In Defence Of The Terror - Liberty Or Death In The French Revolution

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In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution - Sophie Wahnich and Slavoj Zizek
Sophie Wahnich and Slavoj Zizek
Author: Slavoj Zizek
File type: pdf
Publisher: Verso Books
Year: 2012
Language: English
ISBN: 1844678628
Time Added: Wed Feb 13 2019 13:58:54 GMT+0300 (MSK)
Author: Slavoj Zizek
File type: pdf
Size: 4 mb
City:
Pages: 141
Id: 888076
Time Modified: Wed Feb 13 2019 13:58:54 GMT+0300 (MSK)
Extension: pdf
Bibtex: "Sophie Wahnich and Slavoj Zizek",
"In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in the French Revolution"
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Provocative reassessment of the Great Terror as a price worth paying. For two hundred years after the French Revolution, the Republican tradition celebrated the execution of princes and aristocrats, defending the Terror that the Revolution inflicted upon on its enemies. But recent decades have brought a marked change in sensibility. The Revolution is no longer judged in terms of historical necessity but rather by “timeless” standards of morality. In this succinct essay, Sophie Wahnich explains how, contrary to prevailing interpretations, the institution of Terror sought to put a brake on legitimate popular violence—in Danton's words, to “be terrible so as to spare the people the need to be so”—and was subsequently subsumed in a logic of war. The Terror was “a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty, the only alternatives being to defeat tyranny or die for liberty.”