The problem of the Terror lies at the heart of any reflection upon the French Revolution and its implications for modern political culture. Contemporaries sought to grasp its meaning immediately after the fact as they struggled to explain an experience which seemed to defy the Revolution's fundamental assumption: that rational human intentions could erase the arbitrariness of history and institute a transparent social order. Since then, historians and philosophers have not ceased to ponder what Benjamin Constant called "that inexplicable delirium known as the reign of the Terror." For some, the Terror deviated from the rights of man only to preserve them: it was a system of revolutionary government dictated by circumstances that threatened the very existence of the infant French Republic. For others, it revealed a dynamic inherent in the Revolution from the start: a dynamic unleashed by the very effort to refashion society in the light of human