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Article: Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution.(Review)
- Article from:
- The Historian
- Article date:
- June 22, 2000
- Author:
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Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution. By Patrice Higonnet. (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1998. Pp. i, 397. $24.95.)
The author of this book sees Jacobinism as an admirable but flawed and ultimately disastrous effort to reconcile individualism and communitarianism by politicizing the universalist republican ideals of freedom, social justice, and altruistic involvement in the public sphere. It was an effort, he suggests, that"foundered on the issue of class and class formation" because the Jacobins called for social reconciliation but were at the same time socially conservative (3). As social tensions rose in 1794, he ...