The Permanent Revolution: The French Revolution And Its Legacy, 1789 1989

by Geoffrey Best

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

An historian of 19th and 20th century Britain, Geoffrey Francis Andrew Best was Emeritus Fellow of the British Academy, a former Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Professor of History at Edinburgh, Dean of European Studies at Sussex, Academic Visitor at the London School of Economics, and Senior Member of St Antony's College, Oxford.

Reviews

[Robert Oeser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Takeaway quote follows.

. . . as François Furet pointed out in his Interpreting the French Revolution (1978) . . . the period was unique in French history in the sense that it was a time when the normal agencies of political authority failed to function and the country was dominated by the practitioners of an ideology.

Norman Hampson, “The French Revolution and its Historians,” in The Permanent Revolution, Geoffrey Best, Ed., (University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 233

Question: Have we just experienced, in the US, a similarly unique period where the "country was dominated by the practitioners of an ideology," albeit the domination began on the right?