In the summer of 1789, as peasants attacked chateaus and revolutionaries vowed to “abolish privilege,” many members of the elite felt that their world had suddenly fallen apart. In truth, it had been disintegrating for decades. Today, as in the 1790s, an old order is ending in convulsions.
~ Rebecca L. Spang via The Atlantic
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If brick-and-mortar restaurants become mere storefronts for delivery services, they will cease to be public spaces in any sense of the term.
~ Rebecca L. Spang via The Atlantic
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Revolutionary events, those that result in sustained transformations of society, are not made by strategic plan. They do not have bullet-pointed deliverables and clear metrics of success. If they did, they would be business as usual, not a revolution.
~ Rebecca L. Spang via The Atlantic
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If the United States is in the middle of a new American revolution, months and probably years will pass before its effects or causes are fully discerned. Even when structures are unstable and existing institutions lack legitimacy, “old regimes” never fall apart neatly and completely—they have to be taken apart piece by piece.
~ Rebecca L. Spang via The Atlantic
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The most timeless and emancipatory lesson of the French Revolution is that people make history.
~ Rebecca L. Spang via The Atlantic
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The protocols and norms that emerged in the aftermath of 18th-century revolutions — the inviolability of private property, the abstract idea of the rights-bearing individual, the fiscal-military nation-state — are today under attack as forms of privilege themselves.
~ Rebecca L. Spang via The Atlantic
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Revolutions happen when the distinct concerns of many different groups are for a time more or less soldered together—and this coming together is not planned in advance, but produced largely by chance.
~ Rebecca L. Spang via The Atlantic
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