The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution

by Dan Edelstein

Natural right—the idea that there is a collection of laws and rights based not on custom or belief but that are “natural” in origin—is typically associated with liberal politics and freedom. In The Terror of Natural Right , Dan Edelstein argues that the revolutionaries used the natural right concept of the “enemy of the human race”—an individual who has transgressed the laws of nature and must be executed without judicial formalities—to authorize three-quarters of the deaths during the Terror. Edelstein further contends that the Jacobins shared a political philosophy that he calls “natural republicanism,” which assumed that the natural state of society was a republic and that natural right provided its only acceptable laws. Ultimately, he proves that what we call the Terror was in fact only one facet of the republican theory that prevailed from Louis’s trial until the fall of Robespierre. A highly original work of historical analysis, political theory, literary criticism, and intellectual history, The Terror of Natural Right challenges prevailing assumptions of the Terror to offer a new perspective on the Revolutionary period.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, France, French Revolution, Politics, European History, Philosophy

350 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting study of radical Jacobin thought as a coherent apparatus based upon French understanding of natural law rooted in Montesquieu and various other French philosophes drawing upon fictional and contemporary proto-anthropological accounts of "golden ages" of virtue and republics. Edelstein uses this understanding to elucidate the Jacobin democratic anti-constitutionalism as well as reliance upon "republican institutions" like the Cult of the Supreme Being.

Edelstein, in dealing with concepts of ideology, unfortunately opposes the Marxist school of historiography and draws upon prime revisionist thinkers like Furet and Schama. The work would benefit instead from an Althusserian reading that contextualizes these ideological apparatuses as a radical bourgeois understanding of morality and struggle for a new social order. Book unfortunately ends with a conclusion that accepts the Arendt-esque "totalitarian" school, making an identity between Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR in terms of judicial policy that allegedly makes similar use of concepts like "outlawry" and political "justice."

[Aldo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply, the best book I have ever read, part history, part philosophy, part political theory, part French language analysis, this book unlocked a whole new way of thinking about the history of ideas.

[Sean Chick · Rating 2 out of 5]

The author has an interesting point, but he fails to connect some of his thoughts, such as how Voltaire's ideas influenced the rise of the terror. It also hurts that the book is poorly written.

[Roy Rogers · Rating 3 out of 5]

smart, readable but edelstein pushes his argument too far.

[Mills College Library]

944.044 E219 2009