On Revolution

Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.

When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.

Neither Rousseau nor Robespierre was capable of dreaming of a goodness beyond virtue, just as they were unable to imagine that radical evil would ‘partake nothing of the sordid or sensual’ (Melville), that there could be wickedness beyond vice.

We noted before that the passion of compassion was singularly absent from the minds and hearts of the men who made the American Revolution.

To sound off with a cheerful ‘give me liberty or give me death’ sort of argument in the face of the unprecedented and inconceivable potential of destruction in nuclear warfare is not even hollow; it is downright ridiculous.

We have become so used to thinking of domestic politics in terms of party politics that we are inclined to forget that the conflict between [the party system and the council system] has always been a conflict between parliament, the source and seat of power of the party system, and the people, who have surrendered their power to their representatives.

For goodness that is beyond virtue, and hence beyond temptation, ignorant of the argumentative reasoning by which man fends off temptations and, by this very process, comes to know the ways, of wickedness, is also incapable of learning the arts of persuading and arguing.

he gains as much power by the system of mutual promises as he loses by his consent to a monopoly of power in the ruler

The greatest revolutionary innovation, Madison’s discovery of the federal principle for the foundation of large republics,

Totalitarianism’s essence, she asserts, is the total domination of human beings by terror. It is not only the scale of the crimes that is novel; it is their very character. At their heart is the attempted extirpation of all human “spontaneity,” which is to say human freedom. Nothing less than radical surgery upon “human nature” has been attempted. To this end, the essential means is the concentration camp system, perfected in different forms by Stalin and Hitler. It acts by tearing down the dignity of human beings, layer by layer, first nullifying the “judicial person,” then destroying the “moral person” (by forcing the inmates to make choices between criminal alternatives), and finally tearing down “individuality,” the seat of spontaneity, leaving, in place of recognizable human beings, “ghastly marionettes with human face.

When regimes lose the Mayflower-Compact-like cooperation of their people, their power evaporates, and, although they may stave off defeat with violence for a while, it cannot save them.