Francois Furet: What troubles democratic capitalism today
... We begin with the late French historian François Furet, who provides striking insights into the political tensions of democratic capitalism. At the time of his death in 1997, Furet was France's foremost historian and the world's preeminent authority on the French Revolution. Though once a Marxist himself, Furet broke with the Marxist view of the French Revolution-long dominant in French historiography-which saw it as an economically determined bourgeois warm-up for the Russian Revolution of October 1917. In the Marxian optic, 1789 was the inevitable result of a rising bourgeoisie overthrowing the ancien régime and the agricultural society that it represented. Furet, however, rejected the notion of historical inevitability and gave human political actions a central explanatory role. In a Tocquevillian register of conservative liberalism, he also claimed that the revolution had released utopian hopes for a humanity at last reconciled with itself and in control of its destiny, hopes that neither liberal democracy nor any other political regime, including socialism, could ever satisfactorily fulfill.
In The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, which appeared in France in 1995 and quickly became a controversial bestseller across Europe, Furet shifted his focus to the twentieth century and specifically to the rise and decline of the communist dream, the shape finally taken by those profound but-when directed into politics-destructive longings first unleashed by the French revolutionaries. Disabused, attentive to the complex interactions of "ideas, intentions, and circumstances" that give meaning to history, Furet's final testament was written on the far side of the revolutionary passions of the epoch. It serves as a kind of warning: we must not expect too much from politics....
Read entire article at Brian Anderson in his book, Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents, excerpted in the NYT
In The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, which appeared in France in 1995 and quickly became a controversial bestseller across Europe, Furet shifted his focus to the twentieth century and specifically to the rise and decline of the communist dream, the shape finally taken by those profound but-when directed into politics-destructive longings first unleashed by the French revolutionaries. Disabused, attentive to the complex interactions of "ideas, intentions, and circumstances" that give meaning to history, Furet's final testament was written on the far side of the revolutionary passions of the epoch. It serves as a kind of warning: we must not expect too much from politics....