Oddbean

Peace! FWIW, I agree with both of you. History is a summation of human choices, but those choices are always limited; by culture, by available information, and by material circumstances. I see the French Revolution as the quintessential failure of courage and high ideals to overcome the deeply damaged culture of late-Bourbon France. The revolutionaries' rural great-grandparents had lived in largely self-governing villages with little exposure to bureaucracy and few positive experiences of hierarchy; but the revolutionaries either no longer had or did not value this cultural toolkit for organising human relations and instead expanded the Ancien Regime's hierarchical bureacracy into the model for their new State.

I just have a problem with this interpretation of society with the social contract idea and all of this generalization about "the people" brought X to power. Re. the revolution, you might find this book interesting https://image.nostr.build/df93c90b9d9edf5cc1e6852c479355208687a974feb4666945fd9f2dd4757cf0.jpg

Yes. The content of the book is interesting, I learned several things I didn't know. But I see that he has self published it and that the last chapter refers to the rest of the book as "this article". The chapters also almost look like separate articles, and they afe not very well tied together. So I kind of get the sense that he sat with gold but no publisher wanted to take it, and he might just have decided just to publish it without doing the last hard 10% of the work. Who knows, the book might have been seen as too dangerous.

They almost never 'take' power. Politicians are given power and you can see many historical examples of this. Many of the worst examples have simply abused power that never should have been given to government by the people in the first place. It was always going to happen and doesn't just pop into existence out of thin air. That isn't to say that there aren't individuals within these contexts who didn't consent, only that enough of the culture and population did. Otherwise, it never would happen. Hitler wouldn't happen. Mao wouldn't happen. Stalin wouldn't happen. People like that were given too much power because of bad dominant culture/philosophy and abused it.