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Radical Translations

It is commonly assumed that the Terror marked the end of revolutionary experiments with antiquity. Sources from antiquity, however, remained powerful conceptual tools, especially for those revolutionaries seeking to examine the Revolution's failure and to imagine alternative political futures. This article is a comparative study of Sylvain Maréchal's Voyages de Pythagore (1798) and Vincenzo Cuoco's Platone in Italia (1806). Both writers turned to antique sources in order to analyse how the Revolution could be corrected and performed again. Their search for indigenous sources of revolution and reflections on agency and voice would prove influential for subsequent revolutionary theories, including those of anarchism and ‘passive revolution’.

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