Table of Contents

A narrative of the French Revolution from a Jacobin perspective; the limitless claims of individual liberty; the indisputable claims of civil society; the limitless claims of the public sphere; the indisputable claims of the nation; Jacobins as the free citizens of a one-party state; social reconciliation, fraternity; spreading the word - rhetorics of harmony; unifying emnities at home and abroad; applied Jacobinism - the social ecologies of Jacobin principle; looking backward - on the origins of Jacobin sensibility; looking forward - Jacobinism in world history.

Promotional Information

A welcome addition to revolutionary studies. Although there is an extensive literature, best known to specialists on the Revolution on Jacobin clubs and popular societies, much too often Jacobinism is dismissed politically or caricatured ideologically. This book provides a splendid synthesis of the extant scholarship along with a strikingly original, well documented interpretation which takes Jacobinism seriously as a political, ideological, and social formation...This book will surely become a standard for students of modern France and eighteenth-century Europe and, more broadly, for those interested in revolutionary movements and political ideas in the modern world. -- Joan B. Landes, Pennsylvania State University This book addresses a key question in modern history that will be of interest to a wide range of educated readers...It is filled with wonderful and rich material...It has an almost meditative structure...[It] is just the kind of book that should be read in class. It takes on one of the most interesting and controversial questions in modern history--why revolutions tend to turn out badly--and offers a judicious, convincing argument based on wide-ranging reading in the secondary literature, in archives, and in other primary sources. The focus on the Jacobins makes great sense, for they are commonly taken as the ancestors of the one-party totalitarian state...His book offers an analysis of the Jacobin mentalite in all its many variations...Immensely illuminating and sagely argued. -- Lynn Hunt, University of Pennsylvania

About the Author

Patrice Higonnet is Robert Walton Goelet Professor of French History at Harvard University.

Reviews

Higonnet's is a serious and generous enterprise, with an underlying and fervent purpose, to dissociate the French from the Russian Revolution. -- P. N. Furbank * New York Review of Books *
The time seems right for a new, post-Marxist, and indeed post-Furetian version of Jacobinism, and this is what Patrice Higonnet now offers us in Goodness Beyond Virtue. It is a surprising, and faintly quixotic construct, for Higonnet endeavors to sketch out a Jacobinism for Our Times which is 'a model for modern democrats'...Patrice Higonnet proposes that the tragedy of the Jacobinism was one in which the Jacobins themselves, as well as their adversaries, were implicated, and that some of the pity we reserve for the victims of the Terror should be extended to its originators. -- Colin Jones * Times Literary Supplement *
No aspect of the French Revolution has been more controversial than the Jacobins. Many historians...see them as a pretotalitarian terrorist force...Higonnet offers a scholarly, sweeping, and level-headed corrective to this orthodoxy...Deeply informed, compassionate, and fair, Higonnet's book has brought fresh scholarship, judicious reflections, and intriguing social comparisons to bear on this endlessly fascinating subject. * Foreign Affairs *
A welcome addition to revolutionary studies. Although there is an extensive literature, best known to specialists on the Revolution on Jacobin clubs and popular societies, much too often Jacobinism is dismissed politically or caricatured ideologically. This book provides a splendid synthesis of the extant scholarship along with a strikingly original, well documented interpretation which takes Jacobinism seriously as a political, ideological, and social formation...This book will surely become a standard for students of modern France and eighteenth-century Europe and, more broadly, for those interested in revolutionary movements and political ideas in the modern world. -- Joan B. Landes, Pennsylvania State University
This book addresses a key question in modern history that will be of interest to a wide range of educated readers...It is filled with wonderful and rich material...It has an almost meditative structure...[It] is just the kind of book that should be read in class. It takes on one of the most interesting and controversial questions in modern history--why revolutions tend to turn out badly--and offers a judicious, convincing argument based on wide-ranging reading in the secondary literature, in archives, and in other primary sources. The focus on the Jacobins makes great sense, for they are commonly taken as the ancestors of the one-party totalitarian state...His book offers an analysis of the Jacobin mentalite in all its many variations...Immensely illuminating and sagely argued. -- Lynn Hunt, University of Pennsylvania