This chapter shows the limits of political Manichaeism with reference to the career of Maximilien Robespierre and his fellow Jacobin leaders during the French Revolution. It criticizes the use of litmus tests and the search for purity in political life, it also engages with the rhetoric of key members of the Claremont Institute whose radical agenda shows disturbing similarities with that of the Jacobins.

This chapter argues that rather than a unilinear extension of the market project from England to France, the Anglo-French contestation, and the concomitant processes of uneven and combined development during the early modern period sharpened and restructured existing sociohistorical differences, ultimately leading to the formulation of a qualitatively different regime of property and modernization in France. Jacobinism was neither absolutism nor capitalism, but combined and bypassed both based on a new form of sociality and political economy. It produced novel social, economic and geopolitical dynamics that gave modernity a radically multilinear texture.

This chapter will depart from these interpretations of the Turkish Revolution through the theoretical and historical pointers discussed in previous chapters. It will argue that the original Kemalist experiment with modernity (1923–45) cannot be understood as a form of (state) capitalism, but rather as a historically specific Jacobinism.

Having documented the uneven and combined developmental trajectories of Britain and France, in this chapter I will begin to explore the significance of Jacobinism for our understanding of the rise of multiple modernities outside Western Europe. To this end, I seek to identify the precise nature and concrete outcome of the "combined" character of Ottoman modernization. It shows that the late Ottoman Empire can neither be understood as a "patrimonial state" nor can it be conceptualized as a "peripheral capitalism." Instead, the end result of the Ottoman experiment with modernity was a historically specific Jacobinism that combined and bypassed capitalism (and socialism) based on an alternative form of property and sociality.

Chapter 6 discusses the origin and protracted development of capitalism in Turkey in the post-World War II period. I show how capitalist social relations began to penetrate the social fabric, and how the initial Kemalist project has been reinvented by different actors to contest and produce capitalism. In addition, the period after the 1950s witnessed the rise of a new capitalist class in provincial Anatolian towns. Pace the conventional interpretation, commercial groups of Anatolian towns organized in and through the Islamic National View Movement (NVM), neither supported an "artisan" or "statist" capitalism, nor was it simply an Islamic critique of the developing market society. Instead, the movement envisioned a novel political space as the foundation of a new capitalist industrialization strategy unencumbered by the spirit of earlier Republican policies. Although the NVM was unable to take control of the state from the 1970s to the 1990s, its conservative capitalist heritage was appropriated by the Justice and Development Party, which has led to an unprecedented consolidation and deepening of capitalist social relations in Turkey since the beginning of the new millennium.

The final chapter summarizes the argument of the book and considers its implications for International Relations and historical sociology.

In 1815, France remained an autonomous state, occupied by Allied troops. The aim of the occupation was to defuse Bonapartist sympathies, and it was marked by indirect rule by the Allies. After the Battle of Waterloo, the Allies addressed the financial dimensions of peace and collective security: deliberations on restorations and compensation made the tensions between the Allies’ interests visible, as Prussia’s demands to bleed France out were weighed against Metternich’s concern about the ‘Jacobin spirit’, and the more moderate positions towards France of both Britain and Russia. Demilitarization and the restoration of the Bourbon regime were achieved by means of a systematically applied military occupation. However, the objectives of fighting Bonapartism, stabilization and the matter of reparation payments had not been settled. ‘Armed Jacobinism’ continued to be a threat to the moderate occupation of France by the Allies.

This chapter discusses the role of diplomats at the Congress of Vienna, with a specific focus on the British Foreign Secretary, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh. While accepting that Castlereagh, like all other diplomats, was motivated by a realist maximization of Britain’s interests, for which the talk of peace and cooperation tosome extent constituted mere rhetoric, the chapter emphasises how diplomats like Castlereagh were formed by the experiences and viewpoints they had accumulated over a long period of time. It was this political socialisation, notably shaped by the lengthy struggle against French Jacobinism and Bonapartism, that influenced Castlereagh’s beliefs about the most dangerous threats to the security of the Continent, and by implication, of Great Britain. These mixed beliefs informed his decision-making in ways that promoted both British interests and collective security and peace in the years after 1813.