Comments Elsewhere

Thanks for these posts, Jason. It’s fascinating stuff. I have a prickly and tangential note, and then a more serious question.

Here’s the prickliness: you worry, inter alia “What, for example, is to be done with the ill-gotten gains of the nobility and the clergy, when these make up the vast majority of the nation’s wealth? … And, as we all know, land reform on the Chinese model was a horrific disaster.” But why in the world would you have to have land reform on the Chinese model (which of course did not exist at the time, anyway) in order to have some kind of serious land reform? Why not (for example) expropriate land acquired illegitimately (e.g. through feudal entitlements) and devolve ownership to individual peasants, thus creating a new class of small freeholders?

Now, here’s the more serious question. Here and in the previous post you’ve made several intriguing comments about the faith of the revolutionaries in central government power and how this led to projects of audacious social engineering and — as those failed to produce the desired effects — the violence of the Terror. Here though you also mention, apparently with favor, the theory of at least four separate and concurrent revolutions. Do you think that there are noticeable differences among each of these revolutionary movements when it comes to constructivist faith in the State? I.E. do you think that all of the revolutions shared the attitudes and conceits that produced the intellectual conditions for the centralized State and eventually the Terror, or do you think that these developments were the result of one tendency within the revolution winning out over the others?