The Sphinx of the Revolution

A review of a book by Francois Furet, Marx et la Revolution francaise ([Marx and the French Revolution] Calvie, Lucien [Ed & Tr], Paris: Flammarion, 1986 [see listing in IPRS No. 47]). This collection of three essays continues & expands on Furet's earlier holistic narrative of the French Revolution (Interpreting the French Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 1981) through a recapitulation & rejection of Karl Marx's views of this event & its legacy. Marx's conceptualization of the political mythology (or alienation) of modernity is discussed, together with his view that the main consequence of the French Revolution was a political illusion & merely created a new mythology. It is argued that Marx's critique of G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy of the modern state is reductionist, & his revision of this theory is criticized, particularly for its inability to account for the relative independence of the state & the affects of the introduction of universal suffrage. Marx's explanation of Bonapartism & his ambiguous position on the Jacobian dictatorship are examined in detail, along with factors that explain his belief that human emancipation offered a means of eliminating or transcending the political. Ways that Marx's inability to come to terms with the enigma of the French Revolution affected his later theoretical struggles with the relation of the social to the political are discussed. 19 References. K. Hyatt