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History of European Ideas 31 (2005) 491–508

www.elsevier.com/locate/histeuroideas

Illusions of revolution: Franc- ois Furet’s

critique of Marx
Kathryn MacVarish
History Department, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9QN, UK
Available online 1 June 2005

Abstract

In this article it will be argued that Franc- ois Furet’s attempt in Interpreting the French
Revolution to provide a conceptual history of the French Revolution through a synthesis of
Tocqueville and Cochin’s historical and sociological accounts fails methodologically. It does
so in two ways: Firstly, in its aim to distinguish between conceptual, explanatory history and
empirical, narrative history, and secondly, in its distinction between revolution as process and
revolution as act. Drawing on Claude Lefort and Paul Ricoeur’s interventions in the
historiographical debate, I demonstrate that these seemingly methodological concerns, conceal
a deeper historical and political question concerning the nature of the ‘event’ of revolution. In
response to Furet’s oblique turn to Hegel in his later work, this article traces the nature of the
‘conceptual inversion’ Furet claims to find in Hegel and Marx’s accounts of the French
Revolution. In relation to Marx, it is argued that Furet’s critique fails to capture the
allegorical nature of the political in Marx’s thought, and underplays the significance of
revolution as the basis for both the separation of the social and the political and their
attempted unity. The article ends with some remarks on the importance of language and
culture in rethinking the relationship between Hegel and Marx.
r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

In the introduction to an edited volume of Marx’s writings on the French

Revolution, Franc- ois Furet proposes that there is a permanent tension throughout
Marx’s work between two conceptions of the relationship between the state and civil
society. Whilst this tension is seen most clearly between the early writings on the one

E-mail address: k.a.macvarish@sussex.ac.uk.

0191-6599/$ - see front matter r 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2005.04.001
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492 K. MacVarish / History of European Ideas 31 (2005) 491–508

hand, On the Jewish Question, The Holy Family, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of
Right: Introduction, and The German Ideology on the other, Furet claims that a
systematic failure characterises Marx’s work as a whole; a failure to conceptualise
the political.1 This failure generates, he argues, certain blind spots in Marx’s analysis
of the French Revolution. Furthermore, Hegel’s interpretation, which Furet
supposes to have been inverted by Marx, succeeds as a philosophical account of
the Revolution at precisely those moments when the blind spots in Marx’s analysis
are most apparent.2 Hegel’s account in the Phenomenology of Spirit where the
French Revolution appears at the end of Chapter VI Section B entitled Self-alienated
Spirit. Culture provides, according to Furet, ‘a veritable history’ of the French
Enlightenment and French Revolution, albeit ‘cast in a speculative mode’;3 a history
offering ‘a chronology of the working of spirit infinitely more precise than the
chronology of the development of productive forces.’4 In contrast, Marx is ‘a
prisoner to the idea of the subordination of politics to civil society, unable to
conceive of the autonomy of politics under any other form than that of illusion’,5
furthermore ‘it is through Marx that the precedence of the social over the political
acquired its speculative dimension.’6
Notwithstanding the considerable influence of Furet’s revisionism and a renewed
attention to the language of revolutionary politics and political culture indebted to
Furet’s approach within Anglo-American historical scholarship on the French
Revolution, the speculative scope of Furet’s work combined with its overtly political
agenda has rarely found favour among historians.7 Whilst Furet himself writes

1
In this, Furet continues the criticism initially levelled at the French Marxist left in the1970s in the light
of the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago for its failure to develop a systematic critique of
Stalinism revealing its shared logic with Fascism. This failure and Marxism’s resistance to totalitarianism
as an explanatory concept was atributed to the lack of a theory of the state and ultimately, of the political.
See Claude Lefort, ‘The Logic of Totalitarianism’ in The Political Forms of Modern Society, ed. John B.
Thompson, Polity Press, 1986 p. 277. See also the special editions of Esprit ‘Retour du politique’, July/
August 1976 and ‘Révolution et totalitarisme’, September 1976 which include contributions by Claude
Lefort, Marcel Gauchet, Franc- ois Furet, and Marc Richir among others. Furet also echoes the claims
made by Hannah Arendt and more recently Jacques Derrida, that Marx’s analysis of the political, of the
state and political institutions, is ultimately grounded in a social ontology of labour (Arendt) or a ‘pre-
deconstructive ontology’ of social life (Derrida). Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, The University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 1998; Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, (trans. Peggy Kamuf), Routledge,
London, 1994.
2
Franc- ois Furet, Marx and the French Revolution, (trans. Deborah Kan Furet), University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1988, p. 65.
3
ibid., p. 60.
4
ibid., p. 59.
5
ibid., p. 30.
6
ibid., p. 11.
7
For example, Michel Scott Christofferson accuses Furet of breaching the ‘professional historians’ most
basic admonitions’ in ‘substituting history for historiography and the politics of interpretation for
interpretation itself, thereby lodging, as much as any historian before him, contemporary politics in the
heart of the Revolution’s history.’ M. S. Christofferson, ‘An Antitotalitarian History of the French
Revolution: Franc- ois Furet’s Penser la Révolution franc- aise in the Intellectual Politics of the Late 1970s’,
French Historical Studies, Vol. 22, No. 4, Fall 1999, p. 595. By invoking these disciplinary codes of conduct
Christofferson forecloses the question of the grounds on which these distinctions are made.
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extensively about the importance of various 19th-century thinkers, including

Tocqueville, Michelet, Quinet, Guizot and Marx, to a re-evaluation of the history
and historiography of the French Revolution, few have followed these leads and
Furet’s debt to Hegel remains unexamined.8 Yet Furet often refers to his own
work as ‘philosophical history’ or ‘conceptual history’, and it is of little surprise
that Hegel and Marx feature, explicitly or implicitly, in many of his considerations of
the history of the French Revolution, for as Adorno remarks, ‘[i]n Hegel and Marx,
the philosophy of history comes as close to historiography as historiography itself’9
and more specifically, ‘The Phenomenology outlines a virtual historiography of
Spirit’.10

A question of method

These reflections on Hegel and Marx continue the methodological, historiogra-

phical and political concerns of Furet’s earlier critique of Marxist and Republican
historiography in Interpreting the French Revolution. In the essays collected in this
volume the ideas of ‘divestment’ and ‘distanciation’ are central to Furet’s
considerations on method. Furet’s project is defined as an attempt to analyse the
event of the Revolution from an intellectual distance in order to break the circle of
commemoration associated with both Marxist and republican historiography. In the
first essay ‘The Revolution is Over’ Furet claims that the fact that all historiography
‘whether of the Right or of the Left, royalist or republican, conservative or
Jacobin’11 has remained locked in a discourse of origins testifies to the unique role
that the Revolution has played both as the founding myth of the modern French
nation and in all efforts to think beyond it. Nevertheless, in this essay Furet identifies
the Marxist notion of ‘bourgeois revolution’ as the most persistent rationalisation of

8
One exception is Michael Mosher who, in his obituary to Furet, comments that ‘One finds the core idea
of Furet’s entire enterprise in paragraphs 5–7 of Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, itself a
condensation of the argument in The Phenomenology of Spirit’ Mosher concludes that ‘ywe must peer
behind the mask of Tocquevillian liberalism and consider the heritage that permits us to salute him [Furet]
as having been the most influential Hegelian writer of his generation.’ ‘On the Originality of Franc- ois
Furet: A Commemorative Note’ Political Theory, Vol. 26, No. 3, June 1998, p. 395. Contrast this with the
view expressed by Sunil Khilnani that Furet contributed to the efforts of French intellectuals in the 1980s
to recover an ‘indigenous and original tradition’ of French political philosophy. Arguing Revolution: The
Intellectual Left in Postwar France, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1993, p. 178.
9
Appropriately, these comments are made in the course of reflection on the significance of facts and
trends in the history of the French Revolution. See Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, (trans. E.B
Ashton), Routledge, London, 1973, p. 303.
10
Theodor Adorno, ‘Skoteinas, or How to Read Hegel’, in Hegel Three Studies, (trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholsen), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. 1993, p. 124. Adorno continues ‘It is although Hegel had hastily
tried to model his presentation on this, to philosophise as though one were writing history, as though
through one’s mode of thinking one could force the unity of the systematic and the historical that is
conceived in the dialectic.’ ibid., p. 124.
11
Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, (trans. Elborg Forster), Cambridge University Press, 1981,
p. 16.
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the revolution as an ‘objective break in the continuity of history’12 which merely

reproduces the ‘subjective’ discourse of the Revolution itself.
Within the orthodox Marxist analysis, both the gradual rise of the Third Estate
and the revolutionary break of 1789 are attributed to the same cause; the class
contradictions arising from the development of capitalism.13 Marxist historiography,
according to Furet, does not simply reproduce the discourse of Revolution, it makes
the Revolution speak the task that history has assigned it; the task of ushering in
capitalism through the agency of the bourgeoisie. What passes for Marxist
‘rationalisation’ and conceptual analysis of the Revolution (the transition from
feudalism to capitalism) in the concept of ‘bourgeois revolution’ simply masks an
approach which ‘amounts to no more than joining an analysis of causes carried out
in the economic and social mode to a narrative of events written in the political and
ideological mode.’14 In confusing causal explanation and narrative, the history of the
Revolution is written as if the narrative of events (starting in 1787 or 1789 and ending
in 9 Thermidor or 18 Brumaire) and the long term causes and outcomes coincide
with, and thus belong to, the same explanatory schema. Furet argues that in the case
of Marxist historiography the concept of ‘bourgeois revolution’ achieves this collapse
in levels of analysis since it unites both the historical content of the Revolution and
the historical agent in the narrative of the rise of capitalism and the bourgeoisie.
In an effort to avoid this persistent conflation of long-term causes and the details
of events, Furet draws a methodological distinction between two modes of historical
understanding or genres. These correspond to two different objects of analysis: the
Revolution as historical process (a set of causes and effects or ‘Revolution-as-
content’) and the Revolution as a mode of change (a specific dynamic of collective
action or ‘Revolution-as-mode’).15 Furet then identifies two historical analyses
which seem to correspond to the two modes of understanding identified above:
Tocqueville’s analysis of the continuity between the ancien régime and the
Revolution, and Cochin’s analysis of the ‘new mode of collective action’ that marks
the moment of innovation that defines the Revolution as ‘event’. However, the choice
of Tocqueville and Cochin marks a second methodological distinction pertaining to

12
ibid., p. 13.
13
A more detailed analysis of the dynamic of class forces in 18th-century France is offered in Furet’s
earlier essay ‘The Revolutionary Catachism’ (reproduced in Part II of Interpreting the French Revolution)
which delineates and compares three approaches to the history of the Revolution: the revolutionary
catechism; Tocqueville; and Cochin. This essay is primarily a response to the Marxist historiography of
Claude Mazauric and Albert Soboul, whose works Sur la Révolution franc- aise, (1970) (with an
introduction by Soboul) and La Societé franc- aise dans la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle, (1969) were, in
turn, responses to Furet and Denis Richet’s La Révolution franc- aise, (1965–1966).
14
Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, p. 13. The distinction Furet makes between causal and
narrative explanation is taken up and developed by Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur draws on both the methodology
of French historians (Annales) and the epistemological arguments made by analytical philosophers
concerning the nature of covering laws (Hempel) and theories of emplotment (W. Dray and Arthur
Danto). See chapter four ‘The Eclipse of Narrative’ and chapter five ‘The Defence of Narrative’ in Paul
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, (trans. K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer), University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1984.
15
Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, p. 18.
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the contrast between narrative and conceptual or explanatory history. Furet’s claim
is that narrative history, in its efforts to recapture the experience of the Revolution
and bring the events ‘back to life’, is unavoidably caught up in the Revolution’s self-
understanding and merely reflects the various positions staked out in the course of
the Revolution itself. In the midst of ‘event-orientated’ narrative historians, ‘both
Tocqueville and Cochin’s taste for conceptual history place them in a category by
themselves in the 19th and 20th century historiography’ of the Revolution.16 Guided
by an appreciation of the ‘strangeness’ of the revolutionary phenomenon, what is
most significant about Tocqueville’s analysis is not so much the thesis it advances but
rather its method;17 similarly, Cochin’s detachment from the ideology of the
revolution ‘gave him the intellectual advantage the concept has over emotion.’18
According to Furet, only a conceptual approach, such as Tocqueville’s and Cochin’s,
can achieve a separation between history as the narrative of the historian and history
as the ‘objective’ explanation of events, and the critical distance required to reveal
the ‘gulf between the Revolution’s true outcome and the revolutionaries’
intentions.’19 Furet’s claim is that the Marxist fallacy concerning the ‘objective
break’ is the fallacy of the Revolution itself. Accordingly, any conceptualisation of
the history of the Revolution has to penetrate the ephemera of the Revolution’s self-
presentation and challenge both the experience and perception of the revolutionaries
that the Revolution affected a radical transformation. For Furet, this critique should
begin by asking Tocqueville’s question ‘what if the discourse about a radical break
reflects no more than the illusion of change?’20

Revolution as content and mode

In contrast to the Revolution’s optical illusion concerning its break with the past
and a recasting of the history of its origins, Tocqueville aims to foreground the real
causes of the Revolution and to stress the institutional continuity between pre- and
post-revolutionary societies whilst also drawing attention to the difficulties of such
an approach since ‘when great revolutions are successful their causes cease to exist,
and the very fact of their success has made them incomprehensible.’21 Thus, although
16
ibid., p. 195.
17
ibid., p. 195.
18
ibid., p. 194.
19
ibid., p. 16.
20
ibid., p. 17.
21
Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, (trans. Stuart Gilbert), Doubleday,
New York, 1983, p. 5. However, like Furet, Tocqueville stresses the timeliness of his own time as the point
from which to comprehend the truth of history free of the illusions of the event: ‘ytoday we are in a
position to see this memorable event in its true perspective and pass judgement on it.’ ibid., p. 5. The sense
of temporality in Tocqueville’s work might be less clear than the above suggests, Reinhart Koselleck
describes Tocqueville’s work as ‘heavy with the suspense of the modern breaking free of the continuity of
an earlier mode of time’, and quotes Tocqueville from Democracy in America, ‘As the past has ceased to
throw its light upon the future, the mind of man wanders in obscurity.’ R. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the
Semantics of Historical Time (trans. Keith Tribe), MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1985, p. 27.
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Tocqueville places considerable emphasis on the short term causes of the cultural
revolution of the 1750s onwards and the rise of an intelligentsia deprived of political
power, the Revolution still has to be treated as an extensive parenthesis. Instead, the
causes of the Revolution are to be sought in the long term, protracted
democratisation of the gentry and the rise of the Third Estate within the ancien
régime which is itself overcome as the democratic principle gains ascendancy over the
aristocratic principle within the framework of the absolutist state. The shift in the
relationship between civil society and the state, the drive towards equality of
conditions (democracy) and governmental centralisation constitute the main themes
of his narrative such that Louis XIV links up with Napoleon in the lineage of cause
and effect of the Revolution. Far from bringing about the overthrow of the ancien
régime, Tocqueville claims that the Revolution merely brought to consciousness the
fact that the ancien régime had already died. The successful Revolution conjures up
the ghost of the ancien régime in order to name it and provide itself with a myth of
origin. But having identified the long term causes of the French Revolution, the
‘virus’ to be found in modern Revolutions, which Tocqueville concedes ‘now has a
progeny everywhere in the civilised world’, continues to elude his powers of analysis:
I am exhausting my mind trying to conceive a clear notion of this object and
seeking a way to depict it properly. Independently of all that can be explained
about the French Revolution, there is something unexplained in its spirit and in
its acts. I can sense the presence of this unknown object but despite all my efforts I
cannot lift the veil that covers it. I can palpate it as through a foreign body that
prevents me from grasping it or even seeing it.22
Tocqueville’s attempt to separate the causes and outcome of the Revolution from
the event of revolution reveals that there is something in the revolutionary
phenomenon that was not subservient to the logic of cause and effect; that, as Furet
goes on to argue, was ‘largely independent of the situation that preceded it, and
therefore had its own consequences.’23
Furet turns to the late 19th-century sociologist Augustin Cochin to supplement
Tocqueville’s account of the ‘revolution as content’ with an analysis of the
unprecedented ideological mode of social action that defines the novelty of the
revolution as event. Although Tocqueville in Book Three of The Old Régime and the
French Revolution emphasised the importance of the philosophes in the construction
of the abstract language of revolutionary discourse, the development of a
‘democratic state of mind’ under the ancien régime was nevertheless presented as
the result of the gradual development of real social and economic equality (even if
this relationship between democratic attitudes and the contradictions in civil society
between the nobility and the third estate could only be said to ‘coincide’ in 1788).
22
Letter to Kergolay 16 May 1858, Ouervres Complètes, Vol. XIII, 2, Gallimard, 1977, p. 337–338. The
second volume of The Old Regime and the French Revolution never appeared despite repeated attempts to
address the question of the Revolution. However, Furet finds traces in the ‘Fragments and unpublished
notes about the Revolution’ an interest and understanding of revolutionary ideology. Furet, Interpreting
the French Revolution, p. 160–1.
23
Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, p. 23.
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Influenced by Durkheim’s notion of collective representation, Cochin’s sociological

analysis of abstract equality does not attempt to discover its conditions of emergence
in the development of equality in social and economic life, however conceived,
rather, it attempts to analyse the abstraction of the philosophical societies’ notion of
equality as itself a social phenomenon. Cochin’s own research on the emergence of
philosophical societies (literary circles, Masonic lodges, academies, patriotic clubs,
musées), and in particular freemasonry in Brittany and Burgundy during the 18th
century, concluded that they were prefigurations of the type of democracy
Jacobinism would inaugurate with the Revolution.24 The characteristic feature of
the philosophical societies was that, in contrast to the corporate principle of
sociability based upon interest, the condition of membership required the loss of
distinction and real social existence in the name of the establishment of an abstract
equality among individuals. In effecting this shift from the principle of ‘esprit de
corps’ to ‘esprit de société’25 the philosophical societies fostered the beliefs and myths
essential to the dynamic of Jacobinism—the belief that power and society were one,
the mythical identity of the people with power, and the myth of pure democracy. For
Cochin, the events of 1789–1794 trace the increased influence of the philosophical
societies from the contradictions inherent in the voting procedures for the elections
of the revived Estates General in 1789 that enabled the philosophical societies to act
as a ‘substitute for collective experience and for non-existent public competition’26 to
the seizure of political power under the sign of the people, as power was vacated and
events pressed up against the limits of the old legitimacy.
While Cochin’s analysis of the philosophical societies may be challenged on
empirical grounds,27 it is the analysis of the ideology of Jacobinism rather than its
genesis, that Furet finds so persuasive. For Furet, the strength of Cochin’s history
lies in its refusal to take Jacobin claims of popular participation literally. Instead,
Jacobinism is portrayed as an imaginary discourse of power which assumed
complete control over society through the symbolic appropriation of the people’s
will. Developing Cochin’s analysis of the ideological machinery of Jacobinism, Furet
shows how the Jacobin imaginary centres on the idea of ‘the people’ as the figure of
the truth of history. We say ‘figure’ because it is primarily a rhetorical reality. The
paradox at the heart of the revolutionary idea of the people is that the people can
only be held to be the universal historic agent in so far as they are distinguished from
the empirical popular masses and are held to be indivisible. Revolutionary power, as
Claude Lefort explains in an essay on Furet, is the people, however, ‘as the people

24
Augustin Cochin, La Campagne électorale de 1789 en Bourgogne in Les Sociétés de Pensée et la
Démoctratie, Études d’Histoire Révolutionnaire, Plon-Nourrit, Paris, 1924, pp. 235–282 and Les Sociétés de
Pensée et la Révolution en Bretagne (1788– 1789), 2 Vols, Champion, Paris, 1925.
25
Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, p. 187.
26
ibid., p. 184.
27
For example, Margaret Jacob argues that the Lodges in France far from exercising direct democracy,
as both Furet and Reinhart Koselleck claim, continued the discriminatory practices based on hereditary
rank characteristic of the ancien régime. See Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry
and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Oxford University Press, New York, 1991, pp. 13–17, pp.
203–214.
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are what they are only insofar as they extract themselves, thanks to their vigilance,
from the empirical society in which they are embedded’,28 it has to be constantly
shown that the idea of ‘the people’ coincides with the actual actions of the people
and those who act in their name. However, this indivisibility needs to be continually
affirmed by popular vigilance; a vigilance through which the people become self-
certain of their virtue. The plot becomes the figure of the contradiction in
revolutionary identity and, as Furet is keen to demonstrate, the dynamics of
revolutionary power obey an inexorable logic that leads from the language of the
General Will to the Terror.
This logic, operating through the machine-like linguistic practices of Jacobin
democracy, is the logic of ideology. For Furet, following Cochin,29 in so far as this
language articulates a ‘socialised truth’ rather than the truth of individual critical
reflection, it must be regarded as a pathological state of cognition:

yideology is not a matter of thinking, at least not in the sense that thinking might
make it susceptible to criticism; it spoke, or rather expressed itself, through its
spokesmen and above all through the machine. So the Revolution was not so
much an action as a language, and it was in relation to this language, the locus of
the consensus, that the ideological machine established differences among men.
Ideology spoke through the Jacobin leaders much more than they spoke through
it.30

In bringing to the fore the ‘fictitious’, ‘imaginary’, ‘illusory’ nature of Jacobinism

as language Augustin Cochin provides, according to Furet, the elaboration of this
practical and ideological mode of social action that made the Revolution ‘yever
ready to place ideas above actual history, as if it were called upon to restructure a
fragmented society by means of its own concepts.’31 The illusion of revolutionary
agency and political will, the ‘hypertrophy of historical consciousness’32 which
marks the Revolution as event, is only brought to an end through the re-
establishment of particular interests and representative democracy in the figure of
Thermidor. Thermidor marks the revenge of society over the state, of particular
interests over the General Will, of ideology as a means to an end, rather than an end
in itself, and as a tool of power rather its locus: ‘Having ceased to be an advent, the
Revolution had become a record of acquisitions. Reconquered and once again taken
in hand by civil society, it became visible as a balance-sheet of losses and gains.’33 It
is from this perspective that Tocqueville writes his history. However, Furet claims
that the significance of ‘[t]aking Tocqueville on such a detour by way of August
28
Claude Lefort, ‘Interpreting Revolution within the French Revolution’, in Democracy and Political
Theory, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1988, p. 108.
29
Augustin Cochin, ‘Vérité ou la pensée socialisée’ in La Révolution et la Libre-Pensée, Plon-Nourrit,
Paris, 1924.
30
Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, p. 178.
31
ibid., p. 25.
32
ibid., p. 25.
33
ibid., p. 75.
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Cochin—with some disregard for chronology’34 is to reveal what is missing in

Tocqueville; the routes taken in the course of the triumph of egalitarian culture and
the central administrative state. Cochin provides the means of understanding how an
‘apparently relentless continuity of phenomenon could come to light through the
apparently radical discontinuity of a Revolution.’35 In the penultimate paragraph of
the essay Furet brings the history of the Revolution to a close. With Thermidor the
new principle of legitimacy invented by the Revolution finds an institutional form:

Bonaparte could only ‘close’ the Revolution because he embodied a plebiscitary

version of it. Society was thus finally able to set up a government that, while
deriving all its power from society, remained independent from it, even above it,
just like the Terror. At the same time, however, that government provided the
conditions in which a new king could establish a democratic administration, a
goal society had pursued in vain—because it was a contradiction in terms—ever
since 1789. The Revolution was over, since France had returned to its history or,
rather, reconciled its two histories.36

In Furet’s account, the chronological history, or the history of events, and the
conceptual histories of Tocqueville and Cochin are united in the figure of Bonaparte.
In the series, Tocqueville–Cochin–Tocqueville the history of events and the history
of their interpretation, both as ‘mode’ and ‘content’, are finally reconciled:

Thermidor separates not only two phases, but two concepts of the Revolution. It
marks the end of Cochin’s Revolution, and brings to light Tocqueville’s
Revolution. That chronological turning point is also an intellectual dividing line.
It brings out different interpretations within an apparently continuous tradition.37

However, this reconciliation of the two histories of the Revolution (as ‘content’
and ‘mode’) and the identity of this conceptual schema with the empirical course of
events raises several questions concerning the plausibility of his methodological
approach and also concerning the status of the event of revolution in Furet’s
account. It is in recognition of the irreducibility of the Revolution to its causes that
Furet turns away from Tocqueville and towards Cochin. But in adopting Cochin’s
conception of Jacobinism as an ideological language inseperable from the claims of
democracy and traceable to the philosophical societies of the 18th century, Claude
Lefort asks whether Furet has ‘ysimply transferred the idea of the continuity of
history, which others thought they could find in the register of modes of production
and class struggle or in the register of the growth of the modern state and of
administrative centralisation, to the register of ‘democratic sociability?38
Rather than providing an alternative conception to the continuity of history,
Cochin ultimately offers a proleptic account of Jacobinism; an account that proves
34
ibid., p. 78.
35
ibid., p. 77.
36
ibid., p. 78–79.
37
ibid., p. 73.
38
Lefort, ‘Interpreting Revolution within the French Revolution’, p. 112.
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unable to address the question of the revolution as origin and invention that Furet
nevertheless raises. At several points, Furet refers to the uniqueness of the French
Revolution as ‘the first experiment with democracy’, that cannot be regarded as ‘a
transition but a beginning and a haunting vision of that beginning’39:

That is why, in a sense, everything indeed ‘began’ here: 1789 opened a period
when history was set adrift, once it was discovered that the actors in the theatre of
the Ancien Régime were mere shadows. The Revolution is the gap that opened up
between the language of the Cahiers and that of the Ami du peuple in the space of
only a few months. It must be seen as not so much a set of causes and
consequences as the opening of a society to all its possibilities. It invented a type
of political discourse and practice by which we have been living ever since.40

These remarks suggest that the revolution cannot be reduced to the ideological
coding supplied by Cochin and identified as a moment when history was ‘set adrift’
only to return to the ‘real’ flow of events after Thermidor. Furet seeks to dismantle
the ‘political illusion’ of the revolution and its ‘hypertrophy of historical
consciousness’ that puts ‘ideas above actual history’, but fails to address the
substantive problem that these illusions produced events. In reducing the revolution
to the ‘gap’ between the languages of the Cahiers and that of the Ami du people, or to
the ‘intellectual dividing line’ between Tocqueville and Cochin, the ‘event’ of the
Revolution continually escapes every effort to locate it within these conceptual
schemas. This leads Paul Ricoeur to question the status of the ‘excess’ of the event
beyond it being something that would simply temporarily disrupt this series.41 He
asks whether the continuation of the ancien régime ‘passes not only by way of the
ideological acceleration of Jacobism but by the actions that this political illusion
engendered.’42 The act of taking power and the centrality of the figure of the ‘plot’
suggest an order of narrativity that is essential in understanding the revolution as an
event, but ruled out by Furet’s methodological distinction between historical
explanation and historical narrative. For Ricoeur, the ambiguity of the status of the
event in Furet’s interpretation of the French Revolution unsettles this distinction
between explanation and narrative understanding, and, furthermore, castes doubt on
the very possibility of the methodological distanciation and ideological divestment
that defined Furet’s project.
A similar recognition of the difficult status of the event of revolution in Furet’s
account leads Claude Lefort to raise a different question about the nature of the
political in Furet’s interpretation of the French Revolution. Furet presents his work
39
ibid., p. 79.
40
ibid., p. 46.
41
‘It is noteworthy that he only partially succeeds by combining two explanations which, separately and
perhaps together, leave a remainder, and this remainder is the event itself.’ Paul Ricoeur, Time and
Narrative, Vol. 1, (trans. K.McLaughlin and D.Pellauer), University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1984, p.
222. For a more developed version of Ricoeur’s reading of Furet, see ‘The contribution of French
Historiography to the Theory of History’, The Zaharoff Lecture for 1978–9, Clarendon Press, Oxford,
1980.
42
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, p. 223.
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as a return to political history. At the point in his argument when he wants to move
from the long term causes of the Revolution to an understanding of the Revolution
as event, Furet refers to the specific mode of historic action which characterises the
Revolution as event as ‘a dynamic that one may call political, ideological or
culturaly’43 The arbitrariness of these terms suggests to Lefort that Furet’s use of
‘the political’ is wilfully ambiguous and refers to both the ordinary conception of
politics (la politique) that circumscribes politics within the boundaries of power
relations or within the boundaries of the social, and also to a conception of ‘the
political’ (le politique) as the general relationship that society has with itself.44 The
latter becomes perceptible at moments of revolution understood as a generalised
challenge to ‘the reality principle and the legitimacy principle which support the
established order’ and the very criterion for circumscribing the political.45 In
drawing out the hermeneutical implications left unthought in Furet’s work, both
Ricoeur and Lefort find that under the sign of ‘the event’ and ‘the political’,
respectively, there is something that both exceeds and conditions precisely the kind
of historical explanation Furet offers as an attempt to escape the illusions of the
Revolution.

Marx and the illusion of politics

Whilst Furet is careful to disentangle Marx’s own writings on the French

Revolution and the revolutions of the 19th century from subsequent Marxist
historiography, he nevertheless finds in Marx’s work a comparable disregard for the
autonomy of the political. According to Furet, from the The German Ideology
onwards politics is reduced to the expression of class interest and even in the early
writings where the illusory nature of politics is placed within a broader theory of
alienation, ‘[h]is [Marx’s] thought already carries with it this notion that the political
is determined by the social.’46 Each of these claims against Marx seems to invoke a
strong notion of the political. However, given the difficulties that Lefort raises
concerning the conception of the political in Furet’s work, it is questionable whether
Furet’s criticisms of Marx can be as assured as they first appear. Indeed, a
consideration of the themes of illusion and allegory in Marx’s thought will suggest a
number of problems with Furet’s reading.
It is of course fitting that Furet should point to the ‘blind spots’ in Marx thinking
of the political for visual metaphors and the optics of enlightenment play a central
43
Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, p. 22.
44
Compare Lefort’s distinction between la politique and le politique with that of Raymond Aron in
Democracy and Totalitarianism, (trans. Valenace Ionescu), Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1970,
pp. 3–13.
45
Lefort, ‘Interpreting Revolution within the French Revolution’, p. 92. Lefort continues: ‘The
Revolutionary phenomenon is in fact the most convincing proof that an analysis of the political implies
not only an analysis of ideology, but also an analysis of the experience of the world, and of the modes of
thought and belief which are conventionally assigned to the realm of culture.’ p. 93.
46
Furet, Marx and the French Revolution, p. 25.
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role in Marx’s writing on the French Revolution. In On the Jewish Question, Marx
writes that the ‘optical illusion’ of the French Revolutionaries is to be found in the
paradox that the most political of documents, the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man
and Citizen’, effaces its own political nature. The Declaration reduces political life to
the guarantor of the rights of man. As such, the political community, according to
Marx, is reduced ‘to a mere means for maintaining these so-called rights of man.’47
Whilst revolutionary practice violates this principle, for example, by curtailing
freedom of the press, Marx argues that what needs to be explained is not the practice
but rather why ‘the relationship is turned upside-down in the minds of the political
emancipators and the aim appears as the means, while the means appears as the
aim.’48 There is, he proposes, ‘a straightforward solution’ to this political paradox.
For Marx, the significance of the French Revolution is that, in destroying the feudal
institutions of the estates and guilds, it:
yset free the political spirit, which had been, as it were, split up, partitioned and
dispersed in the various blind alleys of feudal society. It gathered the dispersed parts
of the political spirit, freed it from its intermixture with civil life, and established it
as the sphere of the community, the general concern of the nation, ideally
independent of those particular elements of civil life. A person’s distinct activity and
distinct situation in life were reduced to a merely individual significance. They no
longer constituted the general relation of the individual to the state as a whole.
Public affairs as such, on the other hand, became the general affair of each
individual, and the political function became the individual’s general function.49
Central to Marx’s explanation, therefore, is the comparison between the nature of
civil society in feudal and modern history. Schematically, in the feudal notion of civil
society, property, family and work were all aspects of political life and the guilds and
the estates mediated the individual’s relationship to the state. The separation of civil
society from the state was negligible since there was an identity between the classes of
civil society and the estates. Political distinctions were effectively mapped onto
economic distinctions since ‘the organic principle of civil society was the principle of
the state.’50 Thus, although the state could appear as a unifying political force, it
nevertheless also appeared as ‘the particular affair of the ruler isolated from the people,
and of his servants.’51 According to Marx, the political revolution unleashed by the
French revolution destroys the organic principles underlying feudal society and reposes
the political community as a disembodied abstraction beyond the contingent concerns
of civil life. This unleashing of the political spirit from its corporeal forms transforms
the relationship between the individual and the state from one of hierarchical exclusion
from the sovereign to one in which the individual has an immediate identification with
sovereignty in the form of a universal political community.
47
Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question in Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3, (trans.
Clemens Dutt), Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1975, p. 164.
48
ibid., p. 165.
49
ibid., p. 166.
50
Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, MECW, Vol. 3, p. 72.
51
Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 166.
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At this point, Marx’s argument is not incompatible with Tocqueville’s, Furet’s or

Lefort’s claim that this abstraction and alienation from corporeal power at the heart
of political life is the defining feature of democracy. As Jürgen Habermas notes,
‘initially Marx conceives the bourgeois constitutional state in no other way than it
has understood itself in the liberal tradition.’52 However, for Marx, the political
revolution that perfects this ‘idealism of the state’ is ‘at the same time the completion
of the materialism of civil society.’53 The unleashing of the political spirit from all
aspects of civil society also entails the ‘liberation’ of civil society from politics, ‘from
having even the semblance of a universal content.’54 A depoliticised civil society then
becomes reposed as the natural foundation of the state and political community.
This division between civil society and the state is reproduced at the level of the
individual as a division between real man and citizen, hence the ‘Declaration of the
Rights of Man and Citizen’.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that Marx reduces the political to the
social in a straightforward way as Furet claims. Rather, Marx insists that this is
precisely the ‘optical illusion’ of the revolutionaries. The paradox of the political
revolution is that the most impoverished definition of man, man as a member of civil
society whose bond with others is reduced to ‘natural necessity, need and private
interest’, is declared to be the foundation of the political community:

yman as a member of civil society is held to be man in the proper sense, homme as
distinct from the citoyen, because he is man in his sensuous, individual, immediate
existence, whereas political man is only abstract, artificial man, man as an
allegorical, juridical person. The real man is recognised only in the shape of the
egoistic individual, the true man is recognised only in the shape of the abstract
citoyen.55

Having explained the ‘optical illusion’ arising from the principle of the
‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen’, Marx now has to explain why the
political practice defies this principle. The significance of Jacobinism in Marx’s early
writings is that it represents the political attempt to overcome the division between
civil society and the state by force. The forceful politicisation of civil society through
the abolition of religion, the abolition of private property by confiscation and
progressive taxation, the abolition of poverty by decree and the abolition of the
revolutionaries themselves by the guillotine, is the result of the Convention’s belief
that ‘the state and the system of society are not two different things.’56 It is perhaps
worth noting here that in an early essay ‘Revolution and Natural Law’ Habermas
52
Jürgen Habermas, ‘Natural Law and Revolution’, in Theory and Practice, (trans. John Viertel)
Heinemann, London, 1974, p. 109.
53
Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 166.
54
ibid., p. 166.
55
ibid., p. 167.
56
Marx, Critical Marginal Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social reform. By a Prussian’,
MECW, Vol. 3, p. 197. The Convention, argues Marx, ‘yrepresented the maximum of politicial energy,
political power and political understandingy. From the political point of view, the state and the system of
society are not two different things. The state is the system of society.’
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argues that Marx fails to recognise sufficiently the distinction between the liberal
conception of natural law which considers political economy to be the ultimate test
of its truth and the competing notion of natural law found in Rousseau and the
Physiocrats ‘which recognised no separation in principle of human rights from
citizens’ rights, of fundamental rights prior to the state from those conferred by the
state.’57 For Habermas, ‘the liberal notion of natural law could notyhave served as
the basis for the self-understanding of the French Revolution’58 because the French
Revolution has as its basis a political notion of natural law that embraces both state
and society. The philosophical derivation of the principles of natural law, in contrast
to the appeal to common sense that Habermas argues is central to the American
conception, is what makes the French Revolution so significant. In the French
Revolution alone, the actualisation and positivisation of natural law becomes a
revolutionary task.59
Habermas argues that Marx’s failure to make explicit the distinction between the
liberal conception of Natural Law and the Rousseauean one, meant that the political
nature of Jacobinism ‘had to remain inexplicable to him’.60 For Habermas, the
consequences of this unacknowledged debt are that Marx’s analysis of the ‘classical,
political’ aspects of the Revolution tends to subordinate the practice of Jacobinism
to the principle of revolution as the guarantor of the rights of man in civil society. It

57
Habermas, ‘Revolution and Natural Law’, p. 112.
58
ibid., p. 112.
59
It is beyond the remit of our discussion to address the question Habermas raises concerning the
distinction between the American Declaration of Independence and The French Declaration of the Rights
of Man and Citizen. However, any further development of this question would have to address the debate
around the legitimacy of the performative dimension of these revolutionary acts. The classic distinction
between the French and American Revolutions is made by Hannah Arendt in On Revolution, Penguin,
London 1990. The main challenge to her claim that the American Revolution succeeded in its bid for
legitimacy where the French Revolution failed is made by Jacques Derrida in his reading of the
Declaration of Independence. See Derrida ‘Declarations of Independence’, New Political Science, Vol. 15,
1986; ‘The Force of Law’: The Mystical Foundation of Authority’, in D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld, D.G.
Carlson, (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, Routledge, New York, 1992. The most useful
analyses of this debate are: David Ingram, ‘The Legitimacy of the Modern Age: towards a metaphorology
of Revolution, Myth, and Progress in Science and Politics’ in Reason, History and Politics, State
University of New York Press, Albany, 1995; David Ingram, ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Trial of (post)
modernity or the Tale of Two Revolutions’, in Larry May and Jerome Hohn (ed), Hannah Arendt: Twenty
Years Later, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1996 and Bonnie Honig, ‘Declarations of
Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the Problem of Founding a Republic, American Political Science
Review, Vol. 85, No.1 1991. For an analysis of the French Declaration of 1789 which addresses the
problem of legitimacy raised by the elision of two types of discourse, the speculative philosophical and the
historical-political, see Jean-Franc- ois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, (trans. Georges Van Den
Abbeele), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1988, pp. 145–150.
60
For Habermas, the consequences of Marx’s failure to recognise the difference between the liberal
doctrine of natural law and what he calls revolutionary natural law has been fateful for Marxism, not least
because it encouraged the naturalisation of history as the bearer of justice. ‘Marx, with his critique of
ideology applied to the bourgeois constitutional state and with his sociological resolution on the basis of
natural rights, went beyond Hegel to discredit so enduringly for Marxism both the idea of legality itself
and the intention of Natural Law as such that ever since the link between Natural Law and revolution has
been dissolved.’ ‘Natural Law and Revolution’, p. 113.
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would seem that Furet would concur with Habermas here. Indeed, according to
Furet, it is this tendency that ensures that Marx’s work becomes increasingly
complicit with the interpretations of the Revolution offered by 19th century liberals,
in particular Guizot.61
Furet’s principle contention is that from the The German Ideology onwards, the
Revolution is no longer understood by Marx in terms of the political illusions
inseparable from the founding of the modern state on the rights of natural man in
civil society, rather the events of 1789–1799 are, according to Furet, explained in
terms of the drama of class struggle:
In the 1847 article [‘Moralizing Criticism and Critical Morality: A Contribution
to German Cultural History—contra Karl Heinzen’] he can find no solution to
the contradiction raised in The German Ideology between a uniform conception of
the French revolution—bourgeois from start to finish in its actors and
consequences—and a conception that acknowledges the exceptional character
of the Jacobin dictatorship while subordinating it to the end result. Both share at
least the same main point—the reduction of politics to civil society, which makes
the French Revolution into the history of the conquest of state power by a
bourgeoisie that has already taken over society.62
Nevertheless, Marx does maintain that the French Revolution is the ‘classic period
of political intellect (Verstand)’ in which the principle of politics, the will, is incapable
of recognizing the ‘natural and spiritual’ obstacles to its omniscience.63 For Marx,
Rousseau is the thinker who recognises that the founding of a ‘people’s institution’
cannot be based on the natural rights of man in civil society, but rather, on the
partial and moral existence of man in community with others.64 Through this drama
of misrecognition of the nature of the state, social inequality, ‘great poverty and
great wealth’ are regarded by Robespierre to be ‘only an obstacle to pure
democracy.’65 However, for Marx, this absolute conception of politics cannot be
sustained. In a passage strikingly reminiscent of Hegel’s account of Thermidor in the
Phenomenology of Spirit, Marx writes:
At times of special self-confidence, political life seeks to suppress its prerequisite,
civil society and the elements composing this society, and to constitute itself as the
real species-life of man devoid of contradictions. But it can achieve this only by
coming into violent contradiction with its own conditions if life, only by declaring
the revolution to be permanent, and therefore the political drama necessarily ends
61
Hayden White also argues that Marx’s philosophy of history is closer to these liberal historians than to
a utopian, emancipatory conception of history. See Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and
Historical Representation, John Hopkins University Pres, Baltimore, 1987, p. 73.
62
Furet, Marx and the French Revolution, p. 14.
63
Marx, Critical Marginal Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social reform. By a Prussian’,
p. 199.
64
Marx quotes from Book II of The Social Contract in On the Jewish Question, p. 167. Rousseau, The
Social Contract, Penguin Classics, London, 1968, p. 84.
65
Marx, Critical Marginal Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social reform. By a Prussian’,
p. 199.
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with the re-establishment of religion, private property, and all elements of civil
society, just as war ends with peace.66

Against Bruno Bauer’s republican defence of the Jacobin ideas of liberty, justice
and virtue, and his suggestion that the cowardice of the masses had sacrificed the
spirit of the Revolution to Napoleon, Marx argues that Napoleon revealed the truth
of the contradiction between Jacobin ‘political enlightenment’ and the conditions of
its existence. The Directory finally permitted the expression of bourgeois life,
promised in the Declaration but suppressed by the political extravagances of the
Jacobins. However, the liberal bourgeois revolution was again suppressed by
Napoleon, who represented ‘the last battle of revolutionary terror against the
bourgeois society which had been proclaimed by this same Revolution, and against
its policy.’67 In substituting permanent war for permanent revolution, Napoleon
recognised both the separation of civil society and the state, and the significance of
civil society for the continued existence of the state, but nevertheless subordinated
the former to the political ends of the latter. According to Marx, it was only in 1830
that the liberal bourgeois element of the Revolution finally triumphed. However, its
success was won at the expense of the political enlightenment promised by ‘the ideal
of the state, the welfare of the world and the universal human aims’68 of the
Revolution. Thus, although 1830 seems to signify the final acceptance of the social
basis of political power in that it represents the moment when the liberal bourgeoisie
recognises the state as the political expression of its ‘own special interests’, for Marx,
the promise of the Revolution does not end here:

The history of the French Revolution, which dates from 1789, did not come to an
end in 1830 with the victory of one of its components enriched by the
consciousness of its own social importance.69

The political excess of the Revolution, the promise that the Declaration makes
concerning the universal rights of the citizen, still exceeds the prosaic realisation of
the rights of man in 1830. As Habermas also remarks, despite Marx’s failure to make
explicit the distinct nature of revolutionary Natural Law, Marx nevertheless,
‘y stands within this tradition, and takes his departure from its concept of
revolution, though, to be sure, giving this concept a new contenty’70 Furet, on the
other hand, persists with the claim that Marx considers 1830 to be the end of the
Revolution; the point at which the truth of the Revolution is revealed.71
Accordingly, for Furet, it is from the perspective of 1830 that Marx then judges
the revolution to be essentially bourgeois and to be exhausted by this bourgeois
content. Yet, Marx’s analysis of the Revolution suggests, not only that the
66
Marx, On the Jewish Question, p. 156.
67
Marx, The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Company, MECW
Vol. 4, p. 123.
68
ibid., p. 124
69
ibid., p. 124.
70
Habermas, ‘Natural Law and Revolution’, p. 112.
71
Furet, Marx and the French Revolution, p. 25, 26, 91.
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revolution does not end in 1830, but that it also exceeds the anachronistic content
modelled on ancient Roman republicanism.
The theme that Marx will develop at length in the The Eighteenth Brumaire is
already central to his critique of the political illusion of the revolutionaries in The
Holy Family:

Robespierre, Saint-Just and their party fell because they confused the ancient,
realistic-democratic commonweal based on real slavery with the modern spiritua-
listic-democratic representative state, which is based on emancipated slavery,
bourgeois society. What a terrible illusion it is to have to recognise and sanction in
the rights of man modern bourgeois society, the society of industry, of universal
competition, of private interest freely pursuing its aims, of anarchy, of self-
estranged natural and spiritual individuality, and at the same time to want
afterwards to annul the manifestations of the life of this society in particular
individuals and simultaneously to want to model the political head of that society
in the manner of antiquity!72

The ‘illusion’ of the Revolution thus operates on two levels that correspond to two
stages in the history of the Revolution; its representative stage and its Jacobin stage.
First, the optical illusion contained in the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen’ arises from the belief that man, as a member of civil society, is the
foundation of the political state. Second, the ‘tragic illusion’ of the Jacobins was to
think that the unity of the Roman political community could be recreated in the
conditions that make the first illusion necessary. Marx quotes from Saint Just: ‘The
world has been empty since the Romans, and only their memory fills it and still
prophesies liberty’.73 The tragedy of the Jacobins is that they forget the truth of the
first illusion, that political man is allegorical man. Marx’s analysis of the illusions of
the Revolution hinges on this paradox. However, contrary to Furet’s interpretation,
Marx does not think it sufficient simply to unmask the political illusions of the
Revolution. A mere inversion would only return allegorical man to the ‘real’ man of
civil society. Rather, Marx’s ideological critique must recognise the truth content of
the abstract political community. As

Warminski reminds us: ythe language of ideology is what one could call an
‘allegorical’ language: one that represents, figures, one thing but actually means,
signifies, points to, refers to, something else. Hence it can never be enough to
unmask or demystify its phenomenal appearance, its figural, representational
function, this would be to fall into the trap that ideologies set for critics, rather its
allegorical, pointing, referential (carrying back) function also needs to be read in
its over-determined historical materiality.74
72
Marx, The Holy Family or Critique of Critical Critique. Against Bruno Bauer and Company, p. 122.
73
ibid., p. 121.
74
Andrzej Warminski, ‘Hegel/Marx: Consciousness and Life’, in Hegel after Derrida, Stuart Barnett
(ed.), Routledge, London, 1998, p. 175.
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The generation of illusions traced by Marx through the various different stages of
the Revolution from 1789 to 1830, is more prolific and, according to Marx’s
allegorical reading, more complicated than Furet acknowledges and the relationship
between form and content in Marx’s conception of history is less assuredly unified
than Furet’s reading implies. The French Revolution opens up a question about the
form of revolution and its relation to the political which exceeds the simple reduction
of the political to the social that Furet argues characterises both Marx’s writing and
Marxist historiography of the French Revolution. Furthermore, Furet attributes the
apparent failure of Marx’s work to explain why the Revolution took on so many
diverse political forms in the course of 1789 to 1799 or 1830 to Marx’s conceptual
reversal of Hegelian categories. The attempt to identify the nature of the inversion
between Hegel and Marx’s categories would have to do so in full awareness of the
theme of inversion and inverted talk that characterises Hegel’s notion of Spirit as
‘pure culture’ in the figure of Rameau’s Nephew. The parodic theatricality of Marx’s
account of the failings of revolutionary action in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparthe and the complicated thematics of form and content developed in this
work, suggest a rather different relation between Hegel and Marx’s categories than
one of simple reversal or inversion which, according to Marx, ‘would be the illusion
of a break’.