There is something about the suddenness of the French Revolution that makes people come to the realization that the way government is organised is actually just a convention. It’s not given by nature, it’s not given by tradition. It inaugurates an enormous debate about how far you can go to change things just because you think it’s reasonable and right to change them, and how much change has to take place in a more gradual way. The revolution raises the whole issue of how change takes place, and how much people should organize to insist that change takes place. It rips off the veil of tradition and says that the only justification for government is that it makes sense, that it’s fair, that it’s equal, that it’s just. … It gives a force to this that no other event had previously done in quite the same way, which is why everyone who writes about it, from Burke on, is completely obsessed with what happened.