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Rating: 
Summary: Petulant, Marxist Whine
Review: Kaplan's "Farewell, Revolution" is an utterly petulant work. It is, of course, an attempt to defend the "Jacobino-Marxist" position on the French Revolution through the deconstruction of two great historians (he does not neglect attacking their personal and professional lives),Pierre Chaunu and Francois Furet, who both have traced the wages of extreme-left, revolutionary ideology to the genocide committed by both the French Terror and twentieth century Marxists.
He insists on the error in Furet's hieraerchy of values, namely, that the history of ideas and their effects on events outweighs the sociological background of these events. He also suggests that Furet's Critical Dictionary is not critical or "open" at all, and he contradicts himself by applying right-wing ideological precepts to his massive tome centering on French Revolutionary historiography.But his argument doesn't fly. It doesn't fly for Furet's insistence on the primacy of ideas and the actions which resulted, is absolutely correct. It is substantive when a historian can trace an idea emanating to either its logical end or what effect that (political-social-economic) idea had on the general actions of governments and/or mobs. Furet is welcomed and such a relief after a century of Marxist dogma and their much vaunted ability to look at history "transparently." Kaplan serves the Reds well, but his deconstuctive diatribe piqued my interest of Chaunu and Furet and didn't turn me against them.
Rating:
Summary: Petulant, Marxist Whine
Review: Kaplan's "Farewell, Revolution" is an utterly petulant work. It is, of course, an attempt to defend the "Jacobino-Marxist" position on the French Revolution through the deconstruction of two great historians (he does not neglect attacking their personal and professional lives),Pierre Chaunu and Francois Furet, who both have traced the wages of extreme-left, revolutionary ideology to the genocide committed by both the French Terror and twentieth century Marxists.
He insists on the error in Furet's hieraerchy of values, namely, that the history of ideas and their effects on events outweighs the sociological background of these events. He also suggests that Furet's Critical Dictionary is not critical or "open" at all, and he contradicts himself by applying right-wing ideological precepts to his massive tome centering on French Revolutionary historiography. But his argument doesn't fly. It doesn't fly for Furet's insistence on the primacy of ideas and the actions which resulted, is absolutely correct. It is substantive when a historian can trace an idea emanating to either its logical end or what effect that (political-social-economic) idea had on the general actions of governments and/or mobs. Furet is welcomed and such a relief after a century of Marxist dogma and their much vaunted ability to look at history "transparently." Kaplan serves the Reds well, but his deconstuctive diatribe piqued my interest of Chaunu and Furet and didn't turn me against them.
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