These two phenomena, the intensification of the concept along the French model and its dilution, are interrelated. The historical and political exhaustion of the former has rendered the term available for every possible extension and, ultimately, for its depoliticization. Faith in an unlimited historical progress, which according to Condorcet could still be represented with a certain precision in figures or on a graph (Condorcet 146), has given way to the technological fatalism of innovation for innovation’s sake.
If this is the present situation, the term revolution cannot be recovered as one retrieves an old artifact from the museum of history. One must instead excavate the history of the present. Here we find that the term revolution has given way to other words: insurgency, insurrection, upsurge, and movements. The language of class and class struggle has yielded to that of popular uprisings and mobilizations. The scope of inquiry must be enlarged so as to include recent non-European events, from the Zapatista movement that emerged in Chiapas to the Arab Spring. One must learn how to learn from the theory-in-action of insurgents and from their political vocabulary. The Primera Declaración de la Selva Lacandona of 1994 issued by the Zapatistas contains at least two fundamental claims that break with the script of modern Western revolutions. The first is its reference to a tradition of “500 years of struggle” rather than to a rupture with tradition. The second is the claim concerning the illegitimacy of the incumbent federal government and the intention to restore (restaurar) the legitimacy of the nation by appealing to the true spirit of the 1917 Mexican Constitution. The appeal to a long tradition of struggles and mobilizations of the past, in order to restore social and political forms indispensable to the reconfiguration of the present, is the element that emerges in this recent uprising (Tomba, Insurgent 186–222). Here we find the categories through which the notion of revolution and its history could be revisited.
The German Spartacists, even in their very name, invoked Spartacus, the slave, and a tradition of two thousand years of struggle. During the Bavarian socialist revolution, Gustav Landauer drafted The United Republics of Germany and Their Constitution (1918), drawing not only on the tradition of the Paris Commune and the sans-culottes, but also invoking a return (zurückkehren) to the true democracy of the medieval constitutions of municipalities and provinces (Landauer). In 1871, the Communards sought to resurrect (ressusciter) and bring back to life the communal idea pursued since the twelfth century. In 1649, the Diggers turned to the Bible in order to restore the earth as a “common store-house for all,” free from private property (Sabine 252).
Learning from these historical events, it becomes possible to reconsider the meaning of the term revolution from the perspective of the coexistence of different semantic layers corresponding to distinct revolutionary discourses and temporalizations. The ancient notions of revolutio, restauratio, and restitutio are not simply superseded by the notion of progress that leads to the modern concept of revolution, but persist as temporal stratifications that can be—and have been—reactivated in specific historical conjunctures. Originally, the terms revolution and restoration overlapped. In the English Revolution, the re-establishment of the monarchy with the return of Charles II in 1660 was described as a “happy restauration” and understood as the completion of the revolution. Indeed, Hobbes interpreted the sequence from King Charles I to Cromwell and finally to the return of Charles II as a “circular motion” (Hobbes 389–90). The restoration of the monarchy thus closes and completes the revolutionary cycle, at least until 1688, when the “Glorious Revolution” begins to disentangle the concept of revolution from civil war, marking a further semantic shift. The term restoration was also used to designate the return of the Bourbon monarchy in France in 1814, following the fall of Napoleon. By that point, however, it had come to signify a clear opposition to revolution, past, present, and to come.
In modern history, and beyond the boundaries of the West, the French Revolution has come to function as a kind of script of revolution. This script is characterized by the emergence of modern relations of private property against forms of common possession and feudalism; by the monopolization of representative public power against the dispersed authorities of numerous assemblies and the imperative mandate; by individual rights against common rights and guilds. It is, in short, the script of the state against society: the attempt of the state to give form to the social through the weaponization of progress against the allegedly regressive elements of society. These latter were identified with peasants and their defense of common possession and local authorities; with the radical sans-culottes and their defense of the authority of assemblies against the Convention, and of the imperative mandate against the free mandate; with the common rights of corporations against the individualized rights proclaimed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. This conflict finds a paradigmatic expression in the bill introduced by Le Chapelier and approved by the National Assembly on June 14, 1791. Article 1 declared the “abolition of any kind of citizens’ corporations in the same trade or of the same profession […] it is forbidden to reestablish them under any pretext or in any form whatsoever.” It follows that (art. 4) “it is contrary to the principles of liberty and the Constitution for citizens with the same professions, arts, or trades to deliberate or make agreements among themselves designed to set prices for their industry or their labor. If such deliberations and agreements are concluded, whether accompanied by oath or not, they will be declared unconstitutional, prejudicial to liberty and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and will be null and void.” In the same session of June 14, 1791, before presenting the eight articles of the law, Le Chapelier outlined his position before the National Assembly: “There are no longer corporations in the state; there is no longer anything but the particular interest of each individual and the general interest. It is permitted to no one to inspire an intermediary interest (intérêt intermédiaire) in citizens, to separate them from the public interest by a spirit of corporation” (Stewart 165–66). The “progressive” language of the Revolution, personified by Le Chapelier in its attack on feudalism, corporations, and intermediate bodies, barely conceals its real target: the dispersion of sovereignty across a plurality of local assemblies and, as Marx pointed out, the formation of workers’ coalitions capable of defending themselves against factory despotism. Such collective formations were condemned and declared illegal on the grounds that they represented a restoration of the corporations abolished by the French Constitution. If the atomization and fragmentation of society constitute the “progress” sanctified by the Declaration of the Rights of Man, then the plurality of sovereign assemblies and the formation of workers’ coalitions appear as “regression,” insofar as they are interpreted as an attempt to restore the old guilds and undermine the unity of the state.
The Terror, therefore, was a decisive moment in consolidating the unity of the sovereign state and accelerating the process of centralizing its functions against the assemblies of the sans-culottes, the poor, and women’s participation in the revolution. These were its first victims: many of the Enragés were arrested, the Société des républicaines révolutionnaires was dissolved, and the crowd was atomized into a mass of private individuals. This was Robespierre’s war against what he called the democratic excess (Tomba, Insurrection 40). The great thought of the bourgeoisie, in Hegel, still had the courage to define the Terror as a “necessary and just” domination, “insofar as it constitutes and sustains the state.” Once the state had been consolidated and the massacre of the so-called residual elements completed, the mediocre petty bourgeois thought that followed turned back and, gazing in horror at its own origins, came to call the Terror a dérapage. Jacobins and Girondins were in agreement in affirming national unity against the dispersed sovereignty of the many assemblies and in conceiving politics in terms of national representation. Against the right and authority of the primary assemblies to meet spontaneously, Robespierre argued, on June 14, 1793, that this excess of democracy (par excès de démocratie) would subvert national sovereignty (54). That same year, Condorcet had already expressed his opposition to the revocation of mandatories by the sections and to the practice of the imperative mandate, advocated by the Sans-culottes and the Enragés, because it would have led to the destruction of the unity of the nation’s will and action. Both, albeit with different emphases, gave constitutional form to a political agenda already outlined by Hobbes more than a century earlier. This analogy was underscored by a conservative such as von Haller, who described Hobbes as the “forefather of all Jacobins, all revolutionary aberrations, although this was not his intention” (von Haller 40). Indeed, Hobbes advanced the idea of a political tabula rasa: to construct the entire political edifice from the ground up, or rather, from a multitude of equal and free individuals, and to confer unity upon the political body through the unity of representation. The New Regime had to avoid the accommodation of collective entities of any sort since, as Mirabeau posited, “individuals are the only elements of any society whatsoever” (Blaufarb 128).
The French Revolution can still serve as a model, but only if it is turned upside down. Terror is not a deviation, and the alternative to Jacobin fury is not to be found in the more moderate Girondins. The violently repressed alternative lay rather in the democratic excess embodied in the slave revolts of Haiti, in the active political citizenship of women, in the sovereign assemblies of the sans-culottes, in the restoration of the medieval imperative mandate as a means of controlling and revoking representatives, and in the popular regulation of property through collective bodies inherited from the Ancien Régime, now declared illegal and contrary to the general will.
The revolutionary bourgeoisie freed itself from the authority of tradition in the name of a radical break with a past of oppression and its own humble origins. In this way, by destroying the authority of tradition, it also diminished the presence of the past in the present, relegating it to a residual status. Only the future remained available as an alternative temporality to the present. The revolutionary bourgeoisie mobilized the concept of progress to give meaning and direction to the present. But this faith in progress was possible only until the philosophy of history was snatched from the bourgeoisie by the proletariat, which claimed a classless future for itself. At this point a deep skepticism about the future began, and the philosophies of history became—actually without changing much, if not the algebraic sign placed before the historical time vector—the philosophy of historical decadence. Some thinkers, such as the Hegelian Bruno Bauer, well represent this trajectory that goes from radical enlightenment and a progressive conception of history to an epochal pessimism tinged with the themes of historical decadence that would be typical of Nietzsche and Spengler (Tomba, Revolution 33–34).
With the collapse of faith in the future and the break with the authority of past tradition, the present became temporally frozen. It is in this present that the dilution and hollowing out of modern political concepts takes place, including the concept of revolution. This does not mean the end of revolution. Rather, as the history of the last five hundred years teaches us, revolution operates on multiple levels, and the novus ordo seclorum is never the work of the state alone, but also of movements and social institutions that bring about a creative restoration of elements of the past.
The point is no longer to oppose revolution to restoration. Rather, as many recent and past insurrections show us, one must act and think within the tension between the two terms. For this reason, great conservative thought still has something to teach us in its critique of the image of society as a tabula rasa, that is, as a society constituted through the erasure of preexisting legal traditions and communal forms. At the same time, great revolutionary practices also have something to teach us in their innovative restorations of past institutions and traditions. The real difference lies not between revolution and restoration as such, but between the restoration of elements of the past in order to reconfigure democratic life and the “conservative revolution,” such as that promoted by Edgar Julius Jung in the twentieth century, which sought to restore elementary laws and values without which no order is thought possible (Jung 380). What separates these two trajectories is the notion of order itself. For the former, the ancient feudal and theo-ontological order standing above the human world had rightly been shattered by countless revolts of the oppressed. For the theorists of the conservative revolution, that order had instead to be restored. The former referred to the tradition of the struggles of the oppressed; the theorists of the conservative revolution appealed to an aristocracy of rulers. The former practiced an excess of democracy that kept the social and political order open to transformation. The latter sought to re-establish hierarchies within the order and the state. The former practiced politics as a way of exceeding the statist order. The latter located transcendence in the order and in the state itself.
For the partisans of conservation, democratic excess had to be encapsulated within the theory of modern dictatorship; for democratic insurgents, excess dis-orders the existing order by giving rise to new institutions that society borrows from and reconfigures out of the gigantic arsenal of the past. State excess is the surplus of power capable of suspending fundamental rights through states of exception and martial law, declared by the president as the representative of unity and of the nation as a whole against internal and external enemies, in order to restore order. By contrast, for the insurgents of democratic excess, the political order is an open field of experimentation with equality and freedom. The term revolution is one of the names for these experiments: not the mere invocation of a nebulous field of indeterminate possibilities, nor an event necessitated by the laws of history. Yet if a teleology without openness reduces history to pure necessity, governed by the cunning of reason, an openness without telos dissolves into a chaotic proliferation of infinite possibilities. Telos is not rejected in favor of openness. Rather, telos is that which transcends the present and must be patiently composed in order to politically connect multiple experiments with social forms reconfigured by the energy released on the battlefield of the present. However, democratic restorations can themselves generate new exclusions and hierarchies. Democratic openness, in its excess, lies precisely in the institutional and collective capacity to confront these limits constantly and to learn from them.
Massimiliano Tomba is Professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His most recent publication is Revolution and Restoration: The Politics of Anachronism (Stanford University Press, 2025).
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