106. Daniel Chirot — You Say You Want a Revolution? Radical Idealism and its Tragic Consequences

Why have so many of the iconic revolutions of modern times ended in bloody tragedies? What lessons can be drawn from these failures today, in a world where political extremism is on the rise and rational reform based on moderation and compromise often seems impossible to achieve? In You Say You Want a Revolution?, Daniel Chirot examines a wide range of right- and left-wing revolutions around the world — from the late eighteenth century to today — to provide important new answers to these critical questions. From the French Revolution of the eighteenth century to the Mexican, Russian, German, Chinese, anticolonial, and Iranian revolutions of the twentieth, Chirot finds that moderate solutions to serious social, economic, and political problems were overwhelmed by radical ideologies that promised simpler, drastic remedies. But not all revolutions had this outcome. The American Revolution didn’t, although its failure to resolve the problem of slavery eventually led to the Civil War, and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe was relatively peaceful, except in Yugoslavia. Chirot and Shermer also discuss:

• why violent radicalism, corruption, and the betrayal of ideals won in so many crucial cases, but why it didn’t in some others
• Did most Germans really believe in Nazi ideology or did they just go along out of social pressure and political convenience?
• No Hitler, No Holocaust?
• How do you get people to commit genocide?
• Anti-semitism in history and today
• how the logic of utopian radicalism leads to violence
• the difference in belief and action between Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Trotsky
• the difference between the American and French Revolutions
• We think of the American revolution as liberal, but its chief English defender, Edmund Burke, is the founder of modern conservatism.
• lessons to learn from centuries of violent vs. nonviolent revolutions.

Daniel Chirot is the Herbert J. Ellison Professor of Russian and Eurasian Studies at the Henry Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. He is the author of many books, most recently, The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World (with Scott L. Montgomery) (Princeton), which was named one of the New York Times Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of the Year.

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