David Bell, in an otherwise interesting review in The New Republic of David Andress's new history of the Terror (the period of the French Revolution, that is), says the following weird thing:

It is time to conclude that, with the demise of modern revolutionary politics over the past generation, the Terror simply no longer belongs to that part of the historical record which seems to speak directly and vitally to our contemporary experience.

Now, I'm the first to agree that the totalitarian model of state domination has ceased to be the great threat juxtaposed to Western ideals of freedom and democracy, a role it played from Burke's response to the Terror all the way through the liberal response to Nazism and Communism, Orwell, the Thatcher/Reagan years, and its final misplaced and pathetic denouement in the neocon view of the invasion of Iraq. Today, the great threats to Western ideals of freedom and democracy lie in failed states, anarchy, non-state violent organizations, and the impunity of multinational corporations to democratic rule.

But to say that the Terror no longer speaks to contemporary experience is very, very premature; and it may always remain premature. It has not been very long at all since the last seizure of power by a group of fanatical, "incorruptible" ideologues who proceeded to exterminate their political foes in order to construct an unassailable base of power, only to find the list of enemies proliferating wildly and uncontrollably until it came to include many of the instigators of the purges themselves. It has been two hundred and ten-odd years since Robespierre; only thirty since Pol Pot, and ten since the Taliban. There seems little reason not to include Cromwell in the timeline, pushing the origin back another hundred and fifty years. Meanwhile, candidates to host the next revolutionary ideological bloodbath include Nepal and, yes, Iraq, should any faction ever come out on top of the civil war there.

Witchhunts and political centralization are both phenomena of mass society. Their progeny, hysterical state terror, has been around as long as the modern state itself. There seems little reason to believe that it will disappear until the modern state does, and that looks to be a long way off yet.