1789

the revolution of backwardness

pp. 30-56

in: Robbie Shilliam, German thought and international relations, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009

Abstract

This chapter is essentially propaedeutic, its purpose being to document the processes of comparison and substitution that, through the French Revolution, produced the Jacobin political subject. In the chapter I explore not only the intimate relationship between the British capitalist and French Jacobin subject, but also the qualitative differences between the two, and render this intimate distance as an effect of the international dimension of social transformation. All this is necessary in order to set out the multi-linear context of modernity from the French Revolution onward wherein the impingement of the Jacobin and capitalist subjects operated as a dual compulsion on Prussia-German development, which in turn framed the key political questions that Kant, Hegel, Weber and even Morgenthau were to contend with. In fine, their discussions of liberal ethics and illiberal politics were rooted in an attempt to understand the developmental relationship between the impersonalized individual of British capitalism and the impersonal collective of French Jacobinism. Hence there is a need to first clarify this relationship through a historical sociological investigation.