Men have invariably gone forward in history with the assumption that violent shifts in their relation to the world, or in their relations to other men, were subject to a limiting principle: to critique, to reason, to the review of memory. Barely during the event, more frequently after violence has spent itself, revolutions in the physical and moral order were understood to be subject to the judgment of the community that has brought them to pass, or of the civilized community as a whole. Revolutions brought new freedom in their wake, or they suppressed freedom; thev opened new geographical and spiritual horizons, or they cut them down. Sometimes the revolutions were predictable, often they were contained.