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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Revolutions dress up in the costumes and rhetoric of the past for the same reason that, as Karl Marx once asserted, people learning a new language begin by translating word for word from a language already known to them.
~ 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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The United States of America can implode under external pressure and its own grave contradictions, or it can be reimagined and repurposed.
~ 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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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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