Low Information Voter on Nostr: Peace! FWIW, I agree with both of you. History is a summation of human choices, but ...
Peace!
FWIW, I agree with both of you. History is a summation of human choices, but those choices are always limited; by culture, by available information, and by material circumstances.
I see the French Revolution as the quintessential failure of courage and high ideals to overcome the deeply damaged culture of late-Bourbon France.
The revolutionaries' rural great-grandparents had lived in largely self-governing villages with little exposure to bureaucracy and few positive experiences of hierarchy; but the revolutionaries either no longer had or did not value this cultural toolkit for organising human relations and instead expanded the Ancien Regime's hierarchical bureacracy into the model for their new State.
FWIW, I agree with both of you. History is a summation of human choices, but those choices are always limited; by culture, by available information, and by material circumstances.
I see the French Revolution as the quintessential failure of courage and high ideals to overcome the deeply damaged culture of late-Bourbon France.
The revolutionaries' rural great-grandparents had lived in largely self-governing villages with little exposure to bureaucracy and few positive experiences of hierarchy; but the revolutionaries either no longer had or did not value this cultural toolkit for organising human relations and instead expanded the Ancien Regime's hierarchical bureacracy into the model for their new State.