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The trial and execution of Louis XVI served as a founding act of French republican democracy. It was also a scene of irregular justice: no legal warrants or procedural precedents existed for bringing a king to justice before the law. This essay describes how Jacobins crafted a new language of popular agency to overcome that obstacle—the language of redemptive violence. Although redemptive violence had roots in prerevolutionary notions of penal justice and social cohesion, its philosophical ambitions were revolutionary and modern. Analyzing that language illuminates how republican democracy weaponized a distinctive ideology of extralegal violence at its origins. It also helps explain redemptive violence's enduring appeal during and after the French Revolution.

This book uncovers an unfamiliar vision of political violence that nonetheless prevailed in modern French thought: that through “redemptive violence” the people would not rend but regenerate society. It homes in on invocations of popular redemptive violence across four historical moments in France specifically: the French Revolution, Algeria’s colonization, the Paris Commune, and the eve of the first World War. In each of these cases, the book reveals how French thinkers experienced democratization as social disintegration. Yet, before such danger, they also proclaimed that virtuous violence by the people could repair the social fabric. The path leading from an anarchic multitude to an organized democratic society required, not violence’s prohibition, but its virtuous expression by the people. Understanding this counterintuitive vision of violence in French thought offers a new vantage point on the meaning of modern democracy. It alerts readers to how struggles for democracy do not merely seek justice or a new legal regime but also liberating visions of the social bond.

It is now commonplace to acknowledge Alexis de Tocqueville's support for Algerian colonization. Less well understood, however, is why he also endorsed the French strategy of “total war” in the regency. How was Tocqueville's liberalism linked to the specific shape of violence in Algeria? By situating his Algerian writings in the intersecting intellectual contexts of the 1840s, this essay argues that Tocqueville endorsed total war in Africa because of his passion for glory. Far from an aristocratic anachronism, that passion was the product of contemporary scientific debates over voluntarism in France. It was also shaped by the lingering legacies of revolutionary republicanism and Bonapartism which defined glory in terms of national defense. By tethering modern liberty to this conception of glory, Tocqueville provided resources for rationalizing settlerism's exterminationist violence.

How does social change happen? Why do some patterns of change endure and become revolutionary? Eva von Redecker's book, Praxis and Revolution, is a study in fundamental questions. The book was originally published in 2018 by Campus Verlag, but Lucy Duggan has recently translated it for publication in Columbia University Press's 'New Directions in Critical Theory' series. Praxis and Revolution seeks nothing less than to offer a comprehensive theoretical vocabulary to describe social stability and change, at multiple scales, and from a 'practice-first' or 'praxeological' point of view. It is an expansive book, sometimes unwieldy, often maddening, and occasionally brilliant. Its best claims are far-reaching, suggesting new ways for political theorists and critical historians to rethink an alluring phenomenon at the heart of our disciplines: revolution.At its core, Praxis and Revolution builds a 'detailed model' of what revolutions are and how they happen (p. x). Revolutions are not events or ruptures between the old and the new. They are 'stretched out' processes where already-existing practices get transferred, substituted, and repurposed into new configurations. As the first half of the book explains, social stability happens when overlapping practices coagulate, reiterate over time, and form a bedrock of continuity. Like a magnetic field, a society's kaleidoscopic practices get 'aligned' toward one another and 'anchored' around shared foundational practices. We call the result 'structures,' which are not 'repeated practices but the expression of these practices in the form of stable rule-resource sets' (p. 98). A revolution happens when this bedrock of structural stability gets contaminated, or 'hijacked,' by already existing minor practices that are re-functionalized in new ways. As in Ludwig Wittgenstein's treatment of the famous 'duck-rabbit' image, these 'interstitial practices' become fulcrums for perspectival aspect-shifting on a mass scale. In a revolution, interstitial practices, 'laboriously rehearsed over time,' become the anchor for a new hegemonic paradigm (p. 219). What was once anomalous becomes central, even vital. What appears new is discovered to already have been there all along, in