The book itself is excellent, btw, this is purely a question for the editor of "nybooks". Editor: stop pretending that people forgot why the rich are hated when the poor are starving. We aren't at the place where impoverished women take the streets demanding better prices for bread but we aren't far from it either.

We've seen it happen France in the 1700s, Germany in the 1800s and 1900s, Russia pre WWI, China in WW2, and Spain during WW2.

Imo, the US is far from this happening. The only people who often complain about radical income disparity live in one of the major cities. Granted it has merit, but there is a sizable amount of people that live outside of those HCOL areas. City people forget that there is a very wealthy, affluent, and secure America outside of cities.

Here is a complete list of all historically attested successful slave revolts: Haiti, 1791

That’s it. Revolutions require leadership. Overwhelming that’s going to be the educated or otherwise reasonably comfortable, or those who were recently so and want it back. Peasant revolts fail without leaders, who are either going to be nobles or bourgeois. Those who can’t organize can’t win and a bureaucracy requires literate men, who are very unlikely to be poor. Revolutions win. Slave revolts not so much.

The Third Servile War for example grew from 70 slave-gladiators to ~120,000 men in 2 years and won several significant battles vs the Roman Army. You really don’t want to see the modern version of that kind of fighting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Servile_War

I really don’t think this is true. Human property varied in how common it was but the institution existed in every agricultural society I’m aware of up until at least three 1600s when serfdom died out in England. That’s probably the first society in which humans were not held as property. Western Europe was also likely the first agricultural society not to have chattel slavery but I’m less confident. Certainly slavery was practiced in the Moslem world into the 1900s and well attested all over Asia and in most of Africa and the Americas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_India

Anyway, by relatively uncommon I mean compared to the US concept of slavery where they made up a huge chunk of the southern workforce and could be sold between individuals.

Revolutions need leaders, like the other person who commented. There isn't enough wealth aristocrats that can lead, so they stem from the middle class. The middle class tend to have lower class friends. They can very easily sway them to their cause. Now multiply that by tens of millions of middle class that suddenly became unemployed.

Unemployed artists can make propaganda, programmers can make websites and portray this information at the forefront everywhere (think the whole black lives matter flags everywhere), business people assemble and manage large groups of people, scientists devote their time to studies on working class struggles and less on scientific endeavors, etc. The lower class can't do any of that stuff. They don't know how and never had the time to figure out.

This is the very reason why Hitler rose to power through the NSDAP. He did this stuff and appealed to the right aristocrats. The NSDAP grew and unemployed middle class members peacefully revolted by joining them because they wanted their old pre-WWI lives back. They hated hyperinflation owed due to the Treaty of Versaille basically imposed on their government an impossible to pay burden which cause currency debasement galore in order to pay it back. This in turn create hyperinflation that essentially decimated the working class. The money they had no longer could buy the things they wanted. Now they have nothing but an education and time.

What I can describe it as, is helpless. Instead of seizing it's political power to improve their lot, most of the people at the bottom of it are either apathetic to politics, or are politically distracted by a culture war.

In regards to your second paragraph, power in America is heavily concentrated towards rural Americans in sparsely populated states, especially at the national level, because of institutions such as the Senate and the electoral college making it rather difficult to get large legislation passed.

I wouldn’t call it helpless, there’s been a fair amount of political energy in America since its beginning.

As a large city dweller for my entire adult life that does not bother me, but it isn't a sustainable process without those economic engines external to them.

Otherwise I'd argue the reverse. Banking, media, software etc. seem to export wealth from smaller communities back to urban centers. In this regard large urban centers can be regarded something as absentee landlords receiving grapes and oil and Amish furniture and exporting spreadsheets and compliance audits.

Or rather purchasing?

The difference is that city-dwellers are more economically productive (For various reasons, some of which are systemic), and, after paying for all those things, are left with a surplus at the end of the year.

Not to mention that the cost of supplying more mundane, necessary-for-life goods to rural areas is higher, due to higher distances, and the inefficiencies of serving low-density markets. This is another thing that keeps rural areas poor.

In my second paragraph, I'm not even speaking about federal political power. The observation holds for municipal, county, and state-level political power - none of which have anything to do with the electoral college.

Employment and salaries are recent concepts, they have no relevance. A few hundreds years ago the largest single concern by far was to have food on the table. There was no functional markets and no long distance transportation, you couldn't buy food if there was a bad harvest or calamity, there was no food to sale and/or the price doubled overnight.

She was one of the people who was arguing for the reform of the French taxation system under the idea that maybe, just maybe, the clergy and the aristocrats ought to pay some taxes instead of levying it all on the peasantry. Truly a more despotic individual has never walked the Earth.

Pre-Revolution, a lot of the ire directed at her was driven by the fact that she was a woman who was actively engaging in politics as opposed to being a dandy who just looked pretty, hosted parties, and made babies. She was also criticized for being too extravagant with the public purse, though, so she might well have been complained about even if she did the proper societal role befitting a queen. Post-Revolution, the criticism shifts to the fact that she sided with foreign countries against Republicanism. In large part, she was made the solitary scapegoat of the failures of the ancien régime to help bolster support for the abolition of the monarchy, as she was already unpopular before the Revolution.

Sources?

This is what I read in wikipedia: "Her role was decisive in urging the king to remain firm and not concede to popular demands for reforms. In addition, she showed her determination to use force to crush the forthcoming revolution".

Not the glamourous sympathetic little girl from the Coppola movie...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_the_Great

[1] https://teaattrianon.blogspot.com/2007/05/last-letter-of-mar...

It is difficult to see these things through modern eyes, especially in the human rights era. But we have to remember that hereditary monarchs tended to do this to each other a lot. Of necessity - most of the European rulers were blood relatives; power struggles inevitably meant disputing an inheritance. Antoinette's brother was the Holy Roman Emperor. When he died her nephew lead the invasion of France by Austria.

And the punishment for disloyalty was death. If somehow the Bourbons had restored their position, they would have had all the revolutionary leaders executed. As with the Romanovs. Or Elizabeth I'd execution of her cousin Mary.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Also, let's please not fight the French Revolution here.

That is however not French victors writing history, it is more of foreign Communists writing history.

The revolution is still a founding moment of the french "identity", and apart from a few late-to-the-party 2020's monarchists, we pretty much all believe that we did the right thing by kicking out the nobility.

There was French Revolution and then was the freedom and happiness, basically.

> is there a good aristocracy

I think that feudalism is fundamentally bad. But, I think that answer to this question is yes, there are non-evil aristocrats. Aristocracy is class you get born into, set of duties and privileges. Aristocracy holds power and have interests opposed to those who live under them. The image where all individuals belonging to that group are basically ugly and evil is not correct. It is not like all the the tortured and executed aristocrats deserved that.

And then there is question of huge amount of non-aristocratic victims of revolution which went completely unmentioned in our version of history.

Are they to blame for the holocaust? Well no, but they help to run it.

Aristocracy might not be made up 100% of evil mustache twirling villains, but they benefit from fruits of other's toils.

Lets consider much much milder version of the problem that we can relate.

Nestle was caught buying chocolate from sources using child labor and child slaves. Currently AFAIK only Kitkat is using fair-trade chocolate as a token gesture. Anything else is using chocolate with some fake symbols set up by PR companies funded by nestle et al.

Are you eating their - non kitkat - chocolate product supporting child slavery? Even though you might have done it fully ignorant of the fact. Are you going to buy their stuff knowing that now?

Is it feasible to live in our society and not buy stuff from corporations that do things like that?

Compared to that, not just that aristocracy is hereditary, but they had duties beyond "kill people". They were backbone of army, yes, but still it is not just that.

I think that making comparison between aristocracy and guards in concentration camps is more of political then actual attempt at reasonale historical analysios.

The point i am trying to flesh out is how much one can be blamed for a big picture. One cannot change the world only affect it in a tiniest way. But when a majority of a group/class are pushing same way they can affect history.

That is not honest argument, that is absurd accusation.

> The point i am trying to flesh out is how much one can be blamed for a big picture. One cannot change the world only affect it in a tiniest way. But when a majority of a group/class are pushing same way they can affect history.

That was not apparent from your comment. But also, I think that you are using straw idea of aristocracy rather then real societal system as it existed in various periods. The whole thread started with my look at real world historical aristocracy. You used made up nazi guard that was "just doing job" to tilt big picture, but it was not fair comparison.

All this is under article about Marie Antionette who specifically I don't really think was evil.

Direct historical example is the aristocracy of Hungary and Poland. Both undermined and exploited their rulers to extracted privileges and wealth of their respective nations. Resulting in weak states that fall pray to their neighbors.

> All this is under article about Marie Antionette who specifically I don't really think was evil.

I am not arguing she was evil, but that she was guilty of the situation and shouldn't be judged based on how nice she was to people and how great her writing skills were.

I do not believe in guilt based on your birth circumstances. I also think that you are building flippant strawman in "shouldn't be judged based on how nice she was to people and how great her writing skills were".

You dont want to judge people on their actions, you want to build enemies to make it easy to judge people. I am not interested in that. You dont care about what who believed, actually tried to push for and why the old system malfunctioned or was impossible to reform.

Nither do I.

Its not about birth but the action you take or not take.

> You dont want to judge people on their actions, you want to build enemies to make it easy to judge people. I am not interested in that. You dont care about what who believed, actually tried to push for and why the old system malfunctioned or was impossible to reform.

You completely mischarectarise what I say. You use formulations that put words into my mouth

> You dont care about

> You dont want to

This is the definition of building straw-man argument that YOU accuse me of. So maybe read what I write and critique what I wrote and not what you think that I think.

> I also think that you are building flippant strawman in "shouldn't be judged based on how nice she was to people and how great her writing skills were".

This is the definition of judging person by their actions. Just because she was polite and smiling and wrote a tearful letters, it does not make her a good person. I dont care if you believe in Jesus and go to church 3 time a week. If you stab someone to death on the street for giving you 'the look' you should rot in prison.

For the record, I think this is not how one should look at history. We have our current values, but to anachronistically apply these values to whole epochs long gone leads astray IMO.

Personal ethics is another matter, things like greed, dishonesty, callousness, betrayal between equals seem to be held in low regard wherever and whenever we choose to look.

There have been attempts to try and superimpose such personal ethics on grand epochs in history, but it requires a painful shoehorning of personal morals into some square holes where it doesn't belong. It doesn't hold up to serious scrutiny.

Also, people are more likely to knee jerkly defend everything for by past important people and see them as unaware victims of circumstances them to judge them. Maybe except Hitler and Stalin.

Sometimes people do superimpose own values inappropriately, but other times those making judgements just know more about actual acts of those people - even including historical context.

Narcissists and sociopaths and what not are not modern phenomenon never heard about before. And their contemporaties for expressed a lot about them.

It was awful and bloody and many revolutionary were awful people uneducated and prompt to bloodbath. But it soon inspired so many nations to move towards democracy that sometimes if not always history shows that awful people can build great things (pirates in New York etc..)

I remember she hated Lafayette for example to put some USA perspective she must have hated Washington too.

Rulers should be judged indeed on victory or defeat this current fashion of looking back at history to say individuals had good or bad personalities is dangerously capable of transforming the worst people into adorable ones.

Her story is the story of the Romanov in Russia or the Shah in Iran. People who loved to party and who had great education would be people You would love to hang out with today for sure.

But they did so while their own people were on the verge of collapsing... I don’t see a parallel with Hillary neither, if Hillary was burning millions of dollars when her husband was in power and partying all the time in the poorest city with people dying in the street then you would have had Marie Antoinette but Hillary acted as a ruler and worked hard to help her country (wether you like her politics or not)

I would argue that in many cases, the French Revolution might have had the opposite effect. Everyone was so scared of another reign of terror and the devastating revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that it directly led to the conservatism of Metternich and supported the conservative crackdowns in 1848. Monarchism in much of Europe - except France - was abolished after WWI, not after the French Revolution.

In the places where democracy was later established - say, Latin America - I think the US were much more of an influence than France.

The revolutionary wars were devastating, but they also demonstrated the power of a republican state - a sort of power that even reactionaries (e.g. Bismark) wanted to harness.

As for after 1848, I don't think that Europe was much more democratic than before 1789 (except for France, and the second republic was kind of DOA anyway). More states did have a constitution (in comparison to 1789, not necessarily to before 1848), so there was maybe a little bit more protection against absolute tyranny, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there was much effective parliamentary participation.

Although I will admit that the idea of liberalism was definitely in the air and maybe it wouldn't have been without the French Revolution, but that's hard to say (as said, the USA were always more of a poster child because their republic actually lasted).

I'm not sure if the revolutionary wars demonstrated the power of republicanism as much as they demonstrated the power of nationalism to someone like Bismarck, and nationalism is definitely something that was heavily influenced by the French Revolution.

It feels to me if you look at the trajectory from the start of the french revolution to the modern european state, even in periods of reaction, the arrow doesn't really turn much. Reactionaries usually see the advantages of nationalism, bourgeois the advantages of liberalism, and workers the advantages of democracy - and all of the three trends get reversed at points, but if you sum them, then it's a pretty steady gain. For instance, while the dissolution of the Frankfurt parliment was a blow against democracy, I think it probably pushed nationlism forward by putting so much power in Prussian hands.

So I'd credit the French Revolution with spawning and intensively testing the triad of political views that have ended up being totally dominant in Europe - you're right that this triad is not identical with democracy, but I think it is identical with what we generally call democracy in Europe today.

For the bourgeoisie of the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette became that villain. In 1789, they still needed the King, so there was some reluctance to attack him as much, as they were forming a constitutional monarchy. However, when the royal family attempted to escape Paris, all bets were off.

It became common theory, that they were trying to escape to Austria, so Marie Antoinette would get help from her Habsburg family, and Austria would invade France. This conspiracy theory (not true, as it turns out) effectively lead[0] to two things; the establishment of a republic and pre-emptively invading neighbouring countries, like Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium).

There is truth in every stereotype, and there are legitimate criticism of Marie Antoinette, but her character is far more complicated than her common cartoonish perception. This is how lines like 'let them eat cake' gets added afterwards, to justify the means.

[0] Yes, I know there were numerous other factors, but it's kind of astonishing how big of factor the Austrian conspiracy was.

I suggest you familiarize yourself with WW2 history before being an apologist for Japan in that period. Whether it was the Rape of Nanking, or that of Manila, or fatal medical experiments on prisoners, they brought unbelievable horror to civilians.

One fact does not cancel out the other.

Henri Kissinger's book, World order, is a great example of this approach.

You don't need to be a Y apologist to criticize the behavior of X, their enemy.

The Japanese military refused to surrender, and were willing to sacrifice their entire population. Civilians in cities across Japan were making weapons, whether in factories or in their houses.

The US had no desire to bomb cities or use nuclear weapons, and in fact the latter were carefully debated before use.

And don't X - Y me. This is not a math problem, pedant.

What makes you think the GP isn't familiar with it? The vile propaganda and sheer racism of the US against Japan and the Japanese is established fact, regardless of Japan's own actions.

Neither, however, is an attempt to excuse what either the Japanese nor the Germans did in either war. I am very familiar with the events you describe, but please don't read anything broader into my example than merely that; an example of making your enemies cartoonish.

>While Lossky was without doubt a sincere and benevolent person, really caring for the poor and trying to civilise Russian life, such an attitude betrays a breathtaking insensitivity to the systemic violence that had to go on in order for such a comfortable life to be possible. We're talking here of the violence inherent in a system: not only direct physical violence, but also the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation...

The Vendee: A Sociological Analysis of the Counter-Revolution of 1793 by Charles Tilly – https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/395527.The_Vendee#

> She could not but be guilty since she was a royalist in a republic, and her own future depended on overthrowing that republic.

Uh, yeah.

But then the article absurdly, yet somehow so unsurprisingly, drags Hillary Clinton into it.

> It is difficult to resist the parallel with Hillary Clinton, who despite her educated manner, sober clothing, and wonky intelligence was similarly dragged through the mud because she was a woman close to and possibly actually in power.

Hillary Clinton who, after Muammar al-Gaddafi was sodomized with a bayonet then shot, as Libya descended into violent anarchy: "We came, we saw, he died." Well, I'm still not sure about parallels between Clinton and Antoinette, but I can see a parallel in the author's way of interpreting politics.

A couple weeks ago an article rehabilitating Nero came through the HN front page. We know why Marie Antoinette was hated. We know why Nero was hated. But why do HN readers seem so interested in rehabilitating the most detestable monarchs?