Table of Contents

A narrative of the French Revolution from a Jacobin perspective; the limitless claims of individual liberty; the indisputable claims of civil society; the limitless claims of the public sphere; the indisputable claims of the nation; Jacobins as the free citizens of a one-party state; social reconciliation, fraternity; spreading the word - rhetorics of harmony; unifying emnities at home and abroad; applied Jacobinism - the social ecologies of Jacobin principle; looking backward - on the origins of Jacobin sensibility; looking forward - Jacobinism in world history.

Reviews

Higonnet's is a serious and generous enterprise, with an underlying and fervent purpose, to dissociate the French from the Russian Revolution.--P. N. Furbank "New York Review of Books "

The time seems right for a new, post-Marxist, and indeed post-Furetian version of Jacobinism, and this is what Patrice Higonnet now offers us in "Goodness Beyond Virtue". It is a surprising, and faintly quixotic construct, for Higonnet endeavors to sketch out a Jacobinism for Our Times which is 'a model for modern democrats'...Patrice Higonnet proposes that the tragedy of the Jacobinism was one in which the Jacobins themselves, as well as their adversaries, were implicated, and that some of the pity we reserve for the victims of the Terror should be extended to its originators.--Colin Jones "Times Literary Supplement "

No aspect of the French Revolution has been more controversial than the Jacobins. Many historians...see them as a pretotalitarian terrorist force...Higonnet offers a scholarly, sweeping, and level-headed corrective to this orthodoxy...Deeply informed, compassionate, and fair, Higonnet's book has brought fresh scholarship, judicious reflections, and intriguing social comparisons to bear on this endlessly fascinating subject.