Tues 11.29.11 | Radicalism, from the French Forward

Inequalities in wealth and status abound, despite the official rhetoric of equal rights and opportunity. According to Immanuel Wallerstein, the French Revolution had thunderous consequences for the capitalist world-economy and for how struggles between haves and have-nots have played out. Ideals promoted by the French revolutionaries, he argues, generated dynamics that produced a liberalism determined to contain radicalism at every turn.