Digital SAT Reading and Writing Practice Question #332

Text 1 Historian Jonathan Israel characterizes Maximilien Robespierre as a man driven fundamentally by a rigid, uncompromising ideological purity. According to Israel, Robespierre’s actions during the Reign of Terror were not chaotic reactions to wartime stress, but the logical, albeit ruthless, application of a utopian moral framework derived directly from the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Text 2 While it is tempting to view Robespierre as a monolithic architect of terror motivated by abstract philosophy, recent scholarship by Peter McPhee highlights the immense, immediate pressures facing the French Republic in 1793. McPhee argues that the Jacobin leadership's resort to draconian measures was primarily a pragmatic, reactive strategy meant to prevent the total collapse of the state amidst devastating civil war and foreign invasion. Based on the texts, how would Peter McPhee (Text 2) most likely respond to Jonathan Israel's characterization of Robespierre (Text 1)?