Chicago (2025) p/b 140pp £18 (ISBN 9780226843056)
The surprising thing about this book is the claim that there were no revolutions in the ancient world; the unsurprising thing that some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers responded to the changes of their own day as if there had been. To a non-classicist like the present reviewer, events such as the expulsion of the Etruscan kings from Rome, the Macedonian takeover of the Greek city states, the replacement of the Roman Republic by the Roman Empire, and the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity look like revolutions. Sir Ronald Syme’s Roman Revolution and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall confirm him in this impression.
Yet the opening sentence of Professor Leonard’s book says that ‘Revolution, as it is understood today, despite the term’s Latin etymology, arguably did not exist in Greco-Roman antiquity’ (p. 1). Surely, she is setting the bar too high. Does she mean that political and ideological changes do not count? ‘Political thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Polybius [she says] ... mapped alternations in existing political constitutions rather than offering transfomation’ (p.1). Presumably, she believes that a revolution can be said to have happened only when the socio-economic foundations of a polity have changed. If unprivileged people go on scratching the soil, then no ‘revolution’ has taken place. If primitive accumulation has not given way even to feudalism, let alone to capitalism, socialism, and communism, ‘revolution’ lies in the future. By these criteria, there were indeed no revolutions prior to Newcomen’s invention of the steam engine, James Watt’s addition of the separate condenser, and the beginnings of the replacement of people’s labour by the work of machines. Even then, the validity of the word ‘revolution’ would remain open to doubt, for ‘transformation’ took centuries to reach the greater part of the world. Indeed, one might argue that because a higher proportion of the inhabitants of Russia were peasants in 1927 than in 1913, even the Russian ‘revolutions’ of 1917 were no such thing and revolution can be allowed to have begun in Russia only after Stalin set his ‘Great Turn’ under way in 1929.
In short, the author’s premiss seems to the present reviewer to be shaky. Revolutions did take place in the ancient world. Even if they did not, however, it is no surprise that the modern thinkers who are at the centre of the author’s attention (mainly Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche) looked to the ancient world for ways of contextualising the revolutions they lived through in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The ancient world was what they knew about. Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche (especially Nietzsche) were all trained in Latin and Greek. Until at least the end of the nineteenth century, the intellectual framework into which most highly educated people slotted their understanding of the world tended to be classical.
Apart from the introduction and conclusion, Professor Leonard’s book has three chapters. The first, ‘Time’, contextualizes the innovative French Revolutionary calendar of the early 1790s. The second, ‘Genre’, explains how the modern analysts at the centre of the author’s attention saw the changes of their day in terms of ancient dramatic art. The third, ‘Fraternity’, traces interactions between the French Revolutionary use of the term and the significance of ‘brotherhood’ for the ancients.
All three chapters are thought-provoking, but in view of the intellectual formation of the author’s main thinkers, all of them say more or less what one would expect. What would be more interesting to know is whether later thinkers than those on whom the author concentrates continued to interpret events through the lens provided by the classical world. Lenin distinguished himself in Latin and Greek at his classical gymnasium. Except for a few short years at the end of his life, all he did as an adult was think. His collected works fill more than fifty volumes. To what extent did he set his thinking in the context of his classical training? Perhaps Professor Leonard will tell us in a second volume.
David Saunders
Professor of the History of the Russian Empire, Newcastle University