revolution, once the enemy of order, as its very engine.
Put to trial amidst the fires of the French Revolution and canonised in the struggles of the modern age, this vision of revolution would offer nations a siren’s song of justice and renewal. And yet, as Edelstein so eloquently argues, the arrival of any revolution leaves societies not only changed, but often fractured and estranged, birthing new conflicts and hatreds beneath the banners of progress — as the faithful hunt the so-called counterrevolutionary with a zeal that seldom distinguishes between friend and foe.
This is no ordinary volume, but a panoramic meditation upon one of mankind’s oldest dilemmas: whether to prize stability over the allure of transformation, or to wager the peace of the present for the uncertain promises of tomorrow. In our own age — an age not unlike those shadowed by fear and upheaval — Edelstein’s work asks us, as all true philosophy must, to weigh the costs of the world we long for against the world we stand to lose.
