Origins of Terror as a Political Concept and its Reflections in Today’s Political and Academic Discourse

It is often noted that ‘terror’ as a political concept is an offspring (one of the many) of the French Revolution. As the revolution itself, however, it has been laden with the serious normative weight and the justification or abnegation of the terror as used by the Jacobines has long become a sign of adherence to the revolution or of the opposition to it. These two positions never managed to overcome one another and their influence over the policy and academic discourse has fluctuated over the last two centuries with one or another gaining (temporarily) the upper hand. In the first of these positions, terrorism appears as rational, directed, morally justifiable (at least in some circumstances) and strategically plausible. In the other, it is seen as irrational, random, immoral and without any strategic purpose but destruction. The third understanding of terror that is often forgotten is actually also present in the French revolutionary discourse – the terror of crowds which is seen as just, though unruly, purposeful, though misguided. Using Koselleck’s ‘history of concepts’ as a theoretical background, I propose to look at the ‘semantic struggle’ surrounding the concept of terror at its earliest manifestations during the French revolution and its immediate aftermath. I will then look into the usage of the term 200 years later at the height of ‘war on terror’ and explore the differences in the semantic fields surrounding terror then and now. I will argue that though the contemporary use of terror on the surface seems to have adopted the counter-revolutionary representation of terror, it operates in a similar semantic field where ‘terror’ needs to be connected to, juxtaposed or opposed to the notions of ‘virtue’, ‘liberty’, ‘democracy’, ‘violence’ and ‘despotism’.