"Just seventeen years ago the late Alfred Cobban opened the case against the "orthodox interpretation" of the French Revolution. Ten years later, in 1964, he summed up that case in his brilliant essay on The Social Interpretation of the French Revolution. Cobban's argument and works inspired by or complementary to his revisionism have profoundly affected the historiography not only of the Revolution but of the Old Regime as well. We are today still working out the implications of Cobban's position. Briefly, what Cobban did was to demonstrate that the empirical data gathered by historians, including "Marxist" and "Neo-Marxist" historians, had exploded the "Marxist" theory which purported to explain the Revolution."
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Gerald J. Cavanaugh, 'The Present State of French Revolutionary Historiography: Alfred Cobban and Beyond', French Historical Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Autumn 1972), p. 587
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_Cobban
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Alfred Cobban
Alfred Bert Carter Cobban (24 May 1901 – 1 April 1968) was an English historian and Professor of French History at University College, London, who along with prominent French historian François Furet advocated a classical liberal view of the French Revolution.
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