What is the difference between a revolution and the failure of a state or the collapse of an empire? Only that in a revolution, many men, women, and children have the emotional energy to imagine a better future and put lots of creative work into trying to make it so.
~ Rebecca L. Spang via The Atlantic
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When dinner from a restaurant replaces dinner in a restaurant, we lose track of all the other people who are dining as well. Part of the transformation of daily life wrought by Amazon and online retailing more generally, this hyper-individualization of consumption may bring a new political revolution as well.
~ Rebecca L. Spang via The Atlantic
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If one major lesson of the French Revolution is that people make history, another is that it rarely turns out as planned.
~ Rebecca L. Spang via The Atlantic
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For real structural change, Americans will need to look not behind them to vanished certainties but ahead to uncertain possibilities.
~ 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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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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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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