The Last Tocquevillian

A Deck of Cards Dating Back to the French Revolution Where Kings Have Been Replaced With Wise Men (Solo, Plato, Cato, & Brutus), and Queens With Virtues (Justice, Union, Prudence, & Force). Leo S. Olschki,La Bibliofilia, Firenze : Giuseppe Boffito, 1906
"François Furet, who passed away twenty years ago this year, was a central figure in late twentieth-century intellectual life. Historian of the French Revolution, he challenged the social interpretation that presented the uprising as an expression of class struggle, a symptom of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Instead, Furet’s political interpretation portrayed the revolution as the triumph of a Manichaean ideology that almost inevitably led to the violence that followed. Furet first advanced this perspective in Interpreting the French Revolution (1978), which mobilized the then-ascendant French critique of totalitarianism to paint the event as proto-totalitarian and thereby discredit the revolutionary tradition. ..."
Jacobin
W - François Furet
W - Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America