You Can't Buy Freedom

In this week's New Yorker, John Cassidy has a sort of review essay in which he considers and then rejects the notion that Islam causes underdevelopment; for obvious reasons Weber's Protestant Ethic is central to the debate.  It's a perfectly fine little essay; what struck me, however, were its opening lines, which really have nothing to do with essay's overarching argument. Cassidy writes:

After the revolution comes the test of governing. From Paris in 1789 to Cairo and Tunis in 2011, the task is the same: translating the euphoria of the uprising into lasting material progress.

Is that right?  Is economic growth that central to the revolutionary impulse? In 1789 there were, obviously, all manner of economic systems suggested and demands made but was the tulmult really about "lasting material progress" as opposed to say creating new and better political and social arrangements? There were as many if not more proposals for political organization and social alteration as ever there were for economic reorganization.  Unless there is some clause in the Declaration I missed, the complaints I read there are all political and there is no sentence that reads: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and lasting material progress.

According to Aristotle to be human is to be a political animal, which means -- more or less, the ability and the desire to create social and political organizational structures through the use of reason.  No ants we, driven to scurry hither and thither by instinct, humanity gets to decide how or if it will scurry and what set of rules does or doesn't organize the scurrying. When did the notion that civic engagement trumped economic efficiency and material improvement become such a quotidian idea that it's presented in the The New Yorker as if it were a matter of fact?