Political clubs during the French Revolution [ Politics & Society / Clubs & Societies ]
… It holds that the clubs’ toxic culture grew out of their ideological commitments to collective sovereignty and political virtue. 1 A more optimistic interpretation, which runs from Alphonse Aulard in the late nineteenth century to Michael … According to the pessimistic historical interpretation of the clubs, the utopian ideals of collective sovereignty and virtue proved to be destabilising. These ideals blurred the crucial boundary between state and society while sharpening … ‘enemies of the people’. In a vain effort to prevent divisions and power struggles, the clubs called for equality, moral virtue and political unanimity – in short, a ‘general will’, as Jean- Jacques Rousseau had conceptualised it in his On …
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