Against Ideological Absurdity And Tyranny

The concept of “counter-revolution” has always carried an ambiguous charge. It denotes, at its core, organized resistance to the acceleration of utopian ideology inasmuch as this menace begins to devour the concrete order of ordinary life. Unlike nostalgia for a golden age, counter-revolution is the recognition that certain political experiments, once they pass a threshold of abstract purity, become engines of tyranny. The French 1790s offer the paradigmatic case. The Federalist revolts of 1793 and the far more ferocious War in the Vendée reveal two distinct modes of resistance to Jacobin radicalism. One was republican and decentralizing; the other was...