Harold J. Berman > Quotes

“It is the hallmark of the great revolutions of Western history, starting with the Papal Revolution, that they clothe their vision of the radically new in the garments of a remote past, whether those of ancient legal authorities (as in the case of the Papal Revolution), or of an ancient religious text, the Bible (as in the case of the German Reformation), or of an ancient civilization, classical Greece (as in the the case of the French Revolution), or of a prehistoric classless society (as in the case of the Russian Revolution). In all of these great upheavals the idea of a restoration - a return, and in that sense a revolution, to an earlier starting point- was connected with a dynamic concept of the future.”
― Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition