III

The cultural legacy of the French Revolution is heavily represented in this book, but once again exclusively with regard to its impact on the future culture of modernity. This impact is twofold. On the one hand, the Revolution gave the strongest possible impetus to the rise of the golden age of philosophy of history. On the other hand, it triggered the birth of the "objective" science of society. Both issues have been dealt with in this volume by the contributions of Furet, Mitchell, Smith, and this writer.

The impetus given by the Great Revolution to the grand narratives of the philosophy of history was direct. There was nothing pragmatic in the representative actors on the Paris scene. From the fall of the Bastille till Thermidor and even after, the most liberal as well as the most illiberal ones among them shared the conviction, albeit in different orchestrations and varying

interpretations, that the Revolution had not only grown out of philosophy but that it had been assigned the task, as Robespierre put it most poignantly, to fulfill the promises of philosophy, to conclude the prehistory of humankind and complement the revolutions in the physical world by a moral world revolution.

But the watershed event was too close to the body of its actors for them to cast a glance at it from the distance necessary for philosophical speculation. No wonder, then, that the representative philosophies of history, whose specific content can be regarded as a response to the dilemmas posed by the French Revolution, were born outside the French context, primarily in Germany. (This is why the analyses of Kant and Hegel play such a central role in this volume.) Nor was this external fruition of the cultural yields of the Revolution restricted to philosophy. The immortal music of revolutionary enthusiasm—an emotion crucial for both Kant and Robespierre—found its ultimate expression in Beethoven's singular combination of an endless harmonic material with the titanic melody of "fraternity" and the emergence of the motif of the Hero. The single great historical drama written on the Revolution is Büchner's Danton's Death . Only revolutionary painting came of age on the domestic scene through the brush of that bizarre combination of an artist, as genius and individualist, and a security police chief, namely Jacques-Louis David.

Revolutionary (and immediate postrevolutionary) France's own contribution to this great intellectual transformation was the "science" of the new society, which immediately split and went in two different directions. With Saint-Simon, it concentrated on the critique of the society born out of the turbulences of a quarter of a century. Socialism was born as the critical science of the society created by the Revolution, one which applied revolutionary principles to the end result of the revolutionary process. With Comte, social science accepted the new society as an incontrovertible fact and went about the understanding of its mechanics with great equanimity.

Philosophy of history, growing out of the "philosophical revolution," focused on such issues as were, without exception, painful and ultimately unresolvable dilemmas for the revolutionaries themselves. What is the "meaning" of a revolution? Does it imply a complete break with the past, a total tabula rasa as the actors themselves had believed, or does it have a continuity with the past that had remained hidden for the actors in the fever of enthusiasm? Is the revolution a "solemn" act, a moral "surplus" the generated energy of which has to be preserved for the republic to survive? Or is it rather a "relapse into the state of nature" or perhaps the combination of this relapse and a signal of "progress in nature"? Should revolution be continued permanently, or should it come to a halt at some point while building its results in the body of the new society? What is the character of history created by this cataclysm? Is history from now on "determined" and predictable, oper-

ating according to moral or scientific laws? Or is it precisely its unpredictable and "chaotic," that is, indeterminate, character that had opened up in the great event? These and similar questions were asked by the philosophy of history under the direct impact of the French Revolution. And the questions themselves, together with the answers given to them then and there, (both being sufficiently analyzed in the contributions to this book, primarily in that of Harvey Mitchell), have never left us.

Posthistoire , under the aegis of which the present book was born, is not distinguished by having the "ultimate" answer to these old dilemmas. Rather, it is distinguished by recognizing the (obviously not identical) relevance of the varying answers given to the dilemmas, that is, by the spirit of hermeneutics. The book concludes on a seemingly modest note in Furet's rereading of the paradigms in terms of which historiography, in other words, every new present, tried to cope with its past: the Revolution. However, the yield of this hermeneutical voyage is important. For in the carefully worded questions addressed to the text, in the tentative answers the text and the reader together supply to the questions, a major turn has been negotiated. In the historical hour of the crisis of Bolshevik self-identity, the French Revolution, by removing layers of "the Russian interpretation" imposed on its text by generations of interpreters, reclaims its primogeniture as the authentic master narrative of modernity.