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The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin
How an event once considered the greatest of all political dangers came to be seen as a solution to all social problems
Political thinkers from Plato to John Adams saw revolutions as a grave threat to society and advocated for a constitution that prevented them by balancing social interests and forms of government. The Revolution to Come traces how evolving conceptions of history ushered in a faith in the power of revolution to create more just and reasonable societies.
Taking readers from Greek antiquity to Leninist Russia, Dan Edelstein describes how classical philosophers viewed history as chaotic and directionless, and sought to keep historical change—especially revolutions—at bay. This conception prevailed until the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment thinkers conceived of history as a form of progress and of revolution as its catalyst. These ideas were put to the test during the French Revolution and came to define revolutions well into the twentieth century. Edelstein demonstrates how the coming of the revolution leaves societies divided over its goals, giving rise to new forms of violence in which rivals are targeted as counterrevolutionaries.
A panoramic work of intellectual history, The Revolution to Come challenges us to reflect on the aims and consequences of revolution and to balance the value of stability over the hope for change in our own moment of fear and upheaval.
Political thinkers from Plato to John Adams saw revolutions as a grave threat to society and advocated for a constitution that prevented them by balancing social interests and forms of government. The Revolution to Come traces how evolving conceptions of history ushered in a faith in the power of revolution to create more just and reasonable societies.
Taking readers from Greek antiquity to Leninist Russia, Dan Edelstein describes how classical philosophers viewed history as chaotic and directionless, and sought to keep historical change—especially revolutions—at bay. This conception prevailed until the eighteenth century, when Enlightenment thinkers conceived of history as a form of progress and of revolution as its catalyst. These ideas were put to the test during the French Revolution and came to define revolutions well into the twentieth century. Edelstein demonstrates how the coming of the revolution leaves societies divided over its goals, giving rise to new forms of violence in which rivals are targeted as counterrevolutionaries.
A panoramic work of intellectual history, The Revolution to Come challenges us to reflect on the aims and consequences of revolution and to balance the value of stability over the hope for change in our own moment of fear and upheaval.
432 pages, Hardcover
Published April 15, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
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January 5, 2026Much of the world’s population lives under revolutionary regimes. Cambodia, China, France, Greece, Haiti, Iran, Ireland, Mexico, Nicaragua, the United States, even the United Kingdom, that distant descendant of the Glorious Revolution: all entered their modern histories with a revolution. And that’s not even to speak of decolonisation in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, the post-Soviet sphere after 1991, or the ambiguous aftershocks of the Arab Spring in 2011. Most countries have put their revolution behind them. Others simply cannot stop rehashing it, the US most conspicuously (and not just thanks to the semiquincentennial in 2026). All helped to make revolution a hallmark of what it means to be modern.
For much of the 20th century, revolution’s role in midwifing modernity rendered it a compelling subject for historians, sociologists, and students of politics. Some of social science’s greatest hits treated revolution comparatively, from Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution (1938) via Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) to Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions (1979). But then the field fell strangely quiet. So-called and often self-styled ‘revisionists’ shrank individual revolutions to merely national or local events. Grand causal accounts gave way to histories of accident and contingent conjunctures. And the growing awareness of revolution’s human toll – the Terror and the Great Leap Forward; Stalin and Mao’s famines; the camps and the killing fields – cast a dark shadow over the promises of revolution. As a result, big thinkers moved on to other topics. The great days of revolution – that most future-oriented of collective human projects – seemed to be firmly in the past.
And yet, if Dan Edelstein’s The Revolution to Come and Donald Sassoon’s Revolutions: A New History are anything to go by, revolution is back, and in a major way, spanning two millennia in Edelstein’s case but a mere four centuries or so for Sassoon. Sassoon writes in the great tradition of Brinton and Skocpol, lining up a rollcall of revolutions – English, French, 19th-century European, Russian, Chinese – for comparative inspection. Edelstein, meanwhile, masterfully combines the intellectual history of revolution with the experience of revolution all the way from the Peloponnesian War to our populist present. Sassoon points back to the heyday of revolutionary studies; Edelstein shows the way forward.
You can read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University. His most recent book is Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Yale University Press, 2017).
For much of the 20th century, revolution’s role in midwifing modernity rendered it a compelling subject for historians, sociologists, and students of politics. Some of social science’s greatest hits treated revolution comparatively, from Crane Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution (1938) via Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution (1963) to Theda Skocpol’s States and Social Revolutions (1979). But then the field fell strangely quiet. So-called and often self-styled ‘revisionists’ shrank individual revolutions to merely national or local events. Grand causal accounts gave way to histories of accident and contingent conjunctures. And the growing awareness of revolution’s human toll – the Terror and the Great Leap Forward; Stalin and Mao’s famines; the camps and the killing fields – cast a dark shadow over the promises of revolution. As a result, big thinkers moved on to other topics. The great days of revolution – that most future-oriented of collective human projects – seemed to be firmly in the past.
And yet, if Dan Edelstein’s The Revolution to Come and Donald Sassoon’s Revolutions: A New History are anything to go by, revolution is back, and in a major way, spanning two millennia in Edelstein’s case but a mere four centuries or so for Sassoon. Sassoon writes in the great tradition of Brinton and Skocpol, lining up a rollcall of revolutions – English, French, 19th-century European, Russian, Chinese – for comparative inspection. Edelstein, meanwhile, masterfully combines the intellectual history of revolution with the experience of revolution all the way from the Peloponnesian War to our populist present. Sassoon points back to the heyday of revolutionary studies; Edelstein shows the way forward.
You can read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...
David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University. His most recent book is Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Yale University Press, 2017).
September 6, 2025
Great text i finished this book before i appear in my first podcast Suara TV next week. Stasis, metabole, anacyclosis, polybius, Kingship-tyranny Aristocracy - Oligarchy Democracy-'Ochlograchy.
May 13, 2025
Really fantastic work. Americo-centricish, or at least born from this kind of place. Traces the constitutional structures of Ancient Rome, Republican Florence, 17th century England and 18th century America. Classical liberalism, separation of power, limits on executive powers.
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December 15, 2024Reviewed for Library Journal; full review appears there.
January 13, 2026
I found the book as an ambitious intellectual history of one of modernity’s most potent political ideas. The author traces the concept of “revolution” from classical antiquity through to Lenin, the book aims to explain how revolution transformed from something feared and resisted into something anticipated, even idealised, as a mechanism of progress.
In this element, I found that the author succeeds in offering a clear and carefully constructed genealogy of the Western revolutionary imagination.
I would seem the book's greatest strength lies in its conceptual clarity.The author convincingly demonstrates that ancient and medieval political thinkers largely regarded revolution as a sign of disorder, an event to be prevented through constitutional balance and moral restraint. By contrast, the modern era reframed revolution as future-oriented, purposeful, and morally redemptive. This shift, he argues, fundamentally altered how societies understood political change, legitimacy, and historical destiny. As an intellectual history of this transformation within Western political thought, the work is coherent, readable, and often insightful.
However, it is precisely this clarity of focus that also marks the book’s principal limitation. Despite the universal implications suggested by its title, the book remains firmly confined to a Western intellectual trajectory, (for which I was dissapointed) and therefore other historical traditions, non-European political philosophies, anti-colonial revolutionary thought, or alternative civilisational understandings of political rupture are largely absent or not even mentioned. The result is a narrative that risks presenting a particular Western genealogy as though it were a comprehensive history of the idea itself, rather than one tradition among many.
Moreover, while the book is rich in retrospective analysis, it stops short of engaging in forward-looking theorisation. GI was expecting some attempt to hypothesise about future revolutionary forms, contemporary political dynamics, or emerging global pressures. Yet, it would seems the auhtor deliberately avoided prediction, prescription, or even tentative speculation. Therefore, for me the work remains analytical rather than diagnostic—explaining how the modern revolutionary mindset came to be, but declining to ask how it might be transforming or where it may lead.
This restraint may be methodologically intentional, but it nonetheless it left me, the reader with a sense of incompletion. Revolution is treated primarily as an inherited idea rather than as a living, evolving phenomenon shaped by material conditions, global power shifts, or technological change.To be fair broader comparative perspectives and alternative historical experiences could have complicate or possibly enriched the book’s central thesis (as I see it), perhaps the author thought it was the former.
To conclude, the book is a polished and thoughtful contribution to Western intellectual history, offering a persuasive account of how revolution became central to modern political imagination. However due to its narrow geographical focus and its refusal to engage with future trajectories, I feel limits its reach.If you are seeking a global, comparative, or predictive treatment of revolution, the book may feel constrained. For those interested in how the West came to think revolution differently, it remains a valuable, if somewhat incomplete work.
In this element, I found that the author succeeds in offering a clear and carefully constructed genealogy of the Western revolutionary imagination.
I would seem the book's greatest strength lies in its conceptual clarity.The author convincingly demonstrates that ancient and medieval political thinkers largely regarded revolution as a sign of disorder, an event to be prevented through constitutional balance and moral restraint. By contrast, the modern era reframed revolution as future-oriented, purposeful, and morally redemptive. This shift, he argues, fundamentally altered how societies understood political change, legitimacy, and historical destiny. As an intellectual history of this transformation within Western political thought, the work is coherent, readable, and often insightful.
However, it is precisely this clarity of focus that also marks the book’s principal limitation. Despite the universal implications suggested by its title, the book remains firmly confined to a Western intellectual trajectory, (for which I was dissapointed) and therefore other historical traditions, non-European political philosophies, anti-colonial revolutionary thought, or alternative civilisational understandings of political rupture are largely absent or not even mentioned. The result is a narrative that risks presenting a particular Western genealogy as though it were a comprehensive history of the idea itself, rather than one tradition among many.
Moreover, while the book is rich in retrospective analysis, it stops short of engaging in forward-looking theorisation. GI was expecting some attempt to hypothesise about future revolutionary forms, contemporary political dynamics, or emerging global pressures. Yet, it would seems the auhtor deliberately avoided prediction, prescription, or even tentative speculation. Therefore, for me the work remains analytical rather than diagnostic—explaining how the modern revolutionary mindset came to be, but declining to ask how it might be transforming or where it may lead.
This restraint may be methodologically intentional, but it nonetheless it left me, the reader with a sense of incompletion. Revolution is treated primarily as an inherited idea rather than as a living, evolving phenomenon shaped by material conditions, global power shifts, or technological change.To be fair broader comparative perspectives and alternative historical experiences could have complicate or possibly enriched the book’s central thesis (as I see it), perhaps the author thought it was the former.
To conclude, the book is a polished and thoughtful contribution to Western intellectual history, offering a persuasive account of how revolution became central to modern political imagination. However due to its narrow geographical focus and its refusal to engage with future trajectories, I feel limits its reach.If you are seeking a global, comparative, or predictive treatment of revolution, the book may feel constrained. For those interested in how the West came to think revolution differently, it remains a valuable, if somewhat incomplete work.
August 20, 2025
This was an interesting, accessible, if fundamentally conservative intellectual history of the idea of revolution. The basic argument is that the meaning and aims of revolution have changed over time. Initially, from the Greeks to the revolution in what became the United States, revolution was something to be avoided and feared. The goal was stability through effective, balanced governance. But with the advent of the idea of progress during the Enlightenment, ever since the French Revolution, revolution was seen as something desirable and necessary.
I read it largely as a critique of the desire for progress and of the left. Many of the critiques are fair, but my concern is that they have been selectively applied. For example, Edelstein locates the emergence of the practice of "political terror" as being intrinsically linked to progress and leftist revolution via events in France. I would argue that all states practice political terror. What was slavery and Indigenous genocide in what became the U.S. if not political terror? What of conservative regimes such as Pinochet's throwing opponents out of helicopters into the ocean? Or that most institutionalized of terror: the Nazi holocaust? Those receive no mention (aside from a claim they do not fit within the scope of study). To condemn Stalin is justified. But to give a pass to Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, et al. because they were not leftists is to miss the bigger picture. What is at issue is not the "pathological" aspect of leftist revolution, but rather the bane that is the nation-state and its exercise of illegitimate power and authority - left or right.
As a study, it is troubling in that it is focused solely on Western thought. There is no consideration of Indigenous forms of governance. Similarly, it is largely a story of powerful white men, with little consideration or contemplation of dynamics such as race or gender or who even gets to decide what government is desirable. Ultimately, what Edelstein wrote without knowing it or acknowledging it is a history of power from above. Unfortunately, those who have always critiqued such power, such as anarchists, are mentioned only in passing, while others are absent entirely.
I am not trying to entirely pan the book (I'm giving it a very generous three stars here, after all). There is much that is of interest, but I also believe that to extract such information one must read it against the grain - ironic, as his reading of revolution is presented as doing just that.
I read it largely as a critique of the desire for progress and of the left. Many of the critiques are fair, but my concern is that they have been selectively applied. For example, Edelstein locates the emergence of the practice of "political terror" as being intrinsically linked to progress and leftist revolution via events in France. I would argue that all states practice political terror. What was slavery and Indigenous genocide in what became the U.S. if not political terror? What of conservative regimes such as Pinochet's throwing opponents out of helicopters into the ocean? Or that most institutionalized of terror: the Nazi holocaust? Those receive no mention (aside from a claim they do not fit within the scope of study). To condemn Stalin is justified. But to give a pass to Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, et al. because they were not leftists is to miss the bigger picture. What is at issue is not the "pathological" aspect of leftist revolution, but rather the bane that is the nation-state and its exercise of illegitimate power and authority - left or right.
As a study, it is troubling in that it is focused solely on Western thought. There is no consideration of Indigenous forms of governance. Similarly, it is largely a story of powerful white men, with little consideration or contemplation of dynamics such as race or gender or who even gets to decide what government is desirable. Ultimately, what Edelstein wrote without knowing it or acknowledging it is a history of power from above. Unfortunately, those who have always critiqued such power, such as anarchists, are mentioned only in passing, while others are absent entirely.
I am not trying to entirely pan the book (I'm giving it a very generous three stars here, after all). There is much that is of interest, but I also believe that to extract such information one must read it against the grain - ironic, as his reading of revolution is presented as doing just that.
August 28, 2025
At the start a bit Pocockian, at the end mostly a standard story of the Russian revolution (as known in English-language literature), but the middle section, on early modern period and the French revolution, is easily worth the price of admission. Very insightful look at the relations between political theory and the words used to express it.
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