Under a review of a book that helpfully informs us that revolutions are authoritarian.

“Authoritarianism,” he writes, “is one of the most striking features” of revolutions. Napoleon was an archetype, followed by a grim parade of successors: “Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot … Khomeini.”

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“The principle of popular sovereignty could be disregarded in the name of the people,” Mr. Edelstein writes. “It was in the name of a future, improved democratic government by people Y that the present, inferior democratic government by people X must be suspended.” Ancient despots had promised order. Modern despots were empowered by the allure of so-called historical progress, to be achieved with terror and coercion. The hiss and thud of the guillotine, the gutters running with blood, the show trials and purges, the inevitable dictatorships of “virtue” or the “proletariat”: These were not failures, Mr. Edelstein suggests, but the necessary if exorbitant price of progress.

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“The inevitable compromises of democratic governance,” he writes of our present moment, “do not sit easily with either progressives or traditionalists. Liberal democracy gets worn down by historical expectations or regrets.” This general ennui produces perilous effects: a taste for centralized power, distain [sic] for procedural justice, aggressive ideological purity, contempt for moderation. Whatever his intentions, Mr. Edelstein may find that his study of revolutions induces in readers an appreciation for the age-old, Polybian balance of the U.S. Constitution, even as history threatens to overtake it. We should certainly hope so.