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high politics, but the traditionalists will hardly rejoice, for if Marx has
vanished from the footnotes along with Weber and Parsons, they have
been replaced by Foucault, Derrida, and all the usual suspects from the
French generation of 1968. Studies of revolution have not reverted to
traditional considerations of great men and ideas. Now they tend to fo–
cus on themes like "the poetics of power" and "the representation of
authority. "
It
is easy to mock and bemoan these developments. The "new cul–
tural history" (the title of an influential recent collection edited by Lynn
Hunt) has inherited much of the fearful opacity of contemporary literary
criticism. Worse, just as Jacques Derrida can spend an entire lecture dis–
cussing the title of the lecture, the new cultural historians frequently de–
vote half a book to questioning the parameters of the subject treated in
the other half, whether or not these qualms are appropriate. The new
movement also lends itself all too easily to a "politically correct" agenda,
notably the Foucauldian desire to expose everything from clothing and
eating habits to parades and advertisements as part of a fearsome
"apparatus" of gender, class, and racial oppression.
Yet this is not the whole story. While the "new social history" had
many strengths, its practitioners never wholly broke away from Fernand
Braudel's unfortunate dismissal of political and intellectual ferment as
mere "foam" drifting above more significant layers of social and geo–
graphical reality. The limits of this approach became painfully clear when
applied to explosive political events such as the French Revolution,
where the "foam" proved corrosive indeed to the underlying strata. By
treating political language with the consideration it deserves, the new
cultural history has had a liberating effect on many historical fields , not
least on the study of the French Revolution itself
Despite the publishing orgy of the recent bicentennial, which left at
least two thousand books washed up on library shelves, the study of the
Revolution has long been in need of such new approaches. Until a gen–
eration ago, most historians clung to the petrified view that 1789 had its
origins in class conflict between a declining aristocracy and a rising bour–
geoisie. Since then, a revisionist school has demolished the empirical basis
for this interpretation with great effectiveness but failed to produce a
convincing substitute. Nor did the new social history prove useful in this
regard. It was the self-proclaimed "philosophical historian" Franc;:ois
Furet who began the process of reconstruction by showing, convinc–
ingly, that the true "rupture" in 1789 occurred not in France's social
structure, but in the realm of ideas, as a new, democratic political culture
was erected over the scattered debris of divine-right monarchy. Furet,
however, did not himself speculate as to the origins of this new political
culture. Now, a number of historians - mostly associated with "the new
