Dan Edelstein’s The Revolution to Come opens with a joke. A Communist agitator promises the crowd that “come the Revolution, everyone will eat strawberries and cream.” A voice protests: “But what if I don’t like strawberries and cream?” The reply: “Come the Revolution, everyone will like strawberries and cream.” Edelstein doesn’t tell it to ridicule revolution, but to chart its transformation. In 1776, the joke would have made little sense; by 1924, it was practically doctrine.
“Come the Revolution, everyone will like strawberries and cream.”
This is not a history of revolutions, but of the idea of revolution. For Edelstein, how revolution is imagined depends on how historical time is conceived. In the ancient world, history was cyclical. Revolution was stasis: collapse, fratricide, the return of chaos. In The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides recounts civil war breaking out in Corcyra, spiralling into atrocity and madness. “Revolutions were to be feared, not fomented.”1
This classical model persisted. Polybius’ theory of anacyclosis, a doomed sequence of regime types, was revived in early modern Europe, not least through translations that recast it as “revolution.” The term shifted, acquiring semantic instability. After the execution of Charles I, the English republic was widely seen not as innovation, but as a turning of the wheel. By 1660, the wheel had turned again. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was celebrated for its stability, not its rupture.2
It is only with the Enlightenment that revolution becomes directional. Not liberalism as such, but the idea of progress: history as a process, society as improvable, the future as something to be made. Turgot and Condorcet reconceive revolution as the lever of human perfectibility. “The Enlightenment didn’t merely give revolution new goals; it gave it a new temporality.”3 Condorcet, writing while hunted by the Terror, imagines reason itself advancing through revolution.4
Edelstein’s reading of the eighteenth century is assured. He shows how the American founders, still wary of the passions, struggled to reconcile liberty with order. John Adams feared Greek-style civil war. Thomas Paine, by contrast, revelled in rupture. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Revolution becomes rebirth, not rotation.5
But progress comes at a price. Once revolution is the mechanism of history, it cannot fail. “If the people must be unified for the revolution to succeed, then unity cannot be optional.” Dissent becomes heresy. The guillotine does not discriminate by class or creed; it enforces temporal alignment. Edelstein argues that the Revolution’s logic requires unanimity—not just over the present, but the future. “It was not disagreement per se that became intolerable, but disagreement about the future.”
The same pattern reappears in Russia. Edelstein’s account of Bolshevism is not new, but it is effective. The revolution becomes permanent, the party becomes history’s vanguard, Trotsky declares the party is always right. The future hardens into dogma. If the people do not fit the future, so much the worse for the people.6
To a Marxist reader, this is familiar ground. But Edelstein’s account is almost entirely idealist. Revolutions unfold in texts and metaphors; the contradictions of capital, the dynamics of class, the machinery of empire are largely absent. Factories and peasant communes appear only as footnotes. The Haitian Revolution is barely touched. The global counterrevolution is missing altogether. This is intellectual history in the tradition of Pocock and Skinner—not Marx, not Luxemburg, not Fanon.
Yet Edelstein’s diagnosis of the revolutionary demand for unity remains one of the book’s most chilling insights. His chapter on 1830 shows how liberal disappointment fed the emergence of socialism: the revolution no longer as a constitutional bargain, but a promise of emancipation.7
Edelstein’s focus is overwhelmingly European. The non-European world appears only intermittently. Iran is a case in point. He sees the 1979 Islamic Revolution as structurally continuous with Leninism: theocratic rhetoric masks a vanguardist apparatus. “A supreme leader determined the correct meaning of revolution and employed revolutionary guards to arrest or harass those who disagreed.” The revolution, though Islamic in content, retained the structural form of modernity’s earlier revolutions—centralised, totalising, and future-bound.
Algeria’s absence is more than an oversight, it’s symptomatic of a wider problem. Edelstein might have considered the 1954–62 revolution: mass mobilisation, anti-colonial war, the FLN’s seizure of the post-independence state. What begins as national liberation ends with one-party rule. The revolutionary dialectic does not dissolve with the end of empire.
Edelstein’s second non-European case is the wave of post-Soviet “colour revolutions”—Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan—often peaceful, often liberal, often short-lived. He is sceptical of their durability. “Revolutions since 2011 have tended to be less velvet and more violent.” The return of violence, he suggests, is not a betrayal of revolution, but a consequence of its unresolved temporality.
In his final chapters, Edelstein turns to the present. Revolution may be disenfranchised, but not discredited. “The next revolution may not come with barricades, but with likes, retweets, and algorithmic consensus.” The form has changed; the imperative remains. The future is still invoked as necessity. What is lost is any space for dissent.
But if Edelstein leaves us in the shadow of enforced consensus, Enzo Traverso begins from the debris of rupture. Revolution: An Intellectual History https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2783-revolutionoffers a necessary counterpoint, less a history of ideas than a montage of images, affects, and unfinished struggles. Where Edelstein traces a concept across texts, Traverso reconstructs an entire symbolic universe. He insists that revolutions are not just ideas, but images: barricades, locomotives, crowds, martyred bodies, red flags, shattered monuments. For Traverso, the barricade is not just a tactic but a visual emblem of autonomy, one that reappears, transfigured, from 1830 to 1968. Counter-revolution, too, appears here not as opposition, but as the revolution’s dialectical twin—“its spectre and condition.” The Thermidor, the White Armies, Pinochet: all part of the cycle.
Traverso’s method is non-linear, dialectical. His chapters juxtapose concepts with historical tableaux: the railway as acceleration; the revolutionary body as both liberated and animalised; the Commune as a vanished alternative. “Revolutions are events that break the continuity of history, creating a before and an after,” Traverso writes, “but they are also carriers of memory.”8
“Revolutions are events that break the continuity of history, creating a before and an after,”
Traverso is also more explicitly Marxist. He insists on the material underpinnings of revolutionary upheaval: economic crisis, class antagonism, imperial violence. But he does not treat these as deterministic. “Revolutions are historical experiences,” he notes, “not philosophical ideas or ideological representations.”9 They fail as often as they succeed. But they leave behind a political and affective archive—grief songs, slogans, fallen comrades, monuments destroyed and rebuilt Without them, the very concept of emancipation is impoverished.
Traverso’s scope is global. Haiti, Algeria, Vietnam, Latin America, these are not peripheral cases, but central episodes. His discussion of the Haitian Revolution recovers its radicalism from the margins of Enlightenment historiography. “The Haitian Revolution was the inaugural moment of the modern black world.”10 It is not a footnote to 1789, but a radicalisation of its premises.
Read together, Edelstein and Traverso offer complementary perspectives. Edelstein explains how the idea of revolution became an instrument of coercive futurity. Traverso shows how revolutionary experience created symbols, memories, possibilities. One cautions against unanimity; the other insists on contradiction.
If revolution is to remain a political category, it must accommodate plurality, not as liberal tolerance, but as structure. The task for the left is not to repeat the past, but to reckon with it. Traverso reminds us that revolutions leave behind a sedimented archive—affective, material, symbolic. Edelstein warns us how easily those archives can be conscripted into unanimity.
But neither author fully accounts for the gendered revolts that have unsettled revolutionary form itself. From Petrograd’s women textile workers to Argentina’s pañuelazo, feminist uprisings have not simply demanded inclusion—they have redefined the very terms of rupture. Nor do they fully face the ecological horizon: a world of fire and flood where the terrain of struggle is planetary, and the urgency no longer waits on historical sequence.
From Palestine solidarity to insurgent climate occupations, today’s movements offer not a unified programme but a fractured, federated refusal. This is not pluralism as policy memo, but as antagonism: multiple struggles with no central committee, no single line. They reject algorithmic consensus and inherited scripts. The pluralist future will not be optimised, it will be struggled into being by feminists, ecologists, workers, and all those refused entry into history’s official scripts.
The joke still lands. But now we know: not everyone likes strawberries and cream. Only in that refusal, of consensus, of coercive futures, of being told what we must like, can revolution begin again.
FOOTNOTES
- Thucydides’ account of civil war in Corcyra becomes Edelstein’s archetype of the classical revolution: chaotic, factional, and cyclical. The point is not merely historical, but structural—stasis is the political form of breakdown in a closed temporal system. ↩︎
- Polybius’ anacyclosis entered English via translations that equated it with “revolution,” even though the Greek implies cyclical return rather than rupture. Edelstein shows how this shift in language quietly laid the ground for a modern, directional sense of revolution. ↩︎
- Enlightenment thinkers like Turgot and Condorcet reconceived history as a rational sequence of improvement. This secularisation of eschatology gave revolution its modern arc: no longer a calamity, but a vehicle. ↩︎
- “The perfectibility of man is truly indefinite” comes from Condorcet’s Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1794). Edelstein treats this not as naïve utopianism but as the cornerstone of a new, future-oriented revolutionary politics. ↩︎
- Adams remained attached to classical republicanism and wary of mass mobilisation. He saw popular passions as inherently destabilising, a position that rendered him an uneasy revolutionary at best. ↩︎
- Trotsky’s infamous remark appears in The New Course (1924). It encapsulates the logic Edelstein critiques: that once the party claims to embody the future, dissent becomes treason. ↩︎
- “Horizon of expectation” is borrowed from Reinhart Koselleck. Edelstein uses it to describe how post-1830 political culture was shaped not by what was, but by what had been promised. ↩︎
- Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History, Chapter 1. ↩︎
- Traverso, ibid., Chapter 3. ↩︎
- Traverso, ibid., Chapter 5. ↩︎
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