Trust, Politics and Revolution

A European History

Francesca Granelli

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788315746
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Tracing the relationships and networks of trust in Western European revolutionary situations from the Ancient Greeks to the French Revolution and beyond, Francesca Granelli here shows the essential role of trust in both revolution and government, arguing that without trust, both governments and revolutionary movements are liable to fail. The first study to combine the important of trust and the significance of revolution, this book offers a new lens through which to interpret revolution, in an essential work book for all scholars of political science and historians of revolution.

1

Introduction

With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which brought an end to the Cold War, the future looked bright as liberal democracy triumphed over communism. Yet today we seem to be entering another period of marked uncertainty: mass migration creates huge stress and major social divisions; religious fundamentalism paves the way for terrorism; transnational organizations and the ‘benefit scramble’ challenge the State from above and below and also challenge institutions¹; the rise of China shifts the axis of global influence; the re-emergence of Iran upsets the regional equilibrium; Russian posturing and aggression threaten European security; globalization exacerbates the divide between rich and poor; and ongoing debt crises undermine growth and stability.

The fragility and volatility of the Middle East – epitomized by the hopes and dreams of the Arab Spring quickly turning to despair and dismay – are played out to a global audience, against the backdrop of a ‘crisis of trust’ in governments and institutions that appeared long before the Brexit decision and the Trump presidency.² This increasingly popular refrain has become a central concern for politicians and regimes in the twenty-first century.³ For without trust, institutions fail, regimes fall and societies falter.

This is the backdrop for an emerging new paradigm in revolution. It is driven in part by communication. Advances in technology have played an important role in twenty-first-century revolution – with instant connectivity (collapsing time and space), many-to-many messaging, and the ability to combine multi-media channels while simultaneously managing vast amounts of data and reducing costs. Traditional and digital media now grow and inform each other. The result has been an explosion in networks of trusts, the conclusion of which we have yet to see. Messages and images move virally and at an exponential rate along these networks⁴; unconstrained within the digital world, they mirror and distort, support and challenge, shape and disrupt both the political mediascape and social attitudes. Underpinning all of this is a critical component: trust.

Research focus, significance, and originality

The present work traces and explores the interplay between trust and revolution. It aims to chart the changing nature and forms of trust against a parallel development in revolution. The underlying questions are: how do we comprehend a particular concept or idea, how was this understanding achieved and how has this influenced our awareness today?

Arguing that trust is a powerful lens through which to interpret revolution, the principal objective of this book is to trace the relationships and networks of trust in Western European revolutionary situations across the longue durée, from the Ancient Greeks to the French Revolution and beyond. The theoretically informed historical account draws on contemporaneous discussions and practices of trust and revolution. The initial chapters serve to highlight changes and contextualize trust in contemporary revolutionary situations. This evaluates the ways in which the two concepts have shaped the diverging trajectories of contemporary uprisings.

Few doubt the importance of trust; few doubt the significance of revolution. Although literature on both is widely available, they have yet to be combined in one study. No book-length historical study of the interconnection of trust and revolution exists to date. When mentioned at all, trust has been subsumed into the concepts of solidarity and collectivism; yet, at best, this deals with one facet of the interplay of trust and revolution. I have set out to contribute to the wider scholarship, by unpacking the multi-faceted meaning of revolution, and the changing nature and networks of trust embedded within Western society.

Methodological perspective, approach, and sources

This book employs historical methods. It sets out to excavate the concepts of revolution and trust across time and space, recognizing that they embody so much that they cannot be unambiguously defined.⁵ By marrying the history of ideas with a longue durée approach (as opposed to traditional, event-focused history found in much of the existing literature on revolution), the role of human agency is maintained. Furthermore, the concept of revolution lends itself to a focus on discontinuity; an objective of the book, informed by the longue durée, is to rehabilitate continuity so that it might apply to revolution as clearly as it does to trust.

In combining these approaches, each of the chapters dealing with historical and contemporary events notes the analytical importance of a specific revolutionary conjuncture. From these, longer-term historical trends and tendencies can be sourced, which lay the foundations and parameters for subsequent developments. We must nonetheless recognize contingencies of social agency, through relationships of trust. Although not uncontroversial, such an approach is made possible by the theoretical and methodological bridges built between the history of ideas and the longue durée, which McMahon labelled: ‘The Return of the History of Ideas?’⁶ Revolution is a prime candidate for such an approach, whereas a history of trust has yet to be written.

No study is without limits: it is beyond the scope and ambition of this book to provide a comprehensive and continuous history of trust and revolution. At most, the following discussion tours a familiar archipelago, comprising acknowledged inflections in both concepts. Using trust to focus on these perceived periods of change provides an alternative perspective on continuity and discontinuity. Drawing on primary sources, each chapter faces its own shortcomings: from the limitations of the literature available to the disjunction between the period and a teleological eye. It repeatedly raises questions of: who authored the source material – elites, historians, theorists, or practitioners, and what were their intentions? All the time, we must minimize the risk of universalizing Western history as seen through Western eyes.

The remainder of this chapter justifies the approach taken with reference to the relevant literature outlined in the methodological sections.

La longue durée

I have set out to explore the concepts of revolution and trust across 2,500 years: from the Ancient Greeks and Romans to the contemporary revolutionary situation in Egypt. In so doing, I am using trust to analyse revolution at various periods and at different scales, a venture that differs markedly from traditional linear, cause-and-effect history. The latter is not the only way to approach such a task: in the words of Braudel, ‘it is one which by itself can pose all the great problems of social structures, past and present. It is the only language binding history to the present, creating one indivisible whole’.⁷ Its methodological shortcomings are addressed by drawing from, and carefully combining, the approaches of a number of theorists as outlined in the following paragraphs.

Braudel’s idealized multi-layered theory of time: of the longue durée (long-term), the conjuncture (medium-term) and episodic history (short-term) – or geographical, social, and individual time – emphasizes the primacy of longer-term, structural trends over momentary events and contingencies in a rather determinist fashion.⁸ However, ‘its preoccupation with the structural scaffolding of history means that the role of individual events and human agency tends to assume an epiphenomenal one, consigned to the marginalia of history’. Individuals in the longue durée are merely the ‘foam cresting on the waves of history’⁹ – a point acknowledged by Braudel.¹⁰ Having fallen out of fashion, a return to the longue durée necessitates revision, especially in its conception of the structure–culture relationship.

Another issue arises when an historiographical approach is applied to concepts: is it justified to speak of the longue durée of a concept if its meaning has changed significantly? What does continuity of a concept require?¹¹

Furthermore, by referencing Koselleck, ‘who has fathomed the longue durée problem for conceptual history’, revised forms of duration can be understood and applied.¹² Just as Braudel sought interdisciplinary collaboration, Koselleck combined history and sociology as a way of going beyond mere historicism but, while his account tended towards the longue durée, he disputed the achievability of histoire totale and instead offered that history is represented through language. He distinguished between two different ‘layers of time’ (Zeitschichten), the ‘natural conditions that allow our specific anthropological experiences of time’, and ‘structures of repetition’ that ‘individuals consciously adopt, ritualise, culturally enrich and level to a degree of consistency that helps to stabilise a society’.¹³ In so doing he frees the longue durée from the confines of Braudel’s naturalistic and structuralist method.

Repeated human activity and practices are underlined throughout this book. With it, ‘different patterns of repetition are conceivable [as] certain phenomena may exist continuously or be interspersed by breaks, repetition may be desired, forced by external constraints or simply exist as a result of inertia’.¹⁴ This approach can accommodate highly individualized situations: while composed of different layers of time, each moment may be interpreted as an instance of a broader trend – such continuity, based on repetition, allows for variation and gradual change.

History of ideas

The history of ideas is a contentious and fiercely debated area of historical enquiry. A key task is to identify its terrain and the methodology used to navigate it, as practitioners use a variety of labels, often interchangeably, such that definitions are hard to come by and consensus easy to conjure.¹⁵ Despite these differences, there remain two common threads.

First, concepts shape and are shaped by the world around them. Often value-laden, they are used as tools or weapons in the argument. As Syrjämäki argues, ‘this theoretical insight leads to explanations of conceptual change and its relationship to social changes; dissolving the sharp distinction between theory and practice to study conceptual history is to study a form of cultural, political and social change’.¹⁶ Second, the meaning of a concept must always depend upon the specific historical context.¹⁷ This raises the question: how are we to study concepts in order to understand them? There is no Archimedean point from which to grasp an objective meaning; they only ever have a contextualized meaning that depends on how the concept is applied, by whom and with what result.

The approach taken here is to draw from primary sources to trace the use of, and interaction between, the concepts of revolution and trust, spanning a variety of periods throughout European history.¹⁸ It reunites the longue durée (once unreceptive to the questions of meaning and intention) with the history of ideas and in so doing reintroduces the role of human agency (which had been side-lined) back into the mix.¹⁹ This is a fruitful reconciliation, which has reinvigorated both schools of thought. By drawing carefully from Koselleck, Skinner, Neustadt and May, respectively, this research is able to overcome many of the criticisms directed at Lovejoy’s traditional history of ideas.²⁰ By using a time-bound methodology, and connecting separate contexts while maintaining the ‘synchronic specificity’ of those contexts,²¹ it avoids the dangers of reification and the denial of agency inherent in Lovejoy’s abstract, atemporal theory.²² Moreover, it counters the criticism levelled at the traditional history of ideas by emphasizing the mechanisms connecting these moments rather than assuming that ideas travel materially and institutionally across time.

In Bevir’s words, the approach suggested here defends ‘against both reductionists who dismissed ideas as mere epiphenomena [by-products] and canonical theorists who approached texts as timeless philosophical works’.²³ However, these theorists are not without their critics. Skinner is criticized for his restrictive approach to ideas through verbal language, since ideas can also emerge in non-linguistic media or genres.²⁴ To avoid similar criticism, a combination of language and daily practice is interwoven through each chapter and further supported by references to evolution in the arts. This book follows the approach of intellectual history, placing the concepts of revolution and trust in a broader context.²⁵

Together, these theorists provide the theoretical and methodological framework that underpins this book. Recognizing that history is constrained by primary sources, the book acknowledges that even the best sources are typically representative of elites. Nonetheless, these historical and philosophical texts were not written in isolation but by historians, commentators, philosophers, and theor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Figures
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What is revolution?
• 3 What is trust in the twenty-first century?
• 4 Power, control, and trust
• 5 Ancient revolutionaries
• 6 Medieval Europe’s rebellious nature
• 7 Renaissance Man – A revolutionary?
• 8 Convulsions, then rupture
• Interlude
• 9 A new revolutionary paradigm?
• 10 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint