Revolutions

Revolutions:
Finished and Unfinished,
From Primal to Final

Edited by

Paul Caringella, Wayne Cristaudo

and Glenn Hughes
 Revolutions:
Finished and Unfinished, From Primal to Final,
Edited by Paul Caringella, Wayne Cristaudo and Glenn Hughes

This book first published 2012

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2012 by Paul Caringella, Wayne Cristaudo and Glenn Hughes and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-4039-4, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4039-2

To the memory of Thomas Hollweck, a wonderful and humane spirit. He
was present at the conference from which this volume arose, and is the
author of a paper in this volume. Sadly he did not live to see this work. We
all miss him.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... ix
Wayne Cristaudo

Introduction .............................................................................................. xiii

Wayne Cristaudo

Chapter One................................................................................................. 1
Revolution as a Political Concept
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

Chapter Two ................................................................................................ 8

Revolutions: Progress or Decline?
Thomas J. McPartland

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 50

The Primal Revolution: Original and Unfinished
Louis Herman

Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 80
Modernity as the Immanentization of the Eschaton: A Critical
Re-evaluation of Eric Voegelin’s Gnosis-thesis
Manfed Riedl

Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 108

A Disturbance in Being: The Idea of Revolution in History
Thomas A. Hollweck

Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 133

On the Ruins of Civilizations: The Regimes of Terror
Manfred Henningsen

Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 154

“England: A Parliamentary Church” and “The European Significance
of the Glorious Revolution” – Selections from Out of Revolution
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
viii Table of Contents

Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 167

A “Half-Revolution” or a Revolution Finally Completed? Reformed
Protestant Theology’s Fulfillment in the American Revolution
Glenn A. Moots

Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 192

Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution
Wayne Cristaudo

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 226

Salvation Without Individuals: The Bolshevik Revolution
Glenn Hughes

Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 252

Loot the Looters: Out of Revolutions With or Without Wealth, Health,
Knowledge, Liberty, and Justice—Generalizations from the Russian
Revolution and Applications of Generalities to Russia
Michael S. Bernstam

Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 293

Development with Chinese Characteristics: Asia’s Sinic Revolutions
in Global Historical Perspective
William Ratliff

Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 329

Revolution or Redemption? The Middle East
Arie Amaya-Akkermans

Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 350

The Worst Revolution of All? Managerialism and the “Body without Ears”
Christopher Hutton

Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 364

Transhumanism: The Final Revolution
Klaus Vondung

Appendix ................................................................................................. 372

Contributors............................................................................................. 378

Index........................................................................................................ 383
 PREFACE

In some ways this book is a testament to a fact too infrequently

appreciated by social philosophers: the vast amount of human reality is
formed through dialogue and encounter, and the inherent tension of those
encounters and dialogues. This volume is the result of a series of chance
encounters - or we could say fate; for if fate is shorn of superstition, it is
the name we give to the tapestry of the myriad of chance encounters that
form us. Every contributor to the volume was either known to me or Paul
Caringella, or Glenn Hughes, whom I met through Paul.
The pathway to Paul led through a sequence of chance encounters
triggered by a day in the open stacks of the University of Adelaide library
when my hand, inadvertently, paused upon a book called Law and
Revolution by Rosenstock-Huessy’s student, the legal historian and Soviet
Law expert, Harold Berman. That book contained a number of footnotes to
Rosenstock-Huessy’s Out of Revolution, which compelled me to read
more by him. It just so happened that the book, along with four or five
other books by Rosenstock-Huessy, was in the library at the University of
Adelaide. (More than twenty years after reading that book, while on
sabbatical at Flinders University in South Australia, I would briefly share a
room with a man who had ordered a number of books by Rosenstock-
Huessy for the University of Adelaide Library in the 1960s.)
So overpowered was I by the opening sentences of Out of Revolution –
“Our passions give life to the world. Our collective passions constitute the
history of mankind” – that I had to hunt down and find everything I could
by this author, most of whose books in English had to be ordered directly
from the small publication company, Argo Books, set up by Rosenstock-
Huessy’s former student Clint Gardner. God knows why Frances Huessy
(the grand-daughter-in-law of Rosenstock-Huessy) happened to be looking
through the back orders of Argo one day and spontaneously called up the
Australian who had ordered all these books. Indeed, the phone-call I
received that day did feel like a phone-call from, if not God, exactly,
someone with a message from God. (Forgive my theological archaisms,
but, allowing for metaphorical rather than metaphysical speech, is this not
the vocabulary that best expresses those rare moments which change the
entire direction of our life?) I was very depressed at the time, and thus
x Preface

instead of being at work in my office, I was lying down on the lounge

room floor staring at the ceiling, when the phone rang; and as the
conversation progressed, I was invited to visit the Huessys. That
eventually led me on a journey through the US to talk to people about
Rosenstock-Huessy. That journey began with Bill Cane and the historian
Page Smith, whose wife had just been given weeks to live (and he himself
would die with forty-eight hours of her). Bill had met Paul Caringella
when they attended a seminary together in the 1960s. I will not recount the
various synchronicities that led from Bill to Paul - there were many - but
one piece of serendipity I must mention is that as an undergraduate I had
learnt about Eric Voegelin, who was presented by my Political Theory
teacher as an odd, but interesting Christian political theorist. I was neither
interesting nor Christian as a student, but I was odd enough to become
somewhat intrigued by him. And Voegelin remained intriguing for me
throughout the rest of my post-graduate studies and through to my
university appointment. So much so that when I became interested in
Rosenstock-Huessy’s connection of revolutions and Christianity, I was
struck by the contrast between how he and Voegelin saw Christianity, and
how different they were in their appraisals of the significance and meaning
of revolutions. Thus when I decided to visit the Rosenstock-Huessy circle
in the United States, I wrote a paper comparing Eric Voegelin and Eugen
Rosenstock-Huessy on the topic of Christianity and revolutions.1 I had no
idea that when I was in the United States I would meet the man who had
been Eric Voegelin’s personal assistant for the last eight years of
Voegelin’s life. That man was Paul. Nor, when Paul and I first met, at a
forum where Page had asked me to give a talk on Voegelin and
Rosenstock-Huessy, would I guess that almost twenty years later we
would celebrate those two great spirits whose work had shaped our lives
and brought us together. The intensity of the initial encounter – ‘murderer,
gnostic!’ if I recall correctly, were but two words hurled at me by Paul
after the paper – was only matched by the intensity of the friendship that
followed it.
I hope I may be forgiven this lengthy prefatory statement, but it is a
sad reflection on the state of the human sciences that we treat knowledge
as something involving a subject, or an object that is perceived or
construed by a subject, when in fact, as Michael Polanyi once formulated
it, all knowledge is “personal knowledge”. Our knowledge is as much
shaped by the gamut of encounters that are constitutive of our relationships

1
This would eventually be published as ‘Philosophy, Christianity and Revolution
in Eric Voegelin and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’ in European Legacy, Vol. IV/6,
December 1999, pp. 58-74.
 Revolutions: Finished and Unfinished, From Primal to Final xi

(indeed of our very selves) as by the desire to know. The three editors of
this volume, as I have indicated, met through our intellectual loves, and
personal journeys. Had it not been for Paul Caringella, I would have left
Voegelin behind many years ago. But Paul would not let me let him go.
There were more things that he needed to say to me, more encounters he
needed to establish, more people he needed to bring together—and it must
be said that Paul Caringella’s genius is in introducing people to ideas and
to each other. It is a neat symmetry of German, a symmetry which has no
English equivalent, that the term for representation or idea—Vorstellung—
is the same root as the verb for introducing one another (sich vorstellen).2
And it is a fact that our ideas are enhanced through what we are introduced
to, and through whom we are introduced to—and also, we must add, what
we are reintroduced to.
Paul, who had known Rosenstock-Huessy’s work many years prior to
our meeting, grasped immediately that the tensions I detected between
Rosenstock-Huessy and Voegelin in their respective writings on revolution
were the source of some new cluster of ideas. And to bring this out he just
needed to introduce Voegelin and Rosenstock-Huessy to each other
(actually, when we first met in 1995, he introduced me to the fact that
there was a very small correspondence between Rosenstock-Huessy and
Voegelin consisting of one letter each!), in part by engaging me, but also
by bringing friends of his, who, for the most part, were also scholars of
Eric Voegelin, together for a conference at the University of Hong Kong.
The result is this volume on revolutions. (We also have done something
similar on philosophical and theological visions of history).
Those introductions and reintroductions could only have taken place
because my then Head of School and dear friend Heung-wah Wong had
not only created a School with a great budget surplus, but who, having
heard of Paul, insisted I do everything possible to bring him to Hong Kong
and have him run some events for us. Again, the personal encounter had
contributed to an event, and eventually to a volume on revolutions. The
particular theories, aspects, and examples of revolution we discuss in this
volume are due to the particular interests of the contributors. This is

2
Cf. “In every healthy society, one is inducted and introduced (vorgestellt),
because life continues as a chain of people and things who have been introduced/
represented (Vorgestellten). That's how one enters history, in so far as one asks
after my name and then one acclaims the other…The human world does not
consist of ‘will and representation’ but as love and introduction/representation.”
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Ja und Nein, Autobiographische Fragmente aus Anlass
des 80. Geburtstags des Autors im Auftrag der seinen Namen tragenden
Gesellschaft, ed. Georg Müller, (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1968), 22.
xii Preface

invariably the case with any edited book, but this particular book is largely
informed by the spirits of Eric Voegelin and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy,
two thinkers who looked at revolution from very different angles. It was,
however, Paul Caringella who grasped that together in tension those spirits
would be even more valuable than if taken separately, especially when it
came to addressing one of the most important topics that confront modern
men and women: revolution. For modern men and women, for better or
worse, are, inter alia, the products of revolutions.
Apart from the serendipities alluded to, and the generous financial
support provided by the School of Modern Languages and Cultures of the
University of Hong Kong, who hosted the conference out of which this
volume grew and financial support for formatting the work, I would like to
thank Charlotte Wong for formatting the book. But once again I would
like to thank the then Head of School and my good friend Heung-wah
Wong for encouraging this project by bringing Paul Caringella to the
Unviersity of Hong Kong for two months.
 INTRODUCTION

This volume was born out of tension, which is no bad thing since
tension is the moment that precedes the break: the moment in which things
are intense, strained to fever pitch. Such moments are highly significant.
Although they may not be quite as significant—that is, as eventful and
fateful and as scarring of human experience—as the explosions that force
us to wake up or perish (and we are the species that can learn or perish and
seem to ever waver between those paths.) The two spirits who inspired this
volume, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Eric Voegelin, both reflected
deeply on tension, and, in somewhat different ways, built their entire
thought on the principle of (if it may be so called) “tensionality”.
With Voegelin, it was the centrality of our human in-between-ness, the
metaxy, that makes us what we are—we are ever drawn toward
transcendence, but also within a world that is decisively not transcendent;
and that there is no “immanent eschaton” is a key tenet of Voegelin’s
diagnostics of the spiritual pathologies of the species. Our lot is bound up
with our orientation, and our orientation is the key to what limited majesty,
and what dignity, we may have.1 Once, though, we substitute our symbolic
power, which is the gift that enables our participation in reality to be
endowed with spiritual meaning, for a misplaced—gnostic—sense of
infinitude, we enter into a phantasmagoric labyrinth bereft of any real
possibility of salvation. For Rosenstock-Huessy, tensionality was intrinsic
to what he called the metanomical reality of multiple times and social
memories, which is constitutive of our post-World-War circumstance.
That circumstance is one in which we can no longer escape the fact that
we survive or perish together, and that survival requires dialogue. When
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig emphasized the
dialogical nature of thinking in their 1916 correspondence, released in
English by Rosenstock-Huessy as Judaism Despite Christianity, 2 they

1
For a view of human dignity that resonates deeply with Voegelin, and one that
contrasts strikingly and powerfully with Kant’s, see Glenn Hughes, “The Concept
of Dignity in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”, Journal of Religious
Ethics 39, no. 1 (March 2011): 1-24.
2
Recently this has been reissued as Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Harold Stahmer,
and Paul Mendes-Flohr, Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime
xiv Introduction

were both engaged in fighting a war that had been the culmination of all
the unresolved forces and resentments flowing through Europe’s nations
and empires and spreading out globally.
Beginning with a work which can be translated as The Marriage of
War and Revolution, Rosenstock-Huesy would spend much of his life
exploring an epiphany that he had on the battlefield of Verdun, viz., that
the Great War (and he would see the Second World War as but the
extension of that War) could be traced back at least a thousand years to the
revolutionary ferment that began with the vision of Odilo of Cluny to unite
all Christians into one great community of souls, and Pope Gregory VII’s
response to Odilo’s call, which required a revolutionary revamping of the
Church and a reaffirmation and reapplication of the Gelasian doctrine in
which the spiritual or heavenly power should take priority over the
temporal power so that the appointment of bishops should no longer be in
the hands of the Emperor and his representatives. Rosenstock-Huessy
would argue that Western “man” and the European nations were
revolutionary creations forged out of the confluence of the hatred of
corruption, of the encrustation of social forces that accompanies the failure
of institutions and groups to adequately create environments of sufficient
solidarity (which is to say, shared and common loves) that they may
continue into the future, and a messianic faith in a future worthy of being
loved. His two great works on revolution, Out of Revolution and Die
europäischen Revolutionen, were surveys of the core achievements of
what he called the “total” revolutions of Europe. Those revolutions took
place on Christian soil, and he also argued, particularly in his magnum
opus, the two volume Die Soziologie, that these revolutions could have
taken the shape they did only because of the expectations and motivations,
and institutional configurations, that had been cultivated by the Christian
faith and the Church.3
This book includes writings from Rosenstock-Huessy as well as a
chapter where I compare him with Hannah Arendt, so I do not wish to
enter into further detail on his ideas here, except to say that Rosenstock-
Huessy saw the total revolutions of the West as providential, which is to
say that they are woven into the fabric of who and what we are today: that
our most important institutions and values have revolutionary origins (and
thus, less conspicuously, but no less necessarily, also Christian origins).

Correspondence Between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011).
3
The corpus of Christopher Dawson contains striking parallels with that of
Rosenstock-Huessy, and together they provide a most powerful narrative of the
role of Christianity in the history of Europe.
 Revolutions: Finished and Unfinished, From Primal to Final xv

To say this does not simply mean revolution is good. Revolutions occur
because of social disease, a view shared by Voegelin and Rosenstock-
Huessy. Nevertheless, if we contrast Voegelin with Rosenstock-Huessy,
we see immediately that one of the differences between their works is that
Voegelin highlights the disorder and sickness of revolution, and, in
particular, the deep disorder and toxic aspects of modernity which are all
too easily concealed in the smokescreen of revolutionary rhetoric; while
Rosenstock-Huessy is looking at what freedoms, what new human
capabilities—capabilities that are cultivated over time through our social
and political institutions (which are but our means for the selection and
enhancement of human potencies)—have come out of revolution. We
might say Rosenstock-Huessy considers, above all, the new health that
recurrently emerges from the fevered and dying body of an old order.
For his part, Rosenstock-Huessy was only interested in those revolutions
that claimed to be total, and which, on account of their totalizing
aspirations, opened up unprecedented pathways for the species. This
volume, while undertaken in the spirit of tension between the spirits of
Voegelin’s more Platonic, even mystical reading of history, and the
ruptures and horrors of revolution, and Rosenstock-Huessy’s more activist
and providential reading of revolutions and history, brings together a range
of diverse points of view about different revolutions and their meaning.
Some of the essays are theoretical reflections on the nature of revolution,
others consider specific revolutions.
Amongst the revolutions discussed in this volume the contributions by
Louis Herman and Chris Hutton may be said to stand at the extremes of
our understanding of the topic. Herman takes us back to prehistoric times
and to what we may call the Ur revolution, that turning around which
commenced humanity on a path that made it different from all other
known species; Hutton, on the other hand, draws our attention to a
revolution that has taken place within our time, and one which he sees as
having no good end, the managerial revolution. This most recent of
Western revolutions is one undertaken without violence (though it violates
many peoples’ lives), yet it has entirely transformed our public institutions
and thus the way we interact with each other and the world around us as
well as the way we move into the future. In point of fact, the managerial
revolution is but the culmination of the mechanistic or scientific
revolution that took off in the early seventeenth century. Significantly, it
is based upon ideas that have been utterly discredited by all the major
philosophical schools and movements of the twentieth century, but it has
been able to occur precisely because modernity reproduces itself via
disconnected/staggered processes, methods, and historicities, and the
xvi Introduction

stakeholders of this discourse have discovered opportunities for power and

wealth in the slumber of liberal democracies and the paucity of the social
science and humanities wing of their education systems. Ironically, the
damage done to the education system was largely done by educators. It
began with the compartmentalization of knowledge, and became intensified
through the 1970s with the politicization of knowledge. The process of
instrumentalism was completed through the ambitions of Business Schools
and Education Faculties under the auspices of administrative efficiency,
quality controls, and knowledge deliverables which would ostensibly
satisfy the business community and electorate. Modernity (or if one
prefers to accept a certain ubiquitous meta-narrative post-modernity) is
literally out of control, and different power complexes (spheres suggests a
symmetry which does not exist) which are constitutive of our social and
personal existence reproduce themselves as if untouched by others. And
yet, they manage to smash into each other, and affect each other,
sometimes seemingly randomly, at other times when a crisis/ catastrophe
is of global proportions – the world wars most obviously, but also global
economic crises – while there seems to be some confirmation of
determinism at work. The managerial revolution is a stark reminder of
how something may set something in a revolutionary motion, and how it
may continue perilously unstoppable. Revolutions are by their nature
imperiling matters – destroying, as they do, all manner of traditions and
life ways, and setting up new forms, forms that may be more imperiling
than those that preceded them. One thing though is common to revolutions
– like wars, even when, as in the managerial revolution, they are not
inherently violent, they sweep up peoples and institutions, launching them
into new futures.
I am well aware that the enormity of this topic is one which cannot be
constrained by one discipline let alone one voice. And we have tried to
provide a balance between broader theoretical appraisals of the meaning of
revolution itself. All of the essays in this volume are theoretically
informed. Some such as those by Thomas MacPartland, Klauss Vondung,
Matthias Riedl (who provides a remarkably interesting refutation of
Voegelin’s reading of Joachim of Flora as one of the leading pioneers of
Gnostic revolt), Manfred Henningsen and the late Thomas Hollweck deal
overtly with more thematic aspects or features of revolutions. And, as we
have indicated above, Herman’s essay touches something at the very axis
of human experience which triggers the possibility of history, while others
take historical revolutions to think both generally about revolutions as well
as the revolution under discussion. Thus we have papers on: the English
Revolution by Rosenstock-Huessy; the American Revolution by Glenn
 Revolutions: Finished and Unfinished, From Primal to Final xvii

Moots; the French Revolution as explored by Rosenstock-Huessy and

Arendt by me; two accounts of the Russian Revolution: one fittingly I
think, given the claims of that revolution, by an economist, Michael
Bernstam; the other by the political philosopher, Glenn Hughes; William
Ratliff’s essay on the Chinese revolution; and Arie Amaya-Akkermans’s
astute analysis of the most recent revolutionary occurrence of our time, the
so-called “Arab Spring,” which provides a rich theoretical discussion, that
also includes Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy.
This volume, then, is a small contribution to our understanding of
revolution itself and some of the major revolutions which have shaped and
still shape us and our world. It is a topic that has been approached in many
ways, but I believe the tensionality that instigated this volume, emerging
out of the editors’ appreciation of the spirits of Voegelin and Rosenstock-
Huessy, makes this a valuable contribution.
 CHAPTER ONE

REVOLUTION AS A POLITICAL CONCEPT1

EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY

The word Revolution as a political concept is a rather young word. A

sudden, unmanageable event that defies our notions of peace and order
was called, in antiquity, mutatio rerum. Rebellion and sedition or Civil
War was used in Latin for the 'cock-fight' as the-Greek called internal
strife and fratricide within one city.
Rebellion or Civil War often could be long and slow affairs. Mutatio
rerum stresses more their sudden, unexpected character. Rebellion was
lawless, mutatio rerum a merely descriptive term, without moral
qualification. The temporal changes could be called reversiones or
volumina, too. Revolution was not in use, except for the metempsychosis,
the migration of the soul through a series of bodies.
After 1200 A.D. however, this changed. With Dante, Revolution is
used for the astronomic / rotation of sun, moon and stars. And in the late
14th Century, the turmoil in Italian cities often led to political
constellations of so unexpected a type that they for their breath taking
abruptness, were called “revolution”. In this same sense, the Italian term-
seemed the only available word, when Henry the IV, the Huguenot King
of France went to mass in 1594. This took the breath of his fellow
countrymen and for that reason seems to have been termed “la revolution”
with a loan from Italian political theory which, at that time, influenced the
“politicians” widely.
In all these cases, the term is indifferent to value. Morally, Revolution
before 1700, could be styled ± 0, that is to say: the event is cosmic,

1
We would like to thank the heirs of Rosenstock-Huessy for granting permission
to publish this previously unpublished essay. This essay, written in 1938, was
originally transcribed by Lise van der Molen, and thus it is possible that minor
errors were introduced into the text. With this in mind, I have on occasion, which I
have footnoted, edited glaringly obvious grammatical errors.
2 Chapter One

transcending the earth, of astronomical size. Useless to argue about its

merits. It was like hail or rain, “beyond me”. A revolution, than, was an
event surpassing human understanding.
This is a valuable feature of the term revolution for any theory, as we
shall see very soon.
In 1688, the term revolution, for the first time, lost its character of the
“beyond”. The Whig “Revolution” was that first cosmic intrusion on the
political globe which was acclaimed as “not” only enormous but as Glorious
as well. The grateful acceptance was the new feature. A Revolution dinner
took place annually on the 5th of November.
Revolution, in England, never lost its positive sign of +, after that. This
is important to remember because on the continent of Europe, this was not
so. There, Revolution was still an event of ± 0, as the French and German
dictionaries of the 18th century show. The Revolution was neither
“glorious” nor “progressive”, nor “inevitable”. It was a break in continuity,
unpredictable, unmanageable.
In the American Revolution, the element that we moderns would
classify as revolutionary was not in the term Revolution at all. For, as the
norm for a Revolution, the American Revolutionists looked back to 1688.
Even today, the 10 first amendments to the American Constitution are
called a bill of rights and the author of the Declaration of Independence
derived the Right of Resistance from 1688. The American Revolution
contained a revolutionary element; this however, is to be found in the word
Americans. Here, a political creation2 was cut out of the wide realm of
nature, and the manifest destiny of the inhabitants of a vast continent was
disclosed by the authority of geography.
The American Revolution was the reassertion of the Glorious Revolution
Principle for a New World the creation therefore, not of the political
principles, but of the United -States of America, was the revolutionary
event.
“I am an American”, a revolutionist of 1776 had to exclaim lest he be
mistaken for a British subject. As a revolutionist, he might have been a
loyalist. The notion and term of a revolutionary, as a man who fostered
future revolution was unknown at that time.
And now, we enter, another period with the French Revolution. The
French, shot through with British ideas and slogans from the English
enlightenment, expected some great event in the summer of 1789. The fall
of the Bastille, on July 14 they took to be the equivalent of James II’s
departure from England in 1688. Only, they erred. The fall of the Bastille

2
The transcript reads “a political created.”
 Revolution as a Political Concept 3

was not the end of the struggle. It was a beginning to be compared to the
British rebellion in 1641. The fall of the Bastille needed to be followed up,
to be interpreted, to be defended. Thus, after the 14 of July 1789, the
cosmic event of super-human validity, the Revolution, was claiming for
human and political support by mortals. The supporters of an existing state
of Revolution, with a new and, in fact, absurd term, were called
revolutionaries. Those who refused to see that the revolution had happened
and was irresistible, became counter-revolutionaries.
The French Revolution, carried forward by Revolutionaries against
Counter-revolutionaries, became the paradigm for the rest of the world. It
was the Great Revolution, from which Mexico and Poland, Belgium and
Greece derived the standards for how to make a national revolution. The
Glorious Revolution of an Island was followed by a Great Revolution
setting up the law for the whole continental world of Nations and allowed
the national democrats everywhere to think of themselves as potentially
revolutionaries.
Even these liberals, however, reserved the adjective revolutionary to
that minimum of violence and lawlessness that society had to pass through
in order to shed the feudal fur. Revolution though positive in result, was
not acclaimed as positive in itself. The terror of 1794 struck so deep and
people disclaimed to be revolutionaries except when no other lawful way
could be found.
The British who wished to foreclose any second Glorious Revolution,
resented the subjective character of the French term. And they, with great
sagacity, coined a phrase that eliminated the continental infiltration by
revolutionaries, effectively. Their Glorious Revolution of 1688 had
transcended all the wilful planning or plotting of individuals. As a parallel,
for the 19th century, an equally objective “revolution” was put in the place
of the French. This was called [an] “Industrial Revolution.” In the usage of
“Industrial Revolution,” the pre-democratic, pre-French way of thinking of
a revolution was preserved in the English political dictionary.
Industrial Revolution corresponds to Glorious Revolution about as
accurately as sportsman to gentleman or as 19th century to 17th. It was a
face-saving term because it allowed [it] to liberalize British institutions
without reference to the Jacobin principles of 1789 although, in fact, their
pressure forced the hands of the British Reformers throughout. Industrial
Revolution, then, is a counterrevolutionary term, from the French
viewpoint, or a term within the framework of English institutional life for
digesting new problems.
4 Chapter One

The objective Italian - astronomic - usage of Revolution, the objective

mixed with positive appraisal (British - American), the subjective - objective
of the French did not exhaust the potentialities of our term.
In 1847, the Communists declared war [on] the French Revolution.
They acclaimed the right of changing the political world in its entirety
logically. This is a remarkably bold attempt to insert Revolution in[to] the
rank and file of man-made products, yet leaving to her the cosmic and
universal character. “All the alterations of the orbs from whom we do exist
and cease to be,”3 now had to become correlated to the process of logical
dialectics of human brains: the unpredictable event that overthrows human
political concepts. The World Revolution, was going to be, altogether, a
logical, arithmetical, mathematical result, too.
The men who predicted, forethought, pre-calculated revolution, long
before it happened or could happen, a kind of cooks of the revolution,
became a new type of professionals. Anyone who shunned loyalties,
legality, career and conventions of the existing order could claim to pre-
live and to anticipate that cosmic surprise of the future, and label himself a
“revolutionary.”
This cold, technical, scientific usage of Revolution is inherent to
Marxian and Bolshevik principles. Where the French Revolutionary,
defenders of the ideas of 1789 are hot, lyric, pittoresque, the Russian
chemists and cooks are Dry-cut, scientific, logical.
Still it is important not to mistake their aloofness and coolness for the
impartiality of a liberal observer of Revolution. Nothing would be more
misleading. The Marxian-Russian cold-headedness of social engineers of
Revolution is balanced by their claim of being scientific. The sober, cold
private individual may see his own interests. The revolutionaries of the
World Revolution claim to realize the world's laws, the world's process of
evolution. This superb arrogance of knowing the divine spirit and its
movements to the minute, makes them akin with the former worshippers
of super-human Revolutions.
Nearer and nearer does man get to the cosmic universality and
scientific necessity implied in our term. When it was used first, in Italy,
the political unity was smallest, a city; the, astronomic and celestial dignity
of the term was in all their minds.4 In [the] glorious Revolution, the term
conquered a whole nation, in the Great Revolution the civilized nation, in
the Russian [revolution] the World. It is, today, nearest to a universal event
including all of us, inescapably, in our ways of thinking, working,

3
King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1.
4
Original “in all the minds”.
 Revolution as a Political Concept 5

planning, hoping or fearing. The fascist powers are making Communism

the Issue in China and Japan, in Spain and Brazil. As if it were, a
compensation to this growth into a universal catastrophe, we think of the
part to be played in it by man, to a larger extent than four hundred years
ago. Then, the event was beyond all human planning. Today, if at least, we
may become conscious of the maelstrom we are in, in time. We may time
the cosmic event.

Table 1-1

Revolution of Area of the Human share

the sky revolution
1400 City None
1688 Country Positive appraisal
Grateful acceptance
1789 Civilisation Defence of its ideas
1917 World Conscious of its materials

The Philistines of Revolution

All the four usages which we listed, agree in one viewpoint. All of
them respect Revolution as a cosmic fact about which there is no
argument. It may be like a thunderstorm, it may be one Glorious and
gracious Opening, once and for ever, it may be the Dawn of Reason for all
the civilised nations or as with Russians, it may be the acceptance of a
perpetual world struggle of the underdog - in all these cases, the speaker
who uses the term, bows to great superhuman necessities.
There exists, however, the overwhelming majority of Philistines who
simply wish to be left alone, with their everyday Peace and evolution and
endless discussion of things. To them, revolutions, even today, are the
things that simply ought not to be. They profane and abuse it as an
abortion, like any crime. Revolution is madness, to them, sterile, destructive.
It is outside the pale of the human affairs which they deign to consider,
like museums, concerts, discoveries etc. Mr. Sorokin and Mr. Merton are
good examples of writers on revolution who feel absolutely sure that they
are unbiased, untempted, disinterested onlookers. They see a strange,
alien, abominable crowd and mob psychology domineering during the
revolutions and they shrug their shoulders. This group is the
counterrevolutionary group. It consists of that brittle part of society which
is no longer conducive of electric waves and subterranean currents. These
Philistines once they become the majority of the ruling class, make the
6 Chapter One

outbreak of revolutions inevitable since they themselves no longer are in

touch with what is going on.
As in illnesses of the body our only safety lies in immunity acquired by
vaccination or similar anticipation of the disease, the only attitude towards
revolutions of the body politic which promises survival, is vaccination. A
man who thinks that never could he become a revolutionary either ignores
his heart or has none. In both cases, he excludes himself from the body of
mankind that experiences revolutions. And, he denies the one great truth,
conveyed by all and every right usage of the term Revolution. And this
great truth is that Revolutions in order to deserve their name, must be
events of cosmic rank, concerning all humanity, disclosing new political
principles valid universally. And furthermore, that there are those
breathtaking, “shocking events”. The totality of a revolution must include
anyone who wishes to talk about it. A scientist who tries to theorize
Revolution from the outside, cripples its very object to insignificance. The
scientist is not expected to be or to become a revolutionary.
I am none. What he, however has to admit that this or that revolution
has given him a mental knockout, that it has overthrown his political
concepts to which, otherwise, he might cling. A revolution must upset the
standards of common place and common sense political reasoning or it is
no cosmic event. Revolution, then, is an event that throws our political
concepts out of gear, why this is possible and even inevitable, is not under
discussion here, where we try to save, from the development of seven
hundred years, the majesty of the term Revolution. As an unexpected
unmanageable event that overthrows our human notions, it claims
universal character, and this word universal must be taken literally enough.
It must include the sociologists who study revolution or it is no revolution.
A comparison may help us. In physics, the effect of dynamite falling
on a rock, will be studied as part of the science dealing with dynamite. The
rock's reaction is a part of the action of the agent dynamite. Similarly, no
medical man will describe a new remedy and omit, in its description, its
effects on the human body. Quite the contrary. The biological scientists
easily will put the reactions of his patients to his new medicine first. They
are the really important thing.
With a revolution, the mind of the sociologist must be saturated. His
mind is shot through, with emotional repercussions from the revolutions he
has studied. His brain is the rock, his mind is the biological system which
is reacting against the vaccination with the germ revolution. As a rock in a
wisely manipulated blasting will move out of our way, as a medicine will
cure the patient because it is administered in a slight dose, the shock from
the revolution in the human mind may be small. Only, we must not deny
 Revolution as a Political Concept 7

the shock. Or we deny our scientific qualification for dealing with the
facts. Physical events are marked in rocks. Biological events leave their
marks in bodies. Social events are retraceable through changes they
produce in our minds.
Now a revolution, by definition is that social event the traces of which
are to be found universally in every mind. The detached sociologist who
claims that he is not changed shell shocked, tempted, remodelled from
standing at the edge of the abysses called revolution, is less vital, less fit,
less representative, in his opinion or judgement than the man in the street.
 CHAPTER TWO

REVOLUTIONS:
PROGRESS OR DECLINE?

THOMAS J. MCPARTLAND

Zero Year commenced on April 17, 1975 (according to the traditional

calendar) in what had been called Cambodia. The Khmer Rouge seized the
capital city of Phnom Penh. The entire population was marched out into
the countryside, including the lame and infirm, who were dragged from
hospitals. The very young and old began to fall by the wayside—and die.
This was only a harbinger of things to come. The new country of
Kampuchea was proclaimed with its new calendar as a symbol of the New
Society. Relations with all governments except China were cut off. The
party elite led by Pol Pot, who had been trained as an engineer at the
Sorbonne, had the momentous task of completely destroying the corrupt
old society and creating the society of the people. This social engineering
meant the eradication of urban life, of the accoutrements of modern
Western life (postal system, currency, telephone, medicine), of the family,
and of “individualism”. This “eradication” required an unrelenting war
against the “enemies of the people”—concretely, death to army officers,
civil servants, teachers, policemen, and any others associated with the Old
Regime, to anyone educated, to those who violated the strict new rules of
behavior. So ensued a reign of torture, terror, and mass killing. While the
methods were often primitive, given the assault on modern civilization, the
results were effective with the use of such implements as axe handles and
such techniques as disembowelment and burying alive. Perhaps up to a
quarter of the population perished in the “killing fields” (from several
hundred thousand to two million). The Khmer Rouge justified these drastic
measures because previous attempts at revolution in Russia, China, and
elsewhere were failures. Only in Kampuchea was there true revolution.
Indeed this was a revolution in the most radical sense.
Anyone sufficiently familiar with the Cambodian Revolution must ask
historical questions about how could such events occur and about other
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 9

revolutions. For the Khmer Rouge claimed to have superseded all other
revolutions. And there were other radical revolutions. In fact, the more we
were to look, the more we would find. The experience of historical
encounter with these revolutions inevitably raises acute philosophical
questions about human nature—about human aspirations for betterment
and human evil, about progress and decline. How could such ideal
aspirations as those for the new society lead to such horror? Could the next
revolution succeed in finally creating the perfect society? Or should the
historical observer of these revolutions retire in utter cynicism? Should we
conserve the current order of society at all costs lest we see society
collapse into other killing fields? But in our contemporary world of vast
ongoing changes, where becoming triumphs, can any standards and norms
endure so that we might assume responsibility for the responsible direction
of history in light of those standards and norms? Can there be a kind of
revolution that is an alternative to such a radical revolution as that in
Cambodia? Our questions, then, are both historical and philosophical. This
paper, accordingly, intends both an historical investigation and a
philosophical encounter with the history of revolutions. This is a reflection
on our historicity, an attempt at an appropriation of our past at the
intersection of the functional specialties of history and philosophy.1

Radical Revolution and Revolution in Its General Sense

We could arguably define the modern world as an age of revolutions
insofar as the self-definition of modernity seems to entail the notion of
revolution (if not always the actual word itself). Every day in the news we
hear the actual term “revolution” used, whether to describe revolutionary
activities, revolutionary regimes, a revolution in medicine, a revolution in
sexual mores, a revolution in electronics, or a revolution in philosophy.
When we examine the history of the modern world we confront such
topics as the Scientific Revolution, the French Revolution, and the
Industrial Revolution. The term “revolution” is used here in a very general
(and descriptive) sense to refer to any irreversible, significant change, or
attempt at change. Such change covers the entire field of historical life
from technology (the printing press, steam power, the computer), to the

1
On the notion of functional specialties, see Bernard Lonergan, Method in
Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), chap. 5; on the relation of
historical disciplines and philosophy as functional specialties, see Thomas J.
McPartland, Lonergan and Historiography: The Epistemological Philosophy of
History (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010).
10 Chapter Two

economy (scientific agriculture, capitalism, socialism), to society (the

bourgeoisie, the masses, gender roles), to politics (liberal democracy, a
people’s democracy), to culture (the Enlightenment, Romanticism). If
revolution in this very general sense is such a prevailing feature of modern
history, it is because modern history has seen unprecedented, continuous,
cumulative changes in every aspect of human living to such a degree as to
make modern history a period unique in world history. In the wake of the
unprecedented development of modern scientific method and its
heliocentric and mathematical cosmology, along with the radical attempt
by the Enlightenment to employ that method in all fields of intellectual
culture, the modern age has witnessed the most far-reaching technological
and economic transformations since the domestication of plants and
animals in the Agricultural Revolution (c. 8000 B.C.E.) and the birth of
cities in the Urban Revolution (c. 3000 B.C.E.). So we see in succession
the First Industrial Revolution from 1750-1850 (steam and coal); the
Second Industrial Revolution in 1850 (railroads); by 1900 the telegraph,
the telephone, the assembly line, the airplane; by 1935 widespread use of
electrical power; by 1945 nuclear power; by 1980 microcomputers. This
breath-taking succession of changes over a very short period of time has
not only spurred the growth of sophisticated commercial and financial
systems in an increasingly global network of economies but also has led to
necessary social, political, and cultural adjustments, including the various
political revolutions of the past two centuries. Change is so rapid that
social commentators no longer speak of styles and tastes in terms of a
century or a generation, but now in terms of a decade.
But why use the term “revolution”?2 The term first attained prominence
with the publication of Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium
in 1543, where the word referred to the revolution of the heavenly spheres.
This notion of “revolving” was applied in the seventeenth century to the
revolving of the forms of government as articulated in classic fashion by
the ancient historian Polybius. The natural course of forms of government,
according to Polybius, was the revolving of kingship into tyranny, tyranny
into aristocracy, aristocracy into oligarchy, oligarchy into democracy,
democracy into mob rule, and mob rule into kingship to start the cycle
again. The so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England was seen by
its supporters as the revolving of tyranny into aristocracy (with a
constitutional monarch). But by then the term had merged with other

2
For a recent study of the term, see Ilan Rachum, ‘Revolution’: The Entrance of a
New Word into Western Political Discourse (Lanham, Maryland: University Press
of America, 1999).
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 11

overtones, derived from the explicit meaning associated with two Italian
words, rivuluzione and rivolgimento, since the fourteenth century—namely,
of an extraordinary alternation of government by force or commotion. The
usage was in the vernacular and had the status of popular slang. It entered
into more prominent political discourse during the European crisis of
1640-1660 in England and France (where the French monarchy could
actually use it to describe the putting down of opponents by force!). The
usage was principally rhetorical, largely politically incorrect, and, as a
consequence, not widespread.
By the eighteenth century this meaning of the term “revolution” was
gradually adopted by philosophes, who changed its meaning. Under the
influence of the Idea of Progress current in the Enlightenment, it began to
refer to irreversible, significant change. “Revolution” in this sense first
referred to cultural transformation, but in the 1780s it began to be applied
by a few French and English authors to the American War of Independence
(as earlier Gouverneur Morris had done in a pamphlet in 1779). With the
shocking experience, however, of the vast political upheaval in France
starting in 1789, the term was more widely applied to politics. In the wake
of the French Revolution—arguably the most significant political event in
world history in the past few centuries—the term “revolution” with
something like this resonance was retrospectively associated with the
American War of Independence. The experience of the French Revolution
not only conveyed the sense of irreversible, significant change but also of
irreversible, significant change on such a scale as to be molded by
historical forces beyond individual, if not human, control. But it did more.
It not only conveyed the sense of change of great quantitative magnitude;
it carried the sense of change of great—indeed unprecedented —
qualitative magnitude. The word “revolution” was linked to an idea, and
the idea was associated with certain sentiments, symbols and aspirations
that had long antedated the French Revolution, that burst out in a most
powerful and transformative way in the French Revolution, and that would
come close to dominating the Western political landscape and much of the
world political landscape in the twentieth century. There have been
parallel aspirations in Chinese history and in Islam. The attraction of the
word “revolution”, therefore, is not solely the result of the experience of
vast changes in the past few centuries, but also the result of the increasing
power of certain aspirations that give meaning, interpretation, and
direction to those changes. These aspirations point to transformations of
metaphysical proportions.
Ever since the French Revolution, the term revolution has had two
meanings: Revolution in the general sense, as we have seen, refers to
12 Chapter Two

irreversible, significant change, or attempt at change, of any sort (for

example, the Neolithic Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial
Revolution, the Hungarian Revolution, the Orange Revolution). Revolution
in the strict sense, on the other hand, refers to a complex of ideas and
sentiments of radical political transformation driven by grand-scale
historical forces the aim of which is the veritable transformation, beyond
the merely political realm, of human society and the transformation of
human nature itself. “Political revolutions” in the general sense are
primarily political in nature and are efforts at reform, even drastic reform,
of political society and other social institutions. By contrast, “radical
political revolutions” in the strict sense go beyond mere political reform to
seek a radical solution to evil in society: hence more is at stake than the
political in any ordinary interpretation.3
Let us define “radical revolution”, therefore, as the attempt through
political violence and substantial social change to transform human
consciousness and human nature, eliminating the major source of evil in

3
Most comparative studies of revolution, whether by historians or by social
scientists, do not differentiate between political revolutions in the general sense
and radical revolutions, but they do amass significant data, present numerous case
studies, and offer insights on such topics as preconditions, typical catalysts,
morphology of leaders, sociology of followers, ideology, techniques to seize power
and to retain control, role of “modernization”, and outcomes (including social
stratification). See, for example, Jack A. Goldstone, ed., Revolutions: Theoretical,
Comparative, and Historical Studies (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1986); Thomas H. Greene, Comparative Revolutionary Movements: Search for
Theory and Justice, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1984);
Jaroslav Krejci, Great Revolutions Compared: The Search for a Theory (Thetford,
Norfolk: Wheatsheaf Books, 1983); Bruce Mazlish, Arthur D. Kaledin, and David
B. Ralston, et. al., eds., Revolution: A Reader (New York: Macmillan, 1971). The
classic historical analysis is Crane Brinton’s celebrated The Anatomy of
Revolution, rev. ed. ((New York: Vintage, 1965). Brinton’s paradigm is the French
Revolution with its “moderate”, “terror”, and “Thermidor” stages. He applies this
model with dubious results to the English, American, and Russian Revolutions. It
is questionable, for example, whether the English and American Revolutions ever
got beyond the moderate phase. We claim, below, that England was on the “brink
of revolution” and that the American Revolution, some radical sentiments
notwithstanding, was an historical alternative to radical revolution insofar as it
aimed at containing, rather than eliminating, evil. And, as we shall see below, the
Russian Revolution differs from the French Revolution in many aspects, including
the fact that professional revolutionaries were involved from the beginning. Closer
to our sense of radical revolution is C. W. Cassinelli, Total Revolution: Comparative
Study of Germany under Hitler, the Soviet Union under Stalin and China under
Mao (Santa Barbara, California: Clio Books, 1976).
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 13

society. The ultimate nature of radical revolution is soteriological. Without

this element we do not have radical revolution. Thus radical revolution is
not merely an assassination, a rebellion of officials, a change of dynasty, a
division of monarchy, a peasant revolt, a civil war, a war of independence,
or a conquest. Nor is it merely a coup d’etat or a change of form of
government. A revolution may involve any of the factors above if it is
driven by an ideology that seeks total transformation by taking the axe to
the roots of evil (hence it is “radical”). This is why it can justify violence
and why it needs to resort to violence (since the forces of evil will not give
up peacefully in the face of total opposition). This is why it must engage in
some program of social change beyond ordinary politics, since social
change, in the eyes of the radical revolutionaries, is both the cause and
effect of changing human consciousness and human nature. An attempt at
radical revolution that does not seize power is a revolutionary movement.
An attempt at radical revolution that seizes power and starts to implement
a program of drastic social change is a radical revolution. It is also a total
revolution.
To be sure, this definition is an extremely narrow one. And yet one of
the more startling historical facts is the extent to which such a
phenomenon has come to dominate much of modern political history and,
remarkably, the extent to which it has extended its scope beyond the
radical revolutions to embrace the sentiments of an ever wider field of
political, social, and cultural movements. Moderate revolutionaries may
hesitate about taking the measures to realize the ultimate goals of radical
revolution, but they share similar hopes and aspirations and can get caught
up in the rhetoric of revolution.
It is the thesis of this essay that a merely descriptive use of the term
“revolution” obscures these developments—and modern history. Whether
any such radical political revolution has succeeded (in its own terms) is
historical dubitable, but the attempts at such revolutions are historical
facts. We must acknowledge them if we are to understand our contemporary
situation. We must be able to differentiate radical revolution from
revolution in its general sense. The former is a source of decline, although
some of its unintended consequences can be positive and it can spur
reversal of decline. The latter can include elements of progress that spur an
acceptance of historical responsibility and an awareness of human
historicity, although the political decisions to do so are not inevitable and
even face formidable obstacles. Since revolution in the general sense is
palpable enough to anyone familiar with the basics of modern history, we
must focus on the history of radical revolution to carry out the
differentiated analysis and any evaluation. Although the term political
14 Chapter Two

revolution is a modern one—and the very self-definition of modernity,

arguably, can be intimately tied to the hope of revolution—the idea, and
the associated sentiments and symbols, of radical political revolution goes
back in time to the ancient world, and extends in space from the West to
China and Islam.
Our procedure must be two-fold if we are to differentiate these two
types of revolution and then evaluate them. We must first examine the
historical profile of radical political revolutions. This will involve tracing
the main radical revolutionary movements and radical revolutions, as
defined above, and, upon the basis of that historical survey, drawing
historical generalizations about tendencies and structural features. It will
be the burden of this historical profile to establish the historical
prominence of radical revolutions even so narrowly defined. The historical
encounter will allow us to reflect philosophically on the types of
revolution, their prospects, and their significance for contemporary human
living. Without the philosophical component we would be left with
essentially an historicist and relativist tale of different worldviews.
Without the historical account the philosophical reflections would be
entirely speculative. Needless to say, the limits of this essay allow for no
more than a cursory historical treatment and for a philosophical analysis
that largely leaves assumptions undeveloped. The goal, then, is to establish
radical revolution, in the sense defined, as a legitimate object of further
historical and philosophical inquiry.

Historical Profile of Radical Political Revolutions

Radical revolution is not “normal”. Remember that radical revolution
is not an assassination, a rebellion, a civil war, a war of independence, a
peasant revolt, a conquest, a coup d’état, a change of form of government,
or a major reform of society. To seek to effect radical political change as a
means to transform human society and human nature requires
extraordinary beliefs and aspirations, and these beliefs and aspirations run
counter to the cultural norms of most societies. Such beliefs and
aspirations arose in what Karl Jaspers first coined the Axial Age of
History, particularly in the world religions coming from the Israelite
tradition and to a lesser extent from Taoism (with later mixtures from
Buddhism and Zoroastrianism). 4 From a trickle of movements, largely

4
See Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, trans. Michael Bullock (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). For equation of Jaspers’s Axial Period with
“leaps in being” (noetic and revelatory, or pneumatic), see Eric Voegelin, Israel
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 15

passive and peaceful, in the Middle Ages, the fever for radical revolution
grew so that by the time of the Reformation violent revolutionary
movements broke out in isolated areas; later in the 1600s they threatened
an entire country, England; and with the “great transformation” of
revolutionary sentiments to “secular” ideas, a radical revolutionary regime
took hold in the largest and most powerful country in Europe, France.
From there, by the twentieth century, radical revolution spread to Russia
and Germany and later to Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin
America. Then, just when the fever for revolution had seemed to die down
after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, radical revolution
threatened world order from Iran and Islamicist movements. Let us
elaborate on these trends.

a. Traditional, Non-Revolutionary Societies

It is important to stress that most human societies throughout most of
human history have been decidedly anti-revolutionary (in the strict, radical
sense). It requires some unique constellation of experiences and symbols
to spark the hope of radical political revolution. In most tribal societies and
early, pre-urban agricultural societies, for example, the society sought
connection with a pre-established mysterious sacred and cosmic order
through the mediation of a shaman, witch doctor, or medicine man. In the
early civilizations, the typical form of government was that of sacred
kingship, where the king had, above all else, the function of integrating
human society with the cosmic-divine order. This was unmistakably the
case with the early civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt (with its pharaoh),
China, the Andes, and Central America. Sacred kingship was also the
dominant form of government of the empires claiming universal rule,
starting with Persia, including later Rome and China, and continuing into

and Revelation, vol. 1 of Order and History, ed. M. P. Hogan, vol. 14 of The
Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001),
48-49; Voegelin, The World of the Polis, vol. 2 of Order and History, ed.
Athanasios Moulakis, vol. 15 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 2000), Introduction, and esp. 86-90; for Voegelin’s
criticism of Jasper’s notion, see Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, vol. 4 of Order and
History, ed. Michael Franz, vol. 17 of Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 2000). For more recent discussion of the Axial
Period, defined as making the sharp distinction between transcendent and
immanent worlds, see S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age
Civilizations, SUNY Series in Near Eastern Studies (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1986).
16 Chapter Two

the mediaeval and even modern periods (Holy Roman Empire, Byzantine
Empire, Caliphate, and Chinese Empire). Indeed, the last great “sacred
empire” only ended in 1911 with the forced abdication of the last emperor
of China (who technically had ruled “Everything under the Heavens”)!
Exhibiting what Mircea Eliade has called the “archaic mentality”,
members of these traditional societies did not look forward to the creation
of a new society on earth but rather to the perpetual and cyclical
restoration of a pre-established order, an order established “in the
beginning” (or, as the Sumerian King List of the Ur III dynasty proclaimed
it, “When kingship was lowered from Heaven”). By contrast, radical
revolutionaries kill kings (as we witness in the English Revolution, French
Revolution, Russian Revolution, and Ethiopian Revolution).5
The great pre-modern historical alternatives to sacred kingship—the
poleis of ancient Hellas, for example, or the Roman Republic—did not
abolish in their civil theologies the goal of harmony with pre-established
sacred order. What some historians call “revolutions” in ancient Greece or
Rome were, in fact, civil wars, largely between factions that sought the
rule of the few (oligarchy) or the rule of the many (democracy). To be
sure, we see the glorification of a certain type of regime in the political
literature, as witnessed in Pericles’s Funeral Oration, which extols the
energy, resourcefulness, and political virtue of Athenian democracy, or in
the Old Oligarch, which argues for the superiority of stable and
meritorious oligarchy over the fickleness of democracy.6 But in none of
this rosy discourse do we find the claim that a particular kind of regime
will end all evil in society. Political philosophers in ancient Greece and
China were not modern “utopians” (a term coined in the sixteenth century
by Thomas More), searching for a radically new, revolutionary state.
Confucius sought the restoration of the ancient rituals. When Plato
addressed the question of the kind of regimes that were “practical” in his
Statesman and Laws, he set in motion a path of inquiry that led to

5
See Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans.
Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series (New York: Harper and Row, 1959). For
examples of the worldviews of early Near Eastern civilizations, see Henri
Frankfort et al., Before Philosophy: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the
Ancient Near East (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1949); also see “The Sumerian
King List”, in Ancient Near Eastern Texts, Relating to the Old Testament, ed.
James B. Pritchard, 3rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 265.
6
For Pericles’s Funeral Oration, see Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 2.34.8-
2.26; for the Old Oligarch, see The Old Oligarch, Being the Constitution of the
Athenians Ascribed to Xenophon, trans. James A. Petch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1926).
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 17

Aristotle’s Politics and eventually to the analysis of Polybius. Far from

hoping to abolish evil in society by a political arrangement, Polybius
claimed to see in the Roman Constitution, with its mixture of monarchy,
aristocracy, and democracy and its “checks and balances”, a “mixed form”
of government that might contain the evil in society by putting the brakes
on the revolution (revolving) of forms of government. (In explicitly
adopting the Polybian model, the framers of the United States Constitution
likewise endorsed this “conservative” mechanism of containing evil).7 The
Legalists in China, with their completely naturalistic interpretation of
political order (similar in many respects to those Greek Sophists who
argued that “might make right”), made evil (sheer power) itself the key to
political order. (The Legalists, for instance, urged as many evil councilors
as possible in government so that they would check each other). By
contrast to all traditional political philosophy, radical revolutionaries seek
to eliminate the source of evil in society by political action. They would be
“radicals” in the literal meaning of the word by laying the axe to the
“roots” of evil.

b. The Sentiments of Radical Revolution

What would impel radical revolutionaries, against the grain of much of
human experience and much of traditional culture, to seek to overthrow
the traditional order? We can gain a clue by examining what is perhaps the
first such radical revolutionary movement on record, that of the Yellow
Turbans in Han China, who were fueled by literalist belief in the
restoration of the Golden Age, or Tai Ping, mentioned in Taoist scripture.
The earlier presence of some Taoist ideas regarding the Tai Ping in the
political philosophy of the Legalists did not overshadow the predominantly
Machiavellian tone of their writings, let alone the practice of Qin Shih
Huang-ti, who ruthlessly unified China. In the waning years of the Han
dynasty, amid severe agrarian crises, three brothers under the banner of
these Taoist ideas sparked fearsome rebellion in the Yellow River Valley.
Rebellion is actually a misnomer because this movement was a messianic
one, which aimed at the total overthrow of the Han and the establishment
of the original state of purity under a theocratic regime. The Yellow
Turbans had all the classical features of a radical revolutionary movement:
it arose in a time of great disaster and political turmoil, it was led by those
proclaiming special wisdom, it consisted of followers who were from the
destitute of society, it sought the elimination of the major source of evil in

7
Polybius, Histories, VI.3-9.
18 Chapter Two

society, and it believed its political action would transform, or restore,

human nature. By 184 C.E. the Yellow Turbans formed an armed group of
360,000 supporters organized into a religious community with rites and
ceremonies that included trances, purification, confessions, and orgiastic
commingling of the sexes. The revolution was put down mercilessly over
the next few years by Han warlords. These revolutionary ideas, however,
did not die out, but continued in secret societies. Almost a thousand years
later, the Red Turbans awaited the reincarnation of a Buddhist bodhisattva
who would usher in the perfect society after liberating China from the
Mongol yoke. With their distinct mixture of Buddhist and Zoroastrian
ideas, they joined in the overthrow of the Mongols, only to see a
traditional restoration of order in the Ming Dynasty. These ideas again
surfaced, mixed in with Christian eschatological notions (the leader, Hong
Xiuquan, believed himself to be the brother of Jesus), in the more famous
Taiping Rebellion of the nineteenth century, in which at least twenty
million were killed in the attempt to overthrow the decadent Manchus and
establish a utopian regime ordained by God.8 We see here, then, a spiritual
principle at work and the literalist interpretation of the accompanying
spiritual symbols that gives rise to an expectation of a transformation of
human society and human nature from outside society.
Playing a far greater role in the history of radical revolution has been
the complex of experiences and symbols arising from the Israelite
religious tradition (and becoming part of the other “Abrahamic” faiths,
Christianity and Islam). According to the self-interpretation of the
Israelites, the key event that constituted the people of Israel as a distinct
community was the Exodus from the great power of the region, Egypt. The
Exodus was indeed unique as an event, not because it was caused by the
irruption of divine agency—for the archaic mentality tended to view all
significant changes in human affairs as the result of vertical causality
operating from “above” by the lords of nature who themselves were
partners in the cosmic order—but because the divine intervention in this
case came from a Lord of History who operated beyond the rules of the
cosmos and could transform history, creating a distinct “before” and
“after”. Meaningful events were not restricted to those associated with the

8
On the Yellow Turbans and Red Turbans, see Jacques Gernet, A History of
Chinese Civilization, trans. J. R. Foster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1982), 155-56; on the “Qing revolution”, see Arthur Cotterell, The First Emperor
of China: The Greatest Archeological Find of our Time (New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Wilson, 1981), chap. 7; on the Taiping Rebellion, see Jonathan D.
Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 19

cyclical restoration of archaic foundations.9 Meaningful events could occur

on the stage of history in a linear fashion. If the past could have been
changed fundamentally and qualitatively, then so, too, might the future
“when swords will be bent into plowshares”. Indeed many passages in the
Old Testament portrayed such a future. One image was the appearance of
the New Jerusalem, when God would rule all the nations. Another
complex of images, found in the Book of Daniel, was that of the
apocalypse, a transformation of society, history, and the cosmos when,
after a great disaster and persecution, there would follow the “reign of the
saints” (those who had remained faithful to God). The Christian New
Testament’s Book of the Apocalypse added the image of the “thousand
year reign of the saints” (the millennium).10 Eventually the image of the
millennium was joined to that of the “Third Age of the Spirit”, based on
Trinitarian speculation by Joachim of Fiore on the meaning of history.11
These images are “eschatological” because they refer to the “last days”
(the “eschaton”). Later, as we shall see, there would be eschatological
images specific to Islam.
What are the possible interpretations one could give, as a believer, to
these apocalyptic, millennial, and eschatological passages? We can trace
here the “logic of radical revolution” along a continuum of types of
interpretations. At one extreme we have the orthodox Christian
interpretation, formulated in classic fashion by St. Augustine, who saw
these passages as entirely symbolic—referring not to actual events in
history but to the inner struggle of the individual soul and its spiritual

9
See Eliade, Cosmos and History, 102-12.
10
Key passages: Isaiah, 2:2-5; 4:2-6; 11:1-9. Hosea, 2:18. Daniel, 7:13-14, 23-27.
Revelation, 13:1-17; 20:1-6; 21:1-8, 22-21; 22:3-5. For general discussion, see
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and
Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University
Press., 1970), chap. 1. These complexes of symbols flow from what Voegelin calls
the expectation of a “metastasis”, the prophetic anticipation of a fundamental
transformation of reality, an attitude constituting a disturbance in the “balance of
consciousness” in its situation between immanence and transcendence: Voegelin,
Israel and Revelation, 23-24, 506-10, 528, 529-35, 537, 543-43, 545; The
Ecumenic Age, chap. 4.
11
On the Joachite tradition, see Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the
Prophetic Future (New York: Harper and Row, 1976); The Influence of Prophecy
in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame press, 1993). On the dangers of interpreting Joachim out of context,
see Matthias Riedl, “The Political Thought of Joachim de Fiore”; Eric Voegelin
Society, American Political Science Association conference (2001): http://www.
lsu.edu/artsci/groups/voegelin/society/2001%20Papers/Panel22001.shtml#Riedl.
20 Chapter Two

destiny in the beyond. 12 This extreme is clearly anti-revolutionary. The

next stage in the continuum is to interpret the passages literally but to
regard the “fulfillment” of the passages as murky and, for all practical
purposes, in the far-off future. The next stage is to claim knowledge of the
time of the fulfillment as immediate or soon, but to adopt a completely
passive (perhaps prayerful) attitude toward the events. The next stage is to
claim knowledge of the time of fulfillment as immediate or soon and to
take up an active, though peaceful, stance (as, for example, warning people
to repent, or joining a procession of Flagellants). The final stage on the
road to radical revolution is to claim knowledge of the time of fulfillment
as immediate or soon and to take up an active—and violent—stance as a
key player in bringing about the transformation. Under very adverse
historical conditions (for instance, in the midst of invasions, plagues,
injustice, or famine) we find ready-made apocalyptic situations where
historical pressures may point the logic of interpretation—especially for
aspiring leaders of the marginalized and victimized—in the direction of
the literal, the specific, the active, and the violent.

c. Medieval and Reformation Western Radical Revolutionary

Movements
So we see the Jewish zealots spearheading a revolt against the Romans
as they anticipated the coming of the Messiah. We witness Western
medieval millennialists growing from a trickle to more threatening violent
movements in the Late Middle Ages. In 1305-1306, Dolcino, at the head
of a group of Apostolic Brethren, believing that a fourth age of history was
about to dawn (after the ages of the Old Testament, Christ, and Constantine),
awaited on a mountainside the coming of a World Emperor to kill the
pope, bishops, and clergy and inaugurate a new disposition in which the
Holy Spirit would be directly present. Instead of the world emperor a papal
army greeted him and his group.
During this century there were reports of some Flagellants becoming
violent and being suppressed by officials. In 1420 radical revolution broke
out amidst the Hussite rebellion, which consisted mainly of moderate
reformers. But apocalyptic fever, preached by a band of former Catholic
priests, spurred radicals to rename their main stronghold—the city of

12
See St. Augustine, City of God, 20.7-9, 22.32; Karl Löwith, Meaning in History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), chap. 9; Klaus Vondung, The
Apocalypse in Germany, trans. Stephen D. Ricks (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 2000), 22-24.
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 21

Usti—the biblical “Tabor” (where Christ foretold his second coming). To

prepare the way for the New Age the leaders proclaimed that, instead of
waiting for miracles to commence the millennium and the Joachite Third
Age, the true believers must purify the world by killing all sinners,
opponents, and those who refused to join. The more extreme among the
Taborites sought to eliminate taxes and property. But the classless
communist society did not last long, as the Taborites felt they did not have
to work since they were living in the New Paradise as had Adam and Eve
before the fall. Finally, the most extreme of the Taborites (for even the
radical revolutionaries have a spectrum of extremists), who were
antinomians to the core, left Tabor two hundred strong to assault the
world. In the process they destroyed all the villages they came across,
killing all men, women, and children. Of course, there was resistance.
Their first two leaders were killed. Soon the entire group was attacked by
the more moderate Taborites (who perhaps considered them “enemies to
the left’) and exterminated them. They were easy to spot since these
Adamites dressed as had Adam and Eve in Paradise! By 1421
revolutionary fever had abated in Tabor itself. In 1434 a Taborite army
was defeated. In 1452 Tabor was taken by moderate Hussites.13
A century later, during the Reformation, Thomas Müntzer, attracted to
the old Taborite ideas, transformed a peasant revolt into a radical
revolutionary movement. In 1525 he led his peasant forces, the League of
the Elect, eight thousand strong, against the local ruler in Thuringia, Prince
Philip of Hesse. In spite of the appearance of a rainbow, which he took as
assign of God’s intervention, his army was destroyed with five thousand
dead. Müntzer was tortured and beheaded. But his memory was kept alive.
Nine years later there was a successful, if brief, effort to establish the New
Jerusalem.14
Left-wing activist Anabaptists seized the town of Münster in 1534,
throwing out all the “godless” Lutherans and Catholics, instituting
communism and polygamy, and establishing a reign of terror to kill all
“evil ones”. In a fashion similar to the Yellow Turbans, this revolutionary
regime at Münster displayed features typical of radical revolutionary
regimes, whether religious or secular, in the following centuries. The
seizure of power by the radicals was followed by the creation of the new
social order of polygamy, communism, and dictatorship. The leader, John
Bockelson, purged any person not following the new rules, or suspected of
violations. While the war against the internal enemies of the saints (the

13
Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, chaps. 7, 11.
14
Ibid., chap. 12.
22 Chapter Two

“people”) was being conducted there was also the external war against the
established order. The immediate external enemies were the forces of the
local prince-bishop, but Bockelson sent messengers (“apostles”) to instigate
world revolution. The emissaries reached Amsterdam, but an insurrection
there failed. The reign of terror depleted the population in Münster, and
the siege against the city was successful in 1535.15
While the Münster regime was ruthlessly destroyed by the neighboring
established political authorities, it was a herald of things to come. Within
little more than a century millennialists threatened to take over an entire
country—England. In the English Civil War, the Puritan forces defeated
the royalists and executed Charles I in the awesome year of 1649. Radical
revolutionaries were jubilant and expectant. Ranters and Ravers (who
claimed to be “godded men” free of any moral law) went wild, Diggers
sought to establish communism in the countryside, Levelers (following,
they claimed, the example of the supreme leveler, Jesus) advocated
democracy, and—most dangerously—the Fifth Monarchists, who held a
slight majority in the constitutional convention to devise the post-
monarchical government, looked forward to the fulfillment of the Book of
Daniel and the coming of Jesus as the next ruler of England, the
prophesied Fifth Monarchy. Oliver Cromwell, who turned out to be a
moderate revolutionary, imprisoned the Leveler leaders, disbanded the
constitutional convention, and created a military dictatorship. England was
on the brink of revolution. There was no reign of terror, and the later
“Glorious Revolution”, while harboring (as Rosenstock-Huessy has
argued) sentiments of a new order—that of the British Empire—was a
compromise, a settlement, and not a radical revolution.16

d. Modern Secular Revolutions

Within a century and a half, radical revolutionaries would seize the
largest country in Europe, France, marking the most significant event in

15
Ibid., chap. 13; Anthony Arthur, The Tailor-King: The Rise and Fall of the
Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 1999).
16
C.V. Wedgewood, The King’s Peace, 1637-1641 (London: Collins, 1955); The
King’s War, 1641-1647 (London: Collins, 1958); Christopher Hill, The World
Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York:
Penguin Books, 1975); Andrew Sharp, Political Ideas of the English Civil Wars,
1641-1649: A Collection of Representative Texts with Commentary, Documents in
Political Ideas, Bernard Crick ed. (New York: Longman, 1983); Cohn, The Pursuit
of the Millennium, appendix; Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution:
Autobiography of Western Man (Providence, Rhode Island: Berg, 1993), chap. 6.
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 23

modern history. The logic of modernity seemed to be the logic of radical

revolution. But the idea of revolution was no longer religious but secular.
What are some of the causes of this “great transformation”?
We must distinguish between sentiments, images, and affects, on the
one hand, and ideas and concepts, on the other hand. What drives radical
revolution in the West is the set of sentiments, images, and affects
originally linked to the notion of divine intervention in history. These
sentiments, images, and affects concern salvation and the elimination of
evil. In theological terms they are, accordingly, “soteriological”. Still, they
can be associated with either explicitly religious ideas or secular ideas. In
fact, there are actual historical connections between the religious
expression and the secular expression. In certain locations, such as the
Rhineland, religious millennialist groups avoided persecution by taking on
secular garb and projects. 17 The Cambridge Platonists, for example,
explicitly effected a gradualization of the idea of the millennium by
transforming it into the idea of progress through science.18 Indeed, many
intellectuals had become disenchanted with Christianity because of the
religious wars of the Reformation. But if one were to reject the hope of
salvation in the beyond, that did not preclude, in some cases, the hope of
salvation on earth—perhaps, as in the case of the Cambridge Platonists, as
a gradual but inevitable progress of the human race through enlightenment.
The logic of this hope, however, could still point to immediate salvation
through radical revolution. The appeal to modern science, too, is an
important factor in the transition to secular revolution. There seemed
something utterly unprecedented in the Scientific Revolution. Had not
modern science penetrated to the secrets of nature? Could it not also—as
in the Enlightenment—penetrate also, for the first time, to the secret laws
of human nature, society, and history? Could not this new human science
replace religion as an authority and lead to moral perfection, to the
elimination of the major source of evil in society, ignorance—and thus to
Heaven on Earth? In the background of this project was the association of
modern science with White Magic and hermeticism, with its tradition of
alchemical transformation of substances. During the French Revolution,
hermeticism and its esoteric lore were rife in groups and secret societies.19

17
Friedrich Heer, The Intellectual History of Europe, trans. Jonathan Steinberg
(New York: World Publishing Co., 1953), 2.
18
Ernest Lee Tuvenson, Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the
Idea of Progress (New York: Harper and Row, 1964).
19
James Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith
(New York: Basic Books, 1980), chap. 2; on hermeticism, see Frances A Yates,
24 Chapter Two

There was indeed a cultural vacuum. Urbanization, population growth, the

“commercial revolution”, global exploration, conquest and colonization,
the Scientific Revolution, the rise of nation-states, and the Reformation—
all, in their totality, constituted a set of experiences that made the old
medieval idea of a static cosmic hierarchy linked to the sacrum imperium
with its universal institutions of Empire and Papacy seem utterly narrow,
inadequate, and outmoded.20 Into this vacuum poured the political symbol
of the “people”, derived from the theological notion of the corpus
mysticum, which became the new source of political legitimacy—legitimacy
from below, not from above.21 By the twentieth century, the major political
conflicts would be over who were the “people”—the electors, the
Proletariat, or the Volk?
In the French Revolution, the sentiments of radical revolution were no
longer attached to Biblical passages interpreted literally, but rather to
passages from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract interpreted
literally. Robespierre during the Great Terror of 1794 justified the violence
and utopian social policy as the means to create in France Rousseau’s
Republic of Virtue and to “realize the promise of history”. Of course, none
of this was planned beforehand. This is one of the marks of the French
Revolution—its totally unpredictable, unprecedented character. To the
shock of the king and his advisors, who had called for the Estates General
to outflank aristocratic opposition to needed taxation, the elections took on
a momentum of their own, leading to the first phase of the revolution, the
constitutional monarchy phase, from June 1789 to June 1791, where
moderate revolutionaries hammered out a new social and political system,
one of drastic reform but with radical revolutionary potential. But the fear
of counter-revolution both from internal threats (revolts in the countryside)
and from the external powers of Austria, Prussia, and Great Britain created
its own dynamics from June 1791 to June 1793. When the moderate
Girondists managed a declaration of war against Austria and Prussia in
April, 1792, this dangerous act opened up a chain reaction of events that
eventually swallowed up the Girondists themselves and led to a Second
Revolution, the declaration of a republic with the eventual execution of the
king. A point of no return had been reached. Within a year the military

Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (New York: Random House, Vintage
Books, 1964).
20
Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, Vol. 6: Revolution and the New
Science, ed. Barry Cooper, vol. 24 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin,
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998).
21
Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in
England and America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989).
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 25

defeats and convulsions in the countryside lead to the ascendancy of the

Jacobins and their erstwhile allies. Thus began the third phase of the
revolution, a Third Revolution, on June 2, 1793, with the fall of the
Girondists. This was the phase of the terror. At first arguably a “terror of
circumstance”, symbolized by the leadership of the realist Danton, the
momentum shifted by 1794. At the very time that the regime seemed
victorious, the terror did not abate but accelerated. Under the Jacobins we
witness the “terror of ideology”, when both “enemies to the right”
(Danton) and “enemies to the left” (Hebert and the sans culottes) were
liquidated in the stupendous effort to realize the Republic of Virtue.
Before he was arrested and executed, Robespierre’s young fanatic
collaborator Saint-Just drafted legislation to mobilize youth, control
education, and establish the Festival of the Supreme Being—legislation to
create a totalitarian state. But the leading Jacobins, unlike later
professional revolutionaries, had not cemented alliances with the army and
other institutions. Their fall was sudden and dramatic. So ended the radical
revolutionary regime. The Thermidor phase was an unstable period of
recovery and consolidation until Napoleon’s coup d’état in 1799. 22
Napoleon indeed preserved in France the “reforms” of the first phase and
extended them to large parts of Europe that came under his conquest. The
French Revolution, perhaps ironically, created a tradition of revolution. It

22
For general treatment, see the classics, Georges Lefebvre, The French
Revolution, Vol. I: From Its Origins to 1793, trans. Elizabeth Moss Evanson (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1962); The French Revolution, Vol. 2: From
1793 to 1799, trans. John Hall Stewart and James Friguglietti ((New York:
Columbia University Press, 1964); J. M. Thompson, The French Revolution (New
York: University of Oxford Press, 1945). For stirring narratives, see Christopher
Hibbert, The Days of the French Revolution (New York: William Morrow and
Company, Inc., 1980); Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French
Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989). For summary and documents, see
Leo Gershoy, The Era of the French Revolution 1789-1799: Ten Years That Shook
the World, An Anvil Original, ed. Louis Snyder (New York: D. Van Nostrand
Company, 1957). For specialized studies, see R. R. Palmer, Twelve Who Ruled:
The Year of Terror in the French Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1969); J. M. Thompson, Robespierre and the French Revolution: A Study of
the Ideals and the Realities of the Revolution as Revealed in the Life of its Most
Controversial Spokesman (New York: Macmillan, 1962); Lynn Hunt, Politics,
Culture, and Class in the French Revolution, Studies on the History of Society and
Culture, ed. Victoria E. Bonnel and Lynn Hunt (Berkley: University of California
Press, 1984). The ideal-type of four stages of the French Revolution presented in
this essay adds the “fear of counter-revolution” to the three stages in Crane
Brinton’s The Anatomy of Revolution.
26 Chapter Two

sparked later waves of revolution that broke out in Paris in 1830, 1848,
and 1870, inspired wars of independence in Latin America, and was a
model for revolutionary movements in nineteenth century Europe. All later
revolutions in the world, except for those in Islam, were its prodigy, as
were all later counter-revolutions.
In 1848 the carrier of the sentiment of radical revolution shifted to
socialism, when the red flag of revolution was raised for the first time in
the streets of Paris. The victory of revolutionary socialism somewhat
surprisingly took place in backward Russia, where the official Marxist-
Leninist ideology proclaimed that the victory of the Proletariat (the
working class) over the Bourgeoisie (middle class) would liberate human
nature and usher in the era of freedom. There is a superficial resemblance
to the phases of the French Revolution. The immediate causes were the
catastrophic (if not apocalyptic) losses in World War One, the flagrant
mismanagement of the war, and the dire economic circumstances, leading
to the March Revolution (by the Western calendar). This is the moderate
phase of the Provisional Government headed by Kerenski (though one
could less plausibly argue that this phase began in 1905 with a
constitutional monarchy controlled from above). From 1918 until 1922
there was indeed a fear of counter-revolution from assassinations by Social
Revolutionaries and from White Armies assisted by Western European and
American forces. There was a civil war, and we can describe the terror
under Lenin as a “terror of circumstance”. But, unlike the French case, the
radicals were in control during this entire phase. In November 1917, the
Bolsheviks engineered a coup d’êtat by Lenin (recently returned to Russia
at the Finland Station courtesy of the German army), Trotsky, and Stalin.
This takeover was not inevitable, and it went against most Marxist ideas of
the determinism of revolution. Lenin was a professional revolutionary who
argued he could actively intervene in the dynamics of history, seize power,
and create a new socialist society in an underdeveloped country that hardly
had begun its “bourgeoisie” phase.23

23
For a dramatic account of the movement leading up to the Russian Revolution,
see Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of
History (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1953); on the leaders, see Bertram Wolfe,
Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History of Lenin, Trotsky, and
Stalin (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001). On the seizure of power and early
years of the revolutionary regime, see Leonard Schapiro, The Russian Revolutions
of 1917: The Origins of Modern Communism (New York: Basic books, 1984);
Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990); E. N.
Burdzhalov, Russia’s Second Revolution: The February 1917 Uprising in
Petrograd, trans. Donald J. Raleigh (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987);
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 27

We cannot underestimate the importance of this revolutionary

development. Professional revolutionaries and parties would proliferate all
over the globe, and Third World revolutionaries could use the Russian
Revolution as a model for revolution in undeveloped areas, including
peasant societies. (Perhaps the most dramatic instance of this professional
tradition is in the case of the Ethiopian revolution, where the Derg, the
army officers in control of the revolution, deliberately hid their status as
radical revolutionaries during a “moderate phase” in 1974-1976, as they
prepared for the horrible “Red Terror” of 1977-1978.) 24 The logic of
Lenin’s ideology required that the dictatorship of the Proletariat would
resort to terror because there was no alternative should circumstances
prove recalcitrant to the new society. 25 And yet we could posit a third
phase of the Russian Revolution as the Great Terror of Stalin, who
perfected terror on an unprecedented level from 1927 until 1953. 26
Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization speech in 1956 marked what seems like a
Thermidor reaction. But a more plausible interpretation is that the period
from 1956 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 is a unique
historical phenomenon: a fossilized Russian autocracy justified by a
revolutionary ideology held with muted revolutionary sentiments, supporting
a totalitarian society and empire. This bureaucratized state was perhaps
ready to implode internally when Gorbachev, replacing the preceding
senile leaders, hastened the fall as he came to doubt it was capable of
adequate internal reform in spite of his strenuous efforts.27 He turned out

Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (New

York: Viking, 1996). For summary and documents, see John Shelton Curtiss, The
Russian Revolutions of 1917, An Anvil Original, ed. Louis Snyder (Malabar,
Florida: Robert E. Krieger Publishing company, 1982).
24
On the first years of the Ethiopian Revolution, see Ryszard Kapuscinski, The
Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, trans. William R. Brand and Katarzyna
Mroczkowska-Brand (New York: Vintage Books, 1984); and René Lefort,
Ethiopia: An Heretical Revolution?, trans. A.M. Berrett (London: Zed Press, 1983).
25
According to Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 467, in 1917 Lenin—who
had already fused Marxism to a professional revolutionary organization—added an
apocalyptic vision (hitherto the dream of anarchists and terrorists): “His first and
most essential step was to identify himself in a time of total confusion with the
most utopian of all revolutionary positions: the anarchist vision of an imminent end
to all authority”. The alternative to all current society and its moral inhibitions was
“totalitarian peace” (481).
26
See Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990).
27
On the fall of the Soviet regime, see Martin Malic, The Soviet Tragedy: A
History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994); Fred
28 Chapter Two

to be a moderate revolutionary sympathetic to liberal democratic

procedures. Ironically, then, it would seem that the origin and fall of this
radical revolutionary regime was brought about by decisions of individuals
more than by the operation of grand historical forces.
Another form of revolutionary socialism was National Socialism. The
Nazi state was a radical revolutionary regime that was engaged, in Hitler’s
world view, in a life and death struggle to liberate the German Volk from
its enemy, the Jewish conspiracy, in order to realize its historical destiny
and salvation. Hitler explicitly incorporated old religious revolutionary
symbols (the Third Reich that would last a “thousand years”). The
Holocaust and the attempted destruction of the Slavic peoples was part of
this new order of history. The “revolutionary conservatism” of the Nazi
regime and its desire to “restore” the historical rights of the Aryan Volk
may cast doubt on its radical revolutionary status, but, in fact, its view of
the past was mythic and it saw as its historical destiny the salvation of the
Volk by destroying the causes of the evil visited upon it. In its policy of
Gleichschaltung (coordination of all aspects of life by the state in service
of the Volk) and in its New Order of Europe it sought to create a radically
new society in order to purify and transform the racial consciousness, thus
creating a new personality.28

Coleman, The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Empire: Forty Years That Shook the
World from Stalin to Yeltsin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); and David
Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (New York: Random
House, 1993).
28
William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi
Germany (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1960), still stands fifty years after
publication as a classic history of National Socialism. See also Eberhard Jackel,
Hitler's World View: A Blueprint for Power, trans. Hebert Arnold (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1981); Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship:
The Origins, Structure and Effects of National Socialism, trans. Jonathan Steinberg
(New York: Praeger, 1970); Joachim C. Fest, Hitler, trans. Richard and Clara
Winston (New York: Vintage, 1975); Charles Bracelen Flood, Hitler: The Path to
Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989). James M. Rhodes, in The
Hitler Movement: A Modern Millenarian Revolution, Hoover Institution Publication
213 (Stanford, California: Hoover Institute Press, 1980), has demonstrated with
precision the correspondence of National Socialism with millennial movements.
For the related symbol of the apocalypse in National Socialism and the “peculiar
attraction” to the symbol in German culture and politics since the eighteenth
century, see Vondung, The Apocalypse in Germany. Voegelin explores various
facets of the moral and spiritual abyss of Nazism in Eric Voegelin, Hitler and the
Germans, ed. and trans. Detlev Clemens and Brendan Purcell, vol. 31 of The
Collective Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999).
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 29

Eventually Marxist-Leninist regimes would dot four continents as the

result of Soviet armies or revolutions in China, Cuba, Ethiopia, Nicaragua,
Grenada, and Cambodia. Even here there was logic to the revolutions.29
The Chinese called the Soviets “margarine Communists”, and in the 1960s
Mao Tse Tung unleashed the unprecedented Great Proletarian Revolution
to purge the Communist Party itself of impurities. 30 When this effort
eventually failed (and more “conservative” leaders restored equilibrium
after the death of Mao in something like a Thermidor Reaction under the
“pragmatist” Deng Xiao-ping), Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia
could claim that it was up to them to establish a true communist society.31
The Khmer Rouge, as we have seen, drove all of the population of
Cambodia into the countryside and killed all persons even remotely
associated with the West and modern professions. Perhaps a quarter of the
population died in the Killing Fields. This unmistakable radical
revolutionary regime was destroyed by an invasion of the more “normal”
Vietnamese communist state. At the time perhaps a third of the world was
under the rule of real or ostensible radical revolutionary states (“people’s

Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, in The Racial State: Germany

1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), detail how sweeping
racial policies matched the Nazi ideology: ‘Its objects were novel and sui generis:
to realize an ideal future world, without ‘lesser races’, without the sick, and
without those who they decreed had no place in the ‘national community’ (306).
29
On Third World revolutions in general, see Gérard Challand, Revolution in the
Third World, trans. Diana Johnstone (New York: Penguin Books, 1978). See also
Elizabeth Becker, When The War Was Over: Cambodia And The Khmer Rouge
Revolution, rev. ed. (New York: Public Affairs, 1998); Jon Lee Anderson, Che
Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 2101); Hugh Thomas,
The Cuban Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1977); Tad Szulc, Fidel: A
Critical Portrait (New York: Avon Books Collins, 2000); David Nolan, The
Ideology of the Sandinistas and the Nicaraguan Revolution (Coral Gables: Institute
of Interamerican Studies, University of Miami, 1984).
30
See John King Fairbank, The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985 (New York:
Harper and Row, 1986); Bill Brugger, China: Radicalism to Revisionism, 1962-
1979 (Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books, 1981); Harrison E.
Salisbury, The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng (New York:
Avon Books, 1992); Dick Wilson, The People’s Emperor Mao: A Biography of
Mao Tse-Tung (New York: Lee Publishers Group, 1979); Ross Terrill, Mao: A
Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1980); Jean Esmein, The Chinese
Cultural Revolution, trans. W. J. F. Farmer (Garden City, New York: Anchor
Doubleday, 1973); Byung-joon Ahn, Chinese Politics and the Cultural Revolution:
Dynamics of Policy Processes (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1976).
31
David Bonava, Verdict in Peking: The Trial of the Gang of Four (New York: G.
P. Putman’s Sons, 1984).
30 Chapter Two

democracies” were imposed on Eastern Europe by the Soviet Union, and

some Third World regimes were a complicated mixture of nationalism,
modernization, and true revolutionary sentiments). The tradition of
revolution imposed certain “obligations” on would-be Third World
revolutions, as dramatically illustrated in the killing of the charismatic
Maurice Bishop in Grenada in 1983, who despite his genuine affection for
the people in his New Jewel Movement, would not conform to the
dogmatic discipline of the communist party Central Committee under the
rigid party hack, Bernard Coard.32
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the tearing down of the Berlin
Wall, and the fall of the soviet regimes of Eastern Europe, the end of
radical revolution in the West seemed at hand. 33 The Western liberal
democracies had apparently triumphed. Nazism and Communism were
both defeated in the twentieth century. True, radical revolutionary
sentiments still seemed vaguely present in the movement of anti-globalism
and among a few isolated Christian and survivalist cults. And the
expectation in the West that “democracy and freedom” must spread
worldwide could easily slide into a gradualist form of millennialism (as
could the secularist attack on religion, when it viewed itself as part of the
progressivist and positivist three stage construction of history, where the
age of science succeeds the age of metaphysics that succeeds the age of
religion). But on the stage of politics, radical revolution seemed dead.
The Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the attacks of 9/11, however,
shook the West out of its provincialism. There was another tradition that
carried sentiments and ideas of radical revolution: Islam.

e. Islam and Revolution

Inspired by the religious teachings and the practices of the prophet
Mohammad (570-632), Arab armies poured out of the Arabian desert in
the seventh century (of the Christian calendar) to conquer Jerusalem,
Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Persia. By 711, Muslim forces moved
across North Africa to Spain and across Central Asia to the Indus Valley
on the subcontinent of India. We witness here something remarkable in
history: the creation, within a mere century, of a universal religion, Islam,
a new civilization (a combination of Arabic, Hellenic, and Persian

32
Gregory Sandford and Richard Vigilante, Grenada: The Untold Story (Lanham,
Maryland: Madison Books, 1984).
33
See Gale Stokes, The Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Collapse of Communism
in Eastern Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 31

cultures), and a universal empire, the Caliphate (claiming the authority of

universal rule by the khalifa, or caliph, the successor to Mohammad).
Islam, seeing itself to be a purification of Judaism and Christianity,
believed, as did its predecessors, in divine intervention in history. Unlike
in the West, there was no distinction between church and state. And
although the tradition would distinguish Great Jihad (the inner struggle of
self against Satan) and Lesser Jihad, or Jihad of the Sword (physical
struggle against the opponents of Islam), thereby putting the emphasis on
the former, Islam initially was spread by the sword (and some scholars—at
least Western scholars—hold that Jihad of the Sword was the original
meaning of jihad). The seeds were present for radical revolution. A
number of factors, however, militated against this. First, the very success
of Islamic forces in establishing a universal empire and an orbit of
civilization blunted the urge to transform the world. Secondly, the
Caliphate had to adjust to some normal political and diplomatic demands
as ruler of a vast territory. Third, the Quran (or Koran) spoke of a kind of
tolerance for at least the People of the Book (Christians and Jews). Fourth,
the majority tradition of Muslims took on a conservative role. By 900 C.E.
there was communal consensus that the four great schools of jurisprudence
had resolved all issues regarding the divinely ordained laws of Islam, the
sharia, which came from the Hadith, or “Tradition”, consisting of the
Quran and the Sunnah, or practices of the Prophet as remembered by his
Companions. Hence among the mainstream Sunni, who accepted the
authority of the Sunnah and the succession of caliphs, radical revolutionary
sentiments were relatively contained; though, as we shall see, there would
be notable exceptions, particularly in contemporary history.
The minority traditions in Islam, those of the Shia, realized the
potential of radical revolution in Islam much earlier. The members of the
Shia were the “party of Ali”, who supported Mohammad Ali in his claim
to be the legitimate caliph. The death of Mohammad Ali in a civil war
(661 C.E.) and the later massacre of his son Al Husayn and family at
Karbala (680 C.E.) created among the Shia the sense of being a persecuted
minority. They continually faced what could seem apocalyptic situations,
the breeding ground for radical revolution. For the Shia, or Shiites, the
legitimate successor of Mohammad was not a caliph but an imam, a
divinely appointed spiritual leader. But within the Shia a major split
occurred when the Ismaelis (Sevener Shiites) claimed that Ishmael was the
legitimate seventh Imam. The Seveners, a minority within the minority
Shia, nevertheless were able to seize power in Egypt from 909-1171,
establishing the Fatimid dynasty as a rival to the Caliphate at Baghdad.
Remarkably, in 1095 radical Ismaelis broke with Fatimids, arguing that the
32 Chapter Two

Fatimids killed the legitimate Imam. They considered themselves the only
legitimate carriers of authority in the world. But their locus of power was
restricted to scattered fortresses in the mountains of Syria, Iraq, and Persia.
Given their limited power, their only method for carrying out jihad against
the illegitimate governments of the world was to conduct terror campaigns
against the Sunni rulers in Syria, Iraq, and Persia and against the Crusaders
in the Holy Land. Their distinctive modus operandi was to insinuate
themselves in the palace of a political leader, perhaps for years, as an
ostensible faithful supporter, and then at the opportune time kill the leader,
fully prepared to suffer torture and death themselves. These were the
infamous Assassins (who contributed the term to the English language).34
They were indeed the forerunners of modern suicide bombers. They fled
the Middle East only when the Mongols destroyed their citadels.
What became the larger group of Shia were the Twelvers, who
believed that the twelfth Imam disappeared from earth but, as the divinely
appointed savior of Islam, would reappear in the “last days” to establish
the rule of Islam on earth. This was the Mahdi, or Hidden Imam.35 Here
we see messianic, millennialist, eschatological, and soteriological symbols
all coalescing. The potential for radical revolution seems so acute that it is
perhaps surprising that throughout much of its history, Twelver Shiites
remained, along the continuum of revolutionary sentiments, literalists who
adopted a passive attitude toward the coming of the Mahdi. It was not until
1501 that Twelver Shiism took strong hold in Persia when the Safawids,
originally of Turkish stock and leaders of a Sufi order, become rulers
(Shahs) of the Persian Empire and imposed Twelver Shiism on the
populace of Iran. And it was not until the twentieth century that Ayatollah
Khomeini proposed an unprecedented activist version of Twelver Shiism,
where Islamic revolution could act in the stead of the Mahdi and perhaps
even pave the way for the eventual coming of the Hidden Imam. In 1979
the return from exile of Ayatollah Khomeini (even more dramatic than
Lenin’s return home to the Finland Station) sparked the Iranian
Revolution, placed in power a theocratic regime, conducted a reign of
terror amid a civil war and calamitous foreign invasion by Iraq, challenged
the contemporary world order by flouting all diplomatic protocols in
taking as hostages the members of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, and spread
revolutionary ideas against the Great Satan (the United States) and the

34
Bernard Lewis, The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1967); W. B. Bartlett, The Assassins: The Story of Medieval
Islam’s Secret Sect (Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2001).
35
See Abdulaziz Abdulhussein Sachedina, Islamic Messianism: The Idea of the
Madhi in Twelver Shi’ism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981).
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 33

Little Satan (Israel).36 Iranian agents helped form in Lebanon the radical
Shiite group Hezbollah (“Party of God’), which in 1981 participated in
bombing the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, leading to withdrawal of U.S.
forces.
Sunni tradition experienced its first great apocalyptic situation when
the Mongols in 1258 under Hulagu destroyed the Caliphate and sacked
Baghdad, killing 800,000 Muslims but sparing Christians and Jews. One
response to this apocalypse is found in the writings of Ibn Taymiyya, who
formulated the notion of a universal jihad against not only the external
enemies of Islam (for example, the Mongols) but also against Muslims
who were unfaithful. He furthermore advocated the “restoration” of a
purified Muslim community that emulated the forefathers (salaf) of early
Islam. Ibn Taymiyya’s Salafism was revolutionary conservatism. This is
not an oxymoron since the community he wanted to conserve did not exist
in his time, and perhaps never did. It was the Golden Age. (This
revolutionary conservatism generically resembles that of many German
groups in the early twentieth century who wanted to restore an idyllic
Germany liberated from the yoke of Roman and Western oppression. As
we noted above, Hitler’s National Socialism played on these revolutionary
conservative sentiments as it sought to liberate the German volk from age-
old oppression.) Centuries later, facing another apocalyptic situation with
the decline of the Ottoman Caliphate, Ibn Taymiyya’s ideas were
embraced by Abd al-Wahhab, who united his ideology to the political
leadership of the Arabian desert chieftain Ibn Saud in 1744. The
Wahhabists gained control of desert tribes around Riyadh, slaughtering
their opponents. Their attack on Mecca and Medina aroused fierce
opposition, and the movement was almost destroyed in 1815 by the
founder of modern Egypt, Mohammad Ali Pasha, who impaled prisoners
from Medina to Jedda. In 1818 he sent the leaders to Constantinople to be
beheaded.37
Nevertheless the fortunes of Wahhabism have since improved. Its
influence spread to India in the nineteenth century as pilgrims to Mecca

36
Said Amir Arjomand, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam: Religion,
Political Order, and Societal Change in Shi’ite Iran from the Beginning to 1890
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Shaul Bakhash, The Reign of the
Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1984); Ray
Takeyh, Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age of the
Ayatollah’s, A Council of Foreign Relations Book (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009).
37
For the Sunni link to modern terrorism, see Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon,
The Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2002), chap. 2.
34 Chapter Two

brought back its ideas to the subcontinent.38 It was particularly prominent

in the religious schools, or madrases, of northern India (and present day
Pakistan), where it remains so today, as a fertile source of jihadism. It also
made inroads along the border between Afghanistan and present day
Pakistan, sparking Mahdist revolutionary movements. Today this is still
fertile ground for the Taliban and Al Qaeda. In Arabia, a descendent of Ibn
Saud with an ambiguous relation to the British founded the Saudi dynasty
in Arabia after World War One and reestablished his ancestor’s alliance
with Wahhabism (his rival was the favorite of Lawrence of Arabia). In the
mid-twentieth century Wahhabist ideas were appropriated by Egyptian
Muslims who promoted Salafism as the response to British imperialism,
eschewing appeals to “Egyptian nationalism’ or “Arab socialism’ as
capitulation to the decadent West. The leading spokesman for this view
was Sayyid Qutb. His Milestones sets out a revolutionary vision.39 He died
a martyr in the eyes of his followers, executed in prison in 1966. Among
his followers was Dr. Ayman al-Zawahri who joined Osama bin Laden to
form Al Qaeda. The rest is the history leading up to 9/11, as bin Laden
proclaimed his jihad to defeat the “Crusaders and Zionists” and restore the
Caliphate.40

Historical Assessment
Drawing from our brief historical account, what assessments can we
make of the history of radical revolutions to round out our historical
profile? Let us propose the following nine historical generalizations.
First, radical revolutions originate in the idea of a divine or spiritual
transformation of the human condition. The sources of this idea came from
the world religions of the Axial Period of history. The main line is Judeo-
Christian in the West; the secondary line is Islamic; the tertiary line is
Taoist with later admixtures of Buddhism and Zoroastrianism in China.

38
Charles Allen, God’s Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of
Modern Jihad (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 2006).
39
Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (Lahore: Kazi Publications, 2007).
40
Peter L. Bergen, Holy War Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden
(New York: The Free Press, 2001); Benjamin and Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror,
pt. 1. For an application of Voegelin’s analysis of spiritual disease to contemporary
terrorism, in which such terrorism is described as form of ‘apocalyptic political
religion’, see Barry Cooper, New Political Religions; or, an Analysis of Modern
Terrorism, Eric Voegelin Institute Series (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
2005).
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 35

Second, the idea of revolution can be separated from the engendering

sentiments, symbols, and aspirations and take on secular garb. This
possibility is actualized in the West (and perhaps in Maoism in China).
The “great transformation” to the secular idea of revolution from the
seventeenth to the eighteenth century in the West is complicated and
perhaps still inadequately explained, but the facts are clear. The idea of
revolution—initially an explicit and fanatic religiosity—moves to a
suspicion of religion and rejection of Christianity (as with the Jacobins), to
militant atheism (as in Marxism), to a crude pagan pan-psychism (as in
National Socialism).
Third, in the West radical revolutions gain in size of operations over
the centuries—from a small bands of ardent revolutionaries in Tabor in the
fifteenth century and Münster in the sixteenth century, to dedicated groups
of revolutionaries threatening to take over the entire country of England
in the seventeenth century, to the convulsions of the French Revolution
in 1789, 1792, 1793, and 1794, to the threat of similar outbreaks in
nineteenth-century Europe, to the totalitarian revolutionary movements in
Russia and Germany in the twentieth century, to the spread of the western
idea of revolution (mainly in its Marxist form) to the non-Western world.
The combination of Western imperialism, colonialism, and revolutionary
ideology has sparked a resurgence of Islamic revolutionary activity and a
distinctly indigenous Chinese adaptation of Marxism by Mao in China.
Fourth, the later the radical revolutions tend to occur the more violent
and total they seem to be. On the one hand, later revolutionaries can build
on their predecessors and claim that the earlier revolutions were only half-
hearted, as we saw with Pol Pot. Later revolutionaries can work within a
tradition of revolution. Robespierre was hurled into the spotlight as the
revolution unfolded with an unpredictable and shocking newness; Lenin
made the revolutionaries a professional party that would seize the moment
to accelerate and direct events; the Derg planned all along to manipulate
the stages of the Ethiopian revolution; Mao unleashed the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution to attack his own revolutionary regime
(which threatened to go the “capitalist road”). On the other hand, the
“logic of revolution” does not favor patience. Its energy heads as a natural
(or supernatural) force toward the literal, the specific, the active, and the
violent.
Fifth, contrary to the propaganda of leftists, radical revolution
embraces both the right and the left, as they have been defined since the
seating arrangements in the French National Assembly gave rise to the
designations. The Flagellants, Apostolic Brethren, Taborites, left-wing
Anabaptists, Fifth Monarchists—all with their millennial and Joachite
36 Chapter Two

ideas of revolution—are every bit as radical revolutionaries as Lenin,

Castro, and Che Guevara, Hitler as Robespierre, bin Laden as Mao. The
more incisive distinction is between radicals (who want a total—
soteriological—solution) and the moderates and progressives (whose heart
is with the revolutionary aspirations but opt for slow change and reform).
As a revolution and its logic unfold, there is often an expanding continuum
between the radicals and the moderates and a shift along the continuum.
What seems radical at one stage, e.g. exercise of violence to bring about
political and social change, can become moderate at a later stage, e.g. a
hesitancy to bring about more drastic social change by a reign of terror;
and even the advocate of terror, a Danton, might at some point want to
stop the bloodshed. The moderate revolutionaries, who settle for reform,
must be differentiated from the non-revolutionary moderates, who seek
reform as the end in itself (even if some might have to employ violence in
a limited way under certain circumstances).
Sixth, the necessary condition of radical revolution is a complicated
triad of bold leaders, willing followers, and favorable circumstances.
These factors, of course, reinforce each other. Charismatic individuals,
elites, and parties do play major roles—more so than some revolutionary
ideologies would admit. Frequently these leaders have pseudo-intellectual
pretensions to match their disturbed psyches so that they can believe they
have a unique vision of history and destiny. Their appeal is to the
marginalized or disgruntled in society (landless peasants, unemployed
laborers, resentful lower middle classes) who might feel “anything is better
than the current system” and be willing to believe they are victims of a
conspiracy. The objective circumstances reinforce this toxic belief.
Revolutions do occur in the face of manifest injustices and calamities—
situations that could truly seem to be apocalyptic (disastrous wars,
plagues, famines, unprecedented economic woes). How many revolutions
have taken place because the government has floundered on land reform
for peasants, as in France, Russia, and Iran! Most major revolutions have
been associated with wars either at their inception or at the threshold of
their radical phase, again as in France, Russia, and Iran. It is precisely
these circumstances that can create situations of such instability that new
brands of leaders, including radical revolutionaries, may arise who, under
normal circumstances, would never have had a hearing. Thucydides in his
account of the terrible civil war in Corcyra gave a classic description of
such a situation:

In peace and prosperity states and individuals have better sentiments,

because they do not find themselves suddenly confronted with imperious
necessities; but war takes away the easy supply of daily wants and so
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 37

proves a rough master that brings most men’s characters to a level of their
fortunes. . . . The advocate of extreme measures was always trustworthy;
his opponent a man to be suspected. . . . Meanwhile the moderate part of
the citizens perished. . . . 41

But Thucydides was not familiar with radical revolution. Bold leaders,
willing followers, and abject circumstances all conspire as necessary
conditions of radical revolution, but they are not in themselves sufficient
conditions. What is needed further is the revolutionary ideology, and this
is not a freely floating entity but is rooted in a cultural tradition.
Seventh, radical revolutions—notwithstanding the claims of revolutionary
ideologies, the logic of the idea of revolution, and the steady increase in
revolutionary activity in the modern world—are not inevitable. Could a
more effective leader in France than Louis XVI have guided reform rather
than suffered the explosion of revolution? The same can be asked of
Russia and Czar Nicholas II. No doubt the task would have been arduous
and heroic—but not impossible. If more moderate revolutionaries had the
steel will of a Cromwell, could more revolutionary movements have been
stopped from going over the brink? If the Austrians and Prussians had
crushed the French at Valmy, they may have destroyed the revolution, and
there would never have been the Great Terror. Surely, in a country with
few workers the Bolsheviks were far from a perfect fit for leadership—in
one of the more daring moves in history, perhaps on a par with Cortes’s
defeat of the Aztecs, they engineered a coup to seize power, changing the
improbable into the seemingly inevitable. The very fact of revolutions,
however, and the existence of revolutionary regimes seem to support the
“myth of inevitability”.
Eighth, no radical revolution has succeeded—according to its own
terms. Thus we do not see established a New Jerusalem, a Fifth Monarchy
ruled by King Jesus, a Republic of Virtue, an historically successful Third
Reich, a stage of communism, a restoration of the Caliphate, a return of
the Mahdi. Revolutionary expectations, of course, can be rekindled in the
hope that the “next one” will prove decisive and final.
Ninth, even though radical revolutions have not succeeded in
eliminating the source of evil in society, they have had enormous historical
influence. It should be obvious the extent to which the French, Russian,
Chinese, Cuban, and Iranian revolutions—which have created their own
traditions—have had a profound impact on modern history, politics, and
culture. Many of the unintended consequences of radical revolutions are

41
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 3.82.2, 8, trans. Richard Crawley (New
York: Random House, Modern Library College Editions, 1951).
38 Chapter Two

dire, but not all unintended consequences, short-term or long-term, are

bad. If every revolution attempts to address real injustices, real corruption,
real antiquated institutions, then some revolutions succeed to some degree
in eliminating the old injustices, embedded corruption, and antiquated
institutions, even as they create new injustices, forms of corruption, and
diabolical institutions. The revolution can act as a purge of the body politic
to renew it (perhaps in ways the revolutionaries would neither anticipate
nor approve). So, for example, France in the wake of the French
Revolution emerged as a modernized state with a central bureaucracy
administering a universal code of laws, which, in principle, treated all
citizens equally. Thus, radical revolutions can blend into revolutions in the
general sense.

Philosophical Encounter
In our treatment of the history of revolutions we have isolated radical
revolutions, identified their sources, traced their sweep and momentum,
and discerned some general patterns. Inevitably such treatment leads to
philosophical reflection on the results of the investigation. What are we to
make of the history of radical revolutions? Prior to judgments of value we
had to attempt to make honest judgments of fact. But the facts by their
very nature hurl us into the drama of history and raise the further questions
of value. These questions, properly speaking, are philosophical and must,
accordingly, be handled philosophically. In the brief compass of this essay,
we must be content with presenting the main dialectically opposed ways
theorists have responded to the phenomena of radical revolutions; with
indicating our fundamental option; and, in the next section, with offering a
modest prognosis. The issues ultimately revolve around whether there is a
human nature and, if so, what it is; whether religious experience is a
permanent feature of authentic human being or is a species of inauthentic
human living to be discarded or superseded; and whether, amid human
historicity, basic standards endure to guide human beings through their
cultures—including the political cultures—to respond to the challenges of
history. It is our contention that reasonable answers to these questions can
show how making the proper distinction of radical revolution from
revolution in the general sense is the key to differentiating progress from
decline. The choice facing humankind is not revolution or no revolution.
The choice is what kind of revolution is authentic and what kind is
inauthentic.
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 39

a. Dialectically Opposed Viewpoints

There are, broadly, five responses to the history of radical revolution.
The first response, which is an integral part of the history of revolution
itself, is that of revolutionary ideologues, today principally Marxists or
others on the left. They operate within the horizon of radical revolutionary
sentiments, and through theoretical tracts or historical writings would tend
to justify the revolutions, or defend them as well-intentioned but premature
attempts at legitimate and necessary human liberation, usually discriminating
between real revolutions and reactionary, false revolutions.
A second response is a progressivist one which would empathize with
the aspirations of the radical revolutions. It either would be highly critical
of the extremism involved and proclaim it to be unnecessary to reach the
entirely laudable goals of the revolution, or would be downplaying it as
regretful although necessary (claiming, for example—so the argument
would go—that the French Terror was entirely one of circumstance). All
the while it would entertain the hope that history is moving in the direction
of a secular, perhaps utopian, society—currently envisioned as one of
tolerance and good feelings reinforced by multicultural relativism. Though
intellectually critical of radical revolutions, this view would tend to
criticize almost with regret, for its “heart is on the left”.
A third response is actually more positive, but it views radical
revolution not from within but from without. This is the functionalist
interpretation of revolutions by such neo-Machiavellians as Georges
Sorel. 42 As an external observer, the functionalist would observe that
revolutions are necessary to effect large-scale social and cultural changes.
Dynamic societies need such transformations. But to carry out such drastic
change, leaders must have the stupendous energy and charisma to
convince the masses of the truth of social myths—scientifically false or
un-provable beliefs that nevertheless can motivate the masses for
breathtaking social change.
A fourth response adopts a skeptical or even cynical reaction. Unlike
the functionalist, the skeptic finds no approbation in the excess of the
revolutions. This view sees the roots of radical revolution in religious
sentiments, entertains no hope that the religious sentiments can be
sublimated into legitimate secular ambitions, and, accordingly, would hope
to extirpate the religious roots. David Hume is the classic skeptic in this
regard. He sees the religious fanaticism and enthusiasm of the English

42
See H. Stuart Hughes,Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of
European Social Thought, 1890-1930 (New York: Vintage Books, 1958), chap. 5.
40 Chapter Two

Civil War as a disease, rooted in fear and terror and appealing to morbid
tendencies in the human psyche. 43 Karl Löwith, in tracing modern
totalizing conceptions of the meaning of history to earlier theologies of
history, draws a skeptical conclusion: the remedy for the malaise is to drop
the religious pretensions. 44 Freud would view revolutions as among the
“discontents” of civilization, caused by an unhealthy combination of the
“universal neurosis” of religion and the “death instinct”.45
The fifth response adopts a conclusion that is the polar opposite of
Löwith’s. Indeed, according to this fifth view—that of Voegelin, for
example—there are religious roots to the idea of radical revolution. But
religion per se is not the culprit; rather the aberrations come from
inauthentic appropriations of the religious traditions, and from failures to
negotiate the tensions created by the religious differentiations of
consciousness, which constitute new historical challenges.

b. A Philosophy of Revolution
We opt for the fifth response.
Our first premise is that human existence—indeed human nature—is
bound up with the spirit of inquiry, the process of questioning, which
humans can either pursue or flee. Both pursuit and flight occur in
history—perpetually. To pursue questions is to open the possibilities of
attending to experience, of understanding, of making reasonable judgments,
and of deciding in light of one’s experience, understanding, and judging.46
This pursuit is a process of self-transcendence, of going beyond. It is not
only evidenced in science and scholarship but in practical matters. The
entire human world constituted by meaning and values—the technology,
the economy, the polity, the culture—is the fruit of the process of
inquiring practical intelligence. The drive to question is the immanent

43
David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, with Of the immortality
of the Soul, Of Suicide, Of Miracles, ed. Richard H. Popkin, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company1998), pt. 12.
44
Löwith, Meaning in History, Conclusion, Epilogue.
45
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, trans. James Strachey (New York:
W.W. Norton and Company, 1961); Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James
Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1961).
46
See Bernard Lonergan, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, ed. Frederick
E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran, vol. 3 of The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), pt. 1; Collection, ed. Frederick E.
Crowe and Robert M. Doran, vol. 4 of The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), chap. 14; Method in Theology, chap. 1.
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 41

source of diversity in history. To be sure, there are various geographical,

technical, social, and cultural determinants of given and diverse historical
situations, but the spirit of inquiry can place in question every theory and
interpretation, every judgment, every evaluation, every practical solution
to the problems of living. Here Hegel had profound insights. It is the very
discoveries and inventions of the modern period that have created a
technological infrastructure of now worldwide proportions, and this ever-
expanding network of communication and transportation supports and
demands constant social, political, and cultural adjustments. Thus it is the
process of questioning, at the core of genuine human being, which—
unleashed in both the practical and intellectual worlds of modernity and
entering into the dialectic of historical situation and response to the
challenge of history—has made our era one of revolution in the general
sense.
But have we no standards left? If questioning is the source of diversity
in history, it is also the identity in history. To pursue inquiry is to engage
in a recurrent set of operations that carries with it immanent norms and
standards. These norms and standards are trans-cultural. They proclaim:
Be attentive to the data; Be intelligent so as to gain insights and formulate
them as concepts, interpretations, and theories; Be reasonable in judging
by gaining further insight into what constitutes sufficient evidence to
justify concepts, interpretations, or theories and into whether, in fact, one
has the evidence; and Be responsible by gaining moral insights into
possible courses of action in relation to a preferential scale of values
consonant with the very activity of self-transcendence. 47 Thus the
openness of inquiry is the source of progress. Of course, it is possible to
flee inquiry. This flight can be nourished by neurosis, egoism, group
selfishness, and shortsighted practicality. The flight from inquiry distorts
concepts, judgments, and evaluations. It warps decisions. The lack of
insights at every level of the process of inquiry not only restricts or even
poisons science and scholarship, but it leads to breakdowns in social co-
operation and institutions, to fractures in the body politic, to fragmentation
in the culture. In a word, it fosters decline—and with it an unintelligible
but very palpable, and often horrific, historical situation.48 If the dynamism
of the human spirit has caused our world to be a world of constant change,
including, in the general sense of the term, revolutionary changes, then in
that sense our world is a world of revolutions. We need, then, to be able to

47
Lonergan, Method in Theology, 20, 33, 55, 231, 302.
48
On progress and decline, see ibid., 52-55; Lonergan, Insight, 8, 251-67. On
biases, see ibid., 8, 214-27, 244-67.
42 Chapter Two

discern performative criteria of progress in revolutions in the general

sense. We need to be able to say attentively, intelligently, reasonably, and
responsibly what revolutionary changes promote progress and what
revolutionary changes promote decline. As we shall argue, radical
revolutions, by contrast, are inherently an exercise in decline (irrespective
of their unintended consequences and long-term effects).
We must consider a second premise, which follows from the first. If
our viewpoint is from within the process of questioning, if our performative
criteria of objectivity, truth, and value come from within the perspective of
the dynamism of inquiry, then our approach to religion will differ from
that of an external observer confronted by alien objects. The desire to
know is unrestricted, and the dynamism of inquiry will not rest as it seeks
a reality commensurate with the unrestricted sweep of its questions. Far
from being a “projection” or fabrication, such a reality is at the core of all
meaning. But since the field of questions surpasses our ability to answer
them, the ultimate reality within the horizon of our self-transcending
process of inquiry is mystery. It is not childish stupidly to speak of the
divine and the transcendent. But there is a further dimension to this, which
the world religions have brought to the point of full clarity. The process of
inquiry is experienced as gifted, healed, and sustained by the state of
unrestrictedly being in love. This state is religious experience. It is a
participatory consciousness out of which arise the authentic symbols of
religious life.49
Insofar as we adopt this second premise, we must reject the approach
of the skeptics, who would purge the world of radical revolution by
purging the world of religion. Certainly religion can be infected by the
various biases, and because religious experience is so potent, the biases
can be as potent and lethal as the skeptics might allege. But religious
experience (and religion) is a genuine dimension of human existence. In
fact, the differentiation of transcendent being, which accompanied the
world religions in the Axial Period of history, was such a dramatic and
momentous development—a revolution in the general sense—that it has
created entirely new tensions in human existence, as Bergson has noted in

49
See Lonergan, Method in Theology, chap. 4; Eric Voegelin, Anamnesis: On the
Theory of History and Politics, ed. David Walsh, trans. M. J. Hanak based on
abbreviated version originally trans. by Gerhart Niemeyer, vol. 6 of The Collected
Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), chap. 2;
Eric Voegelin, In Search of Order, vol. 5 of Order and History, ed. Ellis Sandoz,
vol. 18 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2002), 28-33.
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 43

his idea of the “open religion”.50 Much as puberty causes new adjustments
and dangers, so, too, does the differentiation of the realm of transcendence.
No doubt the dangers are real, the aberrations are scandalous, and the
distortions are pervasive. But the skeptics focus solely on the negative,
problematic side. To proscribe religion is like proscribing puberty. The
point is to grow and develop. If a world religion is a revolution in the
general sense, then we must apply the distinctions of progress and decline
to the religion. Radical revolutions will be linked to religious aberrations.
This leads us to our critique of the first, second, and third responses to
radical revolution—all of which fail to see that radical revolution, whether
explicitly religious or secular, is a fundamental expression of
inauthenticity, flight from inquiry, and distorted self-interpretation—and
thus a powerful manifestation of decline.
The functionalist approach, on the one hand, adopts the subject-object
confrontation model of scientism, where both religions and radical
revolutions are external objects of value-neutrality. The functionalist
would deny the performative criteria of the process of inquiry that
differentiate between progress and decline; thus all religious meanings and
expressions are equally “myth” in the pejorative sense of the term, and so
are those of radical secular revolutions. There is no meaning “out there”.
The only meaning is that which the human artist creates in a kind of
exercise in pragmatic make-believe. The functionalist would in fact be
involved in a performative contradiction by using the process of inquiry
and, implicitly, appealing to its standards, while denying explicitly those
same standards.
On the other hand, the progressivist and the revolutionary ideologue
would, in varying degrees, be espousing precisely the aberrations to which
religion is prone. What, then, are the fundamental aberrations and
distortions at the heart of both religious and secular radical revolutions,
which, of course, the true believers would dogmatically dismiss and the
progressivist apologists would be prone to rationalize, excuse, or
downplay? Radical revolution assaults the integrity of questioning and
short-circuits the process of inquiry. The revolutionary leader convinces
the followers that he has the solution to their calamitous situation. The
radical revolutionary thrives on simplicity and immediacy. Eschewing all
sense of nuance, of complexity, of long-term complications, the radical

50
Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley
Audra, Cloudesley Brereton, and W. Hornsfall Carter (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1977); S. N. Eisenstadt, editor of The Origins and Diversity of
Axial Age Civilizations, sees the common factor among the Axial Civilizations in
the notion of “transcendence” (2).
44 Chapter Two

revolutionary is not in search of insights. There are no further relevant

questions. Openness is an excuse for inaction. Patent investigation is the
enemy of resolution. The appeal to attentiveness, intelligence,
reasonableness, and responsibility must be co-opted by the appeal to
action. The radical ideology justifies the assault on inquiry. For there is a
simple answer that can immediately solve the problem of evil in society.
The heuristic function of questioning is strangled by an absolute claim in
which the tension between question and answer is let go. Along similar
lines, the spiritual tension of existence is “sprung” and spiritual yearning is
given putative but illusory fulfillment. The spiritual outbursts in Judaism,
Christianity, Islam, Taoism, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism, each, in
different manners and with different degrees of intensity, offer the
prospects of a transcendence of the human condition. Where the sense of
transcendence, and salvation, is most intense—in the religions of
revelation—the tension is heightened by the expectation of a Parousia the
hour of which is unknown. But the radical revolutionary penetrates to the
unknown and ends the mystery. The eschatological time is now.
Thus radical revolutionaries are literalists with respect to spiritual
symbols or philosophical texts. The Taborites were convinced that the
millennialist and apocalyptic passages in scripture, along with the
prophecy of Joachim of Fiore, were going to be realized (some dated the
realization to between February 10-14, 1420).51 John of Leyden claimed
the same fulfillment at Münster in 1534, as he was crowned king of the
New Jerusalem. Radical Puritans were expecting the rule of the Fifth
Monarchy of King Jesus after 1649. While to moderns these pretenses
seem silly, are they any sillier than Robespierre’s grandiose claims? On
February 5, 1794, he defined the goal of the French Revolution thusly:

We wish in short to fulfill the course of nature, to accomplish the destiny

of mankind, to make good the promises of philosophy, to absolve
Providence from the long reign of tyranny and crime. 52

The political machinations of Robespierre would solve the problem of

evil and, as a bonus, absolve God! Whatever commentators may want to
say about any totalitarian tendencies in Rousseau’s writing, particularly his
notion of the general will, or want to argue about the complexities of his
thought, Robespierre was a literalist who did not indulge in hermeneutical
subtleties. And his vehement defense, and use, of terror belies any idea
that his speech was merely rhetorical window dressing. Marxist activists,

51
Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 212.
52
Quoted in Gershoy, The Era of the French Revolution, 1789-1799, 160.
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 45

too, would tend to be literalists. They could focus on Marx’s notion of

“species-being’, taken from Feuerbach, which paralleled Rousseau’s’ idea
of the general will.53 They could also cite the following bold proclamation
by Marx, which had overtones of Robespierre’s speech:

[Communism] is the true solution of the conflict between existence and

essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and
necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of
history and knows itself to be this solution.54

Millions would die in Russia, China, Cambodia, and Ethiopia as activists

tried to “appropriate” and implement the solution to the riddle of history.
If radical revolution by its very nature short-circuits the process of
inquiry and plays havoc with spiritual openness, what are the
consequences? We can cite four primary ways that radical revolution
promotes decline.
First, by trying to dominate the spiritual, the radical revolutionary will
only become subject to an existential law of displacement. As Pascal
noted, when a genuine relation to God is missing, the yearning for such a
relation will persist. In the face of the void and acute anxiety, there will be
an attempt to “cover it up” by divertissements. These divertissements can
take the form of frenetic and energetic activities.55 This is a classic case of
idolatry, replacing the divine with a substitute. So the radical revolutionary
can pour all of his or her ultimate concern into the decidedly finite project
of the revolution. But this means that the revolution is of ultimate concern.
Salvation hinges on it. If everything rests on the revolution, then
everything is justified by the revolution—including a reign of terror. The
hopes of the progressivists that radical revolution can be contained, and of
skeptics that radical revolution can be eliminated by the elimination of
religion, are doomed. Spiritual pathology will direct ultimate concern in
dangerous and uncontrollable directions, and the repression of religion will

53
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1.6-7, 2.3; Karl Löwith, From
Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E.
Green (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1967), 232-44; George
Armstrong Kelly, Idealism, Politics and History: Sources of Hegelian Thought
(Cambridge: At the University Press, 1969); Karl Marx, “Alienated Labor,” First
Economic and Philosophical Manuscript, in Karl Marx: Early Writings, trans. T.B.
Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 125-30.
54
Karl Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” Third Economic and
Philosophical Manuscript, in Bottomore, Karl Marx: Early Writings, 155.
55
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin Books,
1966), sec. 1.8.
46 Chapter Two

only exacerbate spiritual pathology and force it underground, where it may

boil up in shockingly diabolic forms.
Second, the blocking of insights by radical revolutionaries only thwarts
progress, opens the floodgates of decline, and creates an eclipse of
reality.56 How could it be otherwise when insight is the key to progress and
knowledge? Although the radical revolutionaries assault the process of
inquiry, they do enter into that process in a highly selective way. Thus they
may have enormous insights into the weaknesses of their enemies, into the
possibilities of seizing power, into measures to control the population. But
they also have surprising oversights and blind spots. Like Oedipus, they
may have fatal flaws. Clearly their ideology gives them a extremely
limited view of human beings and human history.
Third, the constriction of the process of inquiry and the deflection of
ultimate concern open up the floodgate of biases. The protective devices
against biases are gone. The revolutionary ideology would overlook real
long-term trends and focus instead on the ideologically misguided effort to
bring about world-historical change immediately. Radical revolutionaries
can deftly nourish the group bias of followers (perhaps fortified by the
ressentiment of oppressed groups). 57 This can be particularly effective
when the followers are told that they are essential participants in a
movement to bring salvation to the world! The leaders can succumb to
egoism as they engage in a maddening grab for power over the old regime,
their erstwhile allies, and foreign enemies. If the salvation of society and
the turning point of world history rest on their shoulders, then indeed they
must be so important that they need not be subject to ordinary moral laws
and constraints. It is not surprising that the revolutionary leaders display
the symptoms of disturbed psyches or that the revolutionary followers may
be caught in the contagion of group neurosis.
Fourth, if the wounded intelligence of revolutionaries cripples their
grasp on reality, if their spiritual pathology hurls them frenzied into
unattainable projects, and if their weakened minds and spirits are invaded

56
Eric Voegelin, What is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings, ed.
Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul Caringella, vol. 28 of The Collected Works of Eric
Voegelin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), chap. 3.
Lonergan, in Insight, 215, coins the term ‘scotosis’ to refer to the aberration caused
by the blockage of insights; Voegelin in Anamnesis, 399, uses Lonergan’s term to
refer to “the pneumatopathological phenomenon of the loss of reality, an obscuring
of sectors of reality”.
57
Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Lewis A. Coser (New York: Schocken Books,
1972); Lonergan, Method in Theology, 33, 273; McPartland, Lonergan and the
Philosophy of Historical Existence, 173-77, 190-91.
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 47

by biases, then it is not surprising that, as they engage in revolutionary

activity, reality will rear its head in opposition. So it is almost inevitable
that the revolutionary regime will encounter opposition as it strives to
implement its political and social agenda. Nor is it shocking that the
regime in face of a recalcitrant human nature will resort to a reign of
terror.
If decline is endemic to radical revolution, it is not necessarily an
accompaniment of all vast revolutionary changes—revolutions in the
general sense. Let us cite one example of a political revolution in the
general sense that definitely saw itself as embarking on new historical
territory—as something for the ages—but also muted any soteriological
component. The example is the American Revolution (praised by Hannah
Arendt as the paradigm of a “good” revolution).58 Although it originated in
the aftermath of the Great Awakening and had its dose of radical
revolutionary sentiments, particularly in jeremiad sermons extolling
America as the New Zion pitted against the anti-Christ, the basic energy of
the American Revolution was of a more practical bent. It was first and
foremost a war of independence (even in the terminology used at the time).
When the new constitution was fashioned, it was indeed a remarkable and
momentous historical achievement. As Hannah Arendt emphasized, the
framers were consciously creating a new order. But the new order did not
aim to eliminate evil. Following the Polybian model articulated in his text
on the Roman Constitution, it erected a vast edifice of checks and balances
precisely to contain evil. And the dramatic contrast American society
offered to the structure of European society was not the result of deliberate
and radical social change—there was no reign of terror in the American
case, notwithstanding the ill treatment of some Tories—but rather a
reflection of the cumulative American experiments with self-government
during the colonial period and the practices of American life on the
frontier. Moderate revolutionary sentiments have appeared later, however,
when the American sense of Manifest Destiny would urge that the
American system of government be adopted in a literalist fashion as a
model for legitimate governance.

Prognosis
Neither historians nor philosophers are prophets. So it is difficult to say
exactly what the prospects for revolution are in the immediate future. We
can adopt the approach of Thucydides (although the experience of radical

58
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1973).
48 Chapter Two

revolutionaries was completely beyond his horizon and his categories of

analysis). If human nature remains the same, then there will be corruption,
injustice, and ineptitude. If the religious dimension of human existence
remains, then there will be deep spiritual yearning for transcendence and
transformation, the tension of this yearning with a fulfillment in the
beyond, and a strong and incessant pressure to break the tension. There is
the distinct possibility, then, of a lethal combination of calamitous
circumstances and spiritual aberration, whether in religious or secular
garb—an explosive combination that could readily combust into radical
revolution. Similarly, if human nature remains the same and contemporary
civilization is not destroyed, then the human spirit of inquiry will continue
to foster rapid change on such a vast and unpredictable scale that the
possibility of revolutions in the general sense is a genuine one, including
political revolutions. And if both the desire to know and the biases are in
play in the complicated interaction of motives, interests, and opportunities,
then there is the distinct prospect of both progress and decline with respect
to revolutions in the general sense.
What role can intellectual culture play in these likely scenarios? While
its role will modest, it can nevertheless be important, and perhaps even
decisive. If intellectual culture can clearly distinguish between progress
and decline, then it can interact in a constructive manner with the polity
and with world religions. Let us take a clue from the American
Constitution and its use of the Polybian notion of checks and balances. Let
us take this insight and move it beyond the structure of government to the
three main cultural and institutional agents of human development—the
Polity (its framework of order and institutions of cooperation together with
its political culture), the Church (the world religions with their spiritual
experiences, institutions, and traditions), and the Academy (intellectual
culture and its institutions). We need not belabor the point that there are
myriad subdivisions and complicated tensions among individuals,
communities, and historical objectifications.
We are not proposing a dictatorship of intellectuals to impose ideas on
the polity and to control religion. This is precisely because each of these
agents of historical change checks the others. So the polity—with its
concrete challenges and opportunities, strengths and weaknesses—checks
the speculative and conceptualist bent of intellectuals. But if intellectual
culture has sound ideas on progress and decline, they are relevant for the
responsible direction of history.59 There is the possibility that intellectual

59
See Lonergan’s discussion of “cosmopolis” in Insight, 263-67; see also
McPartland, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical Existence, chap. 6.
 Revolutions: Progress or Decline? 49

culture, through persuasion, can affect the political culture (i.e., the
meaning and values that inform political practice), which, in turn, can
affect policies, leaders, and institutions, most importantly during times of
crisis, so that they opt for the openness of inquiry rather than succumb to
the pressures of bias. There is the further possibility that intellectual
culture can affect theologians and religious thinkers, who can persuade
religious leaders and believers to assume a heightened responsibility to
bring the unique resource of the spiritual traditions to bear on the ills of the
polity and society—the resource of redemptive, unrestricted love, which
can heal the wounds of the body politic, reverse decline, and offer hope for
human betterment. To make its proper contributions, intellectual culture
must be conversant about the structure and norms of the self-transcending
process of inquiry and affirm both human historicity and basic horizon. It
must clarify the crucial distinction between radical revolution and
revolution in the general sense. And it must, in the words of Bernard
Lonergan,

learn to distinguish sharply between progress and decline, learn to

encourage progress without putting a premium upon decline, learn to
remove the tumour of the flight from understanding without destroying the
organs of intelligence.60

If intellectual culture can check the narrowness of the polity and the
inauthentic dogmatism and pretensions of the higher religions, it nevertheless
cannot resolve the problem of evil. It cannot stand completely above the
historicity of human being, the intractableness of historical destiny, and
the mystery of the human situation. Insofar as intellectual culture would
seek to go beyond its proper bounds and “penetrate” the riddle of history,
it can be checked and humbled by the higher viewpoint of the world
religions. And insofar as the polity would seek to co-opt the salvific role of
world religions and eliminate the source of evil in society, thereby rapidly
accelerating decline—insofar as, according to Rossenstock-Huessy, every
revolution aspiring to totality reproduces only a partial aspect of human
being61—these excesses of the polity can be checked, not by eliminating
the world religions, but rather by the leaders and believers in the world
religions participating in the authentic experience of self-transcending love
and openness at the heart of the world religions.

60
Lonergan, Insight, 8.
61
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 467, 480.
 CHAPTER THREE

THE PRIMAL REVOLUTION:

ORIGINAL AND UNFINISHED

LOUIS HERMAN

Introduction: Progress and Revolution

The Journal Nature recently reported on the complete sequencing of
the genome of five elderly men representing five different tribes of the
indigenous hunter gatherers of the Kalahari desert—The San Bushmen.1
Each tribe speaks a different language but all are part of the Khoisan click
language group, the oldest surviving group on earth. Khoisan share the Y
chromosome haplogroup, which marks them as having the most direct
connection to the original Bushman Adam from which all of humankind
descended.2 Such reports present us with more hard evidence pointing to

1
Stephen C, Schuster, et. al., “Complete Khoisan and Bantu Genome from
Southern Africa,” Nature. Vol. 463, 18th February, 2010: 857, 943-947.
2
More extensive, and more recent research was showcased in a special feature
article from the National Academy of Sciences “dealing with events of exceptional
significance.” In the report a team of Stanford researchers identified the hunting
gathering population of San Bushmen of Namibia and Botswana, the Bayaka
pygmies of Central Africa and the Sandawe of East Africa as sharing the highest
level of genetic diversity, and lowest level of “linkage disequilibrium,” indicating
they are the closest living relatives to that ancestral population. It seems highly
likely that these surviving hunting gathering groups are now localized remnants of
populations that formerly ranged across much of sub-Saharan Africa 60,000 years
ago. See Brenna Henn et. al. “Hunter-gatherer genomic diversity suggests a
southern African origin for modern humans.” PNAS Feature Article Feb 3, 2011.
www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1017511108. The first research to identify San
Bushmen as one of the oldest genetic populations on the planet, was the landmark
project on global genetic mapping, the largest ever undertaken, led by the Oxford
geneticist Spencer Wells as scientist in residence at National Geographic. See Spencer
Wells, Deep Ancestry: Inside the Genographic Project . The Landmark DNA Quest to
 The Primal Revolution: Original and Unfinished 51

the irreducible mystery at the heart of the human condition: humanity

appears within the immensities of evolutionary time as an explosion; a
revolutionary “leap in being” at a singular time and place. We come from
what we-are-not; civilization emerges from wilderness.
The primal revolution starts building around 200,000 years ago. It
culminates in producing an ancestral Bushman population of hunter-
gatherers which seems suddenly to burst out of Southern African 50,000
years ago, quickly colonizing every continent on the planet.3 But once we
start reflecting on the nature of this revolution we are inevitably drawn
back to six million years ago, to an earlier leap, when humanity emerged
from a common primate ancestor; and then further still to13 million years
ago to when primates started developing from mammals; until, ineluctably,
we are persuaded by the scientific narrative to confront the mystery of
mysteries—the fact that the entire universe exploded into being some 13.7
billion years ago. No doubt this is the greatest achievement of the last 400
years of science—the discovery that the universe is not so much a place as
an event. Human beings wake up within a “story telling us into being”.
Everything we create, all the great works and catastrophes of civilization,
the science that tells us the evolutionary story itself, needs to be
understood in the light of this revelation. We know the fact of evolution;

Decipher our Distant Past. (Washington DC: National Geographic 2006.) This was
the See also his earlier work and the BBC documentary by the same name, The
Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2002.
For a popular synthesis of the recent genetic and archaeological research on human
origins see Nicholas Wade. Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our
Ancestors. (NY: Penguin 2006.).
3
There is a problem with naming San Bushman. The traditional “Bushman”
sounds derogatory and sexist to many Western ears. Unfortunately, there is no
single San language term for all the click language speaking hunter gatherers who
share the core cultural characteristics. “San” is a derogatory term coming from the
closely related group of pastoralists called Khoikhoi, meaning something like
“bush-person”, “tramp”, “vagabond”, “rascal” and “bandi”. Academic anthropologists
have coined the term “Khoisan” to refer to both groups and is the politically
correct term in post-Apartheid South Africa. But South Africa has been largely
without a Bushmen cultural presence since the last of the Southern San were wiped
out in the 19th century. However, the surviving hunter-gatherers and their kin
generally refer to themselves as “Bushmen”, and seem to be doing so self-
consciously, ennobling the term, rather like “black” in the United States. Until
usage settles I use ‘San’ and ‘Bushman’ interchangeably and think of “bushman”
as “bush-human”.
52 Chapter Three

but knowing it how many of us really feel part of the creative process of
the evolving universe? And feeling this truth how many live it? 4
At the same time as we grapple with the implications of this primary
revelation, we enter the 21st century in a state of extraordinary crisis. It is a
crisis of planetary dimensions which our politics seems barely capable of
grasping, let alone creatively addressing. The same method of persuasive
science which allows us to perform our feats of genetic mapping and
intergalactic exploration, tells us that industrial civilization is exterminating
some 30,000 species every year.5 Wilderness ecosystems are collapsing all
over the planet. All our oceans are polluted and our fisheries are
collapsing. There is overwhelming scientific agreement that anthropogenic
global warming is killing coral reefs, expanding deserts and causing
increasingly catastrophic floods and storms.6 At the same time millions of
acres of native forest are still being cut down every year. This is
destruction on a scale which approaches the last great mass extinction 65
million years ago ending the age of dinosaurs.
This shocking fact is compounded by another—we are directly
responsible. Over seven billion humans, armed with industrial technology,
motivated by an insatiable appetite for material consumables, restrained
only by the most minimal of governance drive this doomed process. Our
economic system rewards a few with wealth which eclipses the despots of
antiquity while a billion people go hungry. Wealthy nations seemed cursed

4
I have drawn throughout from the teachings of the mathematical cosmologist,
Brian Swimme, for ways of telling ‘the universe story’ so that we might experience
its truth.
5
The Evolutionary biologist E.O.Wilson’s conservative estimate is that we are
eliminating 24,000 species of living organisms from the face of the earth every
year—over 70 species a day. Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life. (NY:
Norton 1992) p. 280. See also E.O. Wilson The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life
on Earth. (NY: Norton 2006) p. 5. A recent report in The Sunday Guardian
supports E.O. Wilson’s gloomy estimates. The article quotes Simon Stuart, chair of
the Species Survival Commission for the International Union for the Conservation
of Nature, the body which officially declares species threatened and extinct: “all
the evidence suggests . . . that E.O Wilson’s predictions are correct and that the
rate of species loss could reach 10,000 times the background rate in two decades.”
Juliette Jowit. “Humans Driving Extinction Faster than Species can Evolve.” The
Sunday Guardian July 7 2010.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/07/extinction-species-evolve.
6
Bill McKibben presents the recent data on global warming and climate change in
a shocking picture of an earth which has already been profoundly damaged by
human activity in Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. (NY: Times
Books, 2010).
 The Primal Revolution: Original and Unfinished 53

by their excess. Diseases of physical excess and spiritual poverty are all
epidemic. At bottom, there is a deep hunger for meaning and connection,
an unmet need for transcendence that drives many into addiction and
others into murderous fundamentalism.
Twenty years ago, the physicist and philosopher Peter Russell, in his
book White Hole in Time used an unintentionally ominous image to wake
us up to the revolutionary possibilities of our own moment.7 He projected
the five billion years of earth’s evolution on the side of what was then the
world’s tallest building—the quarter mile high 108 stories of the World
Trade Center. If street level represents the formation of our planet around
4.6 billion years ago, the first living cells appear a quarter of the way up on
the 25th floor about 3.5 billion years ago. Plant life starts half way up
around the 50th floor, dinosaurs appear on the 104th floor and mammals
and the great apes arrive on the top 108th floor. Homo Erectus becomes
fully upright only a few inches from the ceiling of the top floor. We have
already covered 99.99% of the story of our emergence and civilization has
not yet begun. One quarter inch from the ceiling Homo Sapiens replace
Neanderthals and the first Paleolithic rock paintings appear. Modernity
only begins less than the thickness of the coat of paint on the ceiling of the
top floor of the quarter mile high structure.
This acceleration in the rate of transformation is due to the fact that
each evolutionary novelty adds to the pre-existing complexity of the
biosphere in a positive feedback loop of exponentially accelerating
complexity and consciousness. With the global spread of industrial
civilization and electronic communication the planet is now encircled an
ever proliferating layer of information folding back on itself in an ever
more complex cycle. If we represent this as a graph plotting organization
of information over time, the exponential curve is now becoming a vertical
line when the equations start breaking down creating a situation
mathematicians call a “singularity”. Russell’s point is as simple as it is
obvious and ignored: “wherever it is we are going, we are getting there
fast”. Something dramatically different is about to happen. The fact that
we can no long use Russell’s metaphor without seeing the twin towers of
the World Trade Center collapsing into rubble reinforces the apocalyptic
possibilities of the moment.
The convergence of these two perspectives—a staggeringly expanded
cosmological narrative on the one hand, and global destruction on the
other—puts extraordinary pressure on our moment. It impels the philosopher

7
Peter Russell, White Hole in Time. (Harper: San Francisco, 1992). Republished as
Waking up in Time, 1989.
54 Chapter Three

to consider the possibility we are poised on the edge of a political

transformation of planetary dimensions: global catastrophe or another
“leap in being”.
It is remarkable that for the most part both Voegelin and Rosenstock-
Huessy were grappling with enormous questions concerning the meaning
and destiny of human civilization, without directly referring to the
cosmological narrative. Neither thinker looked in depth at the emergence
of culture and consciousness in the Paleolithic. Neither wrote about the
political cosmology of hunter-gatherer societies, or the second great
human revolution—the Neolithic—when nomads first settled in agricultural
villages. It is interesting that Voegelin, towards the end of his life,
developed a fascination with the Neolithic. He seemed to grasp the critical
importance of pre-history in illuminating the deep dynamic of the human
drama. 8 Despite this general neglect, both thinkers arrived at profound
insights which resonate deeply with the paradox of the primal revolution.
The purpose of this paper is to present the primal revolution as the
dramatic birth of human consciousness, fully formed, and then to relate
this understanding to the concerns of the two thinkers regarding human
history.9
Wayne Cristaudo, in an earlier article comparing the two thinkers,
argues that they can be seen as representing two poles in the approach to
meaning in history, progress and revolution 10 Rosenstock-Huessy is the
exemplar of the historically embedded, politically engaged thinker, an
“anti-philosophical” Christian passionately concerned with action guided
by faith, hope and love. From this perspective he tends to see some of the
revolutions of modernity—horrific and deformed though they might have
been—as expressions of the flow of revelation in history. Implicit is the
possibility of the Christian vision of universal “planetary consciousness”
and a “peaceful unification of the generations across time.”11
Voegelin, is presented as the classical philosopher par excellence,
moved by reason rather than faith, less concerned with messianic visions

8
See in particular Voegelin’s letters to Marie Koenig in Thomas Hollweck (ed.)
translated from the German by Sandy Adler, Thomas A. Hollweck and William
Petropolus, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol 30: Selected Correspondence
1950-1984.
9
I am developing this idea at book length in Louis Herman, Future Primal:
Towards a Shamanic Planetary Politics, (San Francisco: New World Library, In
Press).
10
Wayne Cristaudo, “Philosophy, Christianity, and Revolution in Eric Voegelin
and Eugene Rosenstock-Heussy,” The European Legacy, Vol. 4, No. 5, 1999: 58-74.
11
Cristaudo, Ibid. p. 71.
 The Primal Revolution: Original and Unfinished 55

of the future and more concerned with diagnosing the catastrophic

disorders of modernity. In his diagnosis lies the therapy—philosophical
contemplation as redemptive action. Cristaudo then points out that
Voegelin’s major works—five volumes of Order and History as well as
his most widely read book The New Science of Politics—can be
understood as restating and elaborating his “one big idea” concerning
living according to the “true structure of being”.
Voegelin’s great insight emerged with increasing luminosity through a
lifetime immersed in a multi-volume civilizational study of philosophy and
religion ranging through the great world civilizations—Mesopotamia,
Egypt, China, Ancient Israel, Greece, Rome, Medieval Christian Europe
and of course Ecumenic modernity.12 The breadth and depth of Voegelin
comparative exploration allowed him to develop a meta-narrative of
history with a multivalency which transcends the limits of his personal life
and politics. The profundity of his this insight, and the uniqueness of our
moment in time, invites application to the politics of prehistory and
speculations on the future.

The Search for Meaning in the Metaxy

In Israel and Revelation, the first volume of Order and History,
Voegelin introduces his big idea in terms of waking up to self-
consciousness realizing we have been born into a drama not of our
making. We find ourselves within a particular body, shaped by family,
society, culture and epoch and have to struggle to find our way. A
fundamental aspect of this experience is uncertainty and anxiety. We know
we can make mistakes and spoil the game, without really knowing what it
is. At the same time we cannot abstain from the struggle.

There is no blessed island to which humans can withdraw in order to

recapture ourselves. . . Our role in existence must be played in uncertainty

12
The level of erudition required to follow his investigations has successfully
intimidated most political scientists into ignoring him. This neglect probably
reinforced Voegelin’s inclination towards a contemplative and conservative
practice of philosophy. With the publication of the final and 34th volume of
Voegelin’s collected works, and translations are appearing in Chinese, French,
Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, there is no American scholar of comparable
stature. This makes the silence surrounding his work particularly deafening.
56 Chapter Three

of its meaning . . . as an adventure of decision on the edge of freedom and

necessity.13

The core experience is thus the necessity of the truth quest but the
impossibility of certainty. Voegelin understands human existence in
history as the ever differentiating symbolization of the truth quest. Simply
put, the deep human drive to search for meaning is a direct outcome of the
metaxic situation.
He gives his most abstract, but precise formulation of the insight, in his
culminating work, Volume Five of Order and History: In Search of Order.
We wake up to self-consciousness within something larger, an ineffable
“It-reality” out of which consciousness differentiates to grasp the world
and its objects as “things”. But the “It-reality” can never fully be grasped
as a “thing” since consciousness itself is in part constituted by the “It-
reality”. It is part of the “thing” it is trying to grasp. There is a blind spot at
the center of human consciousness—an irreducible paradox. Humans exist
in between the It-reality and the thing-reality. Voegelin uses a term from
Plato’s Symposium for this “in-between”, calling it human existence in the
metaxy. We experience the paradox of consciousness as a source of
anxiety and restlessness. We have to struggle to keep the tension in mind.
At the same it we can experience the in-between as a sublime mystery,
filling us with a passion for existence and the quest. As Einstein observed,
“the mysterious is the most beautiful thing we can experience. It is the
source of all true art and science.” Although never seems to explicitly
state this, the search for truth and meaning emerges from the experience of
the mystery of conscious existence in the metaxy.
For Voegelin the initial differentiation of the metaxy—the primary
“leap in being” occurs with the Israelite revelation of the divine as the
transcendent ground—the It-reality. The uniqueness of the event
establishes a “before” and “after” and initiates the self-conscious emergence
of human beings into the drama of history. The novelty of the appearance
of written history reinforces the fact that the leap-in-being is a unique
event in a larger process unfolding in time, which can only be expressed
by a story. Unlike a theory, only the story can capture the dynamic of
unique events unfolding over time. Only the story can express the meaning
of the life of the individual, the society, the species and the universe itself.
The story then becomes a fundamental category of cognition, the ever
growing big picture, into which all the disciplines of knowledge and
branches of human life can be integrated.

13
Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Volume One: Israel and Revelation, (Baton
Rouge: LSU Press, 1956). p.1.
 The Primal Revolution: Original and Unfinished 57

Primal societies, like the cosmological empires of Egypt and

Mesopotamia had not yet fully differentiated a ground of being. They were
still living in an enchanted world where nature had not been clearly
differentiated from the other members of the community of being: . . .
where everything that meets us has force and will and feelings, where
animal and plants can be men and gods, where men can be divine and gods
are kings. 14 He passes over such societies as pre-critical. They are still
bewildered and confused by the experience of consubstantiality because
“variegate materials are classified under too few heads.” Interestingly
Voegelin also realizes consubstantiality has a crucial role in establishing
order. Its compact comprehension, the fact that it can grasp and symbolize
nature, humanity, society, the transcendent whole, give it a powerful
ordering function. Cosmogonic myth“. . . is a living force preserving the
balanced order in the soul of the believer.”15.
As the elements are differentiated so they lose tensional contact with
one another and become isolated, deformed and hypostatized. The leap is
easily forgotten. We succumb to a kind of elasticity in consciousness,
relaxing, regressing, releasing the tension of holding the poles apart that
constitute questing consciousness. When the tension is lost, our meaning
narratives become inflated, frozen, reified. Humanity, thinking it is God,
acts diabolically.
One of the radical implications of Voegelin’s analysis is that
consciousness wakes up, becomes aware of itself, transparent to itself, or
luminous, through the appearance of the individual in the process of
searching. This forces us to recognize that the “primary instrument” for
philosophy is the life of the individual philosopher. We are back to the
primordial wisdom of the Delphic Oracle: “Know Thyself”. Voegelin uses
the Greek term anamnesis to describe this reflective self-exploration: an
ongoing uncovering of what is oldest and deepest in our awareness. This
opens the practice of philosophy to the human passions, which for
Rosenstock-Huessy, define the study of history.
At the same time grounding philosophy in the life of the individual has
democratic implications. Since everyone has a life and some degree of
self-consciousness, everyone has some degree of literacy in the language
of life. While it is a truism that not every opinion is equally valuable, it is
equally true that every individual life contains some irreducible component
of the truth of the whole. It is indeed ironic that the elitist Voegelin
retrieves the Socratic insight requiring the doors of philosophy to be

14
Voegelin, 1956. Ibid. p.24.
15
Voegelin, 1956. Ibid. p.84,85.
58 Chapter Three

thrown open to all. Everyone is a player in the game of “searching how to

live”.
Voegelin’s exploration of the metaxy gave me the philosophical
language to connect the contingencies and passions of my own life story to
participation in what seemed universal in the human condition. In doing so
it allowed me to respond creatively to what our moment seemed to be
calling for. While I present myself as a philosopher in this Voeglinian
sense, I feel close in spirit to Cristaudo’s description of Rosenstock-
Huessy. My engagement with philosophy emerged from my passions,
shaped by some of the defining experiences of my time. Rosentock-
Huessy had a Jewish father. I was born into an orthodox Ashkenazi Jewish
community in Apartheid South Africa. I grew up while the Nazi death
camps were still fresh in family memory. My earliest caretakers were
African women from the tribal homelands; my first faith formed by
experiences of “wilderness rapture”—a kind of intoxication with the
ancient beauty of South African rugged bushveldt and beach. At the age of
twelve my family escaped the claustrophobia of apartheid for liberal
England. There I received a world class education in medicine and the
history and philosophy of science. But by the time I graduated, academia
seemed like a spiritual wasteland. I gave up the chance of a career in
medicine and chose to act on the messianic Zionism of my youth. I moved
to an Israeli Kibbutz and volunteered for military service in a paratrooper
unit. As with Rosenstock-Huessy, warfare was a turning point in my life.
After the Yom Kippur War of 1973 I began studying political philosophy
at the Hebrew University, always returning to the question: “How should
we live? How should I live?”
My searching led me to Hawaii—the furthest point on the planet from
my Southern African beginnings, and a privileged place for philosophical
distance. Once isolated I could make return journeys to my starting point
and get to know it for the first time, as both a spiritual and species
homeland, the site of the convergence of my personal and ours species
anamnesis.
A single story emerges beginning between 200,000 and 100,000 years
ago when modern humans appeared hunting and gathering in a Southern
African wilderness. Their way of life was so successful that by about
50,000 years ago, they had exploded out of Africa to spread almost
instantaneously to all continents, replacing existing populations of archaic
Homo sapiens. Some remained in the Southern African Eden eventually to
become the San Bushman hunter gatherers of the Kalahari. Until recently
many continued to live in relative isolation, practicing a nomadic hunting
gathering way of life within a comparable wilderness ecology to the one
 The Primal Revolution: Original and Unfinished 59

which incubated our common humanity. From the point of view of

duration and stability their way of life represents the most successful
political economy ever practiced. Thirty years ago Ray Inskeep, the South
African archaeologist, called San Bushmen the “ultra-Africans”. Today we
could rightfully call them the “ultra humans.” In both a literal and heuristic
sense San provide the paradigmatic example of politics attuned by a
primordial awareness of the metaxic paradox of consciousness.

A “Metaxic Politics”
Studying the San in an evolutionary perspective helps understand
humanity as emerging in a singular primal revolution with consciousness
quite suddenly unfolding in awareness of the metaxic structure. This
discovery reinforces Voegelin’s insight into the equivalence of symbols of
order among the major civilizations. At the same time this undercuts the
enlightenment conceit of a multi-regional origin separating Caucasians
from Africans. We are now obliged to consider our shared African Adam
and our shared planetary destiny.
Reflecting on the San allows us to further differentiate Voegelin’s
metaxic into a primal political order, with the search for meaning—the
truth quest—at its center. The structure of this dynamic emerged slowly in
my own imagination, as I pursued the convergence of my personal and our
collective story. Then quite suddenly it came into a single focused vision
as a mandala—a circle divided by a cross into four quadrants. Appropriately
enough, this is the most archaic and universal symbol for the divided
whole. The word mandala comes from the Sanskrit for “circle”. It was
popularized by C. G. Jung who noticed its ubiquity in religious and
healing traditions across the globe.16 It helps symbolize the components of
primal politics as a single, tensional dynamic complex. (See Figure4-1).
As we think about the evolutionary story of self conscious humanity
differentiating from nature, we can immediately identify two poles
constituting another tensional couplet—the autonomous individual and the
close-knit community. Consciousness is in part constituted by the push-
pull relation between the individual becoming increasingly autonomous,
while the group becomes increasingly bonded, tending to reabsorb the
emergent individual. The emergence of language reinforces the push-pull

16
Mandalas appear in Navajo sand paintings, as objects of meditation in Tibetan
Buddhism and medieval Christianity and in the dreams and paintings of Jung’s
psychiatric patients during healing. Some of the oldest mandalas are petroglyphs
going back 35,000 years.
60 Chapter Three

between individuation on the one hand and communitarianism on the

other. Language itself differentiates into another tensional couplet. One
pole is face-to-face discussion—the Socratic dialektike—the use of
language to express the unique individual experience, questioning, criticizing,
analyzing and taking structures of meaning apart. The complementary pole
is story-telling—weaving the fragments of truth in individual speech into
ever more integrated and inclusive narratives of meaning—ultimately
expressing the cosmic story, answering the question of origin and destiny.
We now have a complex consisting of a quaternary where each pole is in
tensional relations with all the others. All four elements, individuation, the
free speech community of equals and mythopoesis are necessary for, and
require the practice of truth quest—located at the point at which the
quadrants converge. At the same time this whole human-civilization
quaternary with the quest at its center, emerges in dialectical tension with
the surrounding wilderness. One of the tasks of shamanic boundary
crossing disciplines is to keep each of the four quadrants in a dialectical
relationship with the surrounding wilderness, experienced as the closest
face of the It-reality, the Great Mystery.
This model offers a paradigm of political order that is “revolutionary”
in the sense of supporting and being supported by an ongoing openness to
reformulating the narrative of meaning which binds unique autonomous
individuals into community. It offers a model for a practice which could
initiate and sustain something like Rosenstock-Huessy’s vision of a
peaceful unification of the generations in a planetary consciousness.

The Primal Revolution

We can see the metaxic structure gradually emerge as the mandala
complex in the transition from primates to humans. Already in ground
living apes we see a leap in social complexity, face-to-face communication,
enduring relationship and individual agency (the capacity for calculation
and deception). All these features emerge together in an autocatalytic
feedback cycle which continues and accelerates until the explosion of
modern Homo sapiens.
 The Primal Revolution: Original and Unfinished 61

Figure 4-1: Mandala of a Metaxic Politics

Whole Person Socratic

(arete/Amateur) Discussion
(Face-to-face)

Truth Quest
(Shamanism/
philosophy)

Big Picture Direct

Cosmology/Mythosy Democracy
(myth/cosmology)

CIVILIZATION
62 Chapter Three

The overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is this event

took place in Southern Africa, south and east of the Great Rift Valley,
when forest dwelling primates moved into a totally novel environment—
the drier, more open game filled plains of the savannah—the bushveld—
the “real Africa” of popular imagination.17
The last great leap into fully modern humans, Homo sapiens,, starts
around 200,000 years ago. 18 Earlier humans were habitat specialists,
lacking the ability to exploit a wide variety of environments during
seasonal fluctuations. Modern humans are extravagantly adaptable,
capable of colonizing environments from arctic tundra and rainforest to

17
The very earliest hominid remains, those of Africanus Ramidus and Australopithecus
Afarensis (including he famous skeleton of "Lucy") dating back 4,000,000 years all
come from Ethiopia - where geological conditions make it a more likely site for the
preservation and discovery of plio-pleistocene fossils. Hominid fossils of
Autstralopithecus Africanus, 3,000,000 years old, have also been found in caves in the
Northeast of South Africa at Taung, Sterkfontein and Makapansgat. The oldest stone
artifacts dated to 2.5 million years, are from the Gona and Awash regions of the
Rift Valley, Ethiopia. The Rift valley is thus the most likely center of early hominid
and human evolution. For a good overview of the recent history of paleoanthroplogy
and archaeology see H.J. Deacon & Janette Deacon, Human Beginnings in South
Africa: Uncovering Secrets of the Stone Age. (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press,
Sage Publications,1999). Also Richard Leakey & Roger Lewin, Origins Reconsidered,
(NY: Doubleday, 1992). In 2003 a modern human fossil skull from the Afar region
was dated at 160,000. See
http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2003/06/11_idaltu.shtml. Earlier finds by
Leakey at the Omo site have now been re-dated at 196,000 years. Interestingly the
richest concentration of evidence for modern homo sapiens come from rock
shelters along the coastline of South Africa. Current excavations by an international
team of archaeologist on this coast at Pinnacle Point in Mossel Bay have revealed a
complex of caves with more or less continual human occupation from 160,000 years
ago through the emergence of modern Homo sapiens. See New York Times
10/18/2007. “Key to Human Traits Tied to Shellfish Remains.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/science/18beach.html It seems increasingly
possible that between 200- 100,000 years ago the rich interface between bush and
ocean on the Southern African coast played a significant role in the shaping of what it
means to be human. For an updated compilation of relevant scholarly articles see
Frederick E. Grine, John G. Fleagle and Richard Leakey, eds., The First Humans:
Origin and Early Evolution of the Genus Homo, (NY: Springer Press, 2009).
18
Archaeologist define modern human cognition in terms of ability to plan in
depth, capacity to learn from past experience and action in anticipation of outcome;
handling concepts not limited by time and place, and manipulating symbols to
represent objects, people and abstractions. Economic and technological innovations
appear with greater rapidity.
 The Primal Revolution: Original and Unfinished 63

polluted, overcrowded cities and sterile space stations. Suddenly around

50,000 years ago these fully developed humans burst out of this African
Eden and almost instantaneously appeared throughout the Eurasian continent,
moving down Southeast Asia to populate New Guinea and Australia. 19
Until about 45,000 years ago Neanderthals had Western Europe to
themselves. By 27,000 years ago they had completely disappeared.
The development of language was the final crucial catalyst in the leap
into fully human consciousness. It emerges in a feedback autocatalytic
relationship with all the elements represented in the quaternary of a
metaxic politics: individuation in tension with the tightly bonding
community; discussion and argument in tension with the connecting
symbols of mythology and story-telling. One stimulates the others which
then feed back reinforcing the stimulus.
Conscious self awareness capable of language and complex
symbolization seems to explode out of nowhere. The most dramatic,
tangible and intriguing body of evidence is the sudden appearance, starting
around 30,000 years ago of finely executed rock paintings on all
continents. Symbols allow us to store information outside of the brain.

19
David Lewis Williams, The Mind in the Cave, (London: Thames and Hudson,
2002) p. 97. Our perception of an “explosion” is sharpened by the fact of the
European origins of modern archaeology, the early discovery of Neanderthals,and
its sudden replacement by modern humans, originally identified as “Cro Magnon”
in Europe. By 130,000 years ago Neanderthals had been in Eurasia long enough to
have diverged from the lighter, more agile African stock into the larger, thicker
boned, muscular Homo neanderthalensis better adapted to big game hunting in the
cold climate of Northern Europe. Although Neanderthals have larger brains, the
skull is much thicker and shaped differently from modern humans and the angle of
the skull on the vertebral column suggests that the larynx was not open enough for
the sort of finely tuned vocalization which makes possible the complexities of
language. Superior communication and a culture of learning and teaching would
have given modern Homo sapiens a dramatic competitive advantage and been a
major factor in the disappearance of Neanderthals. Leakey speculates “The basic
cranium of the old man of La Chapelle is no more flexed than what we see in 3733,
a Homo erectus from 1.5 million years earlier in our ancestry. Does this mean that
in Neanderthals, the larynx was in the same position in the neck as in early erectus,
that Neanderthal language was no more developed than it had been 1.5 million
years earlier, or perhaps even regressed from what had been achieved of the
archaic stock. Neanderthals managed to hold on to the last corner of the Iberian
coast, near Gibralter but had completely disappeared from Europe by 27,000 years
ago. There are 4-5 times as many Cro Magnon sites (named after a cave in France)
as Neanderthal sites. The genetic, population and archaeological evidence suggests
that Neanderthals were replaced by Cro Magnon rather than interbred to produce
modern humans. Leakey, Ibid. 271
64 Chapter Three

This radically deepens and “complexifies” our relation to the past and the
future sharpening the poles of the metaxy, marking the beginning of
history, politics, ethics and religion.
The oldest European paintings are from the Chauvet cave in Southern
France and are dated at 32,000 years. However the earliest evidence for
human symbolic activity comes from Blombos Cave, one of the rock
shelters on the Southern African Coast, where Chris Henshilwood found a
piece of carved ochre 77,000 years old.20 Ochre is widely used on the rock
paintings and has widespread use for symbolic and ritual purposes. Older
pieces with cruder carvings go back 100,000 years. More recently
Henshilwood discovered two ochre painting kits at the 100,000 year level.
21
The kits consisted of abalone shell containers with remains of a complex
pigment mix, including fat from a heat-treated seal bone, charcoal and
ochre with simple grinding tools. The nearest source of ochre is 30-40 km
distant. Both kits were found close together without any surrounding
detritus, as if brought there for a short period and forgotten. The painting
kits are the first known instance of deliberate planning, production and
curing of a compound. They are also the first known use of a container and
the production of a complex pigment. All this is evidence for symbolically
mediated human behavior at least 40,000 and quite possibly 70,000 years
prior to the cave paintings of Europe.22

20
Blombos has deposits going as far back as 140,000 years ago. The cave was
sealed by shifting sand dunes around 70,000 years ago. There are also more recent
deposits above the dune layer. d'Errico, Francesco, Christopher Henshilwood and
Peter Nillssen. “An engraved bone fragment from c. 70,000-year-old Middle Stone
Age levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa: Implications for the origin of
symbolism and language.” Antiquity 2001 vol.75:309-318. See also Chris
Henshilwood, J. C. Sealy, R. Yates, K. Cruz-Uribe, P. Goldberg, F. E. Grine, R. G.
Klein, C. Poggenpohl, K. van Niekerk, and I. Watts. “Blombos Cave, Southern
Cape, South Africa: Preliminary report on the 1992-1999 excavations of the
Middle Stone Age levels.” Journal of Archaeological Science 2001, vol. 28(4):
421-448.
21
Christopher S.Henshilwood, Francesco d'Errico, Karen van Niekerk, Yvan
Coquinot, Zenobia Jacobs, Stein-EriK Lauritzen, Michel Menu, Renata Garcia-
Moreno, “A 100,000 Year-Old Ochre-Processing Workshop at Blombos Cave,
South Africa.” Science 334, 219 (2100); DOI: 10.1126/science.1211535. p.219-
222. See also Science podcast interview with Chris Henshilwood 14th Oct 2011.
22
For an overview see Curtis W. Marean “Pinnacle Point Cave 13B (Western Cape
Province, South Africa) in context: The Cape Floral kingdom, shellfish, and
modern human origins.” Journal of Human Evolution, 59, 2010 pp. 425-443.
 The Primal Revolution: Original and Unfinished 65

Europe contains some 350 rock art sites, whereas Southern Africa has
approximately 10,000 sites with new sites still being found regularly.
Where most of the European paintings were done in dark, inaccessible
underground caverns, the Southern African art adorns open face rock
shelters where people lived, ate and danced and where the paintings are
exposed to the elements. Most of the older ones have almost certainly
disappeared. Quantities of pigment are generally insufficient for
radiocarbon dating. The oldest positively dated Southern African painting
is a piece of painted stone, art mobilier, found on the floor of the Apollo
11 cave in Namibia, and dated at around 27,000 years ago.
While there are important differences between the African and
European traditions, there are striking similarities. These include naturalistic
representations of many animals, including some now extinct species.
Bison, lion and mammoth are commonly found in the European paintings.
More interestingly both traditions contain abstract and sometimes complex
patterns of grids, zigzags and nested arcs. The most intriguing are
therianthropes—images combining human and animal features in a variety
of combinations of limbs, hooves, fins, wings and horns which suggests
one of the characteristic experiences of shamanic trance: crossing the
boundary between civilization and wilderness, human and animal to
experiencing partnership in the community of being. Finally come
distorted, fantastical and monstrous creatures which are utterly mysterious.
This body of symbolic representation constituted one of the greatest riddle
in archaeology.
One thing should have been immediately clear. The paintings were of
supreme importance to the people who painted them. An enormous
amount of effort and care went into their execution. They testify to a
reflective depth which seems to come out of nowhere. A new powerful
interpretative paradigm has come from South Africans working with the
double advantage of a profusion of example and an indigenous Bushman
tradition of rock painting that continued until the end of the 19th century.
Although there are no rocks in the Kalahari and thus no rock painting
tradition, the last surviving South African San still painted into the 19th
century and offered interpretations of some of the paintings. An
interdisciplinary team led by the archeologist/cognitive anthropologist Dr.
David Lewis Williams has performed a monumental work of synthesis
connecting the dots between the paintings, archival and contemporary
bushman ethnography, cross cultural studies on shamanism and our
66 Chapter Three

understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of human consciousness. 23

This has made it clear that many of the paintings deal with experiences
related to shamanic states of consciousness, specifically the healing or
trance dance which is still practice by the Kalahari San. The paintings
represent the experience of the shamans, but also seem imbued with
transformative “magical” potency, called by Bushmen /num. They suggest
graphically the simultaneous emergence of shamanism with ego
consciousness and politics.

Political Cosmology of the San

The traditional Kalahari San hunter-gatherers represent a cultural
continuity going back directly to our common Paleolithic hunting
gathering ancestors. They exemplify the typical order of traditional hunter
gatherer—stable, yet flexible, egalitarian and democratic yet fostering
individuality and creativity.24 Their compact structure helps maintain the
tension of living in awareness of the metaxic situation more successfully
than many later civilizations. Their traditional culture can give us a vivid,
dynamic image of what it might have been like living off the fruits of our
“wilderness Eden”—a paradigmatic primal politics.
In thinking about the conditions under which modern consciousness
and primal politics emerge, we need to extrapolate from the Kalahari San
who live in desert where years can pass without rain. Our original
ancestral San occupied the richly varied ecosystem of Southern African all
the way to the bush-lined beaches of the Southern Cape, where most of the
earliest fully modern human remains have been found. The intervening
plains were filled with vast herds of Africa's grazing animals—zebra,
wildebeest, buffalo—as well as elephant, rhino, hippo and all the large and
small antelope. All were target for bushman spear, trap and poisoned
arrow. In addition to rich supplies of meat, countless stone-age beach
middens testify to a large population of “beach bushmen” (Strandlopers)
enjoying an abundance of seafood from one of the richest fisheries in the
world. Given the refined botanical and hunting skills of the Kalahari
Bushmen (for example they can identify 200 species of plants of which

23
For a comprehensive synthesis see David Lewis Williams, The Mind in the
Cave, (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002): also David Lewis Williams and Jean
Paul Clottes, The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Cave,.
(NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1998).
24
See Eleanor Leacock and Richard Lee, Politics and History in Band Societies,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). This establishes the base line
consensus regarding the political order of hunter gatherers.
 The Primal Revolution: Original and Unfinished 67

about 80 are edible) one can easily imagine our shared ancestral San
culture awakening to consciousness in a wilderness Garden of Eden.
The economic anthropologist Marshall Sahlins talks of hunter gatherers
as the “original affluent society” living in a kind of “Zen affluence” with
2-3 days of work a week per adult being sufficient to provide food for the
band. The material simplicity belies a rich social and spiritual life, flatly
contradicting Thomas Hobbes’s assumption concerning a life in a state of
nature without a strong central authority: “a war of all against all . . .
“nasty, brutish and short”.25
The political economy of hunting and foraging provides optimum
conditions for keeping the elements of the quaternary—the individual and
the group—in balance. The group is small, mobile, totally self sufficient
and almost devoid of division of labor and hierarchy. It provides the most
unshakeable foundation for individual autonomy and self sufficiency; but
also for trusting and caring relationships in a tightly bonded community.
Both poles of the individual and community are highly differentiated. Each
individual can participate in the full range of archetypal social roles—
hunting, gathering, healing, dancing, singing, crafting clothes, tools and
shelter and most importantly collective decision making. All of this makes
possible a high degree of individuation.
The community actively pursues egalitarianism within an ethic of
caring and sharing. For example tradition dictates that when a skilled
hunter makes a kill, the meat belongs not to him but the owner of the
arrow fired. A hunter’s quiver contains carefully marked arrows some of
which belong to others—perhaps an older woman or a child or a man too
old to hunt. The stingy are called “bags without openings” and told “only
lions eat alone”. The boastful are ridiculed mercilessly. Beyond this ethic
is a simple love of company. People sit close together shoulders rubbing,
sometime with ankles interlocked. Loneliness is intolerable and ostracism
the greatest punishment.
Yet the individual stands out sharply—each a big frog in a small pond,
as Matthias Guenther puts it. The San are notoriously argumentative,
independent and assertive. When one anthropologist asked “do you have
leaders?” he was given the answer “Yes, of course we have leaders.
Everyone is a leader over himself.” This was followed by great hilarity on

25
The classical study was that of Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, (Chicago:
Aldine Atherton Inc., 1972) p.1. Richard Lee calculated under good conditions that
2.7 days of work for men and 2.1 for women were needed to provide food. See
Richard Lee, “Politics, Sexual and Non-Sexual in Egalitarian Society,” in Eleanor
Leacock and Richard Lee, eds., Politics and History in Band Societies (NY: Cambridge
University, 1982). p.40. Under normal conditions life in the Kalahari is not easy.
68 Chapter Three

the part of the informant. Resources, the waterholes, the pans and animals
of the veld, are available to all. Since relevant knowledge is shared openly
virtually everyone has the capacity to go off on their own, should they
wish, and live directly off the land, gather food, make clothing and build
shelter. By contrast modern life with its inescapable division of labor and
intensive specialization forces conformity and crushes deep individuation.
Few of us could feed our families by hunting and gathering or growing our
own food. Even fewer could build and repair a house, computer, car or
phone. No citizen is more compelled by dire survival necessity to conform
than the obedient wage earner or the rule bound bureaucrat in the
hierarchies of our industrial societies. Paradoxically Bushman hunters and
gatherers have an emotionally richer and more diverse engagement with
their cosmos than sophisticated city dwellers.
San community is held together by the love of company. At first
Westerners saw the San as lacking any form of governance. Then
anthropologists realized that politics is ubiquitous. Conflict resolution and
decision-making take place in the course of ongoing discussion and
storytelling—the other two tensional poles in the mandala complex.
Language is the glue that holds the opposites of individuation and
communalism in dialectical tension. The camp is constantly filled with
conversation – chatting joking, arguing and storytelling. Bushmen call
themselves “lovers of argument.” Decisions are made and conflicts
resolved in the course of the ebb and flow of everyday public discussion,
in small groups and then larger gatherings, until all have been heard and a
consensus arrived at. Elections would seem strange to the San, and
disrespectful of individual diversity. Because of the compact face-to-face
situation the connection between self interest and “the good of the whole”
is concrete and self evident. There is a collective appreciation of
individuality and diversity, since the bigger, truer picture requires
unrestricted participation in argument from diverse and empowered
individuals. The crucial point is that everyone is engaged in politics
motivated simultaneously by self-interest and altruism through the
dialectical back and forth of discussion.
The small self sufficient community, living in a state of Zen-affluence
produces collective wisdom and fosters creative individual through a not-
so-hidden hand of the marketplace of discussion. All contribute to ongoing
fluid collective understanding of how to pursue the good life within the
community of being. Ultimately the big picture is the shared mythology,
open ended, collectively constructed, passed down the generations
connecting all the community of being. It give us an image of a loving
community of Socratic individuals.
 The Primal Revolution: Original and Unfinished 69

Trickster and Trance

San mythology and shamanic religion reinforce a politics of holding
opposites in balance by bringing into consciousness the energy and
experience of living in the metaxy. Myth can be understood as a kind of
living archaeology of consciousness—pieces of narrative and metaphor
resonating with experiences from the earliest layers of consciousness and
bringing them as psychic forces into the present. These provide the
ontological frame—the symbolic expression of the ground of being linking
it to everyday experience to be translated in action and politics. What is
remarkable is how despite the individual variations in telling the stories,
central themes persist across time and place, making mythology
simultaneously conservative and innovative. For example with missionary
activity in the Kalahari, Jesso Cristo (Jesus Christ) starts appearing in
some Bushman trickster stories, not as sublime, sweet reasonableness, but
rather as a shape shifting Bushman trickster who turns water into wine,
feeds the multitude with a few loaves and seduces Mary at the well.
The leap in being of the primal revolution—the emergence of human
consciousness is expressed as a meta-narrative of bushman mythology.
Their “big story” makes a fundamental distinction between the present
state of existence and a period in the distant past called the “first times” or
the “early times” when humans were like animals and animals like
humans. At some point this primordial chaos transformed into the present
order with humans acquiring fire and language, discovering their mortality
and starting to live according to norms, thus establishing the tension of
living in the in-between—the metaxy.
Not surprisingly the two most popular and widely distributed myths
across all the bushman groups deal with the acquisition of fire and the
awareness of death – both defining aspects of the metaxy. 26 Fire is the
catalyst for self-consciousness, opening night for conversation, story-
telling and reflection. Self-reflection sharpens the sense of mortality, the
coming into being and passing of all things. Death awareness in turn puts

26
Sigrid Schmidt counted some 57 varieties of mythic stories concerning the origin
of death and 28 stories about the acquisition of fire. S. Schmidt, “The Relevance of
Bleek/Llyod Folktales to the General Khoisan Tradition” in Janette Deacon and
Thomas Dowson, Voices from the Past: /Xam Bushmen and the Bleek and Llyod
Collection (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1996). The most
comprehensive and philosophically nuanced study of Bushman cosmology is that
of Mathias Guenther, Tricksters and Trancers: Bushman Religion and Society
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Guenther counts 70 versions of
origins of death stories. p.102, 160
70 Chapter Three

pressure on the importance of the moment—the importance of healing

illness, injury and conflict, seeking order.
Trickster stories serve the function of keeping the paradox of the
human condition in mind. The trickster is the central character inhabiting
the early times, and at the same time the primary agent in its
transformation into the present. He (generally, but not always, male) is
universally known in indigenous folklore and mythology as a prankster, a
shape shifter, neither fully one thing nor the other. The descriptions are
infinitely variable but all serve to shock human consciousness out of its
tendency to turn the It-reality into a thing. Thus the trickster can be
humanoid—a black man tall as a windmill dressed in loincloth riding a
giant dog, or a tall white man on a horse with chalk white face and dark
beard transforming from handsome to ugly. He can be embodied as a
jackal or louse or part human part animal or incorporeal as the wind or
sunshine, or simply grotesque and monstrously deformed.27
Nevertheless there are two opposing aspects to the trickster’s character.
On the one hand the trickster is a caricature of human frailties—an
egotistical and bawdy prankster; a protagonist compulsively driven by
gluttony and lust. On the other hand he is also the creator of order, the
giver of norms, the bringer of fire, harbinger of mortality. Then in the next
breath he is the inverter and transformer of everything he creates. He is a
creature betwixt and between all moral and ontological categories. His
appetites can be so excessive that in some stories he rapes his mother; in
others he gorges himself and then starts cutting off and eating pieces of his
own flesh while his howls of agony are overridden by his greed. In the
ultimate reversal he is the creator of the universe. No wonder early
Europeans dismissed such stories as perverse and childish rubbish.
After many years living with the Ju /Twasi Lorna Marshall observed
how such extreme self-contradiction seemed to be the point trickster
teachings:

They tell stories of Trickster without restraint say his name out aloud, howl
and roll on the ground with laughter at his exploits and humiliations. But
when they speak of the Great one in the east sky they whisper and avoid
speaking his name. They offered no explanation for the radical difference
of character and function between the two beings. Yet they think that

27
Guenther, 1999. Ibid. p.98
 The Primal Revolution: Original and Unfinished 71

somehow in the rightness of things these two beings must be one so they
are said to be.28

Instead of dismissing this as nonsense we can understand such

narrative reversals as strategies for maintaining awareness of the tension of
the metaxy. Such stories represent significant differentiation of
consciousness—awareness of the primordial split—reminding us of the
dangers of forgetting and lapsing into extremes of cruelty, brutality, greed
and lust. Yet the trickster is equally capable of the noble and sublime,
dramatizing the full range of good and evil making us aware of what is at
stake, what drives the search for meaning. He is the consummate
personification of the movement of consciousness between the poles of the
metaxic situation.
Trickster stories resonate with our experience of paradox in grappling
with our big story as told by scientific cosmology: that billions of years
ago the entire universe burst forth in an unimaginable explosion of energy
. . . out of a single point. What could be more contradictory than this first
fact of modern cosmology—that the ordered complexity of the earth, the
delicate beauty of birds, flowers, forests and oceans all unfolded over eons
out of an event of cosmic violence? It is almost the limiting case of
credulity. If one will believe this, one will believe anything. Yet it is true!
The trickster reminds us that when talking such about ontologically
primary realms, we are invariably forced into expressions of coincidencia
oppositorum, a unity of opposites. By the same token trickster energy is
associated with creativity in general—the appearance of order out of
chaos, novelty out of order, and the endless, kaleidoscopic play of human
imagination and choice. The stories help access the energy of the early
times as a creative force in the present—an “ever present origin”—to use
Jean Gebser’s richly evocative phrase.
Perhaps the most revealing feature of Bushman truth quest is the
central role of the healing trance dance. 29 This is probably the most

28
Lorna J. Marshall, The Nyae Naye !Kung: Beliefs and Rites (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, Peabody Museum monographs 1999).
p.9
29
The standard work on Bushman trance healing has long been Richard Katz,
Boiling Energy: Trance and Healing among the Kalahari !Kung (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1984). Bradford Keeney, a cultural anthropologist has
recently taken this work on to a new level by become the first Westerner to be fully
initiated as bushman shaman healer. This has allowed him not only to interpret
trance healing but integrate it into Western healing practices. See his remarkable
story in Bushman Shaman: Awakening the Spirit through Ecstatic Dance.
(Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books. 2005).
72 Chapter Three

archaic and enduring of all the shamanic disciplines and is the most
seamlessly integrated into everyday politics. Shamanism is a world-wide
phenomenon that recedes into the earliest origins of culture—a kind of Ur-
religion. It seems to emerge as part of the primal complex as a
complement to language and story-telling as way of negotiating the
anxiety of the primordial split—existence in the metaxy. Shamanism
involves a bewildering variety of “psycho-technologies” which can range
through incessant dancing, chanting, drumming, fasting, thirsting, self-
mutilation, wilderness isolation, meditation and eating hallucinogenic
plants and mushrooms. Shamanic technologies, like trickster stories act to
subvert or disable our everyday socially constructed ego consciousness—
the aspect of consciousness associated with thing-reality, opening us to
dimensions of reality normally blocked out.
The healing dance is the most important single collective activity in the
life of the Bushman band; as Twele, a contemporary Bushman puts it:

[The dance] . . . is the favorite thing for all Bushmen to do. We dance when
we are happy and we dance when we are sad. When we get ready to hunt
we dance because it helps us find the animal, and then after the kill we
bring home the meat and dance again. We also dance when we feel sick. It
helps us take away the sickness and it keeps us well. The dance is the most
important aspect of our lives. It is our prayer, our medicine, our teaching
and our way of having fun. Everything we do is related to that dance.30

Repetitive dancing chanting and singing, for hours, often through the
night drives the participants into deep trance. Accounts of the trance
experience include a range of extraordinary states of consciousness which
can be found in the wide variety of shamanic traditions all over the
world—bodily distortions, transformations into animals—In particular
part-human part-animal therianthropes that we find painted on the walls of
the rock shelters—out of body travel, distant viewing, and encounters with
the spirits, the gods and ultimately the creator.
Hans Peter Duerr in his encyclopedic survey of shamanic religions
concluded that all were concerned with crossing the boundary between
civilization and wilderness. 31 In effect they operated as disciplines
balancing the differentiation of ego consciousness by reversing the

30
Bradford Keeney. Bushman Shaman: Awakening the Spirit through Ecstatic
Dance. (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 2005). p.49.
31
Duerr gives one of the most philosophically penetrating cross cultural
explorations of the connection between the wilderness experience and shamanism.
See H.P. Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Civilization and
Wilderness (NY: Basil Blackwell, 1985).
 The Primal Revolution: Original and Unfinished 73

journey, not regression, but aid further differentiation. By going beyond

the ego in ex-stasis—travelling outside oneself—the shaman accesses the
lost experience, power and wisdom of consubstantiality. It brings into
conscious collective life the experiences symbolized by the stories of the
early times—what the Australian Aborigines call the Dreamtime. As the
trancer returns, the new insights and energy are then integrated, helping
hold the tension between the It-reality and ego consciousness in more
differentiated symbols. The difference between the child, the psychotic
and the shaman is that the shaman can control the crossing back and forth,
and return bringing back insights from the other side, producing a more
conscious human politics.
Unlike the institutionalized religions the disciplines of shamanism,
following the more democratic and egalitarian ethos of hunter-gatherers,
are open to all. Among the San everyone participates in the trance dance.
Some have a calling and are gifted and enter into trance easily. About half
of all men and one third of the women become accomplished trancers
capable of healing and visioning. But everyone participates and derives
some benefit from the collective experience. All live closer to the
experience of the in-between and all have some access to the early times.
Ex-stasis allows one to leave the body and to communicate in a
powerful and emotional way with the entire community of being. This
experience is not confined to dancing. During a hunt the hunter can
experience consubstantiality with the prey. The experience is recognized
as numinous. In one remarkable documentary film of San hunter, the
hunter after hours of running down an antelope explains: “Tracking and
hunting is like dancing. You are talking with God when you are doing
these things.”32
This experiential terrain has been variously explored in the imagination
of art and literature, and the revelations, raptures and visions of mystics,
saints and healers. We have started to map it systematically, scientifically
and rather crudely at first, as Freud’s Id, and then in a more differentiated
fashion as G. Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious. Voegelin
expresses his openness to these realms by insisting that philosophy has to
concern itself with the “full amplitude of human experience”.
What is distinctive and instructive about Bushman shamanism is that
the whole community is involved. Men, women, young, and old, mothers
with babies slung on their backs and even young children spontaneously

32
Feature length documentary film, The Great Dance: A Hunter’s Story, directed
and edited by Craig and Damon Foster, (Earthrise and Liquid Pictures. Off the
Shelf production. 2000).
74 Chapter Three

join in. The dance has an immediate effect on everyone present—healing,

invigorating and fostering loving communication between the participants.
Modern and traditional subjects who experience shamanic states of
consciousness through drinking the shamanic hallucinogen ayahuasca
often report an exhilaration and deep feeling of well-being associated with
quite specific and more metaphysical revelations.
In such states communication is deepened to the point of
consubstantiality—full identification with the cosmic community. 33 One
understands as if for the first time the forces, principles and agents that
underlie everyday reality. At the same time one is forced to recognize the
reality of the bottomless mystery surrounding it all. This is experienced as
simultaneously exquisite, terrifying and vitalizing. The residual emotion is
one of deep gratitude at being alive and a related attitude of compassion
and loving kindness towards others. In this way the Bushman trance dance
combines the means and ends of politics. A society composed of
individuals who are closer to the beauty of the mystery of existence, who
have a direct experience of the paradoxical ground of being, is also a
society more comfortable with paradox in all areas of life. This encourages
boundary crossing between all the pairs of opposites of the mandala
complex. It facilitates balance and encourages a synergy of opposites.
Here we see the ordering function of the compact structure fusing
shamanic ecstasy, philosophy and democracy.
The centrality of shamanism to politics can be gauged by the comment
of one hunter shaman “If we don’t dance we die”.

33
The bushman go into trance without the use of hallucinogens. But scientists and
scholars are now recognizing that natural and synthetic hallucinogens are powerful
tools for exploring such extraordinary states of consciousness. The psychiatrist
Stanislav Grof is one of the leading figures in this project. The landmark
publication was his documentation of the results of thousands of controlled
sessions using the most powerful of all hallucinogens, lysergic acid diethylamide
25 (LSD 25) is Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD
Research. For a comparable mapping of the phenomenology of the ayahuasca
experience see the encyclopedic work of the Israeli psychologist/linguist Benny
Shannon, Antipodes of the Mind: Charting the Phenomenology of the Ayayhuasca
experience. Mircea Eliade’s classic work Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of
Ecstasy suggested Siberian origins for shamanism. He considered the use of
hallucinogenic plants and fungi to be a degenerate form of trance. The weight of
scholarship suggests he was wrong on both counts.
 The Primal Revolution: Original and Unfinished 75

The San Band as an Ultra-Polis—Everyone a Socrates

With settled civilization comes division of labor, specialization and
hierarchy. Each quadrant of the mandala of primary values differentiates,
often isolating it from the ordering effect of the others. The humanizing
charisma of tight group life fragments. The opposing elements of primal
politics become institutionalized. The more universally accessible
technologies of shamanic religion, which empower the creative individual,
are replaced by bureaucracies of church and state. Warfare and slavery
appear. Walls are built between wilderness and civilization. The individual
becomes deformed, no longer able to participate directly in collective
decision making, no longer contributing to the collective cosmology, no
longer having direct experience of the miracle of existence—the divine
within and wilderness without. Interestingly shamanism continues as a
subterranean current in most religious traditions with the archetype of the
four primary values surviving below the surface as potentiality waiting to
manifest at moments of crisis, transition and cultural creativity.
At various points, perhaps when the differentiation and deformation
becomes too extreme there is re-awakening to the split unity of the metaxy
and a re-emergence of the primal complex. The Greek polis during the
classical period from 600-300 BC provides one of the most striking
examples. The ideal of the polis recognized that fully actualizing our
humanity as creative, morally autonomous beings required small scale,
democratic, relatively egalitarian and self sufficient structures. Thus the
Greeks were the first to have an explicit theory of politics, albeit in
embryonic form, where the highest good of the individual, the arête of the
whole person, and the highest good of the community converged in the
practice of both philosophy and democracy. It is the first explicit
formulation of the archetypal mandala dynamic as a model for order.
The genius of the Greeks was to hold for a short while, the tension
between the ordering wisdom of the simple egalitarian community and the
illumination offered by differentiating civilization. In so doing they
generated a burst of creative brilliance that hasn’t been equaled. This
vision was only glimpsed and partially realized. The polis remained a
patriarchal, warrior society, its most profound vision compromised by
slavery and empire.
But from this perspective we can see the San as the “ultra-polis”—
smaller, more personal, more egalitarian, totally self- sufficient, with near
universal participation both in politics and the truth quest. In the primal
situation the whole is not an abstraction like the “nation state” tends to be
for us, but something concrete, graspable. All have direct experience of the
76 Chapter Three

community as a collection of unique individuals each with their

idiosyncrasies, frailties and virtues—the good hunters, the generous and
the selfish, the clowns, the gifted healers. The accessibility of shamanic
trance and the ubiquity of trickster energy deepens and radicalizes the
notion of the whole person. Shamanism offers direct access to what
Emerson demanded for each of us—a philosophy based on an “original
relationship to the universe”. Thus the cosmological whole is not an
abstraction that can only be grasped through the specialized knowledge of
a few experts. All can “talk directly to God.”
It is revealing that the simplest state of society offers such a rich inner
life, where, as Guenther puts it, everyone becomes “an agent and author of
his or her own political cosmology in a far more robust sense than what is
required from a citizen of a nation state.” In this sense the primal band us
closer to a politics where participation requires following the example of a
John Locke, or a Socrates.

Future Primal—Revolutionary Political Science

and a Planetary Politics
Over half a century ago Voegelin, in a New Science of Politics, called
for an integral science of politics—the restoration of political science to its
“full grandeur . . . as the science of human existence in society and history,
as well as of the principles of order in general.” The book became an
unexpected best-seller for an abstruse work in political theory and has
remained in print since its publication. Its inclusive scope, philosophical
penetration and sense of urgency in response to the crisis of civilization,
puts it in the category of a paradigmatic work in political philosophy.34
Writing in the aftermath of a century of revolutions culminating in two
world wars and Soviet totalitarianism, Voegelin excoriates the various
“gnostic” political religions—the blood soaked “isms”—of modernity, and
goes on to identify the Liberal democracies of the United States and Great
Britain as offering the best defense in the search for order.
When we put Voegelin’s understanding of the truth quest into the
larger narrative of the evolution of primal societies, we can differentiate
the seed structure of a paradoxical primal politics which embodies the
truth quest. In this sense it offers a paradigm of politics which is at once a
meta-paradigm for a way of life based on the practice of political
philosophy.

34
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction. Chicago and
London: The University of Chicago Press. 1952/1987 p.2.
 The Primal Revolution: Original and Unfinished 77

By contrast the prevailing model of academic political science with its

neglect of political philosophy, and its focus on quantifiable areas like
voting studies, institutional analysis and public policy, can be seen as an
example of what Thomas Kuhn called normal science.35 This is inquiry as
sort of puzzle solving within the institutional paradigm of what the
university considers valuable questions, appropriate methods and rules for
investigation. 36 Since the university exists within the institutions of
industrial capitalism, it is also shaped by the prevailing intellectual market
place, the bureaucratic model of organization with its structures of reward
and punishment, and the general values and epistemology of Liberalism. A
paradigm enters crisis when the rules for puzzle solving stop producing
useful solutions and start producing unsolvable puzzles. At such a time we
would expect the return of an interest in foundational issues and support
for creative political philosophy, what in science Kuhn would have called
“extraordinary” or “revolutionary” science.
Clearly the liberal paradigm is in crisis and we are seeing a revival of
interest in big picture thinking. However a revolutionary political science
cannot be satisfied with producing just another paradigm. We cannot
regress behind a post-Kuhnian awareness. We now know that all
paradigms and structures of meaning are inherently limited. We seem to be
called upon to create a paradigm of order that has as a central component
the practice of constructing, critiquing and reconstructing paradigms.
When we look at this practice of revolutionary political science in the
life and work of the great paradigm builders of political philosophy—
Plato, Socrates, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke Rousseau, Marx—we find
elements which resonate with the primal quaternary. They were all
passionately involved in their times. They all responded in one way or

35
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1970). This was strictly speaking a work in the historiography of
science, focusing on the way the history of science is written, but it revealed
something fundamental about the human quest to know reality, and quickly
became one of the most influential books across all academic disciplines in the last
half century. Kuhn’s analysis of the way paradigms work in science can help us
understand the role of paradigms in politics; in particular it can clarify the radical
nature of the primal mandala as a meta-paradigm of politics.
36
Kuhn used the word ‘paradigm’ rather like I’ve used ‘big picture’ as a necessary
component of the truth quest. Paradigm are more or less creatively constructed
models or frameworks meaning based on a combination of past experience and
imagined projection. They give us an idea of what to expect and thus what tools or
approaches to use in achieving defined goals whether in research politics or daily
life. In this sense paradigms are ubiquitous and simply describe the way the truth
quest proceeds to explore the in-between.
78 Chapter Three

another to a perception of crisis and disorder. Their response was invariably

refracted through their self understanding—their anamnesis. They were all
“author and agent of their own cosmology” producing enormous works of
creative synthesis, dealing with the foundational issues of human
existence—a “state of nature”, human nature, the individual and community,
government, economics and epistemology. The works were fashioned
within the structure of debate, carried out in a spirit of egalitarianism,
among a virtual, if not an actual, community of philosophers. Finally they
were all concerned directly and indirectly with action—with saving or
transforming their worlds.
However none of them were able to develop an adequate meta-theory
of what they were doing. Consequently their insights were vulnerable to
reification and thus being turned into ideological absolutes—Voegelin’s
“murderous ‘-isms.” Voegelin’s truth quest offers such a metatheory for a
revolutionary political science. It is ironic that when we put this in its
larger evolutionary and anthropological context we find that the mandala
structure of the truth quest converges with a radically democratic
egalitarian model of politics exemplified in the San.
This means the mandala expresses both a discipline for the truth quest
as revolutionary science of politics, as well as the kernel for a species
politics attuned to the metaxic structure of existence. It is a paradigm of
politics that would be open to ongoing self transformation. Organizing
contemporary society around the spiritual and intellectual quest could
constitute that leap in complexity consciousness Russell, and others, see as
the imminent singularity. From this perspective the revolutions of
modernity might appear as the last phase of humanity’s angry adolescence,
rebelling at the human condition in murderous frenzy. We are after all only
in the childhood of our species existence, struggling to deal with the most
astounding of all evolutionary novelties—creative self-consciousness. The
leap would not leave our primate embedded humanity behind, as the
techno-fantasies of the transhumanists would like to believe, but would
rather be like coming into the full glory of our mature humanity, enabling
us to live at more at peace with ourselves and with the glorious mystery of
the evolving community of beings.
It is the task of another larger work to explore contemporary examples
of policies, institutions and practices giving intimations of such a new
order. 37 Suffice to say I have faith in the emergence of that more peaceful
planetary politics Rosenstock-Huessy dreamt of. Here I am using “faith”

37
Louis Herman, Future Primal: How Our Wilderness Origins show us the Way
Forward, (San Francisco: New World Library, in press for Fall 2012).
 The Primal Revolution: Original and Unfinished 79

not as opposed to reason, but in the sense that Voegelin defined it: “the
substance of things hoped for and the proof of things unseen.”38

38
Voegelin did not regard faith and reason as two autonomous source of truth in
opposition to one another. Macon Boczek, “Faith and Reason Reconsidered.”
Paper presented to Eric Voegelin Society Program. 23rd Annual International
Meeting, Chicago, Aug.30-Sept. 2, 2007 http://www.lsu.edu/artsci/groups/voegelin/
EVS/2007%20Papers/Macon%20Bozcek.pdf
 CHAPTER FOUR

MODERNITY AS THE IMMANENTIZATION

OF THE ESCHATON:
A CRITICAL RE-EVALUATION
OF ERIC VOEGELIN’S GNOSIS-THESIS

MATTHIAS RIEDL

Eric Voegelin formulated one of the most challenging theses about the
theological foundations of modern progressivist and revolutionary thought:
the character of modernity is essentially Gnostic. The aim of this essay is
to show why the early version of Voegelin’s Gnosis-thesis, as proposed in
his The New Science of Politics (1951), is not convincing. I argue that
processes of immanentization can be fully explained within the
development of Western ecclesiastical thought without invoking Gnostic
sectarianism. From a historical-empirical perspective Gnosticism is, in
fact, principally opposed to immanentist eschatologies. Joachim of Fiore,
who, according to Voegelin, is the originator of modern Gnosticism, aptly
illustrates this incompatibility. This essay also aims to show how Voegelin
became increasingly aware of this problem and, accordingly, formulated a
much more adequate and convincing version of the Gnosis-thesis in The
Ecumenic Age (1974). The final section of the essay returns to the question
of the relation between Gnosis and revolution.

The Gnosis-thesis in the New Science

and Related Writings
In the 1940s, Voegelin developed a growing interest in Gnosticism, as
the later volumes of the posthumously published History of Political Ideas
 Modernity as the Immanentization of the Eschaton 81

show.1 He had studied some of the recent research on the ancient Gnostics
and believed he had identified Gnostic symbols in the writings of Jean
Bodin and other thinkers who played a crucial role in the formation of
Western modernity. 2 But it was not before Voegelin’s “Walgreen
Lectures,” given at the University of Chicago in 1951 and later published
as The New Science of Politics, that the Gnosis-thesis became a central, if
not the central, element of his thought.
In short, the thesis identifies the essence of modernity with the growth
of Gnosticism.3 Modernity, understood as a process of immanentization,
emerges from medieval sectarianism as “a continuous evolution in which
modern Gnosticism rises victoriously to predominance over a civilizational
tradition deriving from the Mediterranean discoveries of anthropological
and soteriological truth,” 4 that is, over Greek philosophy and Christian
revelation. The initial impetus for formulating the Gnosis-thesis came
from Voegelin’s reading of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s relatively short
introduction to Irenäus: Die Geduld des Reifens, a selection of anti-
Gnostic passages from Irenaeus of Lyon’s Adversus Haereses. In this text,
the Catholic theologian Balthasar refers to the Gnostic principle of self-
redemption, which became seminal for the application of the category of
Gnosticism to modern movements. Already, Balthasar identifies Gnostic
elements in Jakob Böhme, F. W. J. Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel, and Martin
Heidegger. His description of Gnosis as the mythical counterpart to the
soteriological truth of the Christian Gospel and as a recurring phenomenon
of Western thought resembles in many ways the formulations found in
Voegelin’s works:

1
This essay combines two papers given at the meeting of the American Political
Science Association in Toronto, September 3-6, 2009, and at the conference
‘Translatio imperii in the 3rd Millennium’ at University of Hong Kong, February
18-20, 2010. I thank Glenn Hughes and Wayne Cristaudo for their constructive
criticism which provoked the newly written section 5 of this essay. I also thank
Maxwell Staley and Irina Denischenko for comments and corrections.
2
See Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, Volume V: Religion and the Rise of
Modernity, vol. 23 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. James L. Wiser
(Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 221.
3
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics. An Introduction, in Voegelin,
Modernity Without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New Science of Politics;
and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Eric
Voegelin, ed. Manfred Henningsen, (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press,
2000), 190; see also Hans Otto Seitschek, ‘Exkurs: Eric Voegelin’s Konzept der
‘Gnosis’,’ in Hans Maier, ed., Totalitarismus und Politische Religionen, vol. 3:
Deutungsgeschichte und Theorie (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003), 237-245.
4
Voegelin, New Science, 196.
82 Chapter Four

Gnosis emerges anew in all moments of the occidental intellectual

development where man, tired of the existence in faith, ludicrously
attempts to take possession of this faith. He aims to replace the redemption
by God, who descends to “ordinariness” (“Gewöhnlichkeit”), by the self-
redemption of man, who strives upward, out of “ordinariness”. The
encounter between the word of God and the myth—which first occurred in
the second Christian century and then again and again ever since—is
therefore the actual core, the dramatic knot of occidental, even universal
history. Myth seeks the ascent of man; the word of God seeks the descent
of God. Myth seeks power; the word of God seeks the acknowledgment of
powerlessness. Myth seeks knowledge; the word of God seeks faith. Myth
is a sudden flash flickering between contradictions; the word of God is
tender patience in the ineffable tensions of existence (Dasein).5

Voegelin himself restated the Gnosis-thesis in a number of publications

up to the early 1960s, most famously in Science, Politics, and Gnosticism,
an essay based on his inaugural lecture at the University of Munich in
1958. In these writings, Voegelin deepened the psychological analysis of
the motivational forces behind the Gnosticism of individual thinkers like
Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.W.F. Hegel, and Martin Heidegger. He
also clarified what modern movements would qualify as “Gnostic”. “By
Gnostic movements”, he wrote in 1960, “we mean such movements as
progressivism, positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism,
and national socialism”. 6 In other words, the Gnosis-thesis covered
everything commonly addressed as modern ideologies, especially (yet not
exclusively) the ones aiming at a revolutionary reorganization of the
world.7 What unites them is the Gnostic immanentization, an act of self-
divinization resulting in the re-divinization of the world that previously
had been de-divinized by the philosophers and Judaeo-Christian

5
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Irenäus: Geduld des Reifens. Die christliche Antwort auf
den gnostischen Mythus des zweiten Jahrhunderts (Klosterberg und Basel: Benno
Schwabe & Co., 1943), 13f.; my translation. Voegelin’s private copy of the book
(now kept in the Eric Voegelin Library at University Erlangen-Nuremberg)
includes a receipt showing that Voegelin bought it in a bookstore in Cambridge,
MA, in 1945. Thus, the origins of the Gnosis-thesis are datable. I thank Jürgen
Gebhardt for this information.
6
Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism: Two Essays, in Voegelin,
Modernity Without Restraint, 295.
7
For Voegelin, modernity is essentially characterized by revolution. See Voegelin,
New Science, 240f. For an analysis of the ambiguities in Voegelin’s concept of
modernity, see Hans-Jörg Sigwart, ‘Krise der Moderne und moderne Demokratie:
Eric Voegelins neoklassische Interpretation des westlichen Zivilregimes,’ in
Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 18/4 (2008), 471-499.
 Modernity as the Immanentization of the Eschaton 83

revelation. 8 The “new political science” was to be understood as an

exorcism and a remedy, contributing, by means of episteme, to the
expulsion of the Gnostic demons, the reopening of the soul toward the
transcendent ground, and, eventually, the reestablishment of the truth of
existence.9

Joachim of Fiore: A Gnostic Prophet?

The problems arising from the Gnosis-thesis are well illustrated by the
example of Joachim of Fiore. The pivotal role of Joachim in the narrative
of the New Science is evident. Voegelin characterizes him as the Gnostic
prophet, within whom earlier sectarianism crystallizes, and who initiates
the age of modern Gnosticism. In the early Middle Ages, the Gnostic sects
work silently in the underground; after Joachim, Gnosticism rises to
dominance in the Western world. As Voegelin writes: “In his trinitarian
eschatology Joachim created the aggregate of symbols that govern the self-
interpretation of modern political society to this day”. These symbols are:
1) the “brotherhood of autonomous persons”, a spiritually perfect society
without institutional authority; 2) the leader in the third age, later
identified with Saint Francis just as much as with Adolf Hitler; 3) the
Gnostic prophet, Joachim of Fiore being himself the first example; and 4)
the third age as a symbol of immanent fulfilment, later to be found in A. J.
R. Turgot, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and National Socialism.10
A re-evaluation of Voegelin’s claims is promising only if it is based on
recent research and scholarship. There is now a great difference in the
dynamics of scholarship on Gnosticism, on the one hand, and on Joachim
of Fiore, on the other. The spectacular discovery of a whole Gnostic
library near the Egyptian town Nag Hammadi in 1945 led to tremendous
progress in the scholarly evaluation of ancient Gnosticism. Today, the
scholar of Gnosticism is confronted with an impressive number of primary
sources in various editions and translations.
The situation is entirely different with Joachim of Fiore. Most editorial
work happened only after Voegelin’s death in 1985. Even today the
situation is anything but satisfactory. Although an edition of Joachim’s
Opera Omnia is now in progress, some of his main works are still not
available in critical editions; none of them has been translated into a

8
Voegelin, New Science, 189f.
9
Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, 277.
10
Voegelin, New Science, 179f.
84 Chapter Four

modern language.11 Joachim’s longest work, the Expositio in Apocalypsim,

is only available as an early Venetian printing from the 1520s; the same
goes for the second half of his second main work, the Liber de Concordia
Novi ac Veteris Testamenti.12 A critical edition of the third main work, the
Psalterium Decem Chordarum, was published only in 2009. 13 The
knowledge of Joachim’s original writings is still almost completely
restricted to specialized medievalists.14
From the perspective of recent research in this area, the following
qualifications seem to be necessary. First, it is not convincing to place
Joachim into a sectarian context, even though many later heterodox
movements referred to him, or, more frequently, to pseudonymous writings
published under his name. Joachim considered himself an orthodox
Catholic and, in his testament, submitted all his writings to the supervision
of the church. He was an advisor to popes and cardinals, and throughout
his work fought for the primacy of the Roman See against all claims of
kings, emperors, and the Eastern churches. When one of his works was
condemned in the IV Lateran Council of 1215, the only issue at stake was
his Trinitarian speculation. 15 Joachim had polemicized against Peter
Lombard, the rising star of scholasticism who was canonized by the same
council. Ironically, Joachim’s eschatology and theology of history were
not found problematic. Pope Innocent III, who had called the Council,
adopted elements of Joachim’s eschatological speculations and even

11
The only exceptions are some Italian translations which, however, do not include
the two most voluminous and most important works, the Expositio in Apocalypsim
and the Liber de Concordia.
12
For the edition of the first half see E. Randolph Daniel, ‘Abbot Joachim of Fiore:
Liber de Concordia Noui ac Veteris Testamenti,’ in Transactions of the American
Philosophical Society 73/8 (1983), 3-435.
13
Kurt-Victor Selge, Joachim von Fiore: Psalterium Decem Chordarum (Hannover:
Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Monumenta Germaniae Historica, vol. 20, 2009).
14
The author of this essay, however, was given the opportunity to use the
unpublished materials of the Opera Omnia edition, and thus had full access to all
extant writings of Joachim of Fiore. The results are published in Matthias Riedl,
Joachim von Fiore: Denker der vollendeten Menschheit (Würzburg: Königshausen
& Neumann, 2004); an English summary of the research is available in Matthias
Riedl, ‘Joachim of Fiore as Political Thinker,’ in Julia Eva Wannenmacher, ed.,
Joachim of Fiore and the Influence of Inspiration. Essays in Memory of Marjorie
E. Reeves (1905-2003) (Aldershot: Ashgate) [forthcoming].
15
See Fiona Robb, ‘The Fourth Lateran Council’s Definition of Trinitarian
Orthodoxy,’ in Journal of Ecclesiastical History 48/1 (1997), 22-43.
 Modernity as the Immanentization of the Eschaton 85

quoted long passages from Joachim’s Expositio in one of his letters. 16

Accordingly, the decree of the Fourth Lateran ascertains that Joachim is to
be respected as vir catholicus and that the condemnation does not extend
to him as a person or to his other writings.17 Pope Gregory IX strongly
supported Joachim’s Florensian order and, in 1234, declared it one of the
four pillars of the church. 18 It was not until twenty years later that the
abbot’s teachings fell under the suspicion of heresy, when the Franciscan
radical Gerardo of Borgo San Donnino caused great turmoil in Paris by
claiming (very much against the author’s intention) that the writings of
Joachim should constitute a new “Eternal Gospel” for the Third Age.19
Subsequently, a papal commission condemned several of Joachim’s
statements but, up to this day, Joachim has not been officially condemned
as a heretic. In fact, the opposite tendency seems to prevail.
In his early monograph on Bonaventure, Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope
Benedict XVI, saw very well the problematic side of Joachim’s eschatology,
but also emphasized his positive role. It was Joachim who first saw that
the incarnation of Christ does not simply initiate the eschatological events
but rather the age of the church. The church, the new people of God, has
its own historical right just as much Israel, the old people of God.
Ratzinger writes:

Thus, Joachim paved the way toward a new understanding of history

precisely within the church. This understanding seems to be so self-evident
to us moderns that it appears as the properly Christian understanding itself
and makes it hard to believe it could once have been different.20

16
Christoph Egger, ‘Joachim von Fiore, Rainer von Ponza und die römische
Kurie,’ in Roberto Rusconi, ed., Gioacchino da Fiore tra Bernardo di Clairvaux e
Innocenzo III. Atti del 5° Congresso internazionale di studi gioachimiti (Rome:
Viella, 2001), 129-162, at 140ff.
17
H. Denzinger and A. Schönmetzer, eds., Enchiridion symbolorum definitionum
et declarationum de rebus fidei et morum, 36th ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 1976), §807,
262f.
18
Stephen E. Wessley, Joachim of Fiore and Monastic Reform, (New York: Lang,
1990), 2, 46.
19
See Ernst Benz, Ecclesia spiritualis. Kirchenidee und Geschichtstheologie der
franziskanischen Reform (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1934), 244ff.; David Burr,
Olivi’s Peacable Kingdom (Phildelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993),
14ff.; and Marjorie Reeves and Warwick Gould, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of
the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 7ff.
20
Joseph Ratzinger, Die Geschichtstheologie des heiligen Bonaventura, new ed.
(St. Ottilien: EOS, 1992), 108, my translation and italics.
86 Chapter Four

In 2001, the archbishop of Cosenza-Bisignano, Giuseppe Agostino,

initiated the canonization of Joachim of Fiore which, to my knowledge, is
presently still in progress.21
Now, all these arguments for Joachim’s catholicity could still be
rejected as superficial, and the popes might very well have been mistaken
in their appreciation of the Calabrian abbot. It seems advisable to look at
the four symbols Voegelin identified as crucial and see how they appear in
Joachim’s actual writings.22
1) The brotherhood of autonomous persons. Voegelin is mistaken
when he says that Joachim formulated the idea of a community of the
spiritually perfect without institutional authority. The sketch of the
constitution for the third age, as found in his Liber Figurarum, shows that
the future community will be governed by a small number of charismatically
gifted persons. Moreover, the whole society displays a strictly hierarchical
structure, differentiated according to the traditional orders of monks,
clerics, and laics, who do not mix. The real novelty is that the monks,
rather than the clerics, take the highest rank. Yet, even the majority of the
monks lives under the government of a pater spiritualis, a figure that may
be interpreted as an abbot or, if the constitution is applied to Christian
society as a whole, as a monastic pope. 23 Joachim also maintains the
traditional separation between clerics and laics, and condemns the
contemporary Waldensian movement for conflating the two and, thereby,
confusing the spheres of the sacred and the profane.24
2) The leader or dux. Joachim makes very clear that this leader is no
one other than a pope, the highest priest of the universal Jerusalem, i.e.,
the Holy Mother Church (ascendet quasi nous dux de Babilone,
uniuersalis scilicet pontifex noue Ierusalem, hoc est sancte matris
ecclesie). He is the dux de Babylone because he frees the church from the

21
See the archbishop’s statement: Giuseppe Agostino, Arcivescovo Metropolita di
Cosenza-Bisignano, ‘Prefazione,’ in Fabio Troncarelli, Gioacchino da Fiore: la
vita, il pensiero, le opere (Rome: Città Nuova Editrice, 2002), 5-9 (at 8).
22
See Matthias Riedl, ‘Gioacchino da Fiore padre della modernità. Le tesi di Eric
Voegelin’, in Gian Luca Potestà, ed., Gioacchino da Fiore nella cultura dell '800 e
del '900. Atti del 6° Congresso internazionale di studi gioachimiti (Rome: Viella,
2005), 219-236.
23
Leone Tondelli, Majorie Reeves and Beatrice Hirsch-Reich, eds., Il libro delle
Figure dell’abate Gioacchino da Fiore, 2nd ed. (Turino: Società editrice
internazionale, 1953), Tav. 12.
24
Francesco Santi, ed., Tractatus super IV evangelia I:9 (= Fonti per la storia
dell’Italia medievale. Antiquitates 17), (Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il medio
evo, 2002), 196.
 Modernity as the Immanentization of the Eschaton 87

yoke of the German rulers, the new Babylonian kings according to

Joachim’s typology. Moreover, the prophecy of the dux contains another
element, not mentioned by Voegelin: the papal leader will “go to
Jerusalem” not by a change of locations (immutatio locorum), but rather
by internal reform and a subsequent extension of the reformed church to
the whole world (dabitur ei plena libertas ad innouandam christianam
religionem et ad predicandum uerbum dei).25 In other words, the leadership
of this pope will not materialize in a crusade; rather, he will “rebuild the
temple” through spiritual renewal. At least in his mature writings, Joachim
clearly rejects violence as a means of eschatological acceleration.26 The
precondition of ecclesiastical growth is inner reform.
3) The Gnostic prophet. Joachim was certainly not a Gnostic. The still
unedited Expositio in Apocalypsim contains a clear refutation of the only
sect Joachim’s contemporaries identified as Gnostic, justifiably or not: the
Albigensians. It is clear that Joachim in no way belongs to the neat line of
Gnostic movements and sects—from the Manicheans to the Paulicians and
the Bogomils up to the Albigensians—that scholars have identified and
that Voegelin also invokes in the New Science.27 Joachim’s refutation of
the Albigensians is not just the anti-heretic reflex of a faithful Catholic; it
shows that—either through his reading of the Church Fathers or through
more contemporary sources—he had an intimate knowledge of Gnostic
doctrines and understood how much they contradicted his own teaching.
According to Joachim, the error of the Gnostics is a misconception of
the relation between body and spirit. In Voegelin’s terms, one could say
that he accuses them of pneumopathology. The Albigensians wrongly
define redemption as the liberation of man’s spiritual substance from the
prison of the evil body (disputando de corpore et spiritu, ut diceret omne
corpus esse fugiendum). 28 Joachim, on the other hand, explains in
traditional Pauline terms that the redemptory act of Christ is the
crucifixion of the flesh which enables man to join the mystical body of
Christ. In other words, the Christian redemption is an act of divine grace,

25
Liber de Concordia IV, 31, fol. 56rb, ed. Daniel: 402, l. 1-9.
26
See E. Randolph Daniel, ‘Apocalyptic Conversion: The Joachite Alternative to
the Crusades’, in Delno West, ed., Joachim of Fiore in Christian Thought: Essays
on the Influence of the Calabrian Prophet, 2 vols. (New York: Franklin, 1975),
vol. 2, 310-328; and Brett Whalen, Dominion of God: Christendom and Apocalypse
in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 116-124.
27
For a critique of this construct see Ioan P. Coulianu, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic
Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (San Francisco: Harper
Collins, 1992).
28
Expositio in Apocalypsim III, ed. Venice 1527, fol. 130vb.
88 Chapter Four

the transformation of the body from the flesh into the soma pneumatikon,
not an escape from the body and the cosmos.29 Redemption is necessary,
not because the human soul got lost in the flawed creation of the Demiurge,
as the Gnostics think, but because of Original Sin. Evil, therefore, has no
external source outside God’s creation. The Father as the creator, the Son
as the redeemer, and the Spirit, who completes the act of redemption, are
three persons of the same Divine essence. God created the world and he
will save it.
When Joachim says “world”, he means mankind and not the cosmos.
In full agreement with Catholic orthodoxy, Joachim rejects all
cosmological speculation, which can be found not only in Gnosticism but
also in Eastern Christian theology, especially of the Alexandrian type. The
gnosis, the redemptory knowledge of the Gnostics, is cosmological
knowledge and finds no equivalent in Joachim’s writings. All relevant
knowledge is enclosed in the Holy Scripture, especially the Book of
Revelation, and it will remain hidden from the sapientes and prudentes
who are preoccupied with cosmology.30 What Gnostic would ever make
such a statement? This is the inversion of Gnosticism. Joachim’s concept
of knowledge (scientia) has no relation to Gnosticism whatsoever.
Certainly, he says that knowledge will be multiplied in the coming age of
the Spirit. 31 Yet, first, this knowledge is nothing but a more perfect
understanding of the mysteries in the Old and New Testament; second, it
results from the dispensation of the Holy Spirit and not from the efforts of
individuals; and, third, it will not be given to intellectuals but to humble
believers (fideles).
4) The third age. Joachim cannot be understood in the context of
Gnostic sectarianism, but only in the context of Catholic church reform.
This reform program, which brought about the investiture controversy,

29
‘Seculum futurum quod erit post resurrectionem ascribendum est Spiritui sancto,
quia ibi non solum anime, que natura subtiliores sunt, verum etiam corpora nostra
spiritalia erunt et templa Spiritus sancti, quando et, consumptis universis
corruptionibus carnis, solus idem Spiritus regnabit in eis’. Expositio in
Apocalypsim, fol. 6ra; (text of the Venice edition corrected according to Kurt-
Victor Selge’s yet unpublished edition).
30
‘Quod si hi qui iuxta Salvatoris vocem norunt iudicare faciem celi et terre signa
temporum, aut non cognoscunt aut non credunt agnoscentibus ea, non est meum
iudicare de eis. . . . Confiteor tibi, Pater, domine celi et terre, quia abscondisti hec a
sapientibus et prudentibus et revelasti ea parvulis’. Expositio in Apocalypsim, fol. 2va.
31
‘Et notandum quod in tercio statu nuda erunt misteria et aperta fidelibus, quia per
singulas etates mundi multiplicatur scientia, sicut scriptum est: pertransibunt plurimi
et multiplex erit scientia’. Liber de Concordia, V, 67, ed. Venice 1519, fol. 96va.
 Modernity as the Immanentization of the Eschaton 89

always implied two components. First, the papal (Gregorian) reform

program of libertas ecclesiae aimed at the liberation of the church from
the influence of the lay rulers or, put differently, the exclusion of the
temporal rulers from the charismatic order of the church. 32 The new
concept of the church was practically reduced to the ordo ecclesiasticus,
the ordained clergy, which formed a hierocratic church governed by the
pope.33 Second, the monastic reform program, emerging from Cluny and
carried on by the Cistercians aimed at a spiritualized church. The
unprecedented outbreak of monasticism in the twelfth century, the
amazingly successful efforts to spiritualize and monasticize parts of the
clergy (Premonstratensians, Canons Regular, etc.), and the moral victory
of the church in the investiture controversy, could be taken as evidence
that the reform could actually be accomplished.
In sum, Joachim’s contribution is a radically consequential reflection
on the future status of the church, should the reforms actually succeed:
Christian society would be governed by the church and not by temporal
rulers, who would either submit or perish. The church would be spiritual,
monastic, and no longer preoccupied with earthly concerns. The glory of
this church would shine forth throughout the whole world and lead to the
return of the Eastern churches as well as to the conversion of Jews and
infidels. This second transformation of the people of God would be as
significant as the first transformation from Israel to the Christian church.
In a visionary moment, it became clear to Joachim that this status, the
tertius status ecclesiae, would in fact constitute a new age (in initio tertii
status positi sumus).34 The new age, however, would not so much be the
result of human reform efforts; rather, the reform of the church is
interpreted as the final result of God’s continuous re-education and
restitution of mankind, beginning right after Adam’s fall (ut restituens
commutaret in melius).35 There is no place for Gnostic self-redemption in

32
Gerd Tellenbach, Libertas: Kirche und Weltordnung im Zeitalter des
Investiturstreit ( Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1936).
33
Friedrich Kempf, ‘Das Problem der Christianitas im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert,’
Historisches Jahrbuch der Görres Gesellschaft 79 (1960), 104-123.
34
Expositio in Apocalypsim I, fol. 39rb.
35
The following quote illustrates how Joachim relates the reformation (reformare)
of humanity after the fall to the previous formation (formare) in the creation. The
agent of reformation is God, not man: ‘Si enim voluit et potuit formare corpus
Ade, qui fuit pater omnium, de limo terre, cur non possit eodem modo corpora
filiorum Adam reformare de terra? Eras aliquando pulvis terre et esse cepisti quod
non eras—siquidem in Adam omnes fueramus a principio pulvis—, et non potest
Deus reversum in pulverem restituere in formam primam, ut esse incipias sicut
90 Chapter Four

Joachim’s writings, nor do they provide evidence for the Promethean

attitude that Voegelin identifies as an essential characteristic of
Gnosticism.36 However, this third age would be as temporal as any other
age, and perish in the tribulations at the end of times. The mystical body of
Christ would find its final perfection in the Beyond. Joachim of Fiore is
best understood as an apocalyptic thinker, who maintains the apocalyptic
faith in a divinely structured linear course of history, but whose pessimism
about sinful mankind is overcome by the optimism of reformatory
progress. In any case, he firmly stands in the Catholic tradition.
Nevertheless, I still think that Voegelin was right in discerning
Joachim’s thought as a turning point toward the immanentization of
eschatology. However, I insist that this immanentization and its inherent
progressivism are to be understood as a radicalization of Catholic church
reform, and not as an outcome of sectarian undercurrents. It is the result of
the new concept of the church, as developed by the Gregorian reformers.
Augustine once declared that the wheat and the chaff grow side by side in
the church, as long as it a civitas peregrina, a peregrine community in this
world.37 Only the Last Judgment would purify the church and unite it with
the City of God. 38 The Gregorian reformers, however, aimed at a
purification of the church in historical times. They wanted to separate the
wheat from the chaff and achieve personal continuity between the
historical church and the eternal heavenly society. This is exactly what
Joachim describes as progress (profectus). At the end of the reform
process, in the third status, or, according to the Augustinian periodization,
the seventh time of the world, the church will partially display the

eras? An quia tunc erat Verbum Dei, per quem facta sunt ista, modo autem esse
desiit, ne horum similia operetur? O stulta corda hominum et tarda ad credendum
in omnibus que locuti sunt prophete! Nonne hec pati oportuit genus hominum
propter malum superbie et sic per mortem carnis pertingere ad vitam eternam? . . .
Voluit Omnipotens exercere iudicium hoc in genere humano, non ut dissiparet
opus suum, sed ut ostenderet illi altitudinem magnitudinis sue et incuteret ei
timorem discipline, ut non saperet alta, sciens quia, qui potens fuerat ad
formandum, non erat impotens ad reformandum, non solum ut restitueret quod
dissolutum erat, verum etiam ut restituens commutaret in melius’. Expositio in
Apocalypsim I, fol. 67vb, my italics; (text of the Venice edition corrected according
to Kurt-Victor Selge’s unpublished edition).
36
Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, 269-271.
37
‘Nec tamen cum illo [Christo] regnant zizania, quamuis in ecclesia cum tritico
crescant.’ St. Augustine, De civitate Dei contra paganos, XX, 9.
38
Ibid.
 Modernity as the Immanentization of the Eschaton 91

heavenly glory (pars quaedam claritatis Ierusalem manifesta erit in

septima, et tota generaliter in octava).39

. . . in the seventh age, even the smallest detail of the structure of Jerusalem
will be completed just as the convocation of all the people that will dwell
in it (perficiatur in septima, quicquid minus erit in structura Ierusalem, et
vocatione universi populi, qui futurus est in ea)—insofar as in the future
world, which will be like an eighth age, everything will evidently be
fulfilled, which is related to this [convocation].40

It ought to be mentioned that this interpretation of Joachim coincides

with Voegelin’s earlier chapters on Joachim in the Political Religions and
the History of Political Ideas, where Joachim is not seen in a Gnostic
context. 41 The ecclesiastic context of Joachim’s thought is occasionally
mentioned even in the New Science, where the experience of reform is
described as an additional component in the process of immanentization;42
however, these remarks are covered up by the all-comprehensive claim of
the Gnosis-thesis.
A Gnostic influence on Joachim cannot be verified in his original
writings. Joachim’s immanentizing faith in progress can be fully explained
within the Jewish-Christian tradition and the reformatory efforts of his
time. Moreover, the symbols of immantization, such as the spiritual church
or the third status, articulate the experience of God’s increasing presence
in his church, while the Gnostic ethics of escape articulates the experience
of God’s total absence from the cosmos and human society. Joachim
expects a future monastic church wherein his own monastic existence will
be fully integrated, while the Gnostics hold spiritual integration in human

39
Edward Kilian Burger, ed., Enchiridion super Apocalypsim (Toronto: Pontifical
Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1986), 9-90 (at 49).
40
Expositio in Apocalypsim VIII, fol. 221rb; my translation.
41
Eric Voegelin, Political Religions, in Modernity Without Restraint, 50-52;
History of Political Ideas, Volume II: The Middle Ages to Aquinas, vol. 20 of The
Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. Peter von Sivers (Columbia, MO: University
of Missouri Press, 1997), 126-134. Neither discussion portrays Joachim in any
Gnostic context.
42
Surprisingly, Voegelin says at one occasion that Gnosticism does not necessarily
lead to immanentization, and that a further component is needed. He adds: ‘This
further component is the civilizational expansiveness of Western society in the
Middle Ages. . . . The spiritual growth of the West through the order since Cluny
expressed itself in Joachim’s speculation in the idea of a Third Realm of the
monks.’ Voegelin, New Science, 191.
92 Chapter Four

society impossible and suffer from the greatest possible degree of alienation.
In sum, Gnosticism and immanentization are opposed to each other.

Voegelin’s revision of the Gnosis-thesis

In the summer of 1973, Voegelin gave a series of interviews to his
former student Ellis Sandoz, later to be published as the Autobiographical
Reflections. At that time, Voegelin was already unsure about the
comprehensive explanatory value of his Gnosis-thesis:

Since my first application of Gnosticism to modern phenomena in The New

Science of Politics and in 1959 in my study on Science, Politics, and
Gnosticism, I have had to revise my position. The application of the
category of Gnosticism to modern ideologies, of course, stands. In a more
complete analysis, however, there are other factors to be considered in
addition. One of these is the metastatic apocalypse deriving directly from
the Israelite prophets, via Paul, and forming a permanent strand in
Christian sectarian movements right up to the Renaissance.43

This is not just a slight revision. It is not simply that Voegelin

identifies other elements of modernity that he had previously overlooked,
such as the new construction of an intramundane order in the “miscarried”
revival of Platonism in Renaissance Florence and the “egophanic revolt”
in 18th-century France.44 The revision points to a deeper question: whether
or not at least some of the roots of modernity should be sought in the
Judaeo-Christian revelation itself. I will return to this question below.
It seems that Voegelin’s revision of the Gnosis-thesis resulted from a
variety of factors, two of which are related to the growth and the re-
evaluation of historical knowledge.

43
Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections: Revised Edition, with a Voegelin
Glossary and Cumulative Index, vol. 34 of Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed.
Ellis Sandoz (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 93.
44
In a conversation with Eric O’Connor in 1976, Voegelin takes his self-criticism
even further: ‘I paid perhaps undue attention to gnosticism in the first book I
published in English. . . . I happened to run into the problem of gnosticism in my
reading of Balthasar. But in the meanwhile we have found that the apocalyptic
tradition is of equal importance, and the Neo-Platonic tradition, and hermeticism,
and magic, and so on’. Cited in Dante Germino, Eric Voegelin on the Gnostic
Roots of Violence (Munich: Eric Voegelin Archive, 1998), 23.
 Modernity as the Immanentization of the Eschaton 93

1) As mentioned above, the ancient Coptic Nag Hammadi Library,

comprising a great number of Gnostic sources, was discovered in 1945.45
Unfortunately, the editorial process was slowed down tremendously by
political turbulences, such as the Suez Crisis, and other unfortunate
circumstances.46 The significance of these discoveries becomes apparent if
one considers that at the time Voegelin wrote the New Science, the sum
total of primary sources amounted to no more than 50 printed pages. 47
Today, only the English paperback edition of the Nag Hammadi Library
provides more than 500 pages of primary texts.48 As Hans Jonas pointed
out, there is hardly any other field in scholarship where a single
archaeological discovery has so completely changed the picture. 49 “A
world religion is newly uncovered”, wrote the Dutch scholar Gilles
Quispel, one of the Gnosticism experts Voegelin had personally consulted
in the 1950s.50
In the early 1950s, however, the new texts were not yet accessible and
all systematic considerations on the nature of Gnosticism still had to rely
on the heresiological writings of the Church Fathers, i.e., on the writings
of the enemies. Accordingly, Voegelin’s perspective in the New Science is
a heresiological one. As the standard work on Gnosticism, he recommends
the Adversus Haereses of Irenaeus of Lyon, written in the second century
CE.51 By the early 1970s, however, most of the new texts were available in
excellent editions and in translation in several modern languages. The
edition was accompanied by a proliferation of secondary literature. A
lengthy footnote in The Ecumenic Age shows that, meanwhile, Voegelin
had familiarized himself with some of the more recent literature.52 It is

45
Kurt Rudolph, Die Gnosis: Wesen und Geschichte einer spätantiken Religion,
3rd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 40-58.
46
Another important primary source, the Papyrus Berolinensis 8502, was
discovered in 1898, but due to an almost unbelievable series of mishaps and
disasters was published only in 1955. Rudolph, Die Gnosis, 33f.
47
Rudolph, Die Gnosis, 30.
48
James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library: The Definite Translation
of the Gnostic Scriptures Complete in One Volume (New York: Harper Collins,
1990).
49
Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the
Beginnings of Christianity, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge 1992), xx.
50
Gilles Quispel, Gnosis als Weltreligion (Zurich: Origo, 1951), 1; see Voegelin,
Autobiographical Reflections, 93.
51
Voegelin, New Science, 190f.
52
Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Volume IV: The Ecumenic Age, vol. 17 of The
Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. Michael Franz (Columbia, MO: University
of Missouri Press, 2000), 71-2n2.
94 Chapter Four

evident that the new basis of knowledge was one of the major factors
behind Voegelin’s revision of the Gnosis-thesis. The new sources
showed that Gnosticism was a highly complex phenomenon, comprising
a tremendous variety of different trends.53 They also revealed that the lines
between Gnosticism and orthodox Christianity cannot be drawn as clearly
as it had appeared in the heresiological writings, where the Gnostics had
always served as “the heretical other” in order to sharpen one’s own
position.54
In some cases it is still undecided whether we are dealing with
Christian or Gnostic texts. One of the most debated texts of the Nag
Hammadi Library is the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 sayings of
Jesus, formally not unlike the hypothetical source Q that most New
Testament scholars believe to be a common source for Jesus’ sayings in
the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.55 In fact, many of the sayings coincide
with the ones found in the New Testament. It is not unlikely that an early
version of the gospel was written around the same time as Mark, Matthew,
and Luke.56 In any event, the sayings of Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas are
much more adaptable to Gnostic than Christian theology,57 but cannot be

53
For this reason it has even been suggested that scholars give up generic concepts
like ‘Gnosis’ and ‘Gnosticism’ altogether. See Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking
‘Gnosticism’: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princton:
Princeton University Press, 1996). For a more moderate discussion of the problem,
see Christoph Markschies, Die Gnosis, 3rd ed. (Munich: Beck, 2010), 9-35.
54
For a thorough analysis and criticism of the heresiological perspective, see:
Karen L. King, What is Gnosticism? (Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard University
Press, 2003).
55
Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library, cod. II, 2, 124-138;
56
See Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage, 1989), xvi; and
Helmut Koester’s short introduction to the Gospel of Thomas in Robinson, ed., The
Nag Hammadi Library, 124-26.
57
The programmatic prologue (verses 1-3) emphasizes the importance of
knowledge for salvation and the co-substantiality of the inner and outer dimension
of the Divine: ‘These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which
Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down. (1) And he said, “Whoever finds the
interpretation of these sayings will not experience death”.(2) Jesus said, “Let him
who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become
troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over
the all”. (3) Jesus said, “If those who lead you say to you, ‘See, the kingdom is in
the sky’, then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, ‘It is in the
sea’, then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is inside of you [cf. Luke
17:21], and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will
become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living
 Modernity as the Immanentization of the Eschaton 95

ascribed to any Gnostic group or school and display similarities to the

Gospel of John. The Gospel of Thomas, then, could be interpreted as early
evidence for an independent Gnostic or proto-Gnostic tradition, providing
an alternative understanding of the epiphany of Christ. As we will see,
such an interpretation coincides with Voegelin’s reformulation of the
Gnosis-thesis in The Ecumenic Age.
2) Originally Voegelin had planned to write six volumes of his
magnum opus Order and History, describing five types of order and
symbolization. The first three (Israel and Revelation, The World of the
Polis, Plato and Aristotle) were published, addressing the cosmological
form of the Ancient Near Eastern empires, the historical form of Israel, the
Hellenic myth, and philosophy arising from the Polis. In the introduction
to the fourth volume, The Ecumenic Age, Voegelin explains that his
increasing empirical knowledge made him deviate from his plan. The
original program for the fourth volume, the multicivilizational empires
since Alexander and the emergence of Christianity, proved to be too
limited, as Voegelin became aware of China as a parallel and independent
oikumene, and of historically independent spiritual outbursts in India.
Likewise, the description of modernity by only one type, the national state,
and Gnosticism as its symbolic form, turned out to be impossible. The
situation, moreover, could not be remedied by a simple addition of other
types:

What ultimately broke the project, however, was the impossibility of

aligning the empirical types [of order and symbolization; M.R.] in any time
sequence at all that would permit the structures actually found to emerge
from a history conceived as a “course”.58

In other words, the grand narrative behind the whole project of Order
and History collapsed. This narrative suggested that the great differentiations
of consciousness, the revelation of Israel and the logos of the Hellenes,
merged in Christianity under the condition of the multicivilizational
Empires; the resulting anthropological and soteriological truth was later
corrupted by Gnosticism; and this corruption, in turn, enabled the advent
of modernity. As soon as Voegelin discovered the “pluralistic field of
outbursts”,59 he realized that the “process of history, and such order as can
be discerned in it, is not a story to be told from the beginning to its happy,

father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who
are that poverty”’. Cit. from Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library, 126.
58
Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 46.
59
Ibid., 50.
96 Chapter Four

or unhappy, end”.60 If it is true that the spiritual outbursts and the resulting
differentiations of consciousness constitute a pluralistic field instead of a
uni-linear development, the same goes for the deformative processes.
Thus, the above quoted revision of the Gnosis-thesis is partly explained:
modernity is composed of a variety of factors and is not the result of a
single process. Accordingly, the two concluding volumes of Order and
History on early modern and modern Gnosticism, which had been
announced in the preface to Israel and Revelation, were never written.61
And yet, as the above quote suggests, Voegelin did not drop the Gnosis-
thesis completely. Instead, he gave it an altogether new shape in the
introduction to The Ecumenic Age.

The Gnosis-Thesis in The Ecumenic Age

If Voegelin dismissed the linear construction of history, he did not
abandon the basic idea that the “peculiar structure in history originates in
the stratification of man’s consciousness through the process of
differentiation".62 The differentiation results from “theophanic events” in
which man not only becomes aware of a transcendent divine reality, but
also “discovers the something in his humanity that is the site and
sensorium of divine presence; and he finds such words as psyche, or
pneuma, or nous, to symbolize the something”. 63 Theophanic events,
however, always imply a certain danger, as they create a tension between
the experience of the Beyond in the soul, on the one hand, and the
experience of a divine Beginning of spatio-temporal existence in the
cosmos, on the other. As Voegelin explains, the human carriers of spiritual
outbursts are liable to confuse the two:64

60
Ibid., 51.
61
Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Volume I: Israel and Revelation, vol. 14 of
The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. Maurice P. Hogan (Columbia, MO:
University of Missouri Press, 2001), 20.
62
Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 52.
63
Ibid., 53.
64
‘The new truth pertains to man’s consciousness of his humanity in participatory
tension toward the divine ground, and to no reality beyond this restricted area. The
human carriers of the spiritual outbursts do not always realize the narrow limits of
the area directly affected by the differentiating process. For the differentiation of
consciousness indirectly affects the image of reality as a whole; and the
enthusiastic discoverers of the truth are sometimes inclined to treat such secondary
effects as they believe themselves to perceive, and not always correctly, as direct
insights’. Ibid., p. 53. See also Eric Voegelin, ‘The Beginning and the Beyond: A
 Modernity as the Immanentization of the Eschaton 97

Though the divine reality is one, its presence is experienced in the modes
of the Beyond and the Beginning. The Beyond is present in the immediate
experience of movements in the psyche; while the presence of the divine
Beginning is mediated through the experience of the existence and
intelligible structure of things in the cosmos. The two models require two
different types of language for their adequate expression. The immediate
presence in the movements of the soul requires the revelatory language of
consciousness. This is the language of seeking, searching, and questioning,
of ignorance and knowledge concerning the divine ground, of futility,
absurdity, anxiety, and alienation of existence, of being moved to seek and
question, of being drawn toward the ground, of turning around, of return,
illumination and rebirth. The presence mediated by the existence and order
of things in the cosmos requires the mythical language of a creator-god or
Demiurge, of a divine force that creates, sustains, and preserves the order
of things.65

The confusion of the languages, however, can easily lead to a confusion

about existence. Voegelin’s example is the Gospel of John. John, who is
confronted with the epiphany of Christ, that is, the presence of the divine
Word in the cosmos, confuses Beyond and Beginning when he identifies
the revelatory Word from the Beyond with the creating Word of the
Beginning. That is, he identifies the word that becomes flesh with the
word “by which all things are made”, as he says in the prologue to his
Gospel. Nevertheless, the same Word that has created this world promises
salvation beyond this world, speaks a truth which is not of this world,
wants to establish a kingdom which is not of this world, and assembles the
believers who dwell in this world but are not of this world. The following
question, Voegelin points out, is exactly the problem of Gnosticism: “Why
should a cosmos exist at all, if man can do no better than live in it as if he
were not of it, in order to make his escape from the prison through
death?”66
In The Ecumenic Age, and partly already in Israel and Revelation,
Voegelin’s philosophical and historical inquiries have reached a stage
where he no longer hesitates to identify the origins of modern spiritual
deformation in the biblical texts themselves. The Gospel of John is not just
affected by Gnostic influences, as Voegelin said earlier; it displays a

Meditation on Truth’, in Voegelin, What is History? And Other Late Unpublished

Writings, vol. 28 of Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, eds. Thomas A. Hollweck
and Paul Caringella (Baton Rouge: University of Louisiana Press, 1990), 173-232.
65
Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 63.
66
Ibid., 64.
98 Chapter Four

“Gnostic manifestation in its own right.”67 This explains why the modern
Gnostics, Schelling and Hegel, refer not to the symbols of the ancient
Gnostic system-builders Valentinius and Basilides, but to the evangelist
John. Realizing how much the Christian promise of a salvation beyond this
world has aggravated the danger of confusing Beginning and Beyond,
Voegelin takes the argument even further: he recognizes the crystallizing
moment of Gnosticism in the epiphany of Christ.68
Subsequently, Voegelin shows how the Gnostic experience leads to
speculative system-building:

The fallacy at the core of the Gnostic answer to the question [about the
unbearable existence in the cosmos; M.R.] is the expansion of
consciousness from the Beyond to the Beginning. In the construction of
Gnostic systems, the immediate experience of divine presence in the mode
of the Beyond is speculatively expanded to comprehend a knowledge of
the Beginning that is accessible only in the mode of mediated experience.
In the imagery of the expansive speculation, the process of reality becomes
an intelligible psychodrama, beginning with a fall in the pneumatic
divinity, continuing with the imprisonment of parts of the pneumatic
substance in a cosmos created by an evil Demiurge, and ending with the
liberation of the imprisoned substance through its return to the pneumatic
divinity.69

This is not the place to discuss the details of the Gnostic psychodramas.
Of greater importance is the motivating experience. The Gnostics, just as
the Evangelist John, are driven by an extremely intense experience of the
Beyond. John’s experience of “the divine oneness and its presence in man”
is so strong that the experience of the cosmos is drawn into it. Likewise,
the Gnostic is motivated by an “intensely experienced presence of the
Beyond”. 70 The more the Gnostic experiences the Beyond as a psychic

67
Ibid., 67.
68
‘I am inclined to recognize in the epiphany of Christ the great catalyst that made
eschatological consciousness a historical force, both in forming and deforming
humanity’. Ibid., 66. These words coincide with a thesis already proposed by the
German scholar Walter Bauer in 1934, and which has recently received renewed
scholarly interest. His thesis can be summarized as follows: in many of the earliest
Christian communities the Gnostic understanding of Christ’s epiphany was the
original understanding, and not a deviation from an earlier ‘orthodox’ view. Walter
Bauer, Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum (Tübingen: J. C. B.
Mohr, 1934); a complete English translation of the book is available at:
http://jewishchristianlit.com//Resources/Bauer.
69
Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 65.
70
Ibid., 64.
 Modernity as the Immanentization of the Eschaton 99

presence, the more he feels alienated from the cosmos. Out of his
alienation, he creates the anti-cosmic psychodrama that allows him to
integrate the experience of the deficient spatio-temporal existence into the
experience of the Beyond.71 The psychodrama, however, is not identical
with the myth in a traditional sense, as it interprets the cosmogonic events
as certain knowledge, as redemptory gnosis.
The difference between Voegelin’s earlier version of the Gnosis-thesis
and his revision is now apparent. Fifteen years earlier, in Science, Politics,
and Gnosticism, Voegelin had said that “in the gnostic movement man
remains shut off from transcendent being.”72 Later, he claims exactly the
opposite: the Gnostic has “a consciousness of the movement toward the
Beyond of such strength and clarity that it becomes an obsessive
illumination”.73 Every reader of the Nag Hammadi documents will readily
admit that the primary sources support the latter statement.
Still, the psychological dimension does not suffice to explain the
degree of alienation from the cosmos found in the Gnostic texts. Voegelin
adds an analysis of the political context: “In pragmatic history, Gnosticism
arises from six centuries of imperial expansion and civilizational
destruction”. One empire destroys and succeeds the other; Israel, Hellas, as
well as many other societies fall victim to imperial conquest:

This pragmatic impact of conquest on the traditional forms of existence in

society is abrupt; and its abruptness is not matched by an equally sudden
spiritual response to the situation. The divine authority of the older
symbols is impaired when the societies whose reality of order they express
lose their political independence, while the new imperial order has, at least
initially, no more than the authority of power. Hence, the spiritual and
intellectual lives of the peoples exposed to the events are in danger of
separating from the reality of socially ordered existence.74

If the psychological and the political (“pragmatic”) arguments are

taken together, the origin of Gnosticism may be explained by an intense
experience of the divine that finds no symbolic expression and,
consequently, gains no social relevance in a hostile political environment.
Under the conditions of the ecumenic empires, alienation reaches such a
degree that it turns into pure hatred against the cosmos. This explanation

71
In this respect Voegelin agrees with Hans Jonas; see Jonas, The Gnostic
Religion, 49-51.
72
Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, 265.
73
Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 65.
74
Ibid., 67.
100 Chapter Four

of the Gnostic phenomenon provides an adequate explanation of the

symbolisms in the original sources. It fully explains why the Gnostic
psychodramas extend political symbolism to cosmology, as it is expressed
in the symbols of the archons and the evil demiurge. Not only society but
all eight Aeons of the cosmos are governed by alien rulers. Salvation
means a final victory over the cosmos, made possible by a redeemer sent
from the Beyond. Thus, Jesus says in the Gospel of John: “Though in the
cosmos you have affliction, be confident, for I have been victorious over
the cosmos”.75

The Revolutionary Character of the Gnostic Mind:

Voegelin and Jonas
The question now is: what remains of the Gnosis-thesis? Was Voegelin
completely wrong or are some elements of his thesis still worth considering?
Or, to put the question another way, does the Gnosis-thesis help us
understand modern revolutions? We might usefully approach an answer by
comparing Eric Voegelin and Hans Jonas. Already in Science, Politics,
and Gnosticism, Voegelin explicitly referred to Jonas’s groundbreaking
study Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, especially the chapter on “The
Revolutionary Element of Gnosis”. 76 Even Voegelin’s examples of the
ancient Gnostic texts (Zosimos) that seem to prove the Promethean
attitude of the Gnostics are taken from this chapter.
As Jonas argues, the revolutionary character of Gnosticism is implied,
on the one hand, in the total devaluation of the cosmos described as the
creation of an evil god, and, on the other hand, the offer of an ontological
alternative. More specifically, Jonas refers to the following elements of
Gnostic thought:
a) Hermeneutics. The allegorical exegesis of the Gnostics does not
attempt to spiritualize mythological traditions, but rather aims at the
inversion of their meaning. Accordingly, not only Prometheus is transformed

75
John 16:32f.; see Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 62.
76
Hans Jonas, Gnosis und Spätantiker Geist, vol. 1, Die mythologische Gnosis,
2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1954), 214-251. Unfortunately,
Jonas’s later work, The Gnostic Religion, which was first published in English and
remained the standard monograph on Gnosticism in the Anglophone world for
quite a while, contains only a shortened and watered down version of the earlier
study ( 91-97). In my view, Jonas’s earlier German work remains the most
profound study of the Gnostic mind to this day, despite its limited and outdated
empirical basis. Voegelin’s reference to Jonas’s chapter on revolution is in Science,
Politics, and Gnosticism, 271n24.
 Modernity as the Immanentization of the Eschaton 101

into a positive hero against the order and rule of an evil Demiurge, but also
Eve, Cain, Esau, and ultimately the serpent of Eden.

We discern in the allegorical symbol the world-historical replacement of

the old and mighty father-religion by the son-religion, the replacement of
the cosmic by the acosmic religion. “Man” and “Son of Man” are elevated
over the old gods and become themselves the highest god or the divine
centre of a redemptive religion; the pneumatic self-overcomes the world
and, in its contempt of the numina, recognizes itself as identical with the
transcendent primordial ground.77

Within Gnosticism, allegorical exegesis becomes “the revolutionary

instrument of its breakthrough against tradition”.78
b) Fatalism. Gnosticism takes the Hellenic emphasis on the inevitable
and inscrutable necessity of fate to an extreme, yet draws the opposite
conclusions. Insight into the fatal conditions of existence does not lead to
pious acceptance of tragedy, but to the degradation of worldly existence
and the will of overcoming this cosmos governed by heimarmene. Jonas
writes: “The unity of these two elements [of degradation and overcoming;
M.R.] is the unbound totality of Gnosticism. Yet, in the sequence of their
development, they relate to each other as preparation and enactment of
revolution”.79 The extreme fatalism of the Gnostics also explains why their
revolutionary attitude contradicts immanentization. To Christians, the
redemptive activity of the Saviour means a new, positive and permanent
historical reality; while the Gnostics, “having an ahistorical and timeless
notion of redemption, were forced to turn the pure negation of the initial
revolutionary moment into a permanent form and to exhaust themselves in
this permanent repetition, which starts anew for every individual”.80
c) The intramundane godhead(s). In the Gnostic myth, the traditional
gods turn into symbolical objects of revolutionary combat. In their eyes,
the gods are the tyrants ruling over the worldly order. As Jonas puts it, the
Gnostics support contemporary developments toward henotheism or
monotheism, and show greatest interest in the creating and legislating
sovereign god of the Jews; however, this is done only to concentrate and
direct their anti-cosmic hate and accumulated ressentiment against a single

77
Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, 219. All translations from Jonas are my
own.
78
Ibid., 222, see Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, 270.
79
Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, 226 (emphasis in original).
80
Ibid., 227n2.
102 Chapter Four

object. 81 Their firm conviction of belonging to an even higher spiritual

reality provides them with the confidence to rebel against the world and its
god. At the same time, the Gnostic fears the powers of the world-god.
Gnostic salvation lies, therefore, not in the actual confrontation with the
cosmic order, but rather in the redemptive knowledge (gnosis) of how to
secretly slip by the ruler of this world and escape into the realm of light.
The Gnostic refuses to submit to God’s legislation and jurisdiction but also
avoids open controversy. His revolutionary attitude is a “strange mix of
fear and recklessness, of guilty conscience and obstinacy, which, in the
manner of former servants, blends liberty with the dizziness of profligacy”.82
d) Gnostic morals. The Gnostic pneuma, the symbol of the co-
substantiality with the true God, functions like “the aristocratic privilege of
a new human species”.83 Therefore, the moral order of this world means
nothing to the Gnostics. The “law” is given to strengthen the tyranny of
the worldly powers and to enslave human liberty. The Gnostic resistance
to this order may take the form of libertinistic excess or ascetic
withdrawal, but it always means revolution against the creator and his
claim to rule.84
e) The Gnostic self. In classical ancient thought man is always
described as part of a greater whole, as part of the cosmos and as part of
the polis. His self is integrated in a greater unity which will survive his
personal existence. This conception necessarily and instantly had to collapse
once the Gnostic “incommensurable, acosmic self” was introduced. The
pneuma, as the symbol of the absolute self, is “the proper and central
revolutionary conception of the whole ontology”.85
f) The Gnostic god. The god of the Gnostics may at times appear as a
syncretistic construct, yet is a new and unknown god. His absolute
“worldlessness” (Weltlosigkeit) can only be expressed in negative
predicates: “unrecognizable, unnameable, unspeakable, non-understandable,
formless, boundless, and even non-being”.86 The negativity of the Gnostic
god expresses the nihilism that aims at the total suspension of reality and
the positing of a new anti-cosmic reality. The revolutionary ontology,
however, is only the final product of the annihilation of the world within
the Gnostic soul. In this context, the epiphany of Christ, experienced as an

81
Ibid., 228.
82
Ibid., 233.
83
Ibid., 234.
84
Ibid., 236.
85
Ibid., 238f.
86
Ibid., 248.
 Modernity as the Immanentization of the Eschaton 103

acosmic reality breaking into this world, is “practically nothing else but
the great projection of the revolutionarily discovered acosmic self”.87
As mentioned above, Voegelin refers to Jonas’s analysis where some
of Voegelin’s claims in fact find confirmation, as for instance in the
assertion that Gnostics tend to create secondary realities. However in the
course of his argument, Voegelin deviates significantly from Jonas in
order to establish (or rather force) a parallel between Gnosticism and
Marxism. Voegelin writes that from the Gnostic belief “that salvation from
the evil of the world is possible . . . follows the belief that the order of
being will have to be changed in a historical process” and “the belief that a
change in the order of being lies in the realm of human action”.88 These
conclusions, however, confuse Gnosticism and immanentization, and
constitute the fallacy behind the early Gnosis-thesis. This confusion allows
Voegelin to call Marxism, positivism, and various other progressivist
conceptions “Gnostic”. However, such labelling diametrically opposes the
conclusions of Jonas, whom Voegelin names as a witness, and also
contradicts the evidence of the Gnostic sources. Jonas made clear that the
Gnostic revolution has no immanent goal:

If one understands [the term “revolutionary”; M.R.] as an attitude that

posits instead of given conditions of human social life other, equally
objective conditions, thus militantly transforming the world according to a
model which, in its turn, is again a model of the world . . . , then, according
to this modern and political concept, Gnosis is anything but revolutionary.
Since it does not have the world as its goal and is neither directed against a
social order of governance (soziale Herrschaftsordnung) nor concerned
with it, it could even be called “reactionary”, insofar as it tries—through its
pronounced desistance from the world—to persuade the humans to abstain
from changing and improving their situation.89

It is unlikely that a careful reader like Voegelin could have overlooked

these contradictions. In other words, the flaws of the early Gnosis-thesis
resulted not only from a lack of empirical knowledge. The conclusion that,
under the circumstances of the Cold War and concomitant ideological
battles, Voegelin gave in to the seductions of an all-comprehensive thesis
and its polemical value can hardly be avoided.90

87
Ibid., 249.
88
Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, 297f.
89
Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, 214 (emphasis in original).
90
In this respect it was anything but helpful that Time Magazine popularized and
vulgarized Voegelin’s Gnosis-thesis in a pronounced Cold War context. The
general paranoia of the time helped to create the picture of an American society
104 Chapter Four

However, the revision of the Gnosis thesis in The Ecumenic Age is

fully compatible with the analysis of Jonas. Furthermore, it adds a new
dimension that is downplayed in the work of Jonas: the political.91 To be
sure, in a more general sense the political argument is not new. Many
scholars of Gnosticism refer to Max Weber’s thesis of the “depoliticization”
(Entpolitisierung) of urban elites as traditional carriers of political
engagement, which led to alienation from the political world and the
creation of redemptive religiosity.92 Yet, Voegelin integrates the argument

that was being infiltrated by Gnostics on all levels. On March 9, 1953, Time
Magazine published the cover story, ‘Journalism and Joachim’s Children’, a
review of Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics. Other main topics in this issue
were the Korean War and the McCarthy Committee. Unsurprisingly, the review
turned into a radical actualization of the Gnosis-thesis: ‘If Voegelin is right, his
analysis should throw light on the present and future. Journalism can apply his
theory to some areas of “current events”’. Subsequently, critics of Cold War
politics, skeptical voices about the Korean War, Russian foreign policy, the ‘U.N.
cult’, ‘hysterical intellectuals’ exaggerating the methods of the McCarthy
Committee, and the saboteurs of America’s international self-presentation were all
labeled ‘Gnostic’. Then the article went on to analyze the Gnostic world situation:
‘The world’s way out of Gnostic confusion depends largely on the U.S. Most
nations were set in their present mold by revolutions that came after the great
Gnostic triumph of the French Revolution. The American Revolution (like the
British) occurred before this turning point, and basic American institutions and
attitudes are, therefore, relatively free of Gnostic influence’. Cited from the online
archive of Time Magazine: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171
,890497-8,00.html, last accessed July 28, 2010. It is evident that serious historical
arguments can only disturb this simplified scenario.
91
Jonas makes concessions to the political argument but ultimately wants to
understand Gnosticism as the result of the ‘vital surplus of the orient’ and an
‘offensive of oriental man’ against the lethargic West. Jonas does not hide his
admiration for the contemporary cultural-historical theories of Oswald Spengler.
See Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, 67-74.
92
‘Eine Erlösungsreligiosität entwickeln sozial privilegierte Schichten eines
Volkes normalerweise dann am nachhaltigsten, wenn sie entmilitarisiert und von
der Möglichkeit oder vom Interesse an politischer Betätigung ausgeschlossen
sind’. Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Grundriss der verstehenden
Soziologie, 5th ed. (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1980), 306. Weber already explicitly
included the Gnostics in his thesis. See Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, 69f.;
and Rudolph, Die Gnosis, 308-315. Markschies, Die Gnosis, 114f., refutes Weber’s
claim. Finally, Hans Kippenberg turned Weber’s thesis into a comprehensive theory
about the emergence of redemptive religiosity, including Christianity, Gnosticism,
apocalyptic Judaism, and Shiite Islam.Hans G. Kippenberg, Die vorderasiatischen
Erlösungsreligionen in ihrem Zusammenhang mit der antiken Stadtherrschaft.
 Modernity as the Immanentization of the Eschaton 105

into the larger analysis of the religious and political conditions in the
ecumenic age.
Voegelin shows the destructive impact of imperial conquest on the
spiritual life of the conquered peoples; but he also shows that the Gnostic
solution is not a necessary one. Other reactions are possible, such as Stoic
cosmopolitanism, which aims to reconcile ecumenic rule and the Hellenic
philosophy of the polis; or actual political resistance against the ecumenic
rulers, as with the Maccabees or the Zealots.
The most important possibility in this context is what Voegelin calls
“metastatic apocalypse”. It expresses the same hatred against the ecumenic
empires, but turns to a historical solution instead of a cosmic one such as
Gnosticism. In the visions of Daniel, history is portrayed as a succession
of hostile empires. Yet, the faith of the believer is so strong that it
anticipates a future transformation of the world in a metastatic act that
implies the complete destruction of imperial reality.93 The alienation from
reality is almost as complete as in the Gnostic case, but the specific
symbolic tradition of Judaism recommends historical rather than
cosmological speculations. Again, it is this apocalyptic tradition to which
Joachim of Fiore belongs, after it had been revived and actualized in the
context of the investiture controversy. The only decisive novelty is that
under the circumstances of church reform, the metastatic transformation of
reality—the creation of a new world—is not awaited at the end of times,
but experienced in the present (in hoc tempore videmus de novo dominum
creasse celum et terram).94
Yet, anticipation of a metastatic apocalypse does not by itself account
for a revolutionary attitude. The apocalyptic prophet expects and predicts a
future transformation, but he trusts in the agency of the creator and master
of this world. Joachim of Fiore, for instance, believed in a reform of the
Christian society, not in a revolution against it. The Gnostic, on the
contrary, turns against the creator and all his creations; therefore, he has no
hope in immanent changes and defies the meaningfulness of innerworldly
action.

Heidelberger Max-Weber-Vorlesungen 1988 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,

1991); for his claims about Gnosticism, see 369-425.
93
‘When the conflict between the revealed truth of order and the actual disorder of
the times becomes too intense, the traumatic experience can induce the
transformation of the mystery into metastatic expectations’. Voegelin, The
Ecumenic Age, 304.
94
Liber de Concordia V, 21, fol. 70vb; vgl. Expositio in Apocalypsim VIII, fol.
215vb.
106 Chapter Four

As the detailed analysis of Hans Jonas shows, Gnosticism in fact does

imply a revolutionary attitude. Yet, the specific character of this attitude
remains visible only as long as it is not conflated with the immanentizing
trends of other types of religiosity, such as Joachimite eschatology.

Conclusion
We have arrived at the same conclusion as Voegelin in his
Autobiographical Reflections, when he recognized the need to revise the
Gnosis-thesis: the search for the theological origins of revolutionary
progressivism cannot refer to a single symbolic tradition. As Voegelin
rightly saw: “From the Ecumenic Age, there emerges a new type of
ecumenic humanity, which, with all its complications of meaning, reaches
as a millennial constant into the modern Western civilization”.95 However,
this new ecumenic humanity finds expression in different symbolic forms
articulating the varying experiences of the ecumenic situation. Many of
these symbolic forms—the Gnostic, apocalyptic, mystic, and ecclesiastic
types—have a long legacy in Western civilization and beyond. Admittedly,
they often merge and interact; but for the sake of historical clarity and
exactness any unnecessary confusion should be avoided, for a confusion of
symbolic articulations also means a confusion of the underlying
experiences. Therefore, the early version of Voegelin’s Gnosis-thesis was
a dead end.
As I have tried to show above, there is not just one Gnosis-thesis in the
work of Eric Voegelin; his perspective changed over time, partly because
of new developments in historical and philological scholarship, and partly
because Voegelin realized the inner contradictions of his earlier claims.
The all-comprehensive claim of the Gnosis-thesis, as it appears in the New
Science and the writings that immediately follow, must certainly be given
up. Immanentization of eschatology and Gnosticism are two radically
different things. Their commingling in the early version of the Gnosis-
thesis can only lead to confusion. Gnostics do not immanentize the
eschaton; rather, they transcendentalize it more radically than any ancient
religious group.96 The problem cannot be solved by differentiating between
transcendentalizing “ancient Gnostics” and immanentizing “modern
Gnostics”, as this would result in total arbitrariness in the application of
the term Gnosticism. If a modern theorist or movement is labelled
“Gnostic”, the claim must refer to what Gnosis or Gnosticism historically

95
Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 107.
96
See Rudolph, Die Gnosis, 312.
 Modernity as the Immanentization of the Eschaton 107

represented. Otherwise the label is nothing more than a convenient weapon

in ideological warfare. Unfortunately, Voegelin’s early version of the
Gnosis-thesis allowed, if not encouraged, such “politicization” of the
concept and its dissociation from the historical phenomenon it originally
denoted.
In his later work, however, Voegelin realized the shortcomings of the
Gnosis-thesis and tried to correct them. The Ecumenic Age provides a
convincing, sophisticated, and adequate analysis of ancient Gnosticism. It
accounts for its psychological and spiritual characteristics, as well as
addressing its historical and political context. It does justice to the sources
and the contemporary scholarship. Yet its most significant discovery is the
insight that the theological origins of modernity are neither simply
Gnostic, nor simply apocalyptic, nor simply Christian, but can be traced
back to various innovative trends within the vibrant religiosity of the
ecumenic age. Voegelin was not granted the time to re-evaluate the impact
of Gnosticism on modernity, applying his new, historically grounded
understanding of the Gnostic phenomenon. This work remains to be done,
and promises interesting results.97

97
There are a few interesting remarks in the last and unfinished fifth volume of
Order and History, In Search of Order, which show that Voegelin continues to
identify Gnostic elements in modernity, but now clearly keeps the Gnostic,
apocalyptic, and mystic symbolic forms separate. Eric Voegelin, Order and
History, Volume V: In Search of Order, vol. 18 of The Collected Works of Eric
Voegelin, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2000),
47f. and 78. A remarkable attempt to interpret the Cold War as a Gnostic event has
been made by Stefan Rossbach. Except for the analysis of Cold War itself, his
book clearly follows the lead of Voegelin, but takes the more recent literature into
consideration. Stefan Rossbach, Gnostic Wars: The Cold War in the Context of a
History of Western Spirituality (Edinburgh: Edinburg University Press, 1999).
 CHAPTER FIVE

A DISTURBANCE IN BEING:
THE IDEA OF REVOLUTION IN HISTORY

THOMAS HOLLWECK

I
Among the regular lecture courses Eric Voegelin gave during his
tenure at the University of Munich, there was always a course on
revolution. Voegelin used to introduce the topic by pointing out that
political institutions, a major topic of political science, are essentially
forms of human conduct that remain relatively stable over a certain length
of time. Yet a philosophical science of order and disorder cannot be
limited merely to the phenomena of order—and that is what political
institutions generally are—but must pay at least equal attention to the
“class of phenomena in motion and change”, i.e., to the “infinitely
differentiated field of social and historical processes, the field of the
foundation, maturation, and decline, of the reform and revolution, and of
the collapse of institutions”. 1 If one wants to examine, therefore, the
phenomenon of revolution, one should approach it as a manifestation of
the tension between order and disorder, perfection and imperfection,
duration and change in history, always being mindful of the fact that it is
the experience of this tension that lies at the basis all human societies and
that is intimately connected with the process of what Voegelin has called

1
This formulation appeared in Voegelin’s 1964 essay ‘Der Mensch in Gesellschaft
und Geschichte’ (‘Man in Society and History’), at approximately the same time as
the lectures on revolution. Cf. Published Essays 1953-1965, vol. 11 of The
Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2000), 194.
 A Disturbance in Being: The Idea of Revolution in History 109

“the articulation of society”, “the process in which human beings form

themselves into a society for action’.2
It was only in the late eighteenth century, in the American and French
Revolutions, that the idea of a completely new order of society became
associated with the idea of revolution as expressed in the motto that
appears on the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States: “Novus
ordo seclorum”. It was only in the wake of these modern revolutions that
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy could formulate his definition of the “genuine
revolution”, as he did in his book Die europäischen Revolutionen of 1931,
where he writes:

When we speak about revolution in this book we refer to only the kind that
has sought to introduce once and for all a new principle of life into world
history, in short a total turning-about (‘eine Totalumwälzung’). According
to this conception, revolts and coup d’états are to be excluded, even if they
are called “revolution”.3

The German word Totalumwälzung here is a more or less literal

translation of the word “revolution”, and even though this restriction of the
term to its Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment meaning excludes a
variety of phenomena of political regime change, which would fit a
political scientist’s understanding of revolution, Rosenstock-Huessy
correctly identifies the specifically “modern” understanding of change, one
that distinguishes between gradual adaptation and alteration of institutions,
called “reform”, and a fundamental transformation of man and society,
both externally and internally, that dominated the imagination of political
movements in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the West and
would eventually spread throughout the world in the latter part of the
twentieth century. Thus, in the common contemporary consciousness, the
idea of what Rosenstock-Huessy called a Totalumwälzung has become the
perspective from which we interpret not just the recent past but history as
far back as the beginning of the appropriately labeled “Neolithic

2
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics; in Modernity Without Restraint: The
Political Religions; The New Science of Politics; and Science, Politics and
Gnosticism, vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. Manfred
Henningsen, 117.
3
‘Wenn wir aber in diesem Buche von Revolution reden, so meinen wir nur eine
solche, die ein für allemal ein neues Lebensprinzip in die Weltgeschichte hat
einführen wollen, also eine Totalumwälzung. Darnach scheiden Revolten und
Putsche aus, auch wenn sie Revolution heißen’. Eugen Rosenstock, Die
europäischen Revolutionen. Volkscharaktere und Staatenbildung (Jena: Eugen
Diederichs Verlag, 1931), 5 (my translation).
110 Chapter Five

Revolution” that took place between 10,000 and 5,000 B.C.E. In the light
of the millennial transformation brought about by the Neolithic
Revolution, the great political revolutions of modernity are of course mere
seconds on the clock of history that appear as incomplete, inconclusive
events, or more or less haphazard outbursts of human willfulness. “We
assume that revolutions happen because they are planned”, writes
Rosenstock-Huessy in the revised American edition of the earlier book,
before stating authoritatively: “But this supposition is without foundation
in reality. Announced revolutions do not happen”. 4 It may well be that
behind this observation we will find an essential characteristic of
revolution, which is at the same time its fundamental mystery: the
unpredictable course of all great revolutions, their apparent irrationality,
and the elusiveness of their ultimate telos, which usually runs counter to
all the stated goals of those who initially set out to “make revolution”. I
will, therefore, attempt to show in this paper that Rosenstock-Huessy’s
observation may point us in a new direction of understanding revolution,
by openly linking it to the spiritual dimension of human participation in
the process of reality as the experienced tension between order and
disorder. His vision of a planetary fusion of the great spiritual religions,
after the series of “total revolutions” of the second millennium had reached
their climax in the two World Wars and the Russian Revolution, stands as
testimony to the spiritual power embedded in even the most violent
outbursts in history.
Even a skeptic like the Oxford political philosopher and author John
Gray affirms this spiritual aspect of revolution in his recent critique of the
apocalyptic political religions that have added additional misery to our
lives on all continents over the past century when he writes in Black Mass:
“The Enlightenment ideologies of the past centuries were largely spilt
theology. The history of the past century is not a tale of secular advance,
as bien-pensants of Right and Left like to think. The Bolshevik and Nazi
seizures of power were faith-based upheavals just as much as the
Ayatollah Khomeini’s theocratic insurrection in Iran. The very idea of
revolution as a transforming event in history is owed to religion. Modern
revolutionary movements are a continuation of religion by other means”.5
John Gray’s succinct, if sweeping formulation of the connection between
revolution and religion leads straight into the issue to be discussed in this
essay. I will try to state the issue as concisely as possible: Revolutions

4
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution. Autobiography of Western Man
(Norwich, VT: Argo Books, 1969), 128.
5
John Gray, Black Mass. Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New
York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007), 2.
 A Disturbance in Being: The Idea of Revolution in History 111

originate in the mystical visions of individual human beings who

experience the tension between order and disorder more intensely than
their contemporaries with whom they share this tension in their concrete
societies. Historically, such intense experiences of the tension between
order and disorder occurred for the first time in those societies that are
commonly referred to as “Axial Civilizations”. These experiences led, to
use S. N. Eisenstadt’s characterization, to

conceptions of a chasm between the transcendental and the mundane . . .

[that] gave rise to attempts to reconstruct the mundane-human personality
and the socio-political and economic order according to the appropriate
transcendental vision, to the principles of the higher ontological order
formulated in religious, metaphysical and/or ethical terms, or in other
words to implement some aspect of such vision in the mundane world.6

I am letting Eisenstadt state the issue here, not because I think he states
it better than Eric Voegelin has done in Order and History and related
works, but because Eisenstadt formulates the problem specifically in the
context of revolution. Eisenstadt’s “Axial hypothesis” of the origins of
revolution is based on the premise that, in the civilizations to which we
refer as “Axial”, “[t]he political order as one of the central loci of the
mundane order was usually conceived as lower than the transcendental
visions and had to be reconstituted according to the precepts of the latter”
and that therefore fundamental changes in the political realm are ushered
in by certain “transcendental visions”, so that what we call “revolution” is
inseparable from the tension between the political and the transcendent. In
his discussion of fundamentalism, sectarianism and revolution, Eisenstadt
goes as far as calling “heterodox sectarian movements . . . a central
component of the crystallization of modernity in Europe, above all in the
Great Revolutions”. 7 Viewed in this light, revolutions constitute the
essence of modernity because they are the culmination points of the
“heterodox potentials” that were engendered by the cultures of the Axial
Age, especially those cultures “in which the political arena was seen as the
ultimate area for the realization of transcendental visions of salvation”.8
While the sociologist’s conceptual language of the “heterodox
potential” correctly addresses the issue that increasingly complex societies

6
S. N. Eisenstadt, The Great Revolutions and the Civilizations of Modernity
(Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2006), 45.
7
S. N. Eisenstadt, Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution. The Jacobin
Dimension of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3.
8
Eisenstadt, The Great Revolutions, 5.
112 Chapter Five

enable the rise of heterodox or antinomian groups, Eisenstadt’s central

thesis implies that the origin of revolution lies in the possibility of
alternative conceptions of order comprising the entire spectrum of reality,
which originate with segments of society that are able to distance
themselves from the institutional structures of the social order in which
they have previously participated. Such alternative conceptions of order
did not arise everywhere where the external conditions were favorable, as
the example of Egypt shows, and they did not arise all at precisely the
same time—which is one reason why we are rather generous in the dating
of the Axial Age—but we can clearly discern a growing momentum
toward a “distinction between ultimate and derivative reality (or between
transcendental and mundane dimensions, to use a more controversial
formulation)”, as one of Eisenstadt’s authorities, Johan Arnason, has
formulated it.9 What is important about Eisenstadt’s analysis in the present
context is its clear understanding that what he calls the Great Revolutions
are not mere regime changes but are tied to “distinct cosmological visions”
and thus become “kernels of distinct civilizations”. If the defining element
of these new revolutionary processes is “the emergence and
institutionalization of the new basic ontological conceptions of a chasm
between the transcendental and mundane orders”, the question must be
asked who the individuals and groups are that are able to discern such a
chasm in the order of reality, living, as they are, in cosmological societies
(Voegelin) ordered in analogy with the visible order of the divine.
Eisenstadt proposes the idea that they were “small groups of autonomous,
relatively unattached ‘intellectuals’ (a new social element at the time)” and
that they were able to cause their visions of order to become “the
predominant orientations of both the ruling elites as well as of many
secondary elites”. 10 The discovery of the “chasm” entails of course the
idea that there is an inherent “ontological” hierarchy of order, that there
are “higher” and “lower” levels of reality, and the “mundane” order
becomes the symbol for those areas of reality in which most of that which
we may call “the political” takes place, with all its imperfections resulting
from the human libido dominandi that is just as strong in cosmological
societies as it is in the more differentiated societies of the post-Axial Age.
Ultimately, the discovery of the chasm will lead to the call for a
“reconstruction” of the incomplete order, Eisenstadt concludes, leaving
open the question whether such a call would issue from the groups of
“intellectuals” or from any of the elites that have adopted the new

9
Eisenstadt, The Great Revolutions, 44.
10
Eisenstadt, Fundamentalism, Sectarianism, and Revolution, 4.
 A Disturbance in Being: The Idea of Revolution in History 113

conceptions of order. Yet the origins of the “salvational” movements of

reconstruction, to follow Eisenstadt’s use of the Weberian term, remain
unexplained as long as we content ourselves with a sociological description
of these processes as social phenomena, instead of hermeneutically
examining their meaning as symbolizations of fundamental experiences of
the order of reality.

II
For a more complete understanding of the genuinely “revolutionary”
changes that occurred during the “Axial Age’ and have come full circle in
what we call “modernity”, we must go beyond the theoretical
accomplishments of Eisenstadt and the neo-Weberians and focus instead
on the meaning of these changes as it was understood by those whose
experiences of reality engendered the very symbolizations that are being
discussed here. What is needed is the theoretical approach formulated by
Eric Voegelin in his “Configurations of History”, and it will be helpful
present to the concept of “configuration” in Voegelin’s own words:

Configuration refers to more than the patterns that are observable in

history, such as the sequences of institutions. In various high civilizations
we know that we begin with certain types of political organization, usually
of a monarchical or an aristocratic type, and that democratic types always
come later in the course of a civilization. Such sequences would be patterns
that can be empirically observed. But this is not all, because conceptions of
order in a civilization are always accompanied by the self-interpretation of
that order as meaningful; that is, the persons living in an order have
opinions about the particular meaning that order has. In this sense, self-
interpretation is always part of the reality which we live. This is the reality
of order, of political order, or as we might say, of history. A configuration
considers all of these aspects, not only the institutional aspects, but also the
self-interpretations—the opinions expressed concerning meaning. 11

Concretely speaking, Voegelin’s response to the processes described

by Eisenstadt became the story of Order and History, which primarily
relied on the written testimony of those who were both instigators and
witnesses of revolutionary changes in which the chasm between the order
of society and the invisible divine source of order was gradually
articulated to its fullness. The Axial Age, Voegelin persuasively argued,

11
Eric Voegelin, ‘Configurations of History’, in Published Essays, 1966-1985, vol.
12, of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. Ellis Sandoz (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 97.
114 Chapter Five

was in reality the “Ecumenic Age”, a time period in global history during
which local “cosmological” societies were violently absorbed into large
empires whose leaders intended them to become the organizational forms
of known humanity. At the same time, the symbolic orders of the prevalent
cosmological societies, as well as the new ecumenic orders, were
subjected to fundamental critique, not by “autonomous, unattached
intellectuals” but by spiritual men who, within the cultural context of their
respective societies, understood the new insights they received into the
order of reality as representative not only of their local culture and society
but of humanity as a whole. These spiritual men may appear in the role of
a leader of a small tribe subjected to the rule of an Egyptian Pharaoh, as
prophets in times of political upheaval, as Athenian philosophers, as
Indian princes, or as Chinese sages, but they all saw themselves, and were
seen by others, as representatives of new universal orders that challenged
everything that came before. Thus they more or less unwittingly became
elements of disorder in their respective societies, because theirs were
insights into the “true order, which is different from the established order.
Thus, every new insight into order is the beginning of a revolution of more
or less considerable dimensions”.12 For Voegelin, the configurations that
constitute history are the expression of man’s awareness that he
participates in events which are part of his existence and are memorable
as, to use Voegelin’s phrase, “disturbances in being”. It is no accident that
he used this phrase repeatedly in his unpublished introductory chapter
“What is History?” intended for The Ecumenic Age, his response to the
theoretical flaws that in his opinion characterized the notion of the “Axial
Age”. Thus, the “elements of disorder” in society are at the same time
ontological events, according to Voegelin, “disturbances in being” that
manifest themselves both in the differentiations of the mythical cosmos
into a “world’ and a “world-transcendent God” and in the power drives of
individuals like Alexander and Caesar culminating in the desire to
establish Ecumenic empires.13

12
Ibid., 112.
13
Voegelin’s actual formulation of the problem in ‘What is History?’ deserves to
be quoted in full here: ‘In this primary sphere [where a present is constituted as a
past to be remembered in the future] originate the experiences that may pass
through various phases of reflective clarification before they culminate in an act of
historiography. Obviously, this description of the phenomenon is couched in the
same language as the earlier description of an experience of transcendence. At the
beginning again there is something that only can be called a disturbance in being
(my emphasis) preceding all reflective dissociation; again there follow phases of
reflection in which, from an indistinct matrix of involvement, man is released into
 A Disturbance in Being: The Idea of Revolution in History 115

If we now look at Eisenstadt’s revolution thesis in the light of

Voegelin’s analysis, an analysis that has yet to be fully understood in all
its consequences, we are able to restate it without, I believe, falsifying its
intended meaning: During the time period between 800 B.C.E. and 600
C.E., let’s call it an “adjusted” Axial Age, the cosmological cultures of
Southern Europe, the Near East, India and China gave rise to spiritual
movements that had their source in the experiences of men who articulated
a profound sense of dissatisfaction with the traditional means of mediating
the spiritual order underlying the structure of their respective societies and
who embarked on their own searches for a more fundamental, absolute
source of order than the one that had been mediated by the traditional
elites. At the core of these searches we find what Benjamin I. Schwartz has
aptly called “a pathos of negation and constraint vis-à-vis the forces of
human pride and passion”.14 As stated earlier, the carriers of these visions
became founders of new elites of prophets, ascetics, philosophers, and
scholars in competition with the cosmological elites. It is important to
understand that the processes being discussed here occur in what Voegelin
appropriately calls the “primary experience of the cosmos”. Political
society is symbolized as a complex network of cosmic analogies, “ordered
by the same forces of being that order the cosmos, and cosmic
analogies”,15 analogies that are based on the notion that

the world, in the physical sense, and with it the gods, kings, and societies
are conceived as consubstantial partners in a cosmos that embraces them
all without being identical with any one of them.16

his search of the meaning that was enclosed in the encounter—in this case, into his
search of what is truly memorable about the disturbance—until the movement
culminates in an act in which man faces events as the history that occurs to him.
This parallelism of formulation, which will appear presently, is not an accident;
rather, it indicates the structure of transcendence in history’. Eric Voegelin, ‘What
is History?’ in What Is History? And Other Late Unpublished Writings, vol. 28 of
The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. Thomas A. Hollweck and Paul
Caringella (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), 10.
14
Benjamin I. Schwartz, ‘The Age of Transcendence’, in Daedalus 104 (2) (Spring
1975), 5.
15
Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Volume I: Israel and Revelation, vol. 14 of
The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. Maurice P. Hogan (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 2001), 78.
16
Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Volume IV: The Ecumenic Age, vol. 17 of The
Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. Michael Franz (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2000), 122.
116 Chapter Five

This order must be preserved and periodically renewed through

symbolic rituals in order to counteract the effects of time and the
inevitable aging and decay wrought by time, symbolic actions that Mircea
Eliade called “statisation du devenir”, and in which a return to the pristine
order of the cosmogonic origins is reenacted in regular periodic intervals,
such as New Year Festivals and similar symbolic rituals. The notion that
“total revolutions” are sometimes needed to ensure a return to a pristine
cosmogonic beginning, that a complete and radical renovation is at times
the only cure for what is perceived as advanced social and political decay,
thus appears to be the logical response to the ever present problem of
disorder, a response that appears to have perennial validity, occurring long
after the cosmological societies have been replaced by the ecumenic
empires and the later political formations that reach right into our modern
age.
For a theory of revolution, an understanding of the constant presence of
the primary experience of the cosmos is of the greatest importance,
precisely because the breakthroughs of the Axial Age occurred within the
symbolic context of this primary experience in which the tension between
order and disorder has remained alive as an antidote to the great visions of
overcoming this tension that marked the spiritual religions born during the
Axial Age. While Voegelin himself never developed a systematic theory
of revolution, he provided us with enough material evidence to improve on
Eisenstadt’s model. The central point of Voegelin’s analysis of the
cosmological style of truth is to be found in his observation that there are
historical forces that pose existential threats to the cosmological order
strong enough to ultimately destroy faith in this order and lead to the
search for a ground of order beyond the potentially endangered cosmos
itself. Let me stress, though, that there is no direct causal relationship
between the anxiety and bewilderment that will follow disruptive
pragmatic events. The discovery of a rift in the analogical structure of the
cosmos may just result in alienation and despair, whereas basic changes in
the cosmological style of truth

can come only through noetic advances that let more compact symbols
appear inadequate in the light of more differentiated experiences of reality
and their symbolization.17

It is not too far-fetched, in my opinion, to argue that the key point of

Voegelin’s philosophy of order is at the same time a philosophy of
revolution, for Voegelin does not content himself with the observation that

17
Cf. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 121.
 A Disturbance in Being: The Idea of Revolution in History 117

the discovery of the chasm between the mundane and transmundane order
takes place during roughly the time period of the Axial Age, but shows
instead that the discovery of a transcendent ground of reality is, as it were,
preformed in the primary experience itself, specifically, the experience of
“the tension of existence out of nonexistence”. What is particularly
important to Voegelin’s analysis in the context of revolution is his
argument that the cosmological style of truth is “fundamentally unstable”
because it is not able to adequately deal with the tension between existence
and non-existence. In short, Voegelin argues, “the pressure of the tension
in reality . . . tends to disrupt the ordered whole of intracosmic things” and
eventually the cosmic reality is perceived as “too much existent to function
as the non-existent ground of reality”.18
This may sound far too abstract to the reader who is used to regard
changes in the religious and philosophical interpretation of reality as a
kind of intellectual pastime that is practiced by elites of one kind or
another, instead of seriously entertaining the possibility that spiritual
breakthroughs signify not only a change within phenomenal reality but
have an ontological dimension that not only changes man’s perception of
reality but reality itself. Voegelin coined the term “leap in being” to denote
this aspect of a qualitative change in reality as a whole. A theory of
revolution has to be based on an understanding that the initial insights
leading to what Voegelin calls the “crack” in the cosmological style
originate in the consciousness of concrete human beings who in turn may
share them with others, thus forming the kind of groups that have been
referred to as the “new elites”. But what concrete form the articulations of
the new insights will take, whether they will motivate their spiritual and
intellectual carriers to remain deliberately apolitical or take the opposite
path of actively engaging in the societies of which they are part and thus
precipitate social changes, or, as in the case of the ancient apocalyptic
movements, prepare the ground for expectations of divine intercession in
reality, this is precisely the stuff “history” is made of. Yet the cosmic
primary experience will continue in the sphere of popular religiosity, even
after it has ceased to be the motivating force in the further development of
the new elites. It is from this rift that the rich history of the great
civilizations issues, bringing forth the new types of movements and leaders
who again and again seek to translate their visions into the global
expansion of empires during the Ecumenic Age, or into the founding of
apocalyptic and Gnostic communities, and ultimately the call for the kind
of fundamental renovation that formed the revolutionary ferment in

18
Ibid., 127.
118 Chapter Five

European civilization from the late Middle Ages into the twentieth
century.
I have obviously painted with a broad brush here, but it was important
to show that what happened during the Axial Age was precisely what
Voegelin in his essay on the discovery of historiography called
“disturbances in being”, where the human participation in the events that
constitute reality is clearly seen for the first time. But does Voegelin’s
ontological language provide us with the right hermeneutic tools to
understand what is really happening in the Axial Age, or the “Age of
Transcendence” as Benjamin Schwartz called it in his keynote address to
the 1973 Daedalus conference? When Schwartz spoke of “some common
underlying impulse in all these “axial” movements, [that] might be called
the strain towards transcendence”, 19 was he talking about the same
“disturbance in being’ “caused by the rise and expansion of empire”
(Voegelin)? In short, we must further pursue the question of what changed
in the intellectual and spiritual make-up of Axial Age human beings and
their societies, and ultimately entire civilizations, if we want to penetrate
to the ontological roots of such phenomena as the rise of historiography
and the discovery of history forming the basis for the idea of a total
revolution of not just society but the human beings themselves that
constitute society. For the fact that a change did indeed take place is
something cultural sociologists, cultural historians like Eisenstadt and
Schwartz, and political philosophers like Voegelin agree on.
Let us recapitulate what we have seen so far: The empirical evidence
that there did in fact occur fundamental intellectual and spiritual
breakthroughs during the Axial Age is no longer questioned today. What
continues to be a matter of debate is the interpretation of the phenomena
associated with these breakthroughs. But the phenomena which support a
hermeneutics of transcendence and which are introduced as “proof” of the
“spiritual” nature of historic movements of social and political
transformation, i.e., the Great Revolutions, must also not be used
indiscriminately to help shore up modern political theologies of revolution,
as we find them for instance in Ernst Bloch’s Prinzip Hoffnung (The
Principle of Hope) and his early book on the leader of the peasant revolt in
sixteenth century Germany, Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution
(1921). However, there is an important set of questions connected with the
breakthroughs of the Axial Age that have not been dealt with
systematically by cultural sociologists and historians, but which in my
opinion are absolutely central to a fuller understanding of the relationship

19
Schwartz, ‘The Age of Transcendence’, 3.
 A Disturbance in Being: The Idea of Revolution in History 119

between spiritual breakthroughs and revolution. They can, as I see it, only
be approached from the vantage point of a hermeneutics that is
“determined by the interplay between the cognitive exploration of the
phenomena of the experiential world as revealed in the multiple modes of
human self-explication and the reflexive analysis of human existence”, as
Jürgen Gebhardt has characterized the central achievement of Eric
Voegelin’s geisteswissenschaftliche hermeneutics. 20 While the cognitive
aspects of the relationship between Axial Age and Revolution have been
clearly discerned by scholars like Eisenstadt and Schwartz and the post-
Weberian sociological orientation they represent, the existential dimension
of their findings belongs within the domain of a comprehensive philosophy
of order in which meditative self-reflection enables the scholar to see the
connection between public symbolic manifestations of the transcendental
breakthroughs and their existential location in the consciousness of the
persons to whom these experiences occur. As Gebhardt formulates it in the
aforementioned paper:

The meditative experience is constitutive for human experience insofar it

illuminates the cognitive and existential center of human personality from
which meaningful webs of socio-political and symbolic forms radiate into
the human realm.

It is with this hermeneutics in mind that I began to see that Voegelin’s

notion of “disturbances in being”, which he applied to his interpretation of
the connection between the huge historical disturbances caused by the
appearance of “Ecumenic empires” in a world formerly constituted by
cosmological empires and tribal societies and the emergence of
historiography in China, Hellas, and Israel, needs to be more broadly
understood as the Birth of History, even if the experience of history is at
first restricted to the small society of Israel from which it radiated over
more than half a millennium into the fabric of the societies that succeeded
the Roman Empire in the West.
The heuristic advantage of Voegelin’s theoretical concept of the
“Ecumenic Age” over the modified “Axial Age”, which Eisenstadt and
others employ in their search for the origins of revolution, is that it points
to the libidinous aspect in the experience of transcendence that may lead to
the eventual destruction of the cosmological empires by opening the door
to a potentially radical dissociation of power and “spirit” that was
unimaginable in tribal and cosmological societies. What the concept of the

20
Cf. Jürgen Gebhardt, ‘Hermeneutics and Political Theory’, paper presented at the
Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 2002.
120 Chapter Five

“Ecumenic Age” enables Voegelin to see, and what eludes the

representatives of cultural sociology, is succinctly formulated in “What is
History” within the context of a discussion of the disintegration of the
primary cosmological experience in Hellas and the conflict between
sophists and philosophers. The breakdown of the old order, he remarks
there, does not necessarily lead to a more desirable order but could have
some rather unforeseen effects.

The experience of transcendence, to be sure, exacts a new interpretation of

being, but it is by no means certain what form this interpretation will
assume once the primary experience of the cosmos has been discredited. It
may assume the philosophic form, which interprets the totality of being
compactly comprehended in the primary experience, but it may also
assume various defective forms according to the willful preferences of the
interpreters for this and that segment of reality.21

Voegelin’s eye for the potential dangers of the experiences of

transcendence informs his entire political philosophy, with its theoretical
center in the permanent conflict between order and disorder. Once man
consciously becomes “the interpreter of being”, as Voegelin calls it, he is
empowered to see himself “as the source, if not of order, then at least the
conception of order”, and this newly gained autonomy “can be used in the
service of truth as well as untruth”. Here comes the decisive statement:
“Hence, in the new state of emancipation, there are as many conceptions
of order possible as there are drives and desires in the psyche apt to harden
into centers for organizing them”.22 The fact that in this post-cosmological
consciousness the question of right order is always in danger of becoming
a matter of opinion will have the consequence that “[h]ighly specialized
desires, when made the organizational center, will cause severe disturbances
in the economy of the psyche; moreover, they will cause a man and his
followers to be maladjusted to the exigencies of existence in the world.
Cases in point are certain apocalyptic and Gnostic sects that indulge their
desire for redemptions from the evils of this world to the point of
expecting the end of the world to be near, and accordingly neglect to
provide for the permanent order of man in society”.23
Taken by themselves these “disturbances in the economy of the
psyche’ do not yet have the decisive revolutionary ingredient that may
ultimately lead to the desire to affect a fundamental change in the structure

21
Voegelin, ‘What Is History?’, 30.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid., 30f.
 A Disturbance in Being: The Idea of Revolution in History 121

of man and society that we associate with the modern idea of revolution.
Nor does Voegelin mention “revolution” in his essay even once. Instead,
he focuses on the experiences of transcendence, because these experiences
form the basis of the configurations of history. This requires a brief
explanation because it is central to Voegelin’s “philosophy of history”, to
use this term with all due caution. While Voegelin’s account of spiritual
outbursts is widely known, the link between individual outbursts and the
social field in which they occur, and which in turn is constituted by such
outbursts, has not received the same attention, mainly because Voegelin
was always reluctant to argue for any direct causal relationship. He does,
however, explore the issue in “What Is History?” where he observes that
the “movement in a man’s soul, passing through phases of confusion and
of seeking preliminary to the act of transcendence” has parallels in a
movement in society that passes through similar phases, until ultimately
“[m]ankind as a whole tends to become the subject of the movement that
breaks forth in the spiritual outbursts”.24 Yet Voegelin makes it also quite
clear that the expansion of the movement in the soul of a concrete human
being into “social processes in which an indefinite number of persons and
even whole societies participated” should be understood “metaphorically”
rather than as observable phenomena.

Such metaphors, by which the experience is made to include the process of

which it is a part, are useful to bring the difficulties to attention, but they
obviously are no theoretical solution.25

The reason for Voegelin’s terminological restraint lies precisely in the

transcendent nature of the spiritual outburst, for as phenomena occurring
in space and time these movements have a “double constitution” and are
thus objectified historical phenomena, i.e., immanent objects or, as
Voegelin calls them, “a secondary stratum in the phenomenon that as a
whole is the expressive response to an encounter. The primary stratum,
since it is the carrier of the index transcendence, shall be called the
transcendent stratum”. 26 Voegelin calls this “transcendent stratum” the
“primary stratum” because it is indicative of “the realization of eternal
being in time’ occurring “in a manifold of phenomena through the whole
breadth of mankind at any given time”, a manifold that “moves through
time indefinitely into the future”. Thus Voegelin arrives at his definition of
history: “This process of phenomena in breadth and time we shall call

24
Cf. ibid., 33f.
25
Ibid,, 34.
26
Ibid., 35.
122 Chapter Five

history”.27 To enter into the complex philosophical questions associated

with this understanding of history requires a separate analysis. I have to
confine myself here to the consequences Voegelin’s view of history has
for a theory of revolution.
His theory takes its point of departure from the ineluctable fact that the
experience of transcendence signifies an “ontic event”. 28 It is for this
reason, and this reason alone, that occurrences that constitute history—and
revolutions in the initially stated sense of “total revolutions” are among
such occurrences—are themselves ontic events, disturbances in being that
manifest themselves on the phenomenal level. To say it in Voegelin’s own
words:

In general, one may say that an indefinite range of events belonging to the
economic, social governmental, intellectual, and spiritual order of society
can acquire historical relevance because closely or distantly—as causes or
effects, as social settings, as conditions or consequences—they are related
to the central phenomenon, that is, to the experience of transcendence.29

It is in the concluding reflections of “What Is History?” that Voegelin

explicitly warns against treating the “spiritual outbursts” as mere
phenomena in time when they are to be understood philosophically as
“part of the movement by which eternal being realizes itself in time”,
giving with one hand what he takes away with the other when he tells his
reader that symbolic phrases such as “eternal-being-realizing-itself-in-
time” are understood as a “unit of meaning” and not as a quasi-scientific
description of an observable process in time. To quote his precise warning
which takes on the form of a kind of “negative theology”:

There is no reality called “being” that once would exist in the medium of
eternity and, after its realization, in the medium of time; nor is there an
“eternal being” that suddenly would appear as an object in time; nor is
there a “temporal being” that would be transfigured by the realization and
acquire the attribute of eternity; nor are there media of time and eternity
with objects flitting from the one to the other. To advance these negative
propositions is eminently necessary, considering that in the wake of
spiritual outbursts there arise movements of world-historic impact that
operate precisely with fallacies of the adumbrated type. Not only will the
terms of the ontic event, as well as the tension between the terms, be
objectified but even the objects will be personified to become the dramatis

27
Ibid.
28
Ibid., 49.
29
Ibid., 36.
 A Disturbance in Being: The Idea of Revolution in History 123

personae of a new type of myth. Moreover, the fallacious constructions are

more than a matter of theoretical error; they are undertaken for the purpose
of transposing the disturbance in being into the sphere of human action.30

In my estimate, Voegelin’s hermeneutics of consciousness and its

resulting analysis of movement in history is a clear advance over the
existing theoretical models of Eisenstadt and the neo-Weberian cultural
sociology when it comes to explaining the sources of revolution in post-
Axial history. For Voegelin the objectification of the symbols of
transcendence is an act of willful transformation “for the purpose of
transposing the disturbance in being into the sphere of human action”. As
the spiritual outbursts, which are ontic events, become objects of human
manipulation as they give rise to social movements, they at the same time
give rise to a new type of myth in which the symbols turned objects
become the dramatis personae. Such acts of willful transformation—and
this is of the greatest importance to our understanding of modern
revolutions—can be directed toward a perfect state of eternity, i.e.,
“classic” apocalyptic and Gnostic myths, or “conversely, a perfect being
beyond time can be made to enter time”, i.e., modern revolution.31 To sum
it up: “The imaginary operation thus can perfect being either by freeing
temporal being from its worldly prison or by bringing eternal perfection to
temporal being within the world”.32 I will return to the consequences of
this transformation of ontic events into social action in the next section of
this essay.

III
In European history the later Middle Ages became the social
battleground where the “imaginary operation” played out and where its
dual possibilities were never quite resolved. Revolution during the Axial
Age had remained one of several possible directions which the experience
of transcendence could take, rather than an actual social manifestation of
this kind of experience, because the disturbances in being were still largely
experienced as cosmic disturbances and the human role in this cosmic
drama could only be played as the prophetic anticipation of divine
irruption into “pragmatic history” in the apocalyptic movements: as the
attentive waiting for the call of the alien God which would liberate the soul
from the demiurgic prison, or as the noetic love of wisdom that would

30
Ibid., 50.
31
Ibid., 51.
32
Ibid.
124 Chapter Five

establish a harmonious order of the soul and society, and, last but not least,
as the soul’s exodus in the Augustinian amor dei. The possibility that there
might be a more active, more radical role the soul could play in the cosmic
drama by transforming the messianic apocalypse of the Kingdom of God
into the “apocalypse of the soul”, to use von Balthasar’s term, required one
additional step that separates the activist pneumatics from their apocalyptic
and Gnostic brothers and sisters in the spirit. This step, closely related to
the Gnostic idea of the soul as the divine spark that needs to be liberated
from its bodily prison, is taken when the Gnostic myth of the “fall in the
divinity” loses its explanatory appeal and when the soul no longer sees
itself as trapped in the demiurgic prison, but when the accent is shifted to
the divine substance in man and its identity with the divine creative
ground. Soon this experience of a more than virtual identity becomes so
strong that it will have consequences not just for the person who
experiences it but also for the society of which this “divine” person is a
part. What is at issue is inherent in the initial differentiation of the cosmic
primary experience into the “indices’ “world’ and “God”, and with it the
question of how the divine remains present in the world that is no longer
the divine cosmos. In the language of mystical philosophy: How does the
divine incarnate itself after it has become “transcendent”? And what does
this mean for the representation of transcendent truth in human sphere of
political society?
Voegelin, in what can only be called a masterpiece of theological
thinking, has provided us with a fascinating reading of the question of the
Unknown God and the Incarnation. At the end of the German version of
“The Gospel and Culture”, which he presented as a lecture in Munich in
October 1970,33 Voegelin—perhaps motivated by the political tensions in
post-1968 Germany—summed up the potential problems that could arise
in the wake of the differentiation of the “Unknown God” from the cosmic
gods that began in Israel and that became a problem for Plato in the
Phaedrus, and even more so in Christianity. Since God has become extra-
cosmic but is still experienced as connected to the cosmos as the creator of
the world in Judaism and Christianity, He is “eminently present in man in
the incarnation”. But, not unexpectedly, this eminent presence of God in
man can lead to all sorts of derailments, so that man’s existence by virtue
of his relationship to the extra-cosmic God can itself become an extra-

33
The Eric-Voegelin-Archiv at the Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für Politikwissenschaft,
University of Munich, issued the lecture as part of 2 CD set ‘Immer gleich weit
entfernt von Gott’. There exists no printed version of this lecture, which condenses
the American original, in Voegelin, Published Essays, 1966-1985, 172-212, but
places greater emphasis on the aspect of magic violence.
 A Disturbance in Being: The Idea of Revolution in History 125

cosmic existence, while still being anchored in the physical world. In other
words, the classic Gnostic myth of the divine pneuma in man that is
imprisoned in the demiurgic cosmos and has to be awakened by the call of
the Alien God to be reunited with the transmundane pneuma no longer
satisfies the activist desire to liberate the worldly prison rather than escape
from it. This merger of the radical a-cosmism or anti-cosmism of “classic”
Gnosis with the ever-present yearning for incarnation has tremendous
significance for our understanding of revolution: man in his imagined
extra-cosmic existence now experiences the urge to reshape the cosmos
through metastatic action so that the cosmos conforms to man’s imagined
extra-cosmic existence. The world has to be recreated to reflect the extra-
cosmic perfection of the man-god for whom the truth of the divine
presence of the gospel has now become the counter-truth of his own extra-
cosmic existence. As Voegelin emphasizes, while the Christian symbolism
of the Unknown God is not inherently Gnostic, Christianity in the gospels
“creates the cultural field in which Gnosis as an extra-cosmic counter-
posture becomes possible”, accompanying Western civilization in a variety
of activist and quietist forms. Here Voegelin at last gave the experiential
explanation for his original Gnosticism thesis of the New Science of
Politics when he argued that man’s experience of his relation to the extra-
cosmic Unknown God manifests itself as an “extra-cosmic isolation of
existential consciousness” and becomes the cause of metastatic actions
designed to transform the cosmos in such a way that it conforms to the
imagined extra-cosmic existence of man. We could say that ultimately the
cosmos becomes a kind of magic laboratory in which man performs his
magic acts of violently changing reality. In his later reflections on
revolutionary violence, Voegelin realized its structural similarities to the
alchemistic strand in Western thought since the Renaissance and he kept
emphasizing that the magic character of revolutionary violence had not
been sufficiently noted in contemporary discussions of violence.34 But a
discussion of these questions goes beyond the scope of this paper. For now
it must suffice to remember that what Voegelin called “the extra-cosmic

34
One among several explicit references to this problem may be found in a 1971
letter in which Voegelin expresses his admiration for Hannah Arendt’s On
Violence while at the same time lamenting the fact that ‘she disregards the all-
important point that violence has become an instrument of magic, meant to achieve
the alchemistic opus of the perfect society’. Letter to Arian Mack, dated Jan. 23,
1971, in Voegelin, Selected Correspondence, 1950-1984, vol. 30 of The Collected
Works of Eric Voegelin, trans. Sandy Adler, Thomas A Hollweck, and William
Petropulos, ed. Thomas A. Hollweck (Columbia: University of Missouri Press,
2007), 693.
126 Chapter Five

contraction of existence” manifests itself as one of the “disturbances in the

economy of the psyche” on the phenomenal level, while ontologically it
must be classified a one of the “disturbances in being”. Its millennial
history culminated within the cultural field of the Christian gospel, but it
required the gradual erosion of the cosmic primary experience, still very
much present in early Christianity, to unfold its full revolutionary
potential. What late modernity has come to know as the “death of God” is
not the death of the Unknown God behind the cosmic gods but the death of
the God of the Incarnation, or to state it more provocatively: The death of
the Son of God. It is Voegelin—and he is by no means alone with this
observation—who notes that “[t]he death of God and the death of Man are
correlative phenomena”.35 The disturbance in the economy of the psyche is
the expression of man’s fundamental alienation from God and consequently
from himself. Logically, only two ways out of this cul-de-sac remain for
man: either a Platonic metanoia or a total and radical revolution.
The history of the Gnostic revolutionary movements that begins in the
late Middle Ages provides ample evidence for the validity of this thesis.
As Norman Cohn has shown in The Pursuit of the Millennium, the
beginnings of a wave of sectarian revolutionary movements go back to at
least the early twelfth century and figures such as Tanchelm and his
followers in the province of Utrecht and the Amaurians in early thirteenth
century France. About the Amaurians’ beliefs, Norman Cohn writes:

When the Amaurians claimed that ‘each one of them was Christ and Holy
Spirit’, they meant all that Tanchelm had meant. They were convinced that
what Christian theology regards as the unique miracle of the Incarnation
was now being repeated in each one of them. Indeed they believed that the
Incarnation as it had taken place in Christ was now being surpassed.36

Cohn echoes Voegelin’s account of the Free Spirit movement in the

chapter on “The People of God” in Voegelin’s History of Political Ideas
when he sees in this movement the roots of modern nihilistic revolutions,
characterizing its spiritual dynamic with these words:

They were in fact Gnostics intent upon their own individual salvation; but
the gnosis at which they arrived was a quasi-mystical anarchism—an
affirmation of freedom so reckless and unqualified that it amounted to a
total denial of restraint and limitation. Those people could be regarded as
remote precursors of Bakunin and of Nietzsche—or rather of the bohemian

35
Eric Voegelin, ‘The Eclipse of Reality’, in What Is History? 138.
36
Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Harper Torchbooks,
1961), 159.
 A Disturbance in Being: The Idea of Revolution in History 127

intelligentsia which during the last half-century has been living from ideas
once expressed by Bakunin and Nietzsche in their wilder moments. But
extreme individualists of that kind can easily turn into social
revolutionaries—and effective ones at that—if a potentially revolutionary
situation arises.37

Voegelin’s studies of the sectarian mystical activists emerging in the

late Middle Ages led him to very similar conclusions to those of Cohn’s.
Yet Voegelin was able to take his analysis of revolutionary movements
inspired by the extra-cosmic contraction of existence a step further,
because he understood, long before he found the theoretical language he
developed in “The Gospel and Culture” and “The Eclipse of Reality”, that
the nature of these new movements and their spiritual leaders was itself a
spiritual matter and needed to be discussed on that level. Consequently,
Voegelin developed the concept of the “activist mystic” who is unable to
live with the visio beatifica as the symbol of a perfection that can only be
reached through grace in death and who “mistakes the symbol for an
experience that can be realized existentially in the life of man and
society”. 38 Voegelin’s analyses of the sectarian activist are well enough
known to anyone who has some familiarity with his work that we do not
have to lay out his argument here in detail. But what is relevant to this
discussion of total revolution in the post-Ecumenic age is the astuteness of
Voegelin’s insight into the role this activist mysticism has played not only
in Western history but also, by extension, on a global scale. Here his
analysis shows wide-ranging agreement with Rosenstock-Huessy’s theory
that world wars “are a marriage between war and revolution”. 39 The
“universal exclusiveness” of the sectarian mystic’s vision of replacing the
old world with a new one leads to universal alliances against him that
result in world wars, not because of the global expansion of the military
theater, but because “the mysticism of sectarian exclusiveness endows the
parties with the will to universal destruction”. 40 Simply put, total
revolutions and world wars are two manifestations of the same underlying
problem, the eclipse of reality brought about by the extra-cosmic
contraction of existence. The activist mystic’s goal of transposing his

37
Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 150.
38
Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, Volume IV: Renaissance and
Reformation, vol. 22 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, ed. David L. Morse
and William M. Thompson (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 167.
39
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Die Hochzeit des Kriegs und der Revolution
(Würzburg: Patmos Verlag, 1920).
40
Voegelin, Renaissance and Reformation, 172.
128 Chapter Five

transfigured world into reality through political action, first through

revolution at home and, following that, through ecumenic expansion of the
revolution, furthermore requires a new understanding of the role of
violence in this process. Voegelin recognized this already in the 1940s and
found a new technical term for it when he introduced the term
“eschatological violence” to denote “a realm of action that lies, in the
sentiments of the activist believers, beyond good and evil, because it
secures the transition from a world of iniquity to a world of light”.41 It will
not come as a surprise that the carriers of such eschatological violence, due
to their suspension beyond good and evil, are likely to indulge in actions
marked by a level of atrocity that deliberately bursts open any existing
limits of institutional political violence. What also makes it difficult for the
representatives of the “old world” to understand the nature of
eschatological violence and to defend their social order against it is not
only their frequently displayed inability to understand the activist mystic’s
radical extra-cosmic position but has just as much to do with the inherent
planlessness of radical revolutionary action. As I mentioned at the
beginning of this essay, Rosenstock-Huessy had observed that revolutions
are not planned. And this goes probably for all revolutions. But, as
Voegelin notes, there is a deeper aspect to this absence of a plan, and that
has to do with the intended goal of the revolution, the annihilation of every
vestige of the old world and the establishment of an order that is based on
the assumption that human nature will have changed. The clash between
the existing order based on human nature and the visions of the new order
leads to the well-known phenomena of revolutionary chaos and the almost
inevitable rise of revolutionary figures who understand that they have to
act “on precisely the principles on which he would have had to act if the
revolution had not occurred”.42 In its final stages this process results in the
liquidation of the “incurable eschatologists” and the establishment of
dictatorial regimes.
It is not always easy, therefore, to see the phenomena we have
mentioned here in the cool ontological light of “disturbances in being”.
One is far more tempted to look at them as phenomena of mass insanity, or
Massenwahn, to use the terminology Herman Broch introduced in his
studies on mass psychology and politics in the twentieth century.43 While
such an interpretation is by no means wrong and in fact yields important

41
Ibid., 174.
42
Ibid., 126.
43
Cf. Herman Broch, Massenwahntheorie. Beiträge zu einer Psychologie der
Politik, vol. 12 of Kommentierte Werkausgabe, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Frankfurt
a. M., 1979).
 A Disturbance in Being: The Idea of Revolution in History 129

insights into the nature of these movements, as Broch’s and Elias Canetti’s
analyses have shown, it not sufficient by itself to adequately describe their
nature. Voegelin was aware of this when he stated the issue in “What Is
History?” under the impression of the events of the 1960s, both East and
West: “Since liberation is the order of the day, and the gnostic mass
movements play their great role in the politics of our time, one cannot be
careful enough in the analysis of the ontic event, not rigorous enough in
determining the meaning of terms”. 44 As political philosophers look at
apparent parallels between phenomena such as modern “liberation
movements”, violent sectarian movements such as National Socialism,
Marxist social revolutions such as the Russian and the Chinese
Revolutions, on the one hand, and their Christian antecedents between the
fourteenth and sixteenth centuries on the other, they must beware of
making oversimplifying comparisons. Only a philosophy of consciousness
that differentiates between these movements as phenomena and as
participatory events in the comprehensive reality of being enables us to
gain a measure of understanding of their significance. Otherwise political
philosophers will not be able successfully to counter Hannah ’s argument
made almost half a century ago in her book On Revolution, which
questioned whether it was permissible to interpret modern revolutions as
secularized versions of the rebellious social fervor of the early Christian
sects enhanced by a new sense of the eschatological nature of history
originating with Joachim of Fiore and finally the Reformation and the
radical social eschatology of men like Thomas Müntzer. In On Revolution,
Arendt reacted to the secularization debate that was just beginning to reach
its dramatic climax in the wake of Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History,
Blumenberg’s Legitimität der Neuzeit, and the revival of Carl Schmitt’s
Politische Theologie in Germany. There is no need to address these issues
here, except to say that Voegelin was always aware of the fact that his
Gnosticism theory did not cover all the theoretical problems of modern
revolutionary existence, and that the often uncritical application of the
theory to all forms of revolutionary violence could easily derail into a
secondary ideology that would obfuscate rather than illuminate the issues.
For instance, one aspect of Voegelin’s theory as presented in The New
Science of Politics that is consistently neglected is the notion that with the
dissociation of spirit and power, which occurs during the Ecumenic Age
and reaches its climax at the end of antiquity and the victory of
Christianity in Europe, the “de-divinization of the temporal sphere of
power” had been completed. The Gelasian differentiation of the two

44
Voegelin, ‘What Is History?’, 51.
130 Chapter Five

estates, the temporal and the spiritual, proved to be a precarious solution,

being constantly threatened by the very real gains that were made on the
temporal side. Thus, it is ultimately the persistent re-divinization of society
that characterizes the development of modern Western societies and the
revolutionary movements associated with this development. Even
“secularized” societies and political movements have to be endowed with
meaning from within and, as we have seen, this meaning often was
provided from within the inner-Christian tension that shaped so much of
Western history and ultimately spilled over into non-Western societies
through such ideological political religions as Marxism.
That the re-divinization of society is indeed more than a Western
process, and that it is intimately connected with the revolutionary aspect of
modernity, is shown in Robert Jay Lifton’s analysis of the Chinese
Cultural Revolution in his Revolutionary Immortality, a study conceived
during the height of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1968. In it,
Lifton examined the events in China under the aspect of the search for
immortality by revolutionaries who experience

a shared sense of participating in permanent revolutionary fermentation,

and of transcending individual death by ‘living on’ indefinitely within this
continuing revolution.45

This idea that found its theoretical articulation in Trotsky’s principle of

“permanent revolution” reflects the great fear of all true revolutionaries,
the death of the revolution, which needs to be counteracted with a “total
mobilization of faith”, something that Lifton defines as “psychism—the
attempt to achieve control over one’s environment through internal or
psychological manipulations, through behavior determined by intra-
psychic needs no longer in touch with the actualities of the world one
seeks to influence”.46 It will have become clear after what we have said
earlier about the extra-cosmic contraction of existence that Lifton’s
psychological terminology is aimed at the same phenomena as those
described by Voegelin in “The People of God” and the “Eclipse of
Reality”, i. e., the attitude of the extra-cosmic revolutionary whose hatred
for existing reality is so strong that he does not even believe that he has to
adjust his pragmatic actions to the traditional means-ends relation. The
Chinese Cultural Revolution is still awaiting its theoretical analysis that

45
Robert Jay Lifton, Revolutionary Immortality: Mao Tse-Tung and the Chinese
Cultural Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 7.
46
Ibid., 32.
 A Disturbance in Being: The Idea of Revolution in History 131

may show that eschatological violence can also occur outside the Christian
cultural field.
The question we have to come back to at the end of this essay emerges
from the preceding reflections as the question of the connection between
the disturbances in being and the human psyche, not in the psychological
sense of the word, but in the philosophical sense of consciousness. This is
the reason why I have attempted here to shift the accent from revolutions
as social and political movements to the experiences of the potential and
the actual revolutionary, and the tension between perfection and
imperfection that some experience more strongly than others. What called
“disturbances in being” are not some ontological ripples but the very
concrete conflicts that play out in the concrete souls of concrete human
beings. This tension is always at the center of Voegelin’s political
philosophy, and it could therefore be argued that it is a philosophy sub
specie revolutionis. Nothing sums this up better than a spontaneous answer
Voegelin once gave to a questioner who expressed concern that Voegelin
dismissed “the apocalyptic element”, a dismissal that would lead to a
“static civilization”. “Civilizations are never static”, Voegelin replied,
“because every man is an element of revolution in the world’.47 Far from
making Voegelin a crypto-revolutionary, the remark underscores the
fluidity of social and political institutions reflecting the tension between
order and disorder in history. It cannot be repeated often enough that we
must distinguish between this ever-present revolutionary substance and the
revolutions originating in a profound alienation from reality. In Voegelin’s
words: “. . . giving revolution the foundation of an existential theory—that
man in his alienation is the ultimate entity—that is new”.48 Revolution as
an existential theory, that is indeed the signature of modern revolution, and
Voegelin’s analysis of the “complex structure of existence” that follows
man’s loss of identity after the death of God may well provide the most
promising opening to a more profound understanding of the link between
revolution and consciousness to date. A passage in a letter of Voegelin’s to
one of his former Munich assistants which paraphrases the analysis given
in “The Eclipse of Reality” may illustrate this best:

I believe I have succeeded at last in presenting the problems of disturbed

existence with some theoretical polish. . . . The main problem was to find

47
Eric Voegelin, ‘In Search of the Ground’, in Published Essays, 1953-1965, 249.
48
Eric Voegelin, ‘Conversations with Voegelin’, in The Drama of Humanity and
Other Miscellaneous Papers, 1939-1985, vol. 33 of The Collected Works of Eric
Voegelin, ed. William Petropulos and Gilbert Weiss (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2004), 283.
132 Chapter Five

the formulae for the split consciousness: the true self (existential identity),
the false self (contracted self) that is imagined, and the consciousness that
must make space for both (comprehensive consciousness). The true self
has a genuine identity, the false self has an imagined identity, and
comprehensive consciousness has no identity altogether and is, therefore,
in constant danger of falling apart (nihilism, if consciousness holds
together at all; schizophrenic neurosis, when it does not hold together any
longer). Comprehensive consciousness, which has no identity, is the
subject of violent revolutionary activism.49

We have come full circle from the revolutionary symbolisms of the

Ecumenic Age beginning with the Exodus and taking on the forms of
prophecy in Israel; the conflict between sophists and philosophers in
Hellas; the libidinous conquest of the ecumene; the preparation for the
apocalyptic end of history; and, lastly, the radical break with the cosmos in
the extra-cosmic existence of the Gnostics and their spiritual descendants.
There is a common element of violence in all of these “disturbances” to
which Voegelin frequently refers as “irruptions” from the transcendent
side and “eruptions” as the manifestations of the human responses to the
transcendent irruption. Moreover, these disturbances disrupt the balance in
the carefully balanced cosmological orders with which they break, and
consequently result in an uncontrolled release of elements of the human
libido, the passions, with the major political consequence of the dissociation
between spirit and power, which has become the millennial signature of
the post-Axial Age. The novus ordo seculorum on the Great Seal of the
United States has become a symbol that has lost much of its one-time
revolutionary appeal. What has remained, for the time being, are the
contracted selves of would-be revolutionaries with or without suicide
vests. The notion of the “Eclipse of Reality” as the current state of
revolutions and their carriers seems to be the only fitting way to describe
the state of revolution today.

49
Letter to Peter Leuschner, dated December 20, 1967, in Voegelin, Selected
Correspondence, 1950-1984, 555. See also Voegelin, ‘The Eclipse of Reality’,
138.
 CHAPTER SIX

ON THE RUINS OF CIVILIZATIONS:

THE REGIMES OF TERROR

MANFRED HENNINGSEN

Boredom and Terror

When the breakup of the Republic of Yugoslavia began to unfold in
1991 under democidal circumstances and when Rwanda turned in 1994
into a massive “killing field”, Francis Fukuyama’s initially uplifting
predictions about an “end of history” (summer 1989) after the disintegration
of the state socialist formation in Eastern Europe lost their symbolic
appeal. Samuel Huntington’s tentative suggestion, in “The Clash of
Civilizations?” and “If Not Civilizations, What?” (1993), that the world
was entering a stage of major confrontations between armed civilizations
became immediately accepted by Western media, pundits of all persuasions,
and politicians as the new interpretive slogan for conflicts they didn’t
understand. The growing tensions with Islamic societies like Iran and
societies with Islamic majorities in the Middle East, the never-ending
conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and the emerging concerns
about Muslim minorities in European countries contributed to the overall
acceptance of Huntington’s explanatory frame. Huntington’s essay and,
later, book title (1995) became the handy explanation for everything that
was wrong with the “Others”. These “Others” were in the 1990s mostly
connected with Islam but became, in the beginning twenty-first century,
joined by the Chinese, which were threatening to take over the center
position in the world economic system that the U.S. had occupied since the
end of World War II.
How tempting but nevertheless misleading the use of Huntington’s
civilizational framework is can be illustrated with the case of the young
Muslim man, Mohammed Bouyeri, who openly shot and killed the
prominent Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh on November 2, 2004, in a
134 Chapter Six

street in Amsterdam. Bouyeri murdered van Gogh because of a film

(Submission) he had made with the Somali born Dutch politician, Ayaan
Hirsi Ali. The movie had been shown on Dutch television and highlighted
Ali’s perspective on the abuse of women in strict Islamic societies. The
“open letter” that he had stuck with a small knife to the body of van Gogh
was actually addressed to Hirsi Ali. She had become a prominent figure in
the Netherlands. Ian Buruma, who has written a book about the killing of
van Gogh, captures her place in Dutch society at that time well when he
writes:

A delicate African beauty, Hirsi Ali had caught the public imagination by
the eloquence and conviction of her public warnings against a religion
which had already a sinister reputation. Here was a Muslim, or ex-Muslim,
from Africa, telling Europeans that Islam was a serious threat.1

She wrote her own story in her autobiography, Infidel, and sums up the
film project with van Gogh:

We called it Submission, Part 1. I intended one day to make Part 2. . . .

Part 1 was about defiance—about Muslim women who shift from total
submission to God to a dialogue with their deity. They pray, but instead of
casting down their eyes, these women look up to Allah, with the words of
the Quran tattooed on their skin. They tell Him honestly that if submission
to Him brings them so much misery, and He remains silent, they may stop
submitting.2

Hirsi Ali takes Bouyeri’s justification for his action as a believing

Muslim for granted, though her indictment of Islam lists primarily
patriarchal prejudices against gender equality. Certainly, there is nothing
wrong with pointing out patriarchy as a major feature of Islamic political
and social teaching. However, it doesn’t exhaust Islam, since patriarchy is
not particularly Islamic; and, in addition, there is nothing wrong in
attacking the inhumane codes of punishment for female non-compliance
with their decreed submission. However, the Catholic Church is at its
organizational, priestly and theological core patriarchal, and demands of
women to accept an equally submissive station by denying them the
possibility of becoming priests and administering the holy sacraments. In
this respect, there is no difference between Islamic and Catholic teaching,
even if Catholics have become used to different means of enforcing the

1
Ian Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits
of Tolerance (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), 5.
2
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), xxi.
 On the Ruins of Civilizations: The Regimes of Terror 135

teaching of female submission to a code that is anchored in an equally

obsolete philosophical anthropology.
These patriarchal prejudices against gender equality are culture-bound
and not specifically connected with religion. Religions may carry these
prejudices with them from their origins in specific civilizational contexts.
Yet, looking at Bouyeri’s case, neither culture nor religion is the
predominant force that helped to shape his self, even if it may appear that
way. He comes across as the true believer, and demonstrated that with
amazing arrogance at his trial as Buruma describes it:

He explained to the court that he was “obligated to cut off the heads of
all those who insult Allah and his prophet” by the same divine law that
didn’t allow him “to live in this country, or in any country where free
speech is allowed”. Alas, there was no country where people like him
could seek refuge, so he had had no choice but to live in the Netherlands.
To the policemen who arrested him, he said that he had shot at them
“fully intending to kill them, and to be killed”. This statement unleashed an
extraordinary outburst of emotion among the policemen. Tears ran down
their cheeks as they fell into each other’s arms. Heads were stroked and
backs patted. They were traumatized, so it was reported, kept awake by
nightmares, and had frequent fits of crying. The idea of a suicidal killer in
the middle of Amsterdam “was just too much to bear”.

This fear of the threatening “Other” in the middle of European

Amsterdam became reinforced by the end of Bouyeri’s speech: “You can
send all your psychologists and all your psychiatrists, and all your experts,
but I’m telling you, you will never understand. You cannot understand.
And I’m telling you, if I had the chance to be freed and the chance to
repeat what I did on the second of November, wallahi (by Allah) I’m
telling you, I would do exactly the same’. Buruma adds the final statement
that the “judge had no choice but to sentence Mohammed Bouyeri to a
lifetime in prison”.3
Buruma asks an obvious question:

Why did a young man, who was neither poor nor oppressed, who had
received a decent education, a man who had never trouble making friends,
who enjoyed smoking dope and drinking beer, why would such a man turn
into a holy warrior whose only wish was to kill, and perhaps more
mysteriously, to die? It was the same question people asked after the
bombings in the London underground, set off by similar young men, who
played cricket, had girlfriends, went to the pub. All we know is that they

3
Buruma, Murder in Amsterdam, 189f.
136 Chapter Six

murdered in the name of Allah and his prophet. Quite why they did it is
harder to explain.4

It his hard to explain because Bouyeri, contrary to his expressive

allegiance to Allah, hardly made an appearance at a mosque while he was
at school 5 and used without any reservations all the benefits of Dutch
political freedom and the welfare state6 for which he had, as becomes clear
in his contorted rhetoric, nothing but contempt. Buruma makes the point
that Bouyeri is defined by his religious zeal and not the culture of his
Moroccan background.
I think that both cultures are of marginal importance for the creation of
Bouyeri’s self. He lives in a vacuum of meaning and can, like so many
other people without qualities in this and the century before, be picked up
by any movement or cause that promises them some semblance of spiritual
substance to fill the emptiness of their existence. To Bouyeri the killing of
Theo van Gogh was meaning created through violence. The act of killing
transforms a person who thinks of himself as nobody into somebody. Most
suicide bombers are taught that they will become immortalized or at least
remembered by blowing up other people. The teachers of this mode of
righteous thinking believe in the remaking of the world through the
destruction of a contemporary order that is perceived as being corrupt.7
This terminal therapy of creative destruction is not the privilege of
people who think of themselves as being religious. To be sure, the killer
crews of the September 11, 2001, planes claimed like Bouyeri to be the
saviors of Islam or whatever they thought was covered by the name of that
religion. Their social background didn’t single them out as being
oppressed either in their native societies or in the countries where they
were getting a university education. They all resembled in their social
make-up the not particularly religious members of the West German
Baader-Meinhoff group, which has been brilliantly portrayed in the
German movie The Baader-Meinhoff Complex (2008). What comes across
in this group portrait of terrorists is the utter disconnectedness with major
issues in German society at that time. The visit of the Shah of Persia in
June 1967 to West Berlin and the repressive behavior of Persian security
personnel and supportive German police, resulting in the death of one

4
Ibid., 192f.
5
Ibid., 199.
6
Ibid., 203.
7
See Robert Jay Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo,
Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism (New York: Henry Holt,
1999).
 On the Ruins of Civilizations: The Regimes of Terror 137

student, provided the only direct contact with German reality. All the other
issues that they began to embrace over the next twenty-five years had
nothing to do with their experiential environment or were the results of
their own violent and murderous behavior. The larger issues were the
pretexts for confrontations with German power that created the excitement
of being engaged in the transformation of reality. In terms of the
existential quality of these German political engagements, they were as
abstract and empty as those of Bouyeri and the September 11 hijackers.
The best analysis for the mindset of these German, Moroccan, and
Middle Eastern agents of terror is to be found in Blaise Pascal’s Pensées,
when he writes in the 1650s about boredom (ennui): “Man finds nothing
so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest, without passions, without
occupation, without diversion, without effort. Then he faces the nullity,
loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness, emptiness. And at once
there wells up from the depths of his soul boredom, gloom, depression,
chagrin, resentment, despair”.8

The Terror of Revolutions

The terror phase of the French Revolution from July, 1793, to July,
1794, is well documented and doesn’t need further elaboration. Still, this
bloody interlude in the most prominent of the modern revolutions
overshadowed French history and the memory of the Revolution for the
next two hundred years. Hegel negatively immortalized this period in his
lectures on Rechtsphilosophie when he said in 1820 (in # 5 of his
Introduction):

. . . it is only one side of the will which is described, namely this

unrestricted possibility of abstraction from every determinate state of mind
which I may find in myself or which I may set up in myself, my flight from
every content as from a restriction. When the will’s self-determination
consists in this alone, or when representative thinking regards this side by
itself as freedom and clings fast to it, then we have negative freedom, or
freedom as the Understanding conceives it. This is the freedom of the void
which rises to a passion and takes shape in the world; while still remaining
theoretical, it takes shape in religion as Hindu fanaticism of pure
contemplation, but when it turns to actual practice, it takes shape in
religion and politics alike as the fanaticism of destruction—the destruction
of the whole subsisting social order—as the elimination of individuals who
are objects of suspicion to any social order, and the annihilation of any

8
Blaise Pascal, Pensées (London: Penguin Classics, 1995), 208 (#622).
138 Chapter Six

organization which tries to arise anew from the ruins. Only in destroying
something does this negative will possess the feeling of itself existent. Of
course it imagines that it is willing some positive state of affairs, such as
universal equality or universal religious life, but in fact it does not will that
this shall be positively actualized, and for this reason: such actuality leads
at once to some sort of order, to a particularization of organization and
individuals alike; while it is precisely out of the annihilation of
particularity and objective characterization that the self-consciousness of
this negative freedom proceeds. Consequently, what negative freedom
intends to will can never be anything in itself but an abstract idea, and
giving effect to this idea can only be the fury of destruction’.9

Hegel wasn’t interested in the American Revolution and the new

political formation that had come into historical being with the Declaration
of Independence in 1776 and the ratification of the Constitution in 1789.
Hegel reflects the general European dismissal of America that Thomas
Jefferson tried to refute in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) and
Alexander Hamilton in essay XI of the Federalist Papers (1788). Jefferson
encountered the European dismissal of the New World when he was
Ambassador of the Confederation at the French Court in Paris and tried to
counter the pervasive views of American inferiority in all realms of being,
from nature to culture and politics. Hamilton was resentful of the
European rhetoric but nevertheless reproduced the American inferiority
complex when he wrote:

The world may politically, as well as geographically, be divided in four

parts, each having a distinct set of interests. Unhappily for the other three,
Europe, by her arms and by her negotiations, by force and by fraud, has in
different degrees extended her dominion over them all. Africa, Asia, and
America have successively felt her domination. The superiority she has
long maintained has tempted her to plume herself as the mistress of the
world, and to consider the rest of mankind for her benefit.

He then expressed a sense of American self-assertion when he

continued:

It belongs to us to vindicate the honor of the human race, and to teach that
assuming brother moderation. Union will enable us to do it. Disunion will
add another victim to his triumphs. Let Americans disdain to be the
instruments of European greatness! Let the thirteen States, bound together
in a strict and indissoluble Union, concur in erecting one great American

9
G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1969), 22.
 On the Ruins of Civilizations: The Regimes of Terror 139

system superior to the control of all transatlantic force of influence and

able to dictate the terms of the connection between the old and the new
world!10

Hegel was not impressed, not even in 1820 when he gave his lectures
at the University in Berlin. He generously conceded he wouldn’t deny the
New World “. . . the honour of also having risen from the sea at the time of
the world’s creation (or however we wish to describe it)’. But he wasn’t
impressed by the information about pre-Columbian cultures nor the
domesticated animals of his time: “And although America has huge herds
of cattle, European beef is still regarded as a delicacy”.11 His views of the
new political culture were not characterized by knowledge or great
interest:

As to the politics of North America, the universal purpose of the state is

not yet firmly established, and there is as yet no need for a closely knit
alliance; for a real state and real government only arise when class
distinctions are already present, when wealth and poverty are far advanced,
and when a situation has arisen in which a large number of people can no
longer satisfy their needs in the way to which they have been accustomed.
But America has a long way to go before it experiences tensions of this
kind; for the outlet of colonization is fully adequate and permanently open,
and masses of people are constantly streaming into the plains of the
Mississippi. By this means, the principal source of discontent has been
removed, and the continued existence of the present state of civil society is
guaranteed.

Whatever misperceptions of the U.S. in the 1820s may show in this

topographical description, Hegel was absolutely clear about the political
formation:

. . . North America cannot yet be regarded as a fully developed and mature

state, but merely as one which is still in the process of becoming; it has not
yet progressed far enough to feel the need for a monarchy.12

Hegel’s imagined America at the beginning of the nineteenth century

may look strange if juxtaposed with the actual constitutional process of the
Republic at that time. Yet the American Left at the end of that same

10
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers, ed.
I. Kramnick (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 133.
11
Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 162f.
12
Ibid., 169.
140 Chapter Six

century was equally blinded by a perspective that was formed by European

theoretical anticipations and became regularly affirmed at radical socialist
and anarchist meetings by the singing of the Marseillaise. They were all,
however, unwilling to recognize the genuine American beginning that had
provided the “dregs of European society”, as Hegel called the
immigrants,13 with a tabula rasa on which to establish a new society. This
beginning was anchored, as in all other societies in history, in an economy
of terror and violence.14
All American societies are built on the ruins of pre-Columbian
civilizations, the mass graves of natives who became the victims of
European germs and guns, and the exploitation of the labor of enslaved
Africans. This original record of terror and violence is absent from most
accounts of American history, though Las Casas had already provided in
1552, with his “Brief Account” of The Devastation of the Indies, a chilling
report that could have set the tone for the coverage in the following
centuries. The Spanish authorities, however, made sure that Las Casas’s
perspective and similar critical accounts from that century were banished
from public viewing until the nineteenth century. This censure of the
reporting about the destruction of a world and its people was certainly not
lifted by the other European powers that were fighting for hegemonic
positions in the Americas. Whatever knowledge had slipped through the
controlling censure was used by, for example, the English, who moved
across the Atlantic to prepare themselves for the conquest of wilderness
and the wars against the obvious savages which either had to accept
European civilization or death. All of the European powers that took
possession of parts of the newly discovered Western hemisphere
participated in the macro-criminal economy of violence.
The quality of this violence is not different from the genocidal
phenomena in the twentieth century, though the intellectual coverage of
the destruction of the pre-Columbian world is not allowed to be compared
with the Holocaust. The German expression Zivilisationsbruch (breach of
civilization) is reserved by the intellectuals who coined and frequently use
it for the German mega-crime against Jews because it targeted European
victims which belonged to the same civilizational environment. As
savages dwelling in nature, Indians had no “civilization” and could
therefore not become physically and culturally destroyed by a
Zivilisationsbruch. The arrogance of European power becomes perpetuated

13
Ibid., 166.
14
See, for the European imagination, my book Der Fall Amerika (Munich: List,
1974), and for the American self-understanding, my book Der Mythos Amerika
(Frankfurt: Eichborn, 2009).
 On the Ruins of Civilizations: The Regimes of Terror 141

by the arrogance of European consciousness. When one reads Las Casas

one finds oneself transported into the 1940s when German Einsatzgruppen
marched through Poland and the Soviet Union. This is Las Casas in 1552:

And the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry
out massacres and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns
and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor
women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but
cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in a slaughterhouse. They
laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two
or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the
pike. They took infants from their mothers’ breasts, snatching by the legs
and pitching them headfirst against the crags or snatched them by the arms
and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the
babies fell into the water, “Boil there, you offspring of the devil!” Other
infants they put to the sword along with their mothers and anyone else who
happened to be nearby. They made some low wide gallows on which the
hanged victim’s feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims
in lots of thirteen, in memory of Our Redeemer and his twelve Apostles,
then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive. . . . . They
usually dealt with the chieftains and nobles in the following way: they
made a grid of rods which they placed on forged sticks, then lashed the
victims to the grid and lighted a smoldering fire underneath, so that little by
little, as those captives screamed in despair and torment, their souls would
leave them.

If by chance some of the Indians would succeed in fleeing, the Spanish

would pursue them with dogs which would tear them apart and devour
them, and if occasionally Indians would actually kill a Spaniard, the
Spaniards, Las Casas writes, “made a rule among themselves that for every
Christian slain by the Indians, they would slay a hundred Indians”.15 At
one point Las Casas comes to a summary of the violence and the American
translator captures the equivalence of the violence, even if Las Casas
didn’t use the expression that one finds now in the printed English
language text:

This butchery lasted for close to seven years, from the year twenty-four to
the year thirty or thirty-one. You can judge what would be the number of
victims that were swallowed up in the holocaust.16

15
Bartolomé De Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Paperback, 1992), 33ff.
16
Ibid., 70.
142 Chapter Six

The English attitude was not as openly terroristic but was informed by
the same mentality of civilizational non-recognition and dismissal. Cotton
Mather, a member of a prominent preacher family in Boston, published a
history of New England in 1702 from the perspective of victorious
Christianity. His Magnalia Christi Americana: or, The Ecclesiastical
History of New England, From Its First Planting in the Year 1620, Unto
the Year of Our Lord 1693, in Seven Books is full of the language of the
genocidal removal of Indians that permeates the American narratives of
meaning from the Mayflower landing in 1620 to the Wounded Knee
massacre in 1890. The lack of immunity against the germs and diseases the
English had brought to the American shores becomes interpreted by him as
part of divine punishment for the Indian refusal to accept Christianity:

Those infidels . . . replyed, God could not kill them; which blasphemous
mistake was confuted by an horrible and unusual plague, whereby they
were consumed in such vast multitude, that our first planters found the land
almost covered with their unburied carcases; and they that were left alive,
were smitten into awful and humble regards of the English . . . .17

Divine providence helped the Puritans also with smallpox against the
feared enemies:

But this fear was wonderfully prevented, not only by intestine wars
happening then to fall out among those barbarians, but chiefly by the small
pox, which proved a great plague unto them, and particularly to one of the
Princes in the Massachuset-Bay, who yet seemed hopefully to be
christianized before he dyed. This distemper getting in, I know not how,
among them, swept them away with a most prodigious desolation,
insomuch that although the English gave them all the assistance of
humanity in their calamities, yet there was, it may be, not one in ten among
them left alive; of those few who lived, many also fled from the infection,
leaving the country a meer Golgotha of unburied carcases . . . .18

The incompatibility of the American Republic with Indians is

articulated by George Washington before he becomes President. In a letter
he wrote in 1783, he clarified his position:

I am clear in my opinion, that policy and oeconomy point very strongly to

the expediency of being upon good terms with the Indians, and the

17
Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, Vol. I., First American Edition;
From the London Edition of 1702. (Hartford: Silas Andrus, 1820), 49.
18
Ibid., 72.
 On the Ruins of Civilizations: The Regimes of Terror 143

propriety of purchasing their Lands in preference to attempting to drive

them by force of arms out of their Country; which as we have already
experienced is like driving the Wild Beasts of the Forest which will return
as soon as the pursuit is at an end and fall perhaps on those that are left
there; when the gradual extension of our Settlements will as certainly cause
the Savage as the Wolf to retire; both being beasts of prey tho’ they differ
in shape. In a word there is nothing to be obtained by an Indian War but the
Soil they live on and this can be had by purchase at less expense, and
without bloodshed, and those distresses which helpless Women and
Children are made partakers of in all disputes with them. . . .19

The rhetoric of American Manifest Destiny is in the making when

Indians become cast as “aggressors” since they resist accepting their
guaranteed rights being vacated because “the faith of the United States
stands pledged to grant portions of the uncultivated lands as a bounty to
their army” and because “it is become necessary, by the increase of the
domestic population and emigration from abroad, to make speedy
provision for extending the settlement of the territories of the United States
. . .” .20 Chief Justice John Marshall spelled out the justification for the
takeover of the continent in the Supreme Court Decision Johnson vs.
McIntosh (1823) when he wrote:

But the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose
occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the
forest. To leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the
country a wilderness; to govern them as a distinct people, was impossible,
because they were as brave and as high spirited as they were fierce, and
were ready to repel by arms every attempt on their independence. What
was the inevitable consequence of this state of things? The Europeans were
under the necessity either of abandoning the country, and relinquishing
their pompous claims to it, or of enforcing those claims by the sword, and
by the adoption of principles adapted to the condition of a people with
whom it was impossible to mix, and who could not be governed as a
distinct society, or of remaining in their neighborhood, and exposing
themselves and their families to the perpetual hazard of being massacred.21

19
Letter of George Washington to James Duane, September 7, 1783, in Documents
of United States Indian Policy, ed. F. P. Prucha (Lincoln & London: University of
Nebraska Press, 2000), 2.
20
Report of the Committee on Indian Affairs, October 15, 1783, in Documents of
United States Indian Policy, 4.
21
Ibid., 36.
144 Chapter Six

The acceptance of this civilizational incompatibility principle comes to

a culminating conclusion two years after Wounded Knee when Richard
Pratt, who was the superintendent of an industrial training school for
Indian students from 1879 to 1904 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, expressed the
new philosophy:

. . . A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and
that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in
promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but
only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the
Indian in him, and save the man.22

The genocidal spirit of the founding that manifests itself in the removal
strategy toward Indians becomes reinforced by the acceptance of the race-
based institution of slavery. The institution of slavery in the ancient world
was multi-ethnic. Since the Spanish and Portuguese began in 1519 to
replenish the demographic vacuum with Africans, slavery in the Western
world became color-coded. The acceptance of this race-based form of
slavery by the Founders became, next to Indian removal, the curse that
overshadowed from 1789 to 2008 (the election of the first Black
President), the symbolic record of the Republic. The mythical narratives of
self-interpretation paid no attention to this dual evil. Neither Eric Voegelin
nor Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy emphasizes this legacy of the Founding.
Voegelin doesn’t touch the subject at all and Rosenstock-Huessy beautifies
an ugly reality when he writes:

All the races of the world populated America under the protection of due
process of law granted by the Fathers of the Constitution, and upheld by
the Spirit vested in their representatives.23

The Canadian historian Michael Fellman gets it right when he opens

his book on terrorism in America with the observation:

Americans want their creation legends to be beautiful and uncontaminated

—”life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”, the “city upon a hill”. They
do not want to view the United States as grounded in organized political
violence against alien “others”—people whose social and religious

22
Richard Pratt, ‘The Advantage of Mingling Indians with Whites’, in F. R.
Prucha, ed., Americanizing the American Indian: Writings by the ‘Friends of the
Indian’ 1880-1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260f.
23
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man
(Norwich: Argo Books 1969), 686.
 On the Ruins of Civilizations: The Regimes of Terror 145

practices may not fit the white Christian norms—and rarely acknowledge
the lengths to which individuals and government alike have been willing to
go in order to repress such peoples when they appeared to be threatening.
Americans prefer to see terrorism as external to the “American way”, as
exceptional.24

Thomas Jefferson, who drafted the Declaration of Independence

(1776) with the memorable phrase regarding “truths to be self-evident, that
all men are created equal”, suggested, in one of the two chapters of his
book Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) that discussed the then-
prevailing notions on race with regard to American slaves, a suspicion:

I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether

originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are
inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not
against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or
varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications.25

In Paris two years later, Jefferson started a marriage-like relationship

with a young slave of his, Sally Hemings. Hemings was the daughter of
Jefferson’s father-in-law with Sally’s slave mother—which therefore
makes Hemings Jefferson’s late wife’s half-sister.26 Jefferson demonstrates
with his “suspicion” and his existential decision to take Sally as a
concubine and have children with her the honest dishonesty of the
founding rhetoric. The author of the Declaration, to whose language
Abraham Lincoln pays homage in his Gettysburg Address in 1863 in order
to prepare for the re-visioning of the meaning of the Republic while the
Civil War is still going on, cannot bring himself to recognize that
Jefferson’s life with Sally falsifies his intellectual “suspicion” about
Africans belonging to a different species. This honest dishonesty of
Jefferson kept the ideological discourse alive that Africans may after all
belong to a pre-Adamic creation that preceded the beginning of humanity
which is symbolized in the narrative of the Book of Genesis. This pre-
Adamic discourse has been feeding Eurocentric racism since the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, when Europeans had to make sense of the
phenotypical variety of humanity and refused to submit to the mono-

24
Michael Fellman, In the Name of God and Country: Reconsidering Terrorism in
American History (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2010), 1.
25
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. W. Peden (Chapel Hill &
London: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 143.
26
See, for the complicated relationships, Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of
Monticello: An American Family (New York & London: Norton, 2008).
146 Chapter Six

regional origin that was especially defended by the Catholic Church.

Jefferson’s “suspicion” is in line with the unwillingness of Enlightenment
intellectuals, like Voltaire,27 to accept a common origin of humanity that
included Africans and other non-European people.
Jefferson’s “suspicion” may have been shared by the rest of the
Founders even if they did not express these views about a separate origin.
The U.S. Supreme Court, however, did exactly interpret the mind of the
Founders in the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision when they raised
the question:

Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as
slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought
into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become
entitled to all the rights, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen?28

Their answer was unequivocal:

We think they are not, and that they are not included, under the word
“citizens” in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights
and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of
the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a
subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the
dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to
their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held
the power and the Government might choose to grant them.29

Four years after this decision, the Civil War broke out that cost the life
of 620,000 Americans, more than 30,000 black soldiers among them. The
Machiavellian bargain of the Founding—namely, to continue slavery as
the basis of the political economy and thereby violate the symbolic
promise of the Declaration with the enslavement of eighteen percent of the
people in the Republic—extracted a heavy price in lives and in the
postponement of the realization of the vision that Lincoln enunciated in the
Gettysburg Address and at the Second Inaugural in 1865, a few weeks
before his assassination. The price for the Machiavellian bargain was paid
for by Blacks, not only through their existence under slavery, but also by

27
See David N. Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion & the Politics of
Human Origins (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 2008).
28
Reports of Cases Argued and Adjudged in The Supreme Court of the United
States. December Term, ed. B. C. Howard. 1856. Vol. XIX (Washington, D.C.:
Morrison, 1859), 403.
29
Ibid., 404f.
 On the Ruins of Civilizations: The Regimes of Terror 147

the violence of the semi-genocidal Jim Crow regime that emerged in the
South after the withdrawal of Federal troops in 1877. The enforcement of
White supremacy after the defeat of the slavery regime was not only
accomplished by the disenfranchisement of black male citizens in the
South. The racial cleansing of communities,30 the introduction of forced
labor camps as slavery by another name, 31 and the raw terror of the
lynching of close to 5,000 black people under the open participation of
white communities32 achieved, without the establishment of a totalitarian
regime, comparable results of terror. These cleansing events were not
limited, as Jaspin makes clear, to the South.

The Regimes of Terror

The regimes of terror that came into historical being in the twentieth
century and turned it into the most murderous century in history were not
manifestations of the civilizations in whose geographical range they
emerged. Apart from the fact that these civilizations were already dead or
slowly withering away, the manipulative intentions of the ideological
elites of the regimes of terror were quite obvious. As much as they tried to
invoke connections with meaning-narratives that didn’t belong to their
own imaginaries, the purpose of locating the specific regime’s legitimacy
on a different map became clear. Huntington’s claim that the civilizations,
which he discussed in his two essays and the book, were positioning
themselves for potential violent confrontations was obviously not
supported by the evidence that the regimes of terror had left behind.
The regimes of terror that have given the twentieth century its
murderous reputation came into being under circumstances that Carl
Schmitt called, in his famous essay from 1932, The Concept of the
Political, the “state of exemption”. This exceptional condition indicates
that the ordinary circumstances of a transfer of power within a constitutional
order have been suspended, thus enabling revolutionary elites to take
advantage of the situation. The suspension may have been facilitated by a
war, as happened in the cases of Russia (1917), China (1949), and Cambodia

30
See Elliot Jaspin, Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial
Cleansing in America (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
31
Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black
People in America from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday,
2008).
32
See the photos in James Allen, Hilton Als, Leon F. Litwack, and John Lewis,
Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms
Publishers, 2000).
148 Chapter Six

(1975), or been caused by protracted political crises as in Italy (1922) and

Germany (1933), to name a few of the most prominent cases. Although all
five societies had long histories that were known to the world and that
connected them with larger civilizational contexts in Europe and Asia,
these histories do not explain the emergence of the regimes, though some
historians and social scientists often engage in this type of cultural
reductionism. The histories are partly relevant for the understanding of
some elements of the regimes, but not for the emergence of the regimes
themselves. My argument concerning the regimes of terror is that neither
the civilizational nor the national histories are essential for their
understanding. The regimes of terror that emerge as the result of
revolutionary conditions are phenomena sui generis and should be treated
as a political class of their own.
In the case of Italian Fascism, for example, Benito Mussolini added the
historical façade of the Roman Empire to the nationalist and socialist
rhetoric when Italy invaded Libya in 1923. His Fascist imaginary didn’t
suffice to justify the invasion. The mimetic appeal to the Imperium
Romanum became even more pronounced over time and culminated in the
attack on Ethiopia in 1935. Between 350,000 and 760,000 Ethiopians lost
their lives in this experiment of imperial aggrandizement. 33 Mussolini’s
Roman vision for Fascist Italy had cost already 100,000 Libyans their lives
in the 1920s. His megalomania culminated in the understanding that he
would become remembered as the conqueror of Ethiopia. 34 The
arbitrariness of his Roman identity experiment revealed itself when
Mussolini surrendered completely in the late 1930s to the programmatic
agenda of Nazi Germany.
Adolf Hitler and his ideological cohorts exploited all kinds of
civilizational connections in order to repackage and cover up the core
project of the Nazi imaginary, namely to literally purify the German body
politic and to “cleanse” it of all alien elements, especially the Jews. The
Nazis invented ancient Aryan relationships and borrowed Asian symbols
like the Buddhist Swastika and Hindu Mandala (and combined them in the
Nazi flag) in order to enhance the Indo-Germanic relations. Some Indians
fell for this extravagant cultural genealogy and volunteered for the SS.
Prominent Indian nationalists exploited the ideological obsession of Hitler,
Himmler, and other members of the Nazi elite in their resistance against
the British during World War II (e.g., Chandra Bose and Radhabinod Pal).

33
Aram Mattioli, Experimentierfeld der Gewalt. Der Abessinienkrieg und seine
internationale Bedeutung, 1935-1941 (Zürich: Orell Füssli Verlag, 2005), 13.
34
Ibid., 65.
 On the Ruins of Civilizations: The Regimes of Terror 149

The Nazis cultivated Germanic communal rituals and Icelandic Sagas to

emphasize indigeneity. They promoted archaic Germanic theatre and
dance35 and Richard Wagner’s operas. They developed, as Peter Cohen has
shown in his remarkable documentary, The Architecture of Doom (1989),
an aesthetics of terror that ran the whole civilizational gamut from
scientists indulging in eugenics through cityscapes, art, movies, and all the
way to the distortion of Greek philosophy. They raided museums and art
galleries in Nazi occupied Europe and used the cultural loot to enlarge the
art collections in museums or to beautify the homes of members of the
Nazi elite in Germany. Hitler’s plans for the rebuilding of Berlin as
“Germania” was driven by the idea of transcending Greek and Roman
architecture in a grandiose way. This eclectic assemblage of cultural
features that once carried symbolic meaning represents in its arbitrariness
the mentality of people who have no culture but find it necessary to show
that they recognize its importance. Culture is for them nothing but an
instrument of power.
This instrumentalization of culture by the Fascists becomes reproduced
by the regimes on the Left. Lenin, who presided over a massive exodus of
intellectuals in the early years of the Revolution, was succeeded by Stalin
who initially continued the campaign of expulsion before resorting to
arrests, Gulag imprisonment, and large scale killings. During World War II
he discovered the value of Russian history for the defense of the
Fatherland against the Nazi invaders in the “Great Patriotic War” and
demanded that the movie director Eisenstein create grand historical movie
epics like the one on Ivan the Terrible. Russian history became a tool of
power. The Orthodox Russian Church was initially treated like the
Catholic Church in the French Revolution. Churches and monasteries were
closed, property confiscated, theological instruction for priests controlled
and restricted. During the War, the usefulness of the Russian Church was
recognized, although only in a very limited way was it freed of controls by
the regime.
Mao’s use of Chinese culture was even more power-centered. He
looked to the Ch’in Emperor and his unification of the Warring States in
221 B.C.E. as a model for destructive politics. He boasted frequently that
the Communists had outdone the Ch’in dynasty. At the VIII Congress of
the Communist Party of China in May, 1958, he said:

What does the first Emperor of Ch’in mean anyway? He buried only 460
Confucian sages alive, we buried 46,000. Have we not, during the

35
See Klaus Vondung, Magie und Manipulation. Ideologischer Kult und politische
Religion des Nationalsozialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1971).
150 Chapter Six

“Repression of Reaction” period, made some counterrevolutionary

intellectuals a head shorter? . . . We have surpassed the first Emperor of
Ch’in a hundred times. If you insult us as first Emperor of Ch’in, as
dictator, we completely admit it but you haven’t emphasized that enough.36

Nothing in this speech indicates anything but the cynicism of power

that characterizes Mao’s career as a revolutionary from beginning to end.
All the cultural cleansing campaigns, up to the Cultural Revolution from
1966 to 1976 and the suicide of 100,000 intellectuals in the first months of
that particular campaign, affirm Mao’s total disregard for the traditional
dimension of Chinese civilization. Revolutionary China buried the
remnants of Chinese culture that had survived the 1911 Revolution, the
political struggles in the 1920s and 1930s, the Civil War, the Japanese
occupation, and finally the Revolution of 1949. Nothing illustrates the
contrast between traditional China and Mao’s China more than the
architectural functionalism of the Great Hall of the People on one side of
Tiananmen Square and the elaborate aesthetics of the imperial Forbidden
City on the other side. Huntington’s Chinese civilization does not sustain
contemporary China.
If Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime was originally inspired by the huge
temple structures of medieval Angkor Wat and wanted to reconnect with
that past, the auto-genocidal policies of the regime seemed to accomplish
just the opposite. Wiping out the culture of learning in all its contemporary
manifestations, these regime policies pointed in the direction of all the
other killing regimes of the twentieth century. Pol Pot’s Cambodia was in
that respect one of the worst examples known of macro-criminal terror and
cultural destruction. Killing the intellectual elite of Cambodia was meant
to destroy civilizational memory.
Contrary to social scientists and historians, who attempt to find all
kinds of causal connections between the histories of the five mentioned
societies and the regimes of terror that they produced in the twentieth
century, I have problems with this approach to the comprehension of
macro-criminal politics in the twentieth century. For me, these five terror
scenarios have one thing in common: namely, that in all five societies a
political regime comes to power that has the political will to carry out
projects of intentional social transformation on a scale unheard of and
never initiated in those societies before.

36
Quoted in M. Henningsen, ‘The Dream Worlds of Tyrants’, in Politikos – Vom
Element des Persönlichen in der Politik. Festschrift T. Schabert, eds. Karl-Heinz
Nusser, Matthias Riedl, and Theresia Ritter (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2008),
143.
 On the Ruins of Civilizations: The Regimes of Terror 151

Germany may be the best known example for this type of argumentation.
The macro-violence of the Jewish Holocaust and other killing theatres, it
seems, for most can only be explained by arguments like the one Liah
Greenfeld makes:

In combination with the exaltation of violence and death, an equally

fundamental element of German nationalism, racial anti-Semitism, paved
the way to the Holocaust. The possibility of the Final Solution was inherent
in German national consciousness. While not inevitable, it was no accident
and no aberration of German history; it was not a natural response to a
historically immediate structural situation, and, given an identical situation,
could not have happened elsewhere. A madman like Hitler was needed to
hold a match, and certain immediate structural conditions were necessary
to stimulate him and his audience, but the combination of racism,
identification of a particular race as the incarnation of evil, and
glorification of violence and brutality was highly combustible, and only
Germany could produce Hitler and give this form to the response to
structural conditions. Germany was ready for the Holocaust from the
moment German national identity existed.37

I do not want to discuss the historical details of her reductionist

argumentation but to simply point out that for her, the Holocaust seems to
belong in the DNA of German culture. It could have happened only in
Germany because only people who were exposed to German culture were
able of perpetrating this type of event. The self-fulfilling prophesy that
inheres in this reasoning supports certainly the uniqueness argument
concerning the Holocaust, but it does nothing to help us understand the
Holocaust itself, or the genocidal terror that followed after World War II in
Asia, Africa or Europe. The fallacy of her cultural reductionism becomes
obvious when Germans weren’t any longer the perpetrators and Jews the
victims.
Culturally reductionist arguments of this kind are almost the norm in
the literature on the Holocaust. But this type of reasoning can be found
also in the discussion of other regimes of terror. In a less biased language
than Greenfeld uses, the anthropologist Alexander Hinton attempts to
make us understand the Pol Pot regime of terror in terms of Cambodian
culture when he writes:

Their conviction that they had discovered the key to ending oppression and
revitalizing Cambodian society seems to have given Pol Pot and his

37
Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge & London:
Harvard University Press, 1992), 384.
152 Chapter Six

associates a sense of omnipotence and grandeur. . . . Like Buddhists who

had achieved enlightenment, they had attained secret knowledge that would
transform Cambodia and enable its inhabitants to reach a higher state of
being. In fact, the Khmer Rouge ideology often played upon the theme of
enlightenment when it depicted Angkar using metaphors of clairvoyance
and omniscience. Yet another strand in this sense of grandeur was the
French reconstruction of Cambodian history, which provided a narrative of
decline from the magnificence of the Angkorean era, when Khmer kings
built impressive stone monuments and were a dominant military presence
in the region, to the contemporary period, when Cambodia had become a
weak country dominated by others. Driven by feeling of inferiority and
inflation about what was possible, the Khmer Rouge proclaimed that their
revolutionary society would surpass even Angkor in greatness, moving
more rapidly and successfully toward a communist utopia than had any
other communist regime.38

Hinton goes so far to parallel Buddhist and Khmer Rouge thinking

when he writes:

One could certainly push the arguments further, contending that the Khmer
Rouge attempted to assume the monk’s traditional role as moral
instructor . . . and that the DK regime’s glorification of asceticism,
detachment, the elimination of attachment and desire, renunciation [and]
purity paralleled prominent Buddhist themes that were geared toward
helping a person attain greater mindfulness. For the Khmer Rouge, the
construction of such traits was essential to building a proper revolutionary
consciousness—just as monks sought to cultivate a mindfulness that would
enable them to reach nirvana (nibanna).39

Let me finish my discussion by returning to the American story that I

explored in section two above. What distinguishes the American case from
the five scenarios of revolutionary terror in Europe and Asia is the fact that
the propensities for genocidal violence, which were part of the American
cultural formation, never became actualized in the full sense of its
potential possibilities. The political regimes that in the other five societies
carried out the large scale killing projects were never duplicated by an
equivalent regime of terror in the U.S. There were signs of terror before,
during and after the Founding. But even after the Civil War and the failure
of Reconstruction in the South, the reign of Jim Crow never reached the
dimension of a full-blown regime of terror covering the whole South or the

38
Alexander L. Hinton, Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide
(Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), 50.
39
Ibid., 197.
 On the Ruins of Civilizations: The Regimes of Terror 153

rest of the U.S. For all kinds of reasons, American politics succeeded in
avoiding the descent into the institutionalization of terror. The primacy of
politics prevailed in the United States in the good sense of the word, even
if cultural tendencies in the South pointed in a different direction.
 CHAPTER SEVEN

“ENGLAND: A PARLIAMENTARY CHURCH”

AND “THE EUROPEAN SIGNIFICANCE
OF THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION”
– SELECTIONS FROM OUT OF REVOLUTION

EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY

A Parliamentary Church
The latest historian of England in the seventeenth century called the
Church “the key of the whole constitutional building.” But we might better
have called the Church the building for which a key of extraordinary
subtlety was needed, sought, and finally devised. The Christianity of
England being older than its Whiggism, the Whigs, with their passion for
the old, had to take possession of the Anglican Church. That is the creative
act. The combined impact of the words Restoration and Revolution,
though apparently tending in opposite directions, delivered the Church of
England into the hands of the Commons, and did what neither the Puritan
Restoration nor the Whig Revolution could have attained without the
conquest of the Church: it gave to the knights and officers of militia of
Merrie Old England, who were “Junkers” as much as any Junker in Prussia
or Poland or Hungary, the treasures of a liturgy, a religious supremacy,
and a godly sovereignty to which no gentry and no lower house on the
Continent of Europe, except the Hungarian gentry, could pretend.
The British Junkers described their goal as the restoration of Magna
Charta. Magna Charta dates back to 1215. Now in this very year 1215, the
greatest universal council of Western Christendom was held in the Lateran
at Rome, with more than four hundred bishops present. Obviously, in
1215, the Church of England was not a “church” of its own at all. It had
been established as a province of the Church by the Popes of the seventh
century. Lanfranc and Anselm of Canterbury had sought the commands of
 Selections from Out of Revolution 155

the Pope for their second world, their “orbis secundus” as it was called in
1090. Thomas a Becket had shed his blood for the liberty of the Church,
against the King and for the Pope. Christendom had strongly admired his
Catholic courage, and had canonized him as a saint two years after his
death. From 1172 to 1535 Thomas was the saint of the thirtieth of
December, who during Christmas week itself represented the fact that no
priest could be appointed or judged by a secular power. Throughout the
Middle Ages the pilgrimage to his tomb was the symbol of Christian
liberty against kings and lords, and when it was abolished by Henry VIII
he was reminded by the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536), for a last tragic
moment, of the rights of the populace. Henry VIII did not invade the
liberties of Parliament; he led a Parliamentary invasion of the liberties of
the Church. “The Church of England lost the liberties granted by Magna
Charta. These were liberties denied by Parliament and not to Parliament.”1
The paradox of an Anglican Church ruled by the Commons because
these laymen wished to restore the Common Law of mediaeval England is,
I hope, now clear. The Commons wished to restore one half of the
mediaeval constitution and to destroy completely its other half, the
independence of the Christian spirit from kings and parliaments. For both
purposes, restoration and destruction, they used legal fictions; but these
fictions were opposite in character. To destroy the universal and clerical
character of the Church it was important that the King be one of
themselves, a gentleman of the same religion they held, and willing to
grant them complete influence over the stipends and appoints within this
Church. The clergy was to consist of a “Christian gentleman” in every
village. The theologians of the universities were to be without any
influence on the evolution of the creed; for they represented either royal
interests or the un-English, universal influence of scholarship.
In this mighty task the gentry could rely on an important precedent.
The King, in introducing his supremacy over the Church, had deferred to
his subjects by calling the reformed missal the Book of Common Prayer.
This beautiful book has now lived over four hundred years; and its title has
contributed more than anything else to the religious colouring of the word
“Common” in the English language. From the Book of Common Prayer
and from the “Commons” in Parliament originated the two mighty streams
of feeling, thought and imagination which finally led to the vision of the
British Commonwealth of Nations.

1
Albert F. Pollard, The Evolution of Parliament, and edition, p. 215, New York,
Longmans, 1926.
156 Chapter Seven

This book, then, by its very title, made every reasonable concession to
the presumptions of the common man when it was published by the King's
bishops in 1549. It avoided the hierarchical claim by replacing the words
“divine service” with the words ‘common prayer.”2 The introduction runs
as follows: “There was never anything by the wit of man so well devised
or so sure established which in continuance of time hath not been
corrupted: As among other things, it may plainly appear by the common
prayers in the church, commonly called divine service.” This was an
astounding concession on the part of the Anglican Church to the spirit of
the Commons. Here “common prayer” is suggested, or supposed, to be the
original expression; and the hierarchical phrase “divine service” is reduced
to a later, surreptitious alteration of this original meaning. By a stroke of
the pen the proper order of things (sacraments that radiate from a holy
centre to the circumference of the community) is replaced by the
unhistorical fiction of a self-sufficing community, created not by apostolic
succession but by a granted equality of all the members, old and new.
There was a further concession in the Book, in that the praying
community was made the subject of the service. In the Lutheran
churches—as in the Greek or Roman Catholic—the priest made the
confession of sins in the singular: “I, poor sinner.” It had been Luther's
pride that he bestowed on every Christian soul as much of a personal right
to say “I” in church as had the priest who prepared himself individually to
sing the Mass. But the Book of Common Prayer abolished the "I." All
Anglican ritual uses “we.” When, in the eighties of the last century, the
Lutheran churches of America established a common ritual, the one
concession they made to the tradition of Anglo-Saxon congregational life
was to replace “I” by “we” in the confession of sins made by the Lutheran
pastor. So strongly did they feel the pressure of their Anglo-American
environment. This tradition goes back to the year 1549, the oldest year of
the Book of Common Prayer. Here the central prayer of the Mass, the
Canon, was changed into a form that shaped the character of the Christian
people of England for all future times. Instead of praying for “all here
standing around" (circumstantium), 3 the priest now prayed for "this thy
congregation which is here assembled in thy name.” The Anglican
congregation was thus filled with the inspiration promised to every
gathering in his name; and never, after 1549, could it be at rest until its
inspiration was recognized as the public spirit of England. The conquest of

2
For the first appearance of the phrase, see Th. Lathbury, A History of the Book of
Common Prayer, p. 9, Oxford, 1839.
3
See prayer Suscipe in Offertorium of the Mass, in the Roman Missal.
 Selections from Out of Revolution 157

the service by the congregation found a first conspicuous outlet in the

Responsory of the Psalms. Unknown in the Lutheran Church, the
Responsory not only gave the congregation a share in the service, but
endowed the English people with a real language. It made them into a
“Christian people” by bestowing upon them the language of Canaan! Like
the Commons in the Realm, “Congregation” became a living body politic
in the Church. The old Church had always known a distinction between
clergy and people. The order of voting in ecclesiastical elections had
always been “clerus et populous” clergy and laymen. The form of the
Book of Common Prayer exalted the “populus Christianas” into a leading
partner in the Service. Congregation, “grex” became the leading element
in religious life.
The popular concessions were summed up when the “parson” was
turned into a “minister.” Whereas Luther had been a magister, and taught
all the preachers of the “new learning” at Wittenberg to wear the gown of
a university magister (the Lutheran frock is the doctor's gown), the English
“magisters” became “ministers.” Now “magister” is derived from “magis,”
“minister” from “minus.” We find Thomas Hobbes already contrasting the
Lutheran and Anglican conception. He says: “We look at the pulpit not as
magistral, but as ministerial.” Francis Bacon had already attacked
“magisterial method” and recommended “initiative method.”
This ought to be connected with the love of low, “Lower,” and
“Common” in English, as against the aura of unreality which surrounds
everything that is called High or Upper; then the change from magisterial
into ministerial clergy will be appreciated.
All these concessions to the special English political situation were
made by the Book of Common Prayer. But of course it could not renounce
the very idea of the unity of the Anglican Church. It had to keep a
calendar. The English Church could not give up the great festivals of
Christmas, Easter and Whit-sunday—all imperilled and attacked by the
Puritans—without cutting itself off from some of the very deepest symbols
of mutual recognition between the Christians of England and the
Christians of the world. The same is true of the ritual. Without the core of
the Lord's Prayer, the Nicene Creed, the Agnus Dei, and certain other
cardinal prayers and sacraments of the Church, such as baptism,
Christianity evaporates into something like Masonry or philosophy.
But the Non-Conformists, descendants of the ranters as they were,
smelled papacy and superstition everywhere. They wished to abolish
godfathers and godmothers and put their whole trust in the inspiration of
the congregation, the gatherings in church. There the living spirit of the
Christian people should fill the mouths of prophets and ministers. And
158 Chapter Seven

serving as mouthpieces of the people, ministers should be fed by the Holy

Spirit of their congregations and synods.
In the first period of the British Revolution, the very meaning of what
was being done had to be discovered step by step. The men who fought for
the Rights of Parliament, quite capable of understanding the legal fictions
of the Realm, were incapable of using the same fictions for the Kingdom
of God. As gentry, they were ready to accept a visible head of the
Kingdom. But as Puritans, their Kingdom of Heaven was not likely to
tolerate a visible head of the Church of England. The Commons were too
deeply inspired by the Scotch to bear the religious yoke of a “King in
Church” church. John Knox, in the sixteenth century, had taught that the
Lower Estates were responsible for the Christian faith in any case of
emergency; i.e., at any time when the supreme head delayed the reform
called for by divine law. Calvinism favoured everywhere a local church
system, with a local government of elders. This would have meant the
splitting up of a great national institution into pieces; and the fragments of
this presbyterian church would have fallen into the hands of the squires,
except for the institution of synods which were lacking in authority.
The Presbyterians tried this experiment; they abolished the hierarchy.
The local group was made omnipotent. But in so doing they went against
their own parliamentary principles. For, as we have seen, it was not that
“such and such an esquire” at Stokeford Grantham had rights in the Realm,
but that the assembled Commons exercised power in the United Kingdom.
Without this rigid discipline of a single body, the Realm would have been
dissolved into petty local governments. England would have become like
chaotic Poland where every gentleman exercised a personal veto in the
Imperial Diet and could block all procedure. The membership in the House
of Commons, by excluding names, prevented chaos. It barred any return to
the feuds of a lawless aristocracy. The very word “Commons” guaranteed
that the peace of the land, the praiseworthy unifying gift of royal power,
was to be inherited by the new King in Parliament.
Now it was completely inconsistent with this policy of the Commons
to dissolve the other half of the Realm. The Church, schools, hospitals,
universities, prayer-books, calendars, in short, Christian civilization was in
danger of being watered down, and losing all its standards, if parochial and
provincial presbyterians were to govern these institutions. Like any
utterance of the higher life of man, the spirit must be able to move where it
listeth. Parochial fetters suffocate the life of the spirit. As a matter of fact,
animosity against the universities and the cathedral schools ran high in the
Long Parliament. The Presbyterians hated Oxford and Cambridge as they
hated the bishoprics. They were seats of the whore of Babylon, of a royal
 Selections from Out of Revolution 159

and central power in a much too visible church. Parliament began by

abandoning the liturgy of a united Anglican Church to the local ardours of
Puritanism. In 1646 the Book of Common Prayer was abolished. But in
1647 the peculiar situation of the British Isles was suddenly rediscovered
by Parliament. One thing at least made the sacrifice of a united and
hierarchical church as impossible as the sacrifice of the royal peace.
England did not live on land alone; one half of English life was enacted on
the sea. The waves of the British sea were crossed day after day by
hundreds of ships. Few men-of-war and practically no ship of trade carried
a minister on board. But Christians they were, and pray they must. In
abolishing the Book of Common Prayer, the Presbyterians had ignored the
weakness of any institution which is merely local and self-governed; its
incapacity to provide, all the time and everywhere, good, responsible,
highly trained leaders. Intellectual leadership, religious leadership, is
scarce. Talent is not as plentiful as blackberries. Democracy believes that
it is, but the belief is false. Without a Central Power, which could be
nothing but the authority of the Anglican Church more or less disguised,
the seamen would have been lost to the religious cause of the
Presbyterians. They would have clung inevitably to the royal Book of
Common Prayer, because in order to face shipwreck and death they
needed some form of spiritual comfort.
The Presbyterians, therefore, in 1648, issued a decree that a Directory
should supersede the Book of Common Prayer. The Directory took its
position at the heart of the constitution of the Realm. The union of
Scotland, England and Ireland, which was after all merely a royal union by
dynastic inheritance, was vindicated. A prayer was framed for these sacred
covenants, and for the churches of England, Scotland and Ireland, and the
King in Parliament was read a moral lesson by the cursing of his evil
counsellors:

Whereas there are thousands of ships which have no ministers with them to
guide them in prayer, and therefore either use the old form of Common
Prayer or no prayer at all; the former whereof for many weighty reasons
hath been abolished, and the latter is likely to make them heathens rather
than Christians; therefore, to avoid these inconveniences, it hath been
thought fit to frame some prayers, for example, this: ‘We pray thee send
thy blessing upon all the Reformed Churches, especially upon the churches
and kingdoms [sic, the churches precede!] of England, Scotland and
Ireland, now more strictly and religiously united in the solemn league and
covenant. We pray thee for all in authority, especially the King's majesty,
that God would make him rich in blessings, both in his person and
government, establish his throne in religion, save him from evil counsel,
160 Chapter Seven

and make him a blessed and glorious instrument for the conservation and
propagation of the Gospel.’

This time the Presbyterians were as “Anglican” and “Episcopalian” as

they well could be. In publishing the Directory they completely abandoned
the Presbyterian principle of local church government. The Directory is the
“sin against the Holy Ghost” of the Puritan Revolution. Such a great
document is not even mentioned by Gardiner in his books on the Great
Rebellion and the civil wars of England. It would, in fact, be too much to
ask of a Liberal of the nineteenth century that he should divine the real
dangers of the Puritan days. But the whole imperial development, the
Commonwealth of England, was at stake when the Church of England was
given over to petty local pedants or congregationalists. In forbidding the
use of the Book of Common Prayer, Parliament abdicated its religious
dignity as a member of a Realm mighty in the things of the spirit, such
things as universities, schools and the calendar. The introduction of the
Directory was the first event which stopped the threatened suicide of the
Mother of Parliaments. One year later Parliament had broken the
resistance of Charles I. The King agreed to all the secular demands of his
enemies. But in their blindness they could not see what they had already
done in publishing the Directory; it seemed merely an exception to the rule
they had established. On land, the inspired congregationalists did not
shrink at the backward step into chaos; they mistook the isolated local
congregation of each parish for the united members of the Commonwealth.
Charles I did not lose his life because of his temporal power. He had
agreed to all the demands of Parliament in matters of finance and war. But
he was clear-headed enough to understand his father's famous “No bishop,
no Kings” in the sense in which it was meant; namely, that a government
over the counties of England and Scotland was impossible if all that we
call today the civil departments of government were to be excluded from
its co-ordinating power. All civil departments today are of ecclesiastical
origin, derived from common law, the monastic orders, theology, or
university traditions.
Charles I died, not as a fanatic for a personal faith, but as a clear-
headed fighter for the rights of the King's role in the Anglican Church.
When he was beheaded one half of his fight was won. His secular rights,
by his own consent, were gone. But the return to the catholicity of the
Anglican Church was made possible by his tenacity. Had he once given up
his claim it would probably have been impossible to restore it at any later
time. Religion would have fallen into the hands of a special body. The
British Commons would not have acquired the religious sovereignty of
their House. The words on the Great Seal of the Commons in 1642, Pro
 Selections from Out of Revolution 161

Religione, grege et Rege, turned the scales between Rex and Grex, King
and Parliament. But it was the mistake of the Presbyterians not to stop
there, but to mistake grex as meaning ecclesiastical congregation. The
Great Seal of the Civil War would be valid only if grex preceded rex and
religion preceded both, embracing the whole Kingdom at once. Then grex
could not be “congregation,” but had to mean the Christian people of all
England. Not the isolated minister and congregation, but the united
ministers and the united congregation of all England, represented by
Parliament, had to be the bearers of the inspiration. Actually, Charles I
became the martyr of this united Christianity and the protector of
Parliament against local government of the Church. “The King in
Parliament,” by climbing the scaffold, helped Parliament against its own
blindness, along the road to parliamentary glory and sovereignty. Charles I
saved, not a royal Church as against a democratic Church, but an Anglican
and a parliamentary Church as against a Derbyshire, a Norfolk, a Kent, a
Warwickshire and a ministerial Church! By doing so, he acted as the true
trustee of Parliament itself against Parliament, appealing from this
misinformed Parliament to its wiser successors!
Charles I is the only saint of the Anglican Church. No other martyr or
saint was ever inserted in its calendar. Charles I adorns it with good
reason. For it was not the “arbitrary power” of a monarch, but the Realm
of Great Britain which spoke through him in favour of a Church of the
Realm, regardless of the conflict between King and Commons.

The European Significance of “Glorious Revolution”

Humanity as a whole underwent a revolutionary change during the
seventeenth century, and expressed this change through an English
vocabulary. We have already remarked on the word “glorious” in
“Glorious Revolution”; but the word “revolution” deserves some further
notice. The new terminology sanctified revolution as a lawful event—
naturally lawful though politically illegal. Something bigger than legality
had made its entrance into the Western World.
As early as a generation before 1688, individual writers had begun to
use the word “revolution” in a sense which implied a parallel between the
rotations of government and the great motions of the stars. In the Middle
Ages politics were thought of as depending wholly on the “revolving”
wheel of fortune. By the seventeenth century the new astronomy of
Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo had impressed the public deeply
enough to make it apply the notion of astronomical revolutions to earthly
events. Mathematics and the physics of space stimulated the imagination.
162 Chapter Seven

Hobbes wrote, in physical terms: “If in time as in place there were degrees
of high and low, I verily believe that the highest of time would be that
which passed between the years of 1640 and 1660.” In another chapter he
expresses himself in this way:

I have seen in this revolution a circular motion of the sovereign power

through two usurpers, father and son, from the late King to his son. For it
moved from King Charles I to the Long Parliament; from thence to the
Rump; from the Rump to Oliver Cromwell; and thence back again from
Richard Cromwell to the Rump; thence to the Long Parliament and thence
to King Charles II, where long may it remain. Clarendon himself, in his
later years, when he was no longer a responsible minister of the King,
called the royal restoration of 1660 the ‘revolution.’

Through this new usage the laws of nature made their entrance into the
world of politics. “Depression,” “opposition,” “influence,” “conjunction,”
are words of the same stamp. The notorious phrase “the business cycle” is
also descended from this stock. All of them deserve our interest. Take, for
instance, “influence”: “Certain occult streams of power believed to
emanate from the heavenly bodies.” 4 Revolution brought about an
astronomical order of things in which the body politic is no longer moved
by the High of this earth—in which a new “influence,” God's glorious will
from above, has opened unforeseen channels of power to the lower estates
of the realm. This belief in an “influence” more powerful than the written
or formal law is related to the belief in the Revolution. The vocabulary of
politics always has to deal with the intangibles which move the heart and
mind of a ruler, without even being mentioned by the law of the land. The
lawyers of pre-revolutionary England had set up the law against those
secret influences of the court which made the King's power arbitrary. They
tried to exclude influence and act by law alone. But influence is a fluid, as
law is a solid body. Ice and water are no more closely related than politics
and law. Influence cannot be excluded by law, but only by another
influence. Otherwise the origin of new law is made impossible. Thus
legitimate and illegitimate influence are the real opposing elements in the
English revolution. As the Great Remonstrance of 1642 put it, the King
should entrust the business of the State to no other persons than those who
had the confidence of the Commons. The word “conjuncture” points in the
same direction; it is an astronomical term. When Charles II returned in
1660, he said that “a happy conjuncture bad removed a malignant star.”
“Opposition,” the common expression for a political antagonism, is also an

4
Trench, Study of Words, Oxford, 1894.
 Selections from Out of Revolution 163

astronomical word. It was the insight into the inevitability of opposition in

heaven which overcame the reluctance of human brains to tolerate
opposition on earth. When we find the Leader of the Opposition legally
established in the Canadian constitution we should not forget that the
discoveries of the astronomer had to give man a glimpse of the revolutions
of the stars before he was bold enough to legalize human opposition.
We should add, however, that this cosmic point of view did not mean
that the individual politician was governed by the motions of the stars.
Cheap astrology, the drawing of horoscopes, and so on, methods freely
used by princes and military leaders all through the seventeenth century,
were a kind of black magic which a great nation could not tolerate. No, the
application of natural law was, not to the politician, but to the whole of
politics. These new words were acceptable only because they were
applied, not to the individual Englishman and his freedom, or to the King,
but to the balance of power in the body politic as a whole. Astronomical
metaphors were welcomed because no Christian soul, no named
individual, was caught in the net. The new vocabulary emphasized the
anonymous order of things described above, in which gentlemen had no
names of their own, the Speaker of the House no eyes or ears of his own,
and Members of Parliament no desks of their own. This was the sense in
which, by a happy conjuncture, the Lower House had secured its co-
ordination with the upper spheres.
We shall understand the meaning of “Glorious Revolution” still better
if we ask ourselves what bodies were involved in it. Was it everybody,
every citizen, who got his share of power in this revolution? Or was it the
great individuals, dignitaries of rank and influence, lords and aristocrats,
who became the governing class? Either assumption would miss the point
of the British Constitution. The Whigs of 1688 wished their word
“revolution” to be taken literally. Individual men moved on this earth; but
the model of the body politic was the celestial bodies on which Copernicus
had written his famous treatise De revolutionibus corporum ccelestium
(1543). Arbitrary power was banned. There was no Popery left to dim the
light of moon and stars by the alleged glories of its Roman court; there
was only the majesty of the galaxy above a benighted world—supra-
individual, supra-personal. And the mighty of this world were revealed as
nothing and of no account compared with this celestial system of moving
bodies.
164 Chapter Seven

The Three Restorations

Perhaps it seems strange to a modern mind that the people of England
should have looked up from below to an upper Realm of superhuman
powers, and that they should have celebrated a sudden co-ordination with
this upper realm of Church and State as an act of deliverance. But this is
the secret of the English Revolution, that by a penetration and undermining
of the upper powers of the Realm from below, high became low,
mountains valleys, and humble gentlemen of England the proud masters of
Church and State; and that, although Upper remained Upper, High
remained High, and Sovereign remained Sovereign, they all had to give
way henceforth to the opinions, grievances and wishes of the Commons of
England. The power of the House of Commons would vanish the moment
either Realm, Anglican Church or House of Lords ceased to function. All
proposals to abolish the House of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal were
and are doomed, because they are all infected by the Continental,
democratic point of view. These proposals are founded on the assumption
of a nation which governs itself. But the English people do not govern
themselves. They are governed by consent, which is something very
different. Undoubtedly, to secure this consent they have bored through the
foundations of the Realm, which governs England even today, and have
transformed King and Queen, Lords and Archbishops, Chancellors and
Judges of the English nation, for all their pompous wigs and scarlet
vestments, crowns and processions, ritual and privileges, into will- ing
servants of the English people. But the superstructure cannot be
abandoned. Cromwell, describing himself as neither very high nor very
low, was the model of the Commoner of England.
The limelight of French tradition plays on the first years of the French
Revolution. The fourteenth of July, 1789, is the christening day for a
period of twenty-six years. Awaited with impatience for forty years, the
Revolution was realized in its universal importance from the very
beginning. Reality and the consciousness of reality reached a harmony
unheard-of in the annals of our race; in the very dawn of events
consciousness was fully awake.
“Glorious Revolution” emphasizes a different kind of parallelism. The
French were intoxicated by the perfect harmony between mind and body.
The English expression does homage to the perfect harmony in God's
creation of heaven and earth, and to his power to act without man's help in
His government of the world. And this vision came to the British nation as
a farewell to forty-eight years of civil unrest. It was the final ceremony of
a long struggle; the name was uttered like a deep sigh ending the fifty
 Selections from Out of Revolution 165

years of strain and precluding any return to civil war, insurrection, or

illegal procedure in the future. A great solemnity prevails. It is the finality
of the event that strikes us most. As an illustration, I have saved one line
from the divine service for the Fifth of November. In it the note, sounded
in the first hour of the struggle, resounds admirably in the last. I hope that
the reader will share the reverence I felt when I discovered, under the
surface of the “Glorious Revolution” the old word “restoration.” So says
the Book of Common Prayer on the Fifth of November: “The glory of God
made William III the instrument of His will in restoring the rights and
liberties of England.”
We have re-established the unity of the Puritan and royal restorations,
and we have pointed out that 1688 was a third restoration, trimmed and
embellished to suit the limelight of consciousness, and guaranteeing the
Anglican character of the English Church. Now we can rename the phases
of the English Revolution:

Table 7-1

The Puritan Restoration of Freedom 1641-1660

The Royal Restoration 1660-1685
The Anglican Restoration 1685-1689 (1692)

It is the secret of the English Revolution that the real revolution was
deprived of its birthright, and that a later event carried off the glories of
victory. The Glorious Revolution is an aftermath, like the July Revolution
of 1830. Now we have already had occasion to compare the epilogue of
1830 to the prologue of 1905 in Russia; and we asserted that 1830 played a
similar role, in relation to the end of the French Revolution in 1815, to that
played by the prologue of 1905 in relation to the outbreak of the World
Revolution in 1917. In each case the truth had to be proclaimed over
again; the effort had to be made twice before it could be final. Without
1905, the World Revolution of 1917 could not have been aware of its own
finality. Until 1830 the French Revolution was without self-consciousness.
The English crisis obeys the same law of a two-fold beginning.
Without 1688, the great change of 1651 could not be brought fully into
consciousness. Though it had long been in effect, it needed the dramatic
events of 1688 to become legitimate and be made a formula of recurrent
order. But since the English Revolution preceded the French and Russian,
the English were not able to see 1688 as the sequel of 1649, as tne French
could when Lafayette rode through the streets of Paris in 1830 as he had
166 Chapter Seven

ridden in 1789. It is true that many members of the Convention of 1689

had seen the Civil War. It is by no means a mere accident that Maynard
could be so active in 1688, when he was eighty-seven years old. But the
point is that in 1689 everyone did the opposite of what the French did in
1830. Instead of comparing the old days with present events, the British in
1689 were haunted by a firm resolution not to see any similarities and not
to permit any comparison.
 CHAPTER EIGHT

A “HALF-REVOLUTION” OR A REVOLUTION
FINALLY COMPLETED?
REFORMED PROTESTANT THEOLOGY’S
FULFILLMENT IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

GLENN A. MOOTS

“The leaders of such a spiritual movement cannot be called rebels”.1

After one gets past the usual hagiography surrounding the American
Revolution, its precise significance and causes can be puzzling. Even the
Founding generation and its inheritors were not quite sure how to interpret
these events. In an 1816 letter to Hezekiah Niles,2 John Adams cast the
American Revolution as a momentous event that increased worldwide
revolutionary fervor in its wake. Adams wrote, “The American Revolution
was not a common event. Its effects and consequences have already been
awful over a great part of the globe. And when and where are they to
cease?” Adams spoke of the Revolution not so much as the fighting that
commenced in 1775, but as the change “in the minds and hearts of the
people”. This change was described by Adams to include a change in
“religious sentiments of their duties and obligations”. This change,
together with other alterations in American sentiment and thinking, Adams

1
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution (Providence: Berg Publishers,
1969), 301-302.
2
It is not insignificant that the strong circulation of Niles’s Weekly Register made
him one of America’s most successful publishers. Adams’s sense for posterity may
have inspired even more insightful consideration on this occasion. Niles was also
the son of a ‘fighting Quaker,’ member of a group which left the Quakers and their
pacifism to fight for Independence.
168 Chapter Eight

writes, was the “real American Revolution”. 3 But what inspired this
change in sentiments, and was it the same change that led to revolutions
preceding or following the American Revolution—particularly the English
Civil War or the French Revolution? Why did the American Revolution
ultimately result in an almost ideal synthesis of liberal (Whig?) and
republican thought while the English Revolution resulted in a regicide and
a failed Commonwealth and the French Revolution resulted in a reign of
terror, constitutional crisis, and ultimately dictatorship?
Perhaps there is no greater expression of the change Adams described
than the Declaration of Independence—what Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
called the “word” that created America.4 The Declaration is arguably the
greatest articulation of the American Revolution’s principles. In 1859,
Abraham Lincoln was invited to speak at a birthday celebration honoring
the late Thomas Jefferson. In a letter to Henry Pierce and the other
organizers, Lincoln declined the invitation but spoke to the occasion.
Lincoln called Jefferson’s principles in the Declaration “definitions and
axioms of free society”. Lincoln gives “all honor to Jefferson” for
expressing in the Declaration an “abstract truth” that would serve as a
“rebuke and a stumbling block” to tyranny and oppression.5 But one must
ask, would Jefferson have accepted Lincoln’s honor as the Declaration’s
innovator? Did he see himself as the proponent of an “abstract truth”?
Were these sentiments indeed something new?
In the final years of his life, Jefferson offered his own reflections on
the Declaration. In Jefferson’s reflections one can almost infer a return to
Adams’s claim tying the Revolution to changes in the sentiments and
thinking of Americans. Writing from Monticello to Henry Lee on May 8,
1825, Jefferson speaks to the intent and content of the Declaration of
Independence and calls it the expression of American Whigs forced to
“resort to arms” and to “appeal to the tribunal of the world” for
justification. Jefferson does not assert the Declaration to be unique nor
does he seek accolades for originality. In fact, he denies it to be original in

3
John Adams, letter to H. Niles of February 3, 1816; in John Adams, The Political
Writings of John Adams, ed. George W. Carey (Washington: Regnery Publishing,
Inc., 2001), 701-702.
4
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Lecture on Historiography –1959, Vol 20 – Lecture
13, May 26, 1959; retrieved from DVD: The Collected Works of Rosenstock-
Huessy (Essex: Argo Books); Lecture (number-page) 13-038; Item number: 645;
Reel number: 17.
5
Abraham Lincoln, letter to Henry L. Pierce and others; in Abraham Lincoln,
Speeches and Writings, 1859-1865. The Library of America, Volume 46 (New
York: Penguin Books, 1989), 18-19.
 A “Half-Revolution” or a Revolution Finally Completed? 169

principle or sentiment. But neither was it copied from previous writing.

Instead, Jefferson calls the Declaration “an expression of the American
mind,” whose authority rests on a host of expressions, including “the
elementary books of public right” such as Aristotle, Cicero, Locke and
Sidney. In doing this, Jefferson says, the Declaration did not seek to “find
out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely
to say things which had never been said before, but to place before
mankind the common sense of the subject”.6 This statement by Jefferson
implies an implicit conservatism in the Revolution. What then should we
think of Adams’s implication that the American Revolution introduced
something radical that spread around the world?
With two centuries of hindsight, the world does appear “different” in
the wake of the American Revolution. Gordon Wood is perhaps the most
prominent of modern historians who have suggested something quite
radical in the American Revolution. This “radical” element is not the same
as Thomas McPartland defines it elsewhere in this volume, for example,
wherein there is a soteriological aim to cleanse evil absolutely. Rather,
Wood is drawing on more pedestrian usage in suggesting something
unique or extraordinary. American Whiggism, Wood argues, was radical
insofar as it established a democratic, individualist, and capitalistic ethos
unique in the world. Rather than thinking of the American Revolution as
conservative, Wood suggests that the amount of social change “was as
radical and as revolutionary as any in history” and transformed history
thereafter.7
In light of questions raised both then and now, it is worth revisiting
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy’s assertion in Out of Revolution that the
American Revolution was only a “half-revolution”.8 That is, a revolution
best understood as both derivative of previous revolutions and also
unfinished. Indeed, Rosenstock-Huessy’s own brief treatment of the
question leaves much room for controversy. Even his students appear
divided on the question. Legal historian Harold Berman argues forcefully
that the American Revolution is one of the six great revolutions that
“punctuated” the “organic development” of Western legal institutions. 9

6
Thomas Jefferson, letter to Henry Lee, May 8, 1825; in Thomas Jefferson,
Writings. The Library of America, Volume 17, edited by Merrill D. Peterson (New
York: Penguin Books, 1984), 1500-1501.
7
Gordon Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., 1991), 3, 5, 7-8.
8
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 662-65.
9
Harold Berman, Faith and Order: The Reconciliation of Law and Religion
(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), 28; Harold Berman, Law and Revolution: The
170 Chapter Eight

Berman does not flinch at calling the American Revolution a “total

revolution” that introduced new paradigms into law and government and
caused total social transformation. 10 Page Smith (another student of
Rosenstock-Huessy) argues that the American Revolution must be
understood in the context of the British Revolutions. Though Smith argues
that the Whigs were unsuccessful, he praises them insofar as they were
“constantly enunciating (and thereby keeping alive) the great principles of
British constitutional liberty”. 11 By this enunciation of those principles,
Smith argues, the Americans saved Britain from its own bloody social
revolution.
In this essay, I argue that the American Revolution did indeed depend
on important derivative elements, particularly from the Protestant
Reformation and the English Revolution. Much of my essay articulates
those principles as they were articulated over two centuries. This is not a
new thesis, of course. Finding some roots of the American Revolution in
Reformed Protestantism was first argued by David Ramsay, the earliest
historian of the Revolution.12 Page Smith, Rosenstock-Huessy’s student,
concedes that Ramsay’s is the best explanation because of its proximity to
the event.13 But I also argue that the American Revolution was not merely
derivative of either the Reformation or the English Revolution. Rather, it
was a full and substantial revolution in its own right because of how it how
it uniquely utilized arguments from both the Reformation and the English
Revolution. Where the American Revolution appears to be an unfinished
revolution (finished, as Rosenstock-Huessy argues, by the American Civil
War), this reflects nothing more than the reality that revolutions last more
than one generation. In fact, without the uniquely American articulation of
particular principles derived from Protestant and English formulations, the
successful extension of the best Protestant and English principles could not
have been possible nor translated to the next two centuries of the
American experience or even to much of the modern world.
My argument will draw on a particular line of thinking in the American
Revolution derivative from the Protestant Reformation and the English
Revolution, the symbol and device of covenanting, and its accompanying

Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,

1983), 18-19.
10
Berman, Law and Revolution, 20-21.
11
Page Smith, A New Age Now Begins: A People’s History of the American
Revolution, 2 vols. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 1:872.
12
David Ramsay, History of the American Revolution (Philadelphia, 1789), 1, 8-9.
13
Page Smith, ‘David Ramsay and the Causes of the American Revolution’,
William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 17 (January 1960): 51–77.
 A “Half-Revolution” or a Revolution Finally Completed? 171

political theology of resistance. This is an oft-neglected aspect of

American political thought, but one that is most fitting for both the
question at hand and for Rosenstock-Huessy’s own theory of revolution.14

Reviving the Call to Abraham

The debt of the American Revolution to Protestantism begins not with
Luther in Germany or even with Calvin in Geneva, but rather in Zurich
with Heinrich Bullinger, successor to Ulrich Zwingli. In 1534, a relatively
young Bullinger published the most important work of covenant theology
in the history of the church, De testamento seu foedere dei unico &
aeterno.15 This work is of critical importance for the study of revolution,
not only because it provided a politically rich covenant-centric theology
for the burgeoning Protestant world, but also because it summoned biblical
themes of universal redemption. The theme of universal redemption
would, though eventually secularized in the French Revolution, establish a
leitmotif in modern revolutionary rhetoric.
A pioneering work of Reformed political theology, De testamento was
designed to rehabilitate civil government from either Anabaptist dualism
or undue Papal influence. 16 The heart of Bullinger’s work is God’s
covenant with Abraham found in Genesis 15, 17, and 22. Bullinger’s text
is important not simply because it built a bridge between the Church and
the Hebrew patriarchs but because it was written at a time when the
nation-state was just coming into existence. Protestant theology was a
conduit point to bring biblical themes and symbols into the modern
political world.
The covenant with Abraham is unmistakably political. In the Genesis
account, God tells Abraham,

I have made you the father of a multitude of nations. I will make you
exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come
from you. And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your

14
The question of covenants is more important to Rosenstock-Huessey than to
most authors. He often refers to them in the context of politics. See his comments
in Out of Revolution, 196, 496-497, for example; or his description of the secular
French Revolution as a ‘new covenant’ on page 175.
15
The claim of its significance in church history is made by Peter Lillback in his
study of covenant theology, The Binding of God: Calvin’s Role in the Development
of Covenant Theology (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2001), 110.
16
J. Wayne Baker, ‘Church, State, and Dissent: The Crisis of the Swiss
Reformation, 1531-1536’, Church History 57, no. 2, 135-52.
172 Chapter Eight

offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting

covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.17

Earlier, God has told Abraham that his descendents would be as

numerous as the stars in the sky. 18 In Genesis 22 (after Abraham has
offered to sacrifice Isaac), God repeats the promise of innumerable
offspring, but then adds that they will be a blessing to all the nations and
will possess the gates (seat of power) of their enemies.19 This promise is
consistent with both Rosenstock-Huessy’s four-fold conception of reality
and the Christian promise of a universal future.20 The covenant promise to
Abraham does not consist only of a world-to-come. It promises Abraham,
and his descendants, blessing in the world now. The Abrahamic covenant
is the basis of all future covenants, of Judaism and Christianity, and of the
West’s messianic vision.
The covenant symbol is a penultimate revolutionary symbol bound up
with the biblical Book of Exodus and other narratives of suffering and
conquering; such stories of suffering and conquering are favorite tropes of
reformers and revolutionaries ancient and modern.21 Rightly understood, a
covenant is not simply a contract or an agreement. It is both a symbol
(representing an ethos) as well as a device that establishes a relationship
and makes peace. 22 It includes a calling and response. It is, to put it into
terms evocative of Rosenstock-Huessy, an act of speech born of crisis and
suffering. A covenant is a vocative act. It calls particular persons and
whole communities into works of peace and sacrificial love. Unlike a
pronouncement or a mere contract, the covenant calls persons into a
relationship of becoming rather than being. One is continually striving to
fulfill the terms of the covenant. Covenants are religious rather than
philosophical political ideas. They are existentially significant because
they pursue the “who” rather than the “what” of human existence.23

17
Genesis 17:5-7 (all citations are taken from the English Standard Version).
18
Ibid., 15:5.
19
Ibid., 22:15-18.
20
See Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality (Essex: Argo Books, 1970).
21
Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985).
22
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Lecture on Comparative Religion – 1954, Vol 8 –
Lecture 6, Oct 12, 1954; retrieved from DVD: The Collected Works of
Rosenstock-Huessy; Lecture (number-page) 6-010; Item number: 633; Reel
number: 15.
23
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Lecture on American Social History – 1959, Vol 19
– Lecture 10, Mar 4, 1959; retrieved from DVD: The Collected Works of
Rosenstock-Huessy; Lecture (number-page) 10-002; Item number: 644; Reel
number: 17.
 A “Half-Revolution” or a Revolution Finally Completed? 173

The challenge of the covenant is how one reconciles the earthly

meaning of the heavenly call. Eric Voegelin presented the covenant and
the earliest Hebrew symbols as an important expression of the “Metaxy”
of human existence—existence between the mundane and the divine.24 The
problem with Israel’s use of the symbol, Voegelin argues, is that it was
appropriated for its own pragmatic ends rather than as an expression of the
universal God of history.25 The appropriation of the covenant corrupted the
monarchy and inspired the jeremiads of the prophets. Competing
interpretations of the covenant symbol resulted in confusion that has not
only challenged millennia of biblical theologians but also the revolutionaries
that Rosenstock-Huessy casts as walking in their footsteps. This is what
Voegelin described in the case of the Davidic monarchy as the “Messianic
problem”. 26 It is the challenge of balancing self-assertion with political
community. This is the great challenge of any revolution.
In De testamento, we see Bullinger taking this penultimate Jewish
scripture, passages promising universal redemption according to the terms
of a covenant, and introducing it into the first great “modern” revolution,
the Protestant Reformation. And he does this not simply on a theological
level, but on a political and social level. Bullinger argued that the covenant
with Abraham was the same covenant also made between God and the
church. While Bullinger was not alone in asserting covenant continuity
between Abraham and the Christian church, the continuity arguments of
fellow Reformed Protestants Peter Martyr27 and John Calvin28 contained
important differences. Whereas Martyr confined his application to the
sacraments, and Calvin argued that the successes of the prophets should
direct Christians to instead think of heaven,29 Bullinger made the covenant
with Abraham indicative of the kind of success that may characterize the
church and its members. Bullinger argued that the promises to the
patriarchs of “land . . . wars and victories, Judaic glory and happiness” also
extended to Christians. Earthly successes are not to be wholly replaced by

24
Eric Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, vol. 1 of Order and History (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1956), 114.
25
Ibid., 470.
26
Ibid., 472-73.
27
Peter A. Lillback, ‘The Early Reformed Covenant Paradigm: Vermigli in the
Context of Bullinger, Luther, and Calvin’, in Frank A. James III, ed., Peter Martyr
Vermigli and the European Reformation (Boston: Brill, 2004), 70–96.
28
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, II.ix–x.
29
Calvin, Institutes, II.x.11-13; II.x.20; II.x.16, 380; II.xi.1, 388; II.xi.3, 389.
174 Chapter Eight

“cross and exile” or “persecution”. 30 Furthermore, Bullinger cast the

patriarchs as civil magistrates who bore responsibility for the corporate
expression of faithfulness among the people.31
Bullinger was able to have this confidence in the covenant as a civil
device or symbol because of his unique situation in Zurich; his optimism
for a covenanted people could not be applied in every Protestant case. The
church and state in Zurich had separate jurisdictions of authority but were
largely seen as co-operating in a Corpus Christianum. This cooperation
was founded on the covenant of baptism, according to Bullinger.32 In other
Reformed centers, even Geneva, such concord did not necessarily exist.
Calvin’s first efforts at church-state partnership resulted in his exile in
1538 and concessions when he returned in 1541. In France, for example,
the Reformed Protestants were under considerable pressure (and sometimes
murderous persecution) from their magistrates. Britain’s Protestants enjoyed
some progress under Edward VI, but fled to the continent to escape
persecution under Mary Tudor. Under Elizabeth, many dissenting
Protestants (“Puritans”) chafed under the Elizabethan Settlement.
In many respects, the politics of being a chosen people were still
fraught with peril and had yet to be worked out.33 As Reformed Protestants
suffered under persecution, they crafted polemics against Mary Tudor and
her regime. Though both Zurich and Geneva (and Strasburg and Frankfort)
provided refuge for the persecuted, it was Geneva that provided the
theology of resistance against persecution, though Calvin’s own
participation in this project is unknown. While they were exiles in Geneva,
John Knox and Christopher Goodman served as co-pastors of a “Stranger
Church” of English Protestants. Each crafted works advocating resistance

30
Heinrich Bullinger, A Brief Exposition of the One and Eternal Testament or
Covenant of God by Heinrich Bullinger, trans. Charles S. McCoy and J. Wayne
Baker; included in Charles S. McCoy and J. Wayne Baker, Fountainhead of
Federalism: Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenantal Tradition (Louisville:
Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), 101-138 (128).
31
Ibid., 113-15.
32
Bullinger, Anklag und ernstliches ermanen Gottes Allmaechtigen (1528). J.
Wayne Baker, Heinrich Bullinger and the Covenant (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 1981), 103, 104; W. Peter Stephens, ‘Predestination or Election in Zwingli
and Bullinger’, in Emidio Campi and Peter Opitz, eds., Heinrich Bullinger: Life—
Thought—Influence. Zurich, August 25-29, 2004, International Congress Heinrich
Bullinger 1504-1575, 2 vols. (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zurich, 2007) I:313-
34 (333).
33
See Glenn A. Moots, Politics Reformed: The Anglo-American Legacy of
Covenant Theology (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2010).
 A “Half-Revolution” or a Revolution Finally Completed? 175

if not outright revolution and tyrannicide.34 Bishop John Ponet directed a

similar work at “Bloody Mary” in 1556 (after he joined Wyatt’s aborted
rebellion in 1554). French Protestants, who suffered far worse persecution,
directed their own polemics at Roman Catholic monarchs there. This
included the famous Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos (1579). Mary Tudor’s
death meant that none of the Genevan exiles’ theory was put to the test.
French Protestants never gained momentum for revolution. The only
attempt at a Reformed Protestant revolt occurred against Mary of Guise,
who died before things could be seen through to their potentially bloody
conclusion.

Revolution: The Politics of Being a Chosen People

Three aspects of Reformed Protestantism must be put into focus,
including notable differences between Zurich and Geneva: 1) The
relationship between church and state; 2) The condemnation of tyranny; 3)
Remedies against tyranny. For Calvin, the relationship between church and
state was one of both competition and cooperation; for Bullinger, it was
more a relationship of cooperation. This is not a difference that is easy to
dichotomize, however. The crux of church-state relations, at least in the
early sixteenth century, was the question of church discipline. Although
both Calvin and Bullinger believed that the church retained the right to
discipline, the circumstances varied considerably. Calvin insisted on an
independent right of church discipline35 while Bullinger’s approach was
less competitive and antagonistic.36
The politics of being a chosen people, at least in the sixteenth century,
could not help but go beyond the church walls. As the covenant symbol
progressed in political meaning over two centuries, we see the
foundational ideas of Zurich and Geneva working in a kind of cooperative

34
John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of
Women (1558); Christopher Goodman, How Superior Powers Ought to Be Obeyed
(1558), reprint edition (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2004); John Ponet, A
Shorte Treatise of Politike Power (1556).
35
Calvin, Institutes, IV.xii.1-7, IV.xi.3, 4.
36
George M. Ella, Henry Bullinger: Shepherd of the Churches (Durham: Go
Publications, 2007), 170; Bruce Gordon, ‘Introduction: Architect of Reformation’,
in Bruce Gordon and Emidio Campi, eds., Architect of Reformation: An
Introduction to Heinrich Bullinger, 1504-1575 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker
Academic, 2005), 17-32 (28); During later Presbyterian controversies in England,
Bullinger’s close associate Rudolph Gualter was also very wary of church
discipline.
176 Chapter Eight

tension. From Calvin’s Geneva, one can derive the beginnings of

Protestant revolutionary notions about conscience and legal resistance. But
from Bullinger, consistent with his more earth-bound interpretation of
Genesis 17, we gain the notion that revolution is more than just for the
sake of preserving the route to heaven. It can have purely political or legal
motives in its own right. These differences are reflective of their
circumstances. Calvin was a French expatriate who had already been
exiled from Geneva once and was often hamstrung by civil authorities in
Bern and Geneva. His influence, at least until 1555, was only through the
clergy’s consistory who could only recommend excommunication.
Bullinger, on the other hand, faced no such resistance in Zurich. It was
much easier to envision the Corpus Christianum of medieval Christianity
there.
When combined, the resistance theories of Calvin and Bullinger laid
important foundations for Protestant resistance and social thinking. From
Calvin, Reformed Protestantism got its doctrine of individual conscience
and its advocacy of resistance only by “inferior magistrates”. Both are
prominent in later editions of Calvin’s famous Christianae religionis
institutio (commonly now translated as Institutes of the Christian
Religion). 37 But from Bullinger, particularly his widely-read Sermonum
decades quinque (commonly translated simply as Decades), Reformed
Protestantism gained a lasting conviction that tyranny (a moral evil) could
not be ascribed to the sovereignty of God. 38 Tyranny was a point that
Calvin was existentially ambiguous about through most of his corpus, as
he was with other evils such as Adam’s fall into sin.39 On the one hand,
Calvin suggested in his Institutes that tyranny was the work of God. On
the other hand, his Institutes did not prohibit resistance against tyranny in
any case.40 For Bullinger, no ambiguity existed concerning the relationship
of God to tyranny. In his Decades, he condemned tyranny from Christ’s
own lips. The differences between Calvin and Bullinger are no better

37
For Calvin’s discussion of conscience, see Calvin, Institutes, III.xix.15-16,
IV.x.3-6. For Calvin’s famous doctrine of interposition by other magistrates, see
Institutes IV.xx.31.
38
Henrich Bullinger, The Decades of Henry Bullinger, ed. Thomas Harding, 2
vols., Parker Society, 1849-1852; reprint, with new introductions by George Ella
and Joel R. Beeke (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2004), II.vi, 314,
315.
39
Calvin, Institutes, I.xv.8, III.xxiii.7; Calvin, Concerning the Eternal
Predestination of God, trans. J. K. S. Reid (Cambridge, U.K.: James Clarke, 1961),
VIII.5.
40
Calvin, Institutes, IV.xx.25-32.
 A “Half-Revolution” or a Revolution Finally Completed? 177

illustrated than in their respective interpretations of the Nebuchednezar

story from the Bible. Calvin interprets this as a demonstration of God’s
sovereignty setting up a tyrant. Bullinger interprets it as an occasion of
God’s sovereignty pulling a tyrant down.41
The English learned from both Calvin and Bullinger while in exile
from “Bloody Mary”. They learned the importance of the Corpus
Christianum from Bullinger but they also learned the importance of
resistance from Calvin. It was during Mary’s persecution of Protestants
that the rhetorical and theological tools of Protestant resistance theory
were forged, mainly in Geneva. These included the Psalter, the Geneva
Bible, The Book of Common Order, and the radical prescriptions of the
monarchomachs: John Ponet’s A Treatise of Politike Power (1556),
Christopher Goodman’s How Superior Powers Ought to Be Obeyed
(1558), and John Knox’s First Blast Against the Monstrous Regiment of
Women (1558). The English and Scots were not alone in exploring the
basis of revolution at this time. Geneva may have provided refuge for
English Protestants, but it was filling with French Protestants. Similar
works were composed mindful of their suffering. This included the
Huguenot tract Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos (1579), Theodore Beza’s De
jure magistratuum (1575), Franz Hotman’s Franco Gallia (1575), and the
anonymously published Reveille-matin des Francois (1574). Although
each reflects the particulars of its time, there is also a universalizing
dimension contained in many of these works. No less an authority than
John Adams cited both the Vindiciae and the work of John Ponet as
theoretical supports for the American Revolution.42
In some of the revolutionary polemics of the French and British
Reformed Protestants, the question of legitimacy was explicitly tied to a
three part covenant that implied divine accountability and sanction.
Resistance was justified for more than ecclesiastical tyranny. The king
who breaks his trust with the people and the law, the heart of the second
covenant, becomes a tyrant. The Vindiciae, for example, included a wide
array of acts that defined a tyrant.43 This list included ignoring counsel,
abusing taxation to fund extravagance, and the lawless persecution of

41
Ibid., IV.xx.26; Bullinger, Decades, II.vi.317-318.
42
John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States
of America, Vol. 3, Chap. 1: Against the Attack of M. Turgot, in His Letter to Dr.
Price, Dated the Twenty-Second Day of March, 1778; in Adams, The Political
Writings of John Adams, 195-303 (224-25).
43
Phillippe Du Plessis Mornay [Stephanus Junius Brutus, pseud.], Vindiciae,
Contra Tyrannos; reprint of 1689 translation (Edmonton: Still Waters Revival
Books, 1989), 116-33.
178 Chapter Eight

subjects. The Vindicae’s anonymous author (Philippe de Mornay?) not

only gave permission for resistance but considered it a duty. The three-
party covenant in the Vindiciae not only described the legal structure of
accountability but also created obligations punishable by covenantal
sanction.
If a tyrant was allowed to rule, especially to the end of promoting
idolatry, then the wrath of God would be poured out not only upon the evil
ruler but also upon his surety, the people. If the lower magistrates failed in
their duty of interposition, the options of the common people varied. The
Vindiciae explicitly prescribes self-exile for the oppressed. 44 But other
prescriptions were not so peaceful. Quentin Skinner characterizes
Christopher Goodman, John Ponet, and John Knox as arguing that those
who fail to resist tyrants would be damned. 45 That is a reasonable
interpretation given the charge of Goodman to his reader:

[Y]our study in this case, ought to be, to seek how you may dispose and
punish according to the Laws, such rebels against God, and oppressors of
yourself and your country: and not how to please them, obey them, and
flatter them as you do in their impiety. Which is not the way to obtain
peace, and quietness, but to fall into the hand of the Almighty God, and to
be subject to His fearful plagues and punishments.46

Similar admonishment can be found in John Knox’s comments during

a 1564 debate with William Maitland of Lethington (the Queen’s
Secretary).47
In Scotland, Protestants succeeded in the first interposition by “inferior
magistrates” against Mary of Guise in 1559. In England, the revolutionary
spirit took root in the Presbyterian and Puritan dissents under Elizabeth I.
Original dissent was rooted around liturgy and vestments. The Admonition
to Parliament (1572) was a classic case of Reformed Protestants appealing
to magistrates (Parliament) for interposition. Works such as Presbyterian
George Buchanan’s De jure regni apud Scotos (1579) declared that kings
were accountable to the people. Both Calvin and Bullinger discouraged
open ecclesiastical dissent, but Beza was much more accommodating of
the English dissenters, particularly those advocating the more egalitarian

44
Ibid., 45-46.
45
Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 2: The Age
of Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 234–37.
46
Goodman, Superior Powers, 72.
47
John Knox, The Debate at General Assembly; in Knox, On Rebellion, ed. Roger
Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 182-209.
 A “Half-Revolution” or a Revolution Finally Completed? 179

presbyterian form of church government. Geneva increasingly became the

de facto sponsor of the dissent insofar as the divines of Zurich were
associated with advocacy of conformity. Elizabeth, who had already
refused a dedication by Calvin, was not fond of Geneva’s ideological
children. She wrote to James VI in 1590,

There is risen both in your realm and mine a sect of perilous consequence,
such as would have no kings but a presbytery, and take our place while
they enjoy our privilege, with a shade of God’s word, which none is judged
to follow right without by their censure they be so deemed. Yea, look we
well unto them.48

James later expressed the problem as “No bishop, no king”.

The tree of liberty (to use Thomas Jefferson’s metaphor) that the
sixteenth century Protestants planted was eventually watered less than one
hundred years later with the blood of Charles I. Chafing under the reforms
of Charles Stuart and Archbishop Laud, the covenant became a literal
expression of Scottish and English politics in the National Covenant
(1638) and the Solemn League and Covenant (1643). Sermons to
Parliament during the war took on a covenantal cast, comparing the nation
to ancient Israel. 49 Scottish Presbyterian Samuel Rutherford cast the
conflict in covenantal terms. In his Lex, Rex, or The Law and the Prince
(1644), Rutherford used Old Testament examples to argue the existence of
a three part covenant among the king, the people, and God in which God
works through the people.50 God is only bound insofar as the people can
justify being faithful to the king. And Rutherford argued (in the spirit of
Bullinger, Goodman, and Knox) that the people were not obliged to obey a
tyrant. Tyranny was a work of Satan and God worked through the people
and magistrates to remove tyrants.51 Drawing on the tradition established
by his Reformed Protestant predecessors, Rutherford wrote,

48
A.F. Scott Pearson, Church & State: Political Aspects of Sixteenth Century
Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), 61.
49
Examples include Thomas Goodwin, Zerubbabel’s Encouragement to Finish the
Temple; Cornelius Burges, The First Sermon Preached to the Honourable House
of Commons now assembled in Parliament at their Publique Fast; and Herbert
Palmer, The Glasse of Gods Providence; John Strickland, Mercy rejoycing against
Judgment.
50
Samuel Rutherford, Lex, Rex, or The Law and the Prince (Harrisonburg:
Sprinkle Publications, 1982; reprint), 1, 3, 6, 25, 54–62.
51
Ibid., 26, 72–77, 136-143, 152-159.
180 Chapter Eight

We teach that any private man may kill a tyrant, void of all title. And if he
[the tyrant] have not the consent of the people, he is an usurper, for we
know no external lawful calling that kings have now, or their family, to the
crown, but only the call of the people.52

The Solemn League, together with the works of Rutherford and

Buchanan, was later burned by the public hangman.

The American Covenant and the American Revolution

As England and Scotland were withering under the stress of war,
Cromwell’s “Commonwealth”, and the Restoration of Charles II, Puritans
in the Reformed Protestant tradition were emigrating to New England.
New England was a network of covenants and cast in the Puritan mind as a
place where God’s people could pursue a pious and likeminded society
without interference. But because New England was settled largely by
Congregationalists, the covenantal political ethos of a Corpus Christianum
(originating in Zurich and Geneva and proclaimed by the Parliamentary
sermons during the English Civil War) was at odds with the notion of
separately congregated and covenanted churches. Congregationalism
emphasized self-rule, self-withdrawal and autonomy. What is sometimes
missed in understanding the Congregational ethos is that its imperatives
for independence were driven by a desire to separate from a corrupt world,
if not driven by overt millenarianism. 53 There was therefore also
something messianic at its core. Separation and autonomy from the parish
and the larger polity was a lesson learned from Robert Browne, the father
of English Independency. 54 This ethos was so strong in America that
Rosenstock-Huessy has even suggested that American Lutherans became
Congregationalists at heart.55
It wasn’t long before the covenant exerted revolutionary tendencies
once more and Americans found themselves struggling to reconcile the

52
Ibid., 33.
53
Berman emphasizes the importance of millenarianism in legal revolutions.
Berman, Law and Revolution, 23-28. But it is also important that this not
overwhelm the revolution, as it did in the English Revolution.
54
Robert Brown, A Book which sheweth the Life and Manners of all true
Christians. 1582
55
Rosenstock-Huessy. Lecture on American Social History – 1959, Vol 19 –
Lecture 25, Apr 15, 1959; Retrieved from DVD: The Collected Works of
Rosenstock-Huessy; Lecture (number-page) 25-014; Item number: 644; Reel
number: 17.
 A “Half-Revolution” or a Revolution Finally Completed? 181

revolutionary impulse of Geneva with the Zurich model of a Corpus

Christianum. Decline in church membership in the mid-seventeenth
century inspired the lame solution of a “Half-Way Covenant” that would
retain the entrée point of baptism while preserving the pious requirements
for church membership. But the ranks of the Puritans, always revolutionaries
at heart, contained vocal contrarians who would convulse the tenuous
American arrangement of covenanting. Contrarians included Roger
Williams, who advocated separatism for God’s people beyond what even
Congregationalists advocated. Williams confined covenanting only to
churches and excluded it from polities. Jonathan Edwards likewise
demurred on the civil covenant and argued that nations, like children, must
have their covenant confirmed. 56 Presbyterians and Congregationalists
disagreed as to who was truly eligible for church membership. Some
clergy, notably Solomon Stoddard in the Connecticut River Valley, argued
for inclusive steps in membership and sacramental administration that
would make the church and civil covenants more inclusive.57 Efforts at
preservation of the civil-ecclesiastical covenant partnership were
unsuccessful, however. The collapse of the American covenant is
attributable to a variety of factors. Ironically, another Reformed impetus—
revivalism and covenant renewal—eventually trumped its other goal of
communal piety.
But though the ideal of a thoroughly covenantal social theory in
America suffered hard times between 1650 and 1750, it was hardly dead as
a symbol for political action. During this same time, it was moving from
being a theological symbol to being a legal symbol. A number of
developments in England and America moved the covenant from being an
isolated tool of individual piety and church purity to a device and symbol
for Whig political theory. The Restoration of 1660 and Glorious
Restoration of 1688 inoculated the Whigs against radical expressions of
political theology. England was spent and wanted to be rid of what they
perceived as political-religious fanaticism. This had the effect of
transitioning the covenant’s political use in America. The imperative to
remove explicit Puritan religious language from American legal thinking
moved the blessing of God from a theological basis to a legal basis. Such
an argument also increased the credibility of dissenters such as Roger

56
Jonathan Edwards, A Covenant People Ought to Resolve to Be the Lord's People
(1737); quoted in John Gerstner, The Rational Biblical Theology of Jonathan
Edwards (Powhatan: Berea Publications, 1991-1993), 2:140.
57
Solomon Stoddard, The Doctrine of Instituted Churches Explained and Proved
from the Word of God (1700).
182 Chapter Eight

Williams who argued that separating church and state would have the
effect of improving public piety and religious commitment.
With the transformation of the American covenant, the blessings of
political liberty began to stand in for the blessings of the Holy Spirit. In
Cotton Mather’s 1692 election sermon, for example, he did not identify
America as Israel and emphasize spiritual piety. Instead, he praised the
royal governors for their protections of secular interests. That praise
included an expectation that the ruler should uphold every person’s “Right
unto his Life, his Estate, his Liberty, and his Family” together with self-
government in the popular assembly and the privilege of electing the
Governor’s Council. Not only should unmolested religion be a cause for
rejoicing, Mather argued; Mather’s hearers should also rejoice that there
was no taxation without their consent.58 This echoed a previous sermon by
Increase Mather which praised the Royal Charter for securing “all
Christian Liberties, and all English Liberties”. English common law thus
became fused with covenant faithfulness.
The notion that America was Israel was therefore no longer confined to
its pious conduct or ecclesiastical faithfulness; America had a political
mission. The Exodus narrative was not simply liberation from ecclesiastical
tyranny (though this remained important). It also meant liberation from
political tyranny. This was an idea which took hold in New England,
particularly among many clergy, and became the basis for the American
Revolution. Jonathan Mayhew, pastor of Old West Church in Boston,
preached two of the most important sermons inspiring revolutionary
fervor: A Discourse concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance
to the Higher Powers: With some Reflections on the Resistance made to
King Charles I And on the Anniversary of his Death (1750) and The Snare
Broken (1766). 59 Both were important revolutionary tracts. John Adams
called Mayhew’s Discourse a “catechism” of resistance, telling Hezekiah
Niles, “It was read by everybody, celebrated by friends, and abused by
enemies”.
Sermons that compared America to Israel proliferated. Samuel Cooper’s
A Sermon on the Day of the Commencement of the Constitution, for
example, calls on the covenant as evidence of the nature of the “Hebrew

58
Cotton Mather, Optanda, Good Men Described and Good Things Propounded
(1692).
59
Both Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood emphasize that Mayhew did not crib
from Locke but from Bishop Hoadly, though Hoadly and Locke had much in
common.
 A “Half-Revolution” or a Revolution Finally Completed? 183

nation” as a “free republic”. 60 Likewise do Joseph Sewall’s Nineveh’s

Repentance and Deliverance, Samuel Dunbar’s The Presence of God With
His People, and Jacob Cushing’s Divine Judgments Upon Tyrants, which
repeatedly describe divine and human faithfulness in terms of covenants.61
Samuel Sherwood’s The Church’s Flight Into the Wilderness is a sermon
of outstanding millenarian expression.62 Presbyterian Abraham Keteltas’s
God Arising and Pleading His People’s Cause is entirely dependent on
themes central to Reformed theology: election and chosenness;
providential history; predestination; and the federal emphasis on virtue.63
Samuel Langdon made the comparison explicit in his sermon before the
General Court at the annual election on June 5, 1788: The Republic of the
Israelites an Example to the American States.64 The ethnic background and
church affiliation of Americans made them a receptive audience for such
political theology. According to Sydney Ahlstrom, “Puritanism provided
the moral and religious background of fully 75 percent of the people who
declared their independence in 1776”. 65 Among all church-affiliated
Americans in 1775, 80 percent belonged to Congregational, Presbyterian,
or Anglican churches.66 As argued above, all three had some dissenting
tradition.
Obvious parallels were evident between the American clergy in the
mid-eighteenth century and the dissenting clergy of the seventeenth

60
Samuel Cooper, A Sermon on the Day of the Commencement of the Constitution;
in Ellis Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805,
2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, Inc., 2010), 1:634-635.
61
Joseph Sewall Nineveh’s Repentance and Deliverance; in Sandoz, ed., Political
Sermons, 1:38, 42; Samuel Dunbar The Presence of God With His People; in ibid.,
1:220, 221, 229; Jacob Cushing, Divine Judgments Upon Tyrants; in ibid., 1:612,
613, 618, 625-626. Both Sewall and Dunbar were orthodox in their Reformed
theology; see ibid., 1:26, 208.
62
Samuel Sherwood, The Church’s Flight Into the Wilderness: An Address on the
Times; in Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons, 493-528.
63
Abraham Keteltas, God Arising and Pleading His People’s Cause; in Sandoz,
ed., Political Sermons, 1:579-606.
64
Samuel Langdon, The Republic of the Israelites an Example to the American
States; in Sandoz, ed., Political Sermons, 1:941-964.
65
Ahlstrom suggests that this figure could even approach 90 percent, depending on
how it is calculated. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American
People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), 124.
66
Ibid., 517.
184 Chapter Eight

century.67 A Presbyterian Covenanter sermon of 1687, A Hind Let Loose,

was given new life as an American tract in 1783 when it was plagiarized
and published with a pseudonymous author (“A Moderate Whig”). 68
Charles I may be the only unique Anglican saint, but Mayhew’s A
Discourse concerning Unlimited Submission and Non-Resistance to the
Higher Powers celebrated the regicide. Tory Peter Oliver lamented the
decision of James Otis, Jr., a prominent revolutionary leader from
Massachusetts, to enlist what Otis called “the black regiment”—a term
used to describe dissenting clergy because many of them wore a long,
black “Geneva gown” in the pulpit. In justifying his appeal to clergy, Otis
hearkened back to 1641 and the role of clergy in the English Civil Wars.
Though it was certainly the case that both Tories and Patriots could be
found in every denomination, 69 the impact of Reformed theology and
Reformed clergy was not lost on the English. 70 Fourth Earl of Orford
Horace Walpole, who framed and displayed a copy of Charles Stuart’s
death warrant,71 casually threw out a phrase which has come to summarize
how the American situation looked to English royalty. Walpole wrote to
the Countess of Ossory on August 3: “One has griefs enough of one’s
own, without fretting because cousin America has eloped with a
Presbyterian parson”.72
Similar to the way Bullinger hearkened back to the covenant with
Abraham, clergy hearkened back to the law book of the covenant of Israel,
Deuteronomy. Perhaps the most political book of the Bible, this narrative
of Israelite nationality is the most cited source for American political
writings between 1765 and 1805. 73 The covenant was given revived
rhetorical emphasis in the American Revolution. Of the twenty-nine
sermons published by Massachusetts clergy from 1777 to 1783, twenty-

67
Alice M. Baldwin, The New England Clergy and the American Revolution (New
York: Frederick Ungar, 1965), 98; Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 349-
350.
68
Defensive Arms Vindicated (1783).
69
Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity
in Colonial America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 289-291.
70
Tories and British colonial magistrates alike bemoaned the religious fervor
underlying the Revolution in New England. See Steven M. Dworetz, The
Unvarnished Doctrine (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 205-206n48; and
also Baldwin, The New England Clergy and the American Revolution.
71
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 302.
72
Horace Walpole, The Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Peter Cunningham
(London, Bickers & Son, 1866), 6:234.
73
Donald S. Lutz, A Preface to American Political Theory (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 1992), 136.
 A “Half-Revolution” or a Revolution Finally Completed? 185

two explicitly called to mind the covenant. 74 Clergy in the Middle

Colonies, a destination of other covenanting denominations, also used
covenantal language. 75 Many political sermons contained covenantal
themes: election and chosenness; providential history; predestination; and
the federal emphasis on virtue. Jeremiads, a regular staple of the
covenantal approach, were common during the Revolutionary period.
Clergy called Americans chosen and elected by God for a divine mission
of liberty.

America’s Use of Political Theology:

Imperatives and Inclusive Political Imagination
Though one can make a persuasive case for how Reformed political
theology was deeply influential in the rank-and-file American mind during
Revolution—perhaps even more influential than any philosophical or legal
argument—my intent is not to pinpoint the precise contribution of
Reformed theology vis-à-vis other influences. My argument is instead
two-fold. The first argument, already introduced in the beginning of the
chapter, concerns the way in which the covenant introduced a particular
motif into the American Revolution and subsequent revolutions: the idea
of a universal humanity and America’s role in that universal destiny. The
second is to explain how the inclusive nature of American revolutionary
rhetoric helped avoid the extremes of both the British wars in the
seventeenth century and the French Revolution of the eighteenth century.
This particular moderation of rebellion coupled with ordered liberty made
the American Revolution unique and much more than a “half revolution”.
Rosenstock-Huessy’s own comments on America demonstrate that he
was mindful of the universal appeal in the American promise. He took
special note of Rev. Ezra Stiles’s use of the rainbow (a covenant symbol)
as an inclusive religious symbol in a 1783 sermon. In a 1959 lecture on
America, Rosenstock-Huessy said, “Now the rainbow is . . . as you know
in the Old Testament, the symbol of Noah. And the step from Judaism and
Christianity into the new history of the United States then was expressed
and symbolized by going back, before the Jews, to the covenant God made
with Shem, Ham—Japheth, and Ham and his—their father Noah under the
rainbow”. Rosenstock-Huessy noted the way in which this kind of

74
Dale S. Kuehne, Massachusetts Congregationalist Political Thought, 1760-
1790: The Design of Heaven (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), 137.
75
Keith L. Griffin, Revolution and Religion: American Revolutionary War and the
Reformed Clergy (New York: Paragon House, 1994), 71-81, 85-86.
186 Chapter Eight

inclusive theological symbol replaced the more exclusive symbols of the

Cross or the Star of David.76 Rosenstock-Huessy appears both upset by the
rhetorical dissonance but yet complimentary of the salutary and inclusive
effect on unity in America.
Religion requires prophets, and prophecy forces an epistemic choice
which leads to existential choices. Rosenstock-Huessy put the problem this
way in confronting the challenge of supernatural prophecy: “Either there is
a power which can take hold of a single person, allowing people to
suddenly to be able to read in him the laws of the world and human history
as if he were an open book—or any belief in revelation, all the religion in
the old and new covenant is a swindle”. 77 Religious speech and
symbolism, when combined with politics, have the capacity to bring great
or horrible things into existence. Both politics and religion each have
transcending qualities that are bound to overlap. Religious speech and
symbolism force us to confront moral imperatives at an eschatological
level which might otherwise be evaded. And it is this very power which
inspired the universality found in many visions of America, particularly
the American Revolution and Founding. America has arguably succeeded
more than any other country (certainly over two centuries of revolution) in
reconciling the potential dissonance between religion and politics.
At the time of the Revolution, Americans did not hesitate to inform
their national vision with prophetic insight. This implicitly hearkened back
to the Abrahamic vision of Bullinger’s De testamento. In the biblical
prophets they saw a promise for America itself to become a divine tool of
liberty for the world if they would only be faithful to the covenant. The
aforementioned Ezra Stiles was at the forefront of this vision. Stiles not

76
Speaking of Stiles’s use of the rainbow, he writes, ‘You will find that he bases
his attempt to unite all the people in America on exactly the same ground that all
the children of man were promised a peaceful coexistence, by the covenant of the
rainbow. And here you see how the obsession, the taboo which exists to this day in
America, that in public you must neither quote the Cross nor the Star of David,
although it’s in everybody’s heart and mind, and is practiced in their Sunday
service, or Sabbath service every day, this strange ‘Always think of it, and never
speak of it’, which is a taboo, you see, that this has found expression in the symbol
of the American people of the rainbow’. Lecture American Social History – 1959,
Vol 19 – Lecture 12, Mar 9, 1959; Retrieved from DVD: The Collected Works of
Rosenstock-Huessy; Lecture (number-page) 12-010-011; Item number: 644; Reel
number: 17. The sermon by Stiles can be found in John Wingate Thornton, ed.,
The Pulpit of the American Revolution (Boston: D. Lothrop & Co., 1876), 399-520.
Stiles’s use of the rainbow from a manuscript poem by Barlow can be found on
page 486.
77
Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 11.
 A “Half-Revolution” or a Revolution Finally Completed? 187

only said of Charles Stuart’s execution that it ought to have its own
anniversary of celebration but also wrote a history celebrating how New
England (and Connecticut in particular) gave refuge to Charles’s
prosecutors.78 Stiles celebrated the great promise of what America would
mean for the world’s future. In a statement with Abrahamic overtones,
Stiles wrote in his 1783 election sermon, “The American Republic, by
illuminating the world with truth and liberty, would be exalted and made
high among the nations, in praise, and in name, and in honor. I doubt not
this is the honor reserved for us; I had almost said, in the spirit of
prophecy, the zeal of the Lord of Hosts will accomplish this”. 79 While
Stiles’s vision for America was largely bound to evangelism, it was also
bound to constitutional liberty. For Stiles, the two were inseparable.80 For
Baptists such as John Allen or Isaac Backus, civil liberty was also the
source of religious liberty.81 Presbyterian Abraham Keteltas’s God Arising
and Pleading His People’s Cause cast America’s mission as nothing short
of the preservation of an elect people for a holy cause. Keteltas wrote in
his 1777 sermon: “Blessed be God, that all true Christians, in every part of
the world, who plead the cause of truth, liberty, and virtue, are in effect
interceding for us”. 82 Jacob Cushing likewise saw the record of divine
protection of the church to be the foundation for belief in protection of
America from tyrants. After enumerating biblical cases of God’s
faithfulness, Cushing writes, “Cultivate, my friends, a martial spirit, strive
to excel in the art of war, that you may be qualified to act the part of
soldiers well; and, under providence, be helpful in vanquishing and
subduing the enemies of God and this people. . . . These assurances of our
Covenant-GOD and Father, may well animate our spirits, invigorate our
faith, confirm our hope, and establish our confidence in him”.83
One can see across the doctrinal and denominational lines in America a
broader and more emphatic vocabulary of liberty than when the plea for
liberty was confined to Protestant complaints against Roman Catholic
oppression in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. This ecumenical
climate set the foundation for the claim that America was a Novus Ordo

78
Ezra Stiles, A History of Three of the Judges of King Charles I (1794).
79
Ezra Stiles, The United States Exalted to Honor and Glory; in Thornton, ed., The
Pulpit of the American Revolution, 486.
80
See Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795
(Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962).
81
John Allen, An Oration Upon the Beauties of Liberty (1773); Isaac Backus, An
Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty (1773).
82
Keteltas, God Arising and Pleasing His People’s Cause, 591.
83
Cushing, Divine Judgments Upon Tyrants, 624-626.
188 Chapter Eight

Seclorum. That phrase—itself taken from Virgil and referring to a

mysterious work of divine deliverance—is a perfect summation of the
secular-sacred project of the Americans. Because of the evolution of
America’s civil covenant, an evolution commencing in the late
seventeenth century, the cause of constitutional liberty and religious
liberty were becoming the same. This not only made the American vision a
new and more universal vision, it also moderated the extremes of the
English and French Revolutions.
But couldn’t it be said that this emphasis on worldwide reform was an
idea that first began in England? Rosenstock-Huessy makes such a claim
in his discussion of the English case, calling it “a human, a Christian, a
universal event”.84 But Rosenstock-Huessy also points out that the English
Revolution emphasized particulars (and not just universals) “[t]hanks to
the Puritan Revolution”. 85 It is in attention to particulars that the
shortcomings of the English Revolution become apparent. Milton and the
Independents were not going to reform “the world” based on the principles
or particulars of English law so much as they were using the radical
eschatology of Independency to recast English law in apocalyptic terms
and usher in the Kingdom of Christ. 86 The millenarian fervor which
Berman considers characteristic of substantial legal revolutions was
clearly evident in the English Revolution, though much more so among
English Independents than among the Scottish Presbyterians. 87 The
English Independency’s goal of reform began with liturgy and ended with
regicide. Its scope and demands stretched the limits of human nature.
Rosenstock-Huessy argues this point when he notes that the Church of
England could not give up its festivals and ritual and liturgy without
cutting itself off from “the Christians of the world”. 88 The great
experiment in political theology in England ended. But it was resurrected
in a more enduring way by the Americans.

84
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 258; Cf. 290-291, 297, 299, 341.
85
Ibid., 286.
86
Noel Henning Mayfield. Puritans and Regicide: Presbyterian-Independent
Differences over the Trial and Execution of Charles (I) Stuart (New York:
University Press of America, 1988).
87
‘At the basis of the creed of every religious body of the time, except the
Presbyterians, lay the Millenarian idea’. G. P. Gooch, The History of English
Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1898), 127.
88
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 314. This was the legacy of Calvin. In
Zurich, Christmas was preserved.
 A “Half-Revolution” or a Revolution Finally Completed? 189

Because Rosenstock-Huessy fails to distinguish Independents from

Presbyterians, he misses a key distinction in his treatment of the English
Civil War.89 The radical vision of the English Independents, a magnified
and distorted legacy of Calvin, was not the vision of the entire Reformed
tradition. And the English Independents’ violent millenarian zeal
(magnified among the Fifth Monarchy men, for example) was not the type
of political eschatology that took hold in America. The sum of the political
eschatology of the American Revolution was akin to the more moderate
Scottish Presbyterians. Presbyterian leadership included common law
lawyers and insisted on legal principle against the regicide. The violent
split between Independents (led by Cromwell) and Presbyterians (led by
Covenanters and Royalists) reached its zenith in the Third Civil War
(1650-1651).
How did America come to reflect the revolutionary zeal of the
Independent tradition while avoiding its excesses? Most likely because of
the moderating influence of Anglicanism, a tradition which could respect
dissent while maintaining the tradition of law and ordered liberty.
Presbyterianism was, after all, a kind of middle ground between
Independency and Anglicanism. Presbyterianism’s affinity for a more
ordered liberty can be traced to its embrace of the parish model and some
semblance of the Corpus Christianum. More importantly, it did not share
the millenarianism which seemed to almost be in the DNA of
Independency or Congregationalism (as it was called in America). But just
as important as the moderating influence of Anglicanism and Presbyterianism
was the longstanding role of “nature” in Reformed political thinking.90

The Significance of the American Revolution

The key dynamic in the universalizing and secularizing of the
Abrahamic covenant in the American case was not simply the right blend
of theological movements but also an appropriate integration of “nature”
into political arguments. This is why Rosenstock-Huessy can say that
American Puritanism, like English Puritanism, was a revolutionary force

89
An example of this is found in Out of Revolution, 315, where Rosenstock-
Huessy writes, ‘The Presbyterians . . . abolished the hierarchy. The local group was
made omnipotent’. Also, the Presbyterians had a directory for worship to supplant
the Book of Common Prayer as early as the late 1550s, when Knox and others
composed The Book of Common Order for the likeminded Marian exiles in
Geneva. It was already in use in Scotland after the introduction of the Kirk.
90
Moots, Politics Reformed, 117-129.
190 Chapter Eight

moderated by Whiggism and Public Spirit. 91 But secularization did not

overwhelm the elements of revealed religion (as in the case of Britain) nor
did it lead to the ideological inhumanity of the philosophes and the general
will in France.92 In Britain, the excesses of political theology gave way to
the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the more secular Whiggism of the
Glorious Revolution.93 The French Revolution was mired in the morass
and contradictions of natural religion and reason alone. In America,
secular and political vocabularies avoided both extremes of religious or
secular enthusiasms, respected the important theological contribution, and
introduced religious liberty. In America, the legacy was a robust
vocabulary of liberty that excluded neither theological language nor
religious liberty. The moderating influence was a rich and humane use of
natural law and natural right.
The American move toward what is called “natural rights” (also
summoned by the English and French) did not represent an abandonment
of biblical religion or ordered liberty as it did in France. Rather, the
greatness of the American Revolution was to fuse a longstanding natural
law and natural right tradition—already existing within Reformed political
theology—with the liberal and republican strains of political philosophy so
evidently compatible with a covenant ethos. This Reformed use of nature
as a basis of political argument is found in prominent American examples
in the prior decades, including John Wise’s Vindication of the Government
of New-England Churches (1717), Stoddard’s Doctrine of Instituted
Churches, the manifesto of the Brattle Street Church, and the Cambridge
Association’s statement composed by Cotton Mather.
Again, we look to the salutary influence of Reformed Protestantism in
its broadest outline. Reformed usage of arguments from nature, including
both natural law and natural right, date back to the sixteenth century.
Reformed Protestantism was not what we would today call a “fundamentalist
tradition”. Fundamentalism was avoided because of the humanist training
of the Reformers. They did not exclude secular arguments for earthly
matters. The distinction between earthly and heavenly matters was quite
clear to John Calvin, for example. Politics was an earthly matter, and could
be informed by secular sources. Knowledge of salvation by Christ was
different, of course, and must be informed by divine revelation.94 Samuel

91
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 320, 335, 336, 340. Rosenstock-Huessy
evinces some confusion, however, about who overwhelmed whom.
92
Rosenstock-Huessey emphasizes that the use of ‘nature’ in America did not
break with the theological tradition. Out of Revolution, 683.
93
Ibid., 337.
94
Calvin, Institutes, II.ii.13.
 A “Half-Revolution” or a Revolution Finally Completed? 191

Rutherford, the greatest Reformed revolutionary theorist of the seventeenth

century, was an encyclopedia of political thought, drawing on over 700
authors both sacred and secular.95 Rutherford wrote of the invention of
government from a state of nature a generation before John Locke. Natural
rights language was not an invention of the Enlightenment. Reformed
Protestants predating Jean-Jacques Rousseau by generations had asserted
the importance of “mine and thine” as a foundation for government. But
whereas property is an invention of a deceptive rogue in Rousseau’s
narrative about the origins of inequality, and nonexistent in Hobbes’s state
of nature, it is quite foundational and natural in the work of the Vindiciae
or Rutherford.96 God was interested in a liberty much broader than just
religious toleration. Mornay writes, “Whereby it plainly appears, that not
for religion only, but even for our country and our possessions, we may
fight and take arms against a tyrant”.97
It is this unique synthesis of divine and natural revelation from the
Reformed tradition, now universalized for posterity, which makes the
American Revolution more than a “half-revolution”. Where liberty was
unfinished by the time of the Founding, it was eventually secured with
similar religious rhetoric by Abraham Lincoln or by Martin Luther King,
Jr.98 As the American experiment leaped beyond the Revolution and the
founding of the republic, it continued to draw on this political synthesis of
a vocabulary religious and secular. The notion of God’s people working in
the world was an idea that went back three centuries or more to the French,
English, and Swiss Reformers. They, in their own revolution, had looked
back to the Hebrew patriarchs.

95
John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel
Rutherford (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 70.
96
Mornay, Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos, 76; Rutherford, Lex, Rex, 67-68.
97
Mornay, Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos, 142-43.
98
Lincoln, himself compared to Jesus because of his death on Good Friday, used
civil religion or political theology readily. A commonly cited example is his
Second Inaugural Address. The same can be said of Martin Luther King, Jr.,
particularly in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. Berman also makes the connection
in Law and Revolution, 23. For a study of the political theology of the Civil Rights
Movement, see David L. Chappell’s A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the
Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
 CHAPTER NINE

HANNAH ARENDT AND EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-

HUESSY ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

WAYNE CRISTAUDO

“If Ms. Arendt and Mr. Rosenstock make sense, this book is nonsense;
the converse, one hopes, may also be true”.1 Thus Crane Brinton in the
“Bibliographical Appendix” to his The Anatomy of Revolution. The rest of
his gloss on Arendt’s On Revolution reads: “Based on the American and
the French Revolution. Emotional, intellectual, full of existential despair,
poles apart from the approach attempted in this book”.2 The comment on
Rosenstock-Huessy’s Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man
runs:

Written in what to an American seems the German cloud-cuckoo-land of

beautiful and inexact ideas, choosing convenient and rejecting
inconvenient facts, something in the tradition of Spengler, but with the
kindly hopes of a man of good will. Full of interesting suggestions and
flashes of insight, poetic to a prosaic nature.3

While Brinton momentarily lumps Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy

together, in their respective studies of revolutions, curiously they never
directly address each other’s studies. In the more than hundred thousand
pages of Rosenstock-Huessy’s collected works (available on dvd) Arendt’s
name does not occur once. In the bibliography of On Revolution while
Arendt does list Die europäischen Revolutionen,4 but not Out of Revolution,

1
‘Crane Brinton’s ‘Bibliographical Appendix’ to his The Anatomy of Revolution
(New York: Vintage, 1965), 291.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid, 295.
4
Long before she had written On Revolution, Arendt did mention to Jaspers that
she had received a crazy letter from Rosenstock-Huessy which she could not
understand. Letter to Jaspers of Nov. 19, 1948, in Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers
 Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution 193

she does not cite it. And although, as I suggest below she argues against a
view central to Rosenstock-Huessy’s theory of revolutions, she does not
mention Rosenstock-Huessy by name. No one who has read all three
studies can doubt that Brinton is correct in his observation that the studies
by Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy are poles apart from his Anatomy. To
be fair to Brinton, the comparison between Rosenstock-Huessy and
Spengler is not altogether inapt. For while Rosenstock-Huessy disagreed
completely with Spengler’s view of history and the meaning of the West,
like Spengler he had a panoramic vision of the meaning of Western
civilization, a vision that took events as large energy systems, historical
waves and blocks of time, that often had little to do with the more settled
nomenclature and taxonomies that wove the consensuses of mainstream
academic historians. Indeed this point about why long waves matter is the
very point that Rosenstock-Huessy would make in his review of Brinton’s
Anatomy:

To me the meaning of revolutions does not disclose itself to the man who
thinks that he himself moves outside their orbit. It is not to be found in
anything happening immediately after and during the fever but in habits,
immunities, and powers developed generations and centuries later.5

In other words, what distinguishes Rosenstock-Huessy’s analysis is his

eye for the genesis and trajectory of “habits, immunities and powers”.
Thus a sympathetic reader of Rosenstock-Huessy is tempted to say that
what Brinton refers to as the selection of convenient facts and the rejection
of inconvenient facts in order to fit some larger vision is, in fact, the
identification of “habits, immunities and powers” that radiate far beyond
the historical moment of their emergence.
It is also hard to argue with Brinton’s judgment that Arendt’s book is
“emotional, intellectual, full of existential despair”, even though the
accusation that a work is “intellectual” is a rather odd “put down” of an
academic study by another academic. But as far as the work being

Correspondence 1926-1929, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner, trans. Robert and
Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 122.
5
‘Review of Crane Brinton's, Anatomy of Revolution’, in American Historical
Review, vol. 44, no. 4 (1939), 882–84 (884). Brinton and Rosenstock-Huessy were
colleagues for a short time at Harvard, and from all accounts strongly disliked what
each other stood for, which is evident in their respective reviews of each other’s
work on revolution. For his part, Brinton sees Rosenstock-Huessy as another
Swedenbourg, and the book an example of ‘Schwärmerei’; see Political Science
Quarterly, vol. 54, 286-88. The review is far more forthright in its animosity than
the bibliographical comment in Anatomy.
194 Chapter Nine

“emotional” and full of “existential despair” goes, one can only respond
that surely the historical conditions which animated the book were, if I
may partially draw on another of Arendt’s titles, born in extremely dark
times. The fact is that Arendt’s On Revolution is part of a more general
diagnosis about the traumatic event which, at the time of her writing On
Revolution, was yet to receive the name by which it has now been
historically sealed—the Holocaust.
Arendt’s popularity is due in no small part to the appositeness of the fit
of her diagnosis, which insisted on the importance of political life and
civic duty at a time when America’s (and not just America’s) educated
youth were beginning to radically politicize themselves and question the
political dimensions of their social institutions. 6 When, on the opening
page of On Revolution, Arendt wrote, “no cause is left but the most ancient
of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has
determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus
tyranny”,7 I think she articulated perfectly the sentiments of the Cold War
generation. By contrast, when Arendt was being feted as a celebrity of
political analysis, with On Revolution being reviewed in Time Magazine,
Rosenstock-Huessy was a forgotten old man read by almost no one except
his students and a small handful of German historians. 8 As opposed to
Arendt, though, Rosenstock-Huessy had almost no impact on what we
might broadly refer to as the 1968 generation.
Arendt’s legacy and work has been continually reassessed since her
death, and her analysis of the public realm and the value of the political
life, the vita active, remains among her more important contributions as a
political theorist. The following sentence from The Human Condition is, I
think, a powerful summation of her view of the importance of political
life: “It is the publicity of the public realm which can absorb and make
shine through the centuries whatever men may want to save from the

6
In 1970 Adelbert Reif asked Arendt about her thoughts on the student revolution.
Her response was typically thoughtful and nuanced. The aspects she saw as
particularly positive have specifically to do with the gains of the civil rights
movement in the USA and the coalescence of solidarity, moral motives and
achievements which she saw as largely coming from the rediscovery of ‘what the
eighteenth century called “public happiness.”’ Hannah Arendt, Crisis of the
Republic: Lying in Politics. Civil Disobedience, On Violence, Thought on Politics
and Revolution, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanoich, 1972), 201-203.
7
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1962), 12.
8
‘The Fools of History’, in Time, March 22, 1963. The reviewer rightly picks up
Arendt’s antipathy toward the French revolution, but makes her position on the
American revolution sound more conservative than it is.
 Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution 195

natural ruin of time”.9 While Arendt is a Jewish-born thinker, and while

certain Jewish motifs seep through her work, her thinking rarely draws
upon the biblical resources of Judaism.10 On the contrary, her mind-set is
better described as liberal German and classically formed, albeit in her
depiction Rome trumps Greece, for it is the Romans who introduced what
she calls “the one, if not decisive factor in human communities”—
authority: “Neither the Greek language nor the varied political experiences
of Greek history shows any knowledge of authority and the kind of rule it
implies”.11 It is the Romans who placed “the sacredness of foundation, in
the sense that once something has been founded it remains binding for all
future generation” at the centre of politics.12 What impresses Arendt is that
the Romans grasped that “to engage in politics meant first and foremost to
preserve the founding of the city of Rome”. And it was, she says, the
Romans who bequeathed the trinity of “religion, authority and tradition” to

9
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press,
1958), 55.
10
Thus Irving Louis Horowitz, in one of the best summaries of her work, says ‘she
remained true to the tradition of German liberalism. The French language, which
she loved, counted for little more than a Cartesian footnote, and the English
constitutional tradition, which surely nourished her faith in compassionate justice
over and against impassioned (non-rational) vengeance, counted more as sentiment
than as structure. Russian democratic thought from Herzen to Solzhenitsyn
scarcely existed for her. And perhaps most shattering to those who saw her
primarily as a Jewish writer, the Hebrew tradition was reduced to several
hyphenated footnotes to Christian theology. In the end, in the long pull, this
remarkable woman, scholar, critic, exile, and teacher turned out to be not an
avenging angel remorselessly pursuing her totalitarian quarry but the last loving
product of German Enlightenment: the keeper of a flame she herself had helped
resurrect from the charnel house of postwar Europe’. Partisan Review, vol. 66,
Spring Issue 2, 263-79 (279). And yet, as Horowitz also observes, something of the
Jewish openness remains central to her orientation: ‘Arendt points to a great divide
in modern scientific quests: on the one hand is the positivist quest for truth, and on
the other is the rationalist quest for meaning. For her, it is a basic fallacy to
confound the two . . . . The distinction between the urgent need to think and the
desire to know is an operational way of distinguishing thinking from doing. And
here, although the Greeks are called upon to bear witness to this distinction, I dare
say it is Arendt's Jewishness that provides the missing link. For it is the historical
role of the Jews to search and not find redemption and the redeemer, in contrast to
the truth announced by Christianity of redemption through the Son of God, that
really distinguishes Arendt's claims for thinking as the ultimate act’ (274).
11
Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1954), 104.
12
Ibid., 120.
196 Chapter Nine

Christendom and the Church.13 It was also, she adds, the reformers and
humanists who originally made the cardinal error of the moderns in
thinking that religion and authority could be preserved without tradition.
Perhaps her most emphatic statement on the importance of politics is
one which so uncompromisingly links the West with its Roman heritage
and with the American Revolution:

For if I am right in suspecting that the crisis of the present world is

primarily political, and that the famous “decline of the West” consists
primarily in the decline of the Roman trinity of religion, traditions, and
authority, with the concomitant undermining of the specifically Roman
foundations of the political realm, then the revolutions of the modern age
appear like gigantic attempts to repair these foundations, to renew the
broken thread of tradition, and to restore, through founding new political
bodies, what for so many centuries had endowed the affairs of men with
some measure of dignity and greatness. Of these attempts, only one, the
American Revolution, has been successful: the founding fathers as,
characteristically enough, we still call them, founded a completely new
body politic without violence and with the help of a constitution.14

For Arendt, the totalitarian fusion of thoughtless evil and inhuman

mechanical savagery is the horrific outcome of the losses that have
accrued under the delusion of gain or progress. Those loses, as we have
just indicated, are the losses of religion, authority and tradition, and the
politics which sustains them. In their place modern politics has fostered
mass participation that is coeval with the withering away of the political
realm and its replacement by what Engels called—though unlike Arendt,
Engels saw this as an advancement—“the administration of things”. 15
While progress first required the notion of the freedom of the mass and the
illusion of mass political participation, that illusion has led to the erosions
of freedom which, in turn, are the void through which totalitarianism
enters the political. That void, for Arendt, was ever in danger of returning,
and, while the French Revolution alone could not be held responsible for
opening the void, it was, nevertheless, a decisive factor in its creation.
I do not think it contentious to add that the primary motivation behind
Arendt’s On Revolution is the same as the motivation of her classic study
The Origins of Totalitarianism—addressing the question, how do we make
sense of the great catastrophes that have completely shaken the twentieth
century? Or, in more specifically Arendtian terms, how was it possible that

13
Ibid., 126.
14
Ibid., 140.
15
Arendt, On Revolution, 272.
 Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution 197

the cause of tyranny has come so perilously close to completely

extinguishing the cause of freedom?16 If we reformulate this question to
point it directly at the French Revolution, which in a sense we may feel
compelled to do after taking Arendt’s reading of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries’ fallouts of the French Revolution seriously, we might
ask: how did it happen that a revolution in the name of freedom not only
led to terror (that, of course, had already been asked and answered by men
like Hegel and Coleridge, and in the twentieth century by several others
including Voegelin and in Talmon’s classic study, The Origins of
Totalitarian Democracy), but that its very successes contained such
ongoing dark terrors within them? And what is most important in Arendt’s
analysis of the French Revolution is the insight that it was the terrors
beyond the Reign of Terror that were incubating in the Revolution’s most
majestic formulations of rights and dignity and security. That was why the
book that really defines her life’s work, The Origins of Totalitarianism,17
signals from the outset that she sees a fundamental connection between the
horrors of the twentieth century and the French Revolution. More
specifically, the Revolution’s ensconcement of nationalism at the heart of
political organization, and its subsequent export of an idea too rigid to
adequately or humanely deal with the messy realities of European peoples,
was decisive in shaping a world in which displaced non-peoples/non-
nations were denied the very rights which are ever associated with the
French Revolution. Further, Arendt saw the breakdown of nationalism as
the essential condition of anti-Semitism: “[M]odern anti-Semitism”, she
states on the opening page of The Origins of Totalitarianism, “grew in
proportion as traditional nationalism declined, and reached its climax at
the exact moment when the European system of nation-states and its
precarious balance of power crashed”.18 What had been mere resentment

16
Cf. Ibid., 11.
17
This is not to deny that it is The Human Condition which discloses her
philosophical or theoretical priorities, but their main purpose is to help make sense
of the horrors of totalitarianism so that they may never be repeated.
18
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1958), 1. Arendt continues by comparing Nazi anti-Semitism with the
French people’s hatred of the aristocracy at the time of the Revolution. The
resentment of the French people, she claims, did not come from the actual power
of the aristocracy, from its exploitation or oppression, but because wealth without
function was intolerable. For it was the same situation she saw in Germany: ‘Jews
had lost their public functions and their influence and were left with nothing but
their wealth’. Ibid., 4.
198 Chapter Nine

that may have passed was to become the horror it did largely because of
what she called “the secret conflict between state and nation’, which

came to light at the very birth of the modern nation state, when the French
Revolution combined the declaration of the rights of man with the demand
for national sovereignty. The same essential rights were at once claimed as
the inalienable heritage of all human beings and as the specific heritage of
specific nations, the same nation was at once declared to be subject to laws,
which supposedly would flow from the Rights of Man, and sovereign, that
is, bound by no universal law and acknowledging nothing superior to itself.
The practical outcome of this contradiction was that from then on human
rights were protected and enforced only as national rights and that the very
institution of a state, whose supreme task was to protect and guarantee man
his rights as man, as citizen and as national, lost its legal, rational
appearance and could be interpreted as the nebulous representative of a
“national soul” which through the very fact of its existence was supposed
to be beyond or above the law. National sovereignty, accordingly, lost its
original connotation of freedom of the peoples and was being surrounded
by a pseudo-mystical aura . . . . Nationalism is essentially the expression of
this perversion of the state into an instrument of the nation and the
identification of the citizen with the member of the nation.19

In my opinion, chapters 8 and 9, “Continental Imperialism: The Pan

Movements” and “Decline of the Nation State and the End of the Rights of
Man”, are the most brilliant in a book that, in spite of all the criticisms
directed against it, remains one of the masterpieces of twentieth century
political analysis. For it is in these chapters that she identifies the collision
of tribalism and rootlessness, and narrates how pan-movements changed
the character of nationalism, which was no longer interpreted as a doctrine
bringing together the members of humankind into “a family of nations”
but “a hierarchical structure where differences of history and organization
were misinterpreted as differences between men, residing in natural
origin”. 20 The escalation of these ideas would feed the process of
denaturalization and de-humanization so that local police and government
apparatchiks would, in the name of a doctrine of rights seemingly designed
to provide liberation, activate terror and the consignment of non-peoples to
camps. In sum, The Origins of Totalitarianism is a most sobering account
of one important dimension of the French Revolution, and it is a brilliant
illustration of how ideas and institutions take on a logic for which they had
not been designed, but which are no less real for that.

19
Ibid., 230.
20
Ibid., 234.
 Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution 199

If, as I have suggested, Arendt’s thinking is primarily governed by her

reaction to and diagnosis of totalitarianism, and thus by the events which
fed into the Second World War and the Holocaust and the death camps,
Rosenstock-Huessy was ever conscious of the fact that he had been shaped
by the First World War: “This book”, he says, of his Out of Revolution:
The Autobiography of Western Man,

owes to the World War its daring to be simple and general. It owes to
events that far transcend our individual judgment its rediscovery of what is
important and what is trifling in the life of mankind. This book owes to the
sufferings of millions and tens of millions its ability to treat the history of
the world as an autobiography.21

For Rosenstock-Huessy, the Second World War (and the Cold War)
and the totalitarian ideologies that were intrinsic to it were the fallout, or
unfinished business, from the Great War. Rosenstock-Huessy’s work
always emphasized that it is suffering that forces human being to learn—
“learn or perish” is the alternative we confront from any great catastrophe.
It is this alternative that places humanity at moments of great catastrophe
ever on a precipice between a past, or tradition, too hateful to endure, and
a future loved in spite of being unknown. It is not our calculations, our
plans, then, that build the world we inherit and inhabit, but

love and hatred remain the powers which govern the sun and all the other
stars, nations and individuals, in so far as their desire for a full and true
future is capable of lifting them out of their rutted tacks and orbits.22

The great changes in our nature, which is to say in the way we make
each other and our world through our venerations and appeals, the gamut
of actions constitutive of social production and reproduction, are, in the
main, forced from us. Thus

civilized man in Europe and America is not the offspring of evolution. He

is the product of a revolution. The melting pots of revolution are full of
images, revivals and reminiscences. Man—not the individual, but man as
the family of nations—was created by a series of volcanic explosions to
which people gave themselves up heart and soul.23

21
Eugen Rosentock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man
(Providence and Oxford: Berg Publishers, Inc., 1993), 7.
22
Ibid., 722.
23
Ibid., 734.
200 Chapter Nine

In this respect, then, an important distinction between not only Arendt

and Rosenstock-Huessy, but more broadly between what we can call a
classical conception of action and a providential or Christian (and, I might
add, a Jewish one), is the emphasis upon what is not only not intended but
what emerges unintentionally but benignly—or, theologically put,
miraculously out of suffering. To this important extent, the scale of
destructive and productive forces or energies which form the basis of
Rosenstock-Huessy’s analysis inevitably requires a more macro-historical
scale, and that scale, necessarily then, not only requires a discernment of
the “volcanic” events that have coined the institutions and sentiments, the
collective social memories and hence semantic field of modern men and
women, which also requires identifying how these events form a sequence,
but also the conditions that made such a sequence possible.
Thus, too, whereas Arendt’s diagnosis requires a greater understanding
of the classical republican heritage in order to assist its reparation and
redeployment, Rosenstock-Huessy’s turns his readers to an appreciation of
the Church as a great storehouse of human social energy, creativity, and
social organization of a very different sort than can be achieved through
politics. For, he argues, if we have been coined by the great revolutions
that have transformed the social and political landscape of the West in a
way that bears so little resemblance to the social formations of antiquity,
we must also concede that those revolutions took place on Christian soil.
And he also emphasizes that “[t]he French and Russian revolutions are
results of the Christian era. They depend upon it, they complete it”.24
While not mentioning Rosenstock-Huessy by name, in On Revolution,
Arendt expressly dismisses “the not infrequent claim that all modern
revolutions are essentially Christian”.25 I am not so sure how frequently
this claim about the Christian nature of revolutions has been made, but
certainly no one makes the case with more rigor than Rosenstock-Huessy.
Arendt’s elaboration of this point does not indicate any familiarity with the
precision of Rosenstock-Huessy’s arguments about the revolutionary
nature of Christianized Europe, nor of his particular “anatomies” (to use
Brinton’s term) of the revolutions that took place with avowedly Christian
appeals and names. Nevertheless, whether deliberately or not, her version

24
Ibid., 716. Cf. Alphonse de Lamartine’s ‘All that could then be seen of the
French Revolution announced all that was great in this world, the advent of a new
idea in human kind, the democratic idea, and afterwards the democratic government,
This idea was an emanation of Christianity.’ History of the Girondists: Vol. 1
Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution, trans. H.T. Ryde,
(London: Henry Bohn, 1856), 10.
25
Arendt, On Revolution, 26.
 Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution 201

of revolution is diametrically opposed to his to the extent that she not only
says “secularization . . . is a crucial factor in the phenomenon of
revolution”, and that “secularization . . . constitutes the origin of
revolution”, 26 but that “no revolution was ever made in the name of
Christianity prior to the modern age”.27 This is a very strange claim. While
one might appeal to a point made by Rosenstock-Huessy—that “the word
‘revolutionary’, as a noun or adjective, did not exist before 1789”28—to
support her case, the fact is that Arendt’s claim is really symptomatic of
the more overtly political and secular parameters of her reflections on
revolution, rather than indicative of whether phenomena are in fact
revolutionary or not. One cannot help but note that her interest in founding
is framed primarily in terms of men acting in political space, and thus, in
spite of occasionally interesting historical theological discussions on such
topics as, for example, the evolution of the doctrine of hell in the Church,
her political-theological forays do not strike me as remotely comparable to
those of Rosenstock-Huessy, or Christopher Dawson or Frederick
Ozanam, who have provided extensive analyses of the Church’s role in the
formation of Europe. 29 Further, Arendt’s claim that Medieval and post-
Medieval theory knew only of rebellions that did not seek to change “the
established order of things” is simply impossible to agree with. To regard,
for example, Dante’s De Monarchia, with its call for one universal empire,
or the vision of republican politics outlined in Defensor Pacis by Marsiglio
of Padua, as not challenging the established order of things strikes me as
close to disingenuous. And in this respect, one can also simply refer the
reader to Rosenstock-Huessy’s account of the revolutions within
Christendom and the appeals to change that he cites to see that Arendt is
overstating her case.
Equally erroneous is Arendt’s insistence that Christianity only cared
for another world—as if it were not also dedicated to transformation of
this world:

26
Ibid., 26.
27
Ibid., 27.
28
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 129. He adds: ‘The English used the
word “revolutionist” for the adherents of the Whigs after 1688. The Americans had
no adjective throughout the whole Revolutionary War. As late as 1791 Patrick
Henry had to speak of the “Revolution War”’.
29
See Frederick Ozanam’s two volume History of Civilization in the Fifth Century
(London, 1868), or Christopher Dawson’s many studies, including Religion and
the Rise of Western Culture, (Image, 1991).
202 Chapter Nine

Christian morality, as distinguished from its fundamental religious

precepts, has always insisted that everybody should mind his own business
and that political responsibility constituted first of all a burden, undertaken
exclusively for the sake of the well-being and salvation of those it freed
from worry about public affairs.30

To point to Dante’s dual eschatology as a refutation risks the danger of

making Dante look the odd man out in Christendom, when in fact Arendt’s
claim completely ignores the democratic tendencies that were intrinsic to
the origin of the Church, and which repeatedly broke out—as, for
example, in the Conciliar movement. On a somewhat different, though not
unrelated point, the great achievements of the Medieval Church most
certainly consisted of public acts and of the creation of new spiritual
orders to make them possible. Was it not members of spiritual orders
rather than men who “worried about public affairs” who created universities,
orphanages and hospitals? In fact, Arendt’s statement represents such a
distorted dualism that it seems to betray an astonishing ignorance of the
organic interpenetration of religious and political life that characterized the
Medieval world.
For his part, Rosenstock-Huessy might simply have responded that to
prioritize Christian morality above religious precepts is already to be
embedded in a classical framework and to be looking through the wrong
end of the telescope. And he may have simply repeated his argument that
it was some eight hundred years before the French Revolution, and within
the bosom of Christendom, that the cries to heaven audible in the
celebration of All Soul’s Day (what he calls “the first universal democracy
in the world” 31 ) were also cries to change the world. In this important
respect, Rosenstock-Huessy, while fundamentally disagreeing with Voegelin
about the value of eschatological movements of the earlier Middle Ages
(waves of what he calls the Papal and Italian revolutions), is far closer to
Voegelin, who had engaged in a critical exchange with Arendt, than to
Arendt in his reading of the revolutionary importance of those
movements.32

30
Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 60.
31
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 508.
32
Voegelin’s critical review of On Totalitarianism, which emphasizes spiritual
diseases that can be traced back to rise of immanentist sectarianism of the high
Middle Ages, elicited a response from Arendt. See Review of Politics vol. 15
(1953), 68-85. Arendt would occasionally footnote Voegelin in her work, even
though in On Revolution she dismisses out of hand his view of the Gnostic nature
of revolutions. Arendt, On Revolution, 26.
 Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution 203

But unlike Arendt, Rosenstock-Huessy’s position is not a priori

committed to a particular division between politics and violence. He does
think that the distinction between religion and politics has been thoroughly
blurred, and if politics is taken as the organization of social life through
public law, public order, public spirit and public opinion, these aspects of
political life are re-created through revolution.33 And if, as he argues, the
difference between public law and religion is that the former demands
obedience of the citizen, while religion asks for worship, it is the religious
aspect of our collective nature which activates revolutionary action: “Any
group obeys its legal ruler politically; but it worships religiously the
opening of a new path out of chaos”.34
It is that highly problematic and ultimately moral division—and we
recall that it is not only the glorification of violence Arendt deems un-
political, but even the “justification”35 of violence—that is behind the key
claim of On Revolution, viz., the political superiority of the American
Revolution over the French Revolution. The severance between violence
and politics, so essential to Arendt’s understanding of politics, is violated
in the French Revolution, through its attempt to redress human misery as
such. As the following indicates, the identification of the vastness of the
problem becomes a spur to, and justification of, revolutionary violence on
(if I may use Camus’s term from The Rebel) a metaphysical scale, which
(and here it is all too evident why Arendt admired Camus so much)
contrasts so strikingly with the more limited aims of the American
Revolution:

The direction of the American Revolution remained committed to the

foundation of freedom and the establishment of lasting institutions and to
those who acted in this direction nothing was permitted that would have
been outside the range of civil law. The direction of the French Revolution
was deflected almost from its beginning from this course of foundation
through the immediacy of suffering; it was determined by the exigencies of
liberation not from tyranny but from necessity, and it was actuated by the
limitless immensity of both the people’s misery and the pity this suffering
inspired. The lawlessness of the “all is permitted” sprang here still from the

33
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 468.
34
Ibid., 473.
35
Arendt, On Revolution, 19. See also John McGowan ‘Must Politics Be Violent?
Arendt’s Utopian Vision’, in Craig Calhoun and John McGowan, eds., Hannah
Arendt and the Meaning of Politics (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota
Press, 1997), 272.
204 Chapter Nine

sentiments of the heart whose boundlessness helped in the unleashing of

boundless violence.36

That sense of boundlessness combined with violence is reinforced in

her observation that “Robespierre once compared the nation to the ocean:
indeed it was the ocean of misery and the ocean-like sentiments it aroused
that combined to drown the foundations of freedom”.37
For Arendt, the French Revolution is constituted through its “tragic
failures”,38 and unlike the American Revolution, whose impact remains,
for her, no less tragically circumscribed, the French Revolution that
“ended in disaster has made world history”. Robespierre’s greatest disciple
is Lenin—who is also “the last heir of the French Revolution”, which is to
say the legacy of the French Revolution is a totalitarian legacy.39 At the
basis of its failure is its innovation alluded to above, that what had to be
eliminated was not the impediments to freedom, but the impediments to
abundance and happiness themselves: social misery and poverty.40 Turning
from freedom to the happiness of the people was the disaster: “The
transformation of the Rights of Man into the rights of the Sans-Culottes
was the turning point not only of the French Revolution but of all
revolutions that were to follow”.41 Moreover, the question of limit alluded
to above is clouded by a sentiment—compassion—that “abolishes the
distance, the worldly space between men where political matters, the
whole realm of human affairs, are located”. 42 Compassion shuns “the
drawn-out, wearisome process of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise,
which are the process of law and politics, and lend its voice to the
suffering itself, which must claim for swift and direct action, that is, for
action with the means of violence”.43 For Arendt, compassion’s passionate
form is pity, and when “pity is taken as the spring of virtue” it is but a
license to cruelty. 44 For her, that coalition of sentiment and cruelty,
combined with the inheritance of an absolutist monarchical inheritance in
France (as opposed to Britain’s legacy of a limited monarchy to the
Americas), would be perfidious and enduring. Also of major importance

36
Arendt, On Revolution, 92.
37
Ibid., 94.
38
Ibid., 65.
39
Ibid., 65-66.
40
Ibid., chapter 2.
41
Ibid., 61.
42
Ibid., 86.
43
Ibid., 86-87.
44
Ibid., 89-90.
 Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution 205

was the abolition of sovereignty in America,45 and the French retention of

absolutist sovereignty of the people. In America, “the great good fortune
of the American Revolution was that the people of the colonies, prior to
their conflict with England, were organized in self-governing bodies”,
while the “great and fateful misfortune of the French Revolution was that
none of its constituent assemblies could command enough authority to lay
down the law of the land”. 46 Finally, concerning Arendt’s comparison
between the French and American Revolutions, the following sums up the
contrast:

The men of the French revolution, not knowing how to distinguish between
violence and power, and convinced that all power must come from the
people, opened the political realm to this pre-political, natural force of the
multitude and they were swept away by it, as the king and the old powers
had been swept away before. The men of the American Revolution, on the
contrary, understood by power the very opposite. To them, power came
into being when and where people would get together and bind themselves
through promises, covenants, and mutual promises; only such power,
which rested on reciprocity and mutuality, was real power and legitimate,
whereas the so-called power of kings or princes or aristocrats, because it
did not spring from mutuality, but, at best, rested only on consent, was
spurious and usurped.47

What we have in Arendt, then, is a reading of the French revolution

that is institutional, and, less obviously but nevertheless still so, moral.
Which is to say: classical. I have suggested that the incipient moral basis
of her argument lies in the starkness of her initial contrast between politics
and violence, a contrast that posits the activity of politics as the disavowal
of violent conflict. What strikes me about this analysis is the stringency of
its focus, which, not surprisingly, yields a rather one-dimensional reading
of the event. While one may wish to defend Arendt by arguing that she is
simply trying to diagnose a particular pathology that flows from the
French Revolution, and while I think her diagnosis of the relationship
between the French Revolution and the rise of nationalism, mass society,
and mass administration is extremely insightful and important, I cannot
help but be struck by the exaggerations and minimizations of her analysis.
Nor in what follows do I wish to deny her key insight depicted above
about the declaration of rights being a Trojan horse for much more
pernicious forces.

45
Cf. Ibid., 153.
46
Ibid., 165.
47
Ibid., 181.
206 Chapter Nine

First, let us take the exaggeration of the institutional distinctions

between the American and French Revolutions. If Arendt were correct
then we would surely be able to demonstrate that any political freedom
France has today exists in spite of the Revolution. That, I think, is simply
not the case, and we could only argue it to be the case if we took the
Terror, a moment within the revolution, as the essence of the Revolution,
as opposed to being only an element, albeit morally repugnant and
existentially horrific. As for the social/political distinction that Arendt
makes, it is true that on occasional more conservative American
commentators and politicians contrast their freedoms with the supposedly
socialist Europeans, but the contrast is dubious, and, for their part, the
French tend to see the relative distinctions in areas of welfare between the
United States and France as symptomatic of U.S. backwardness and lack
of civility, a lack that has its corollary in the extraordinarily high prison
population and crime rate in the U.S., as well as in what to almost any
European seems barbaric, namely, the lack of adequate health care to all
citizens. Arendt’s elision between the French Revolution and the French
party system (actually “the roots of the whole continental party system”!)48
infers not only that the Jacobin rise to power through intimidation, the
infiltration of popular societies, and dictatorial manipulation are not only
the essential parliamentary legacy of the Revolution, and the source of
one-party dictatorship, but that precious little else came out of this furnace
of activity.
The purely political components of Rosenstock-Huessy’s account of
the French Revolution make an interesting contrast with Arendt’s. He
agrees with Arendt that modern politics has been hugely shaped by the
French Revolution, and he emphasizes how the political vocabulary of the
modern world has been dominated by French ideas, not least beginning
with the nation, which he emphasizes is not to be equated simply with the
people: “’Nation’ is the people restored to a truer and greater nature: it is
‘people’ minus superstition or instincts, plus reason and speech”. 49
Although, Rosenstock-Huessy was no friend of nationalism per se, and his
work also has an eye to the horrific journey of nationalism that culminated
in two World Wars, he is as attentive to the nuances of the French idea of
the nation that are essential to its integrity as to its legacy and abuse. All
three elements are conspicuous in the following:

48
Ibid., 247
49
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 168.
 Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution 207

Most of the mischief done to the map of the world has happened
because well-meaning people overlook the rigid standard implied in the
French conception of “nation”.
It is of practical use to lay bare the foundations of the term, for we are
all taken in today by the promiscuous use of “nation” for all kinds of
purposes. The domination of French ideas has lamed our sense of self-
orientation in the social world. We have French words for everything. The
oldest parliamentary country, England, bows to France and calls the First
Lord of the Treasury by a French title, “Prime Minister”; the British parties
are called “Liberals” and “Conservatives”, which are purely French names.
“Nation” is used even by careless Americans who forget that the
continent of America is a new world embracing all kinds of nations and
open to all kinds of nations, and that Anglo-Saxons should believe in the
Commonwealth, not in Nationalism. A true American patriot should avoid
the word “nation” like the plague.50

What, for Rosenstock-Huessy, is all-important about the concept of

nation as developed through the French Revolution is that it is neither
aristocratic nor democratic, yet it bears features of both, most specifically
through its faith in science, cultivation, education, solidarity and
inspiration. Not only the Revolution itself, but the ends of the Revolution,
and the legacy of the Revolution, make no sense without the all-important
roles of the salons, of the Freemasons (as he notes: “the army of
enlightenment formed the lodges of Freemasonry. Freemasonry came into
existence as the political organization of the European reading public”), of
the literati and dramatists, indeed of the army of ideas-creators and
brokers: “Ideas”, he writes, “are the arsenal with which to equip the new
legislators of France. The bourgeois who devoured Voltaire’s writings
devoured them to become the governing class of France”.51
Whatever political aspects of the French Revolution, then, we want to
dwell upon, if we are serious about it as a process, we cannot omit the all-
important unleashing of a panoply of Enlightenment ideas, which are with
us still and which (for all the defects of the Enlightenment as such) we
would feign relinquish, as essential to the process. And to mistake the
moments of ideological fervour, excessive ambition, fear, intrigue,
paranoia, and revolutionary despair, and the institutional configurations at
those moments for the totality of the process and its legacy is, from
Rosenstock-Huessy’s perspective, to miss the entire point. It is not, to
repeat, that he is uncritical, nor indifferent, to this all-too-human terrible
stuff; but ultimately the reason we are still assembling the meaning of the

50
Ibid., 168-69.
51
Ibid., 194.
208 Chapter Nine

French Revolution is that so much of our daily lives, so much of what we

take institutionally and socially for granted, so many of our contemporary
habits, were forged in that hellish furnace. And that great things are forged
in hell is morally something we would generally prefer to forget. This, by
the way, is a very different thing from simply saying that the ends justify
the means, because when we act we have no idea whether our ends will
succeed or not, though we do know that our means remain our means, and
thus will be engraved in history. More mundanely, we might add that
when Rosenstock-Huessy considers the political legacy of the Revolution
in his sections “The Great Electorate” (I am focussing upon the English
version here), what he presents enables us to see the link between day-to-
day French politics at the time of writing (1938) and its linkage with the
Revolution. To take but one example:

French democracy votes on an equal footing. However there must be a

certain machinery to put candidates before the voters. In America the
candidates are named by bosses and conventions, men and groups of men;
in France by the salon. The salon fills the necessary function of process of
selection which enables the machinery of democracy to work.52

The passage neatly situates the lingering element of the Revolution

within the context of French political life; and where Arendt sees the
totalitarian legacy of party machinations, Rosenstock-Huessy rightly sees
that the political contrast between modern French and modern American
liberal democracy is more a pragmatic manner of selection, of the necessary
application of the aristocratic function to the democratic process.
(Rosenstock-Huessy argues that modern political systems are free to the
extent that they grasp the meaning of why a free constitution must be
mixed—because the various fronts of human endeavour cannot be
completely governed by one political principle.)53
I have stressed that Rosenstock-Huessy is interested in how we have
been irrevocably transformed by the French Revolution. And such a
transformation cannot be explored simply on ethical grounds, because the
kind of template within which it is meaningful to talk about ethical choices
is rendered largely meaningless in Rosenstock-Huessy’s analysis. 54 And
one thing Rosenstock-Huessy ever insists upon is that second order
thinking, abstraction undertaken by mere spectators, is an altogether

52
Ibid., 239.
53
Ibid.; see also. ch. 12, ‘Polybius Once More: Our Economic Future’, 594ff.
54
See ibid., 719ff., where he argues how pointless it is to think of revolutions in
ethical terms.
 Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution 209

different process from the decision-making that is forced upon those in the
flux and pressure of social and political chaos. Nor can its meaning be
gauged on simply political grounds—indeed, he says specifically of the
French Revolution: “Government is not everything in the life of man; this
is the creed of the French Revolution”.55 That is because the legacy of the
French Revolution is primarily social and only secondarily political,
which, of course, Arendt knows, and sees as essentially problematic; but
because her diagnosis is primarily political, she does not really follow
through on the greater social legacy of the Revolution.
Again, Arendt’s focus is deliberately constrained, but it is precisely her
argument that the political cannot salvage the great suffering endemic
within the social that is so important to her critique. And here the
alignment of her classicism and her moderation conspire to make her far
more conservative than she wishes to be. The classical world was built on
slavery, and it took the break-up of the political tradition she valorizes and
new institutional complexes, in which the Church played a significant role
(this point is all too breezily forgotten today), to eliminate slavery. Of
course there is no suggestion that Arendt is a defender of slavery, but
when we see the defenses of slavery provided by Aristotle and Plato, we
are struck not by how inhuman they are—anyone reads them knows they
are not—nor, in Arendtian terms, how thoughtless they are—they are not
philosophical Eichmanns—but how their sense of limit and form has no
way of dealing with that “ocean of misery” that Arendt chastises
Robespierre for making so central to his politics, and which, of course, the
Soviets followed him in. Arendt, understandably enough, is appealing to
moderate means, but this is where Rosenstock-Huessy must break with the
classical connection of good intentions, measured means, and social
improvement: we are not the result of moderate means, but of catastrophe
and horror. And it is no use pretending that we were not formed that way. I
might put this theologically: we have inherited a world where sin and evil
have constantly been done, but miraculously God’s love was strong
enough that this was providential.56 Or, for those for whom such words as

55
Ibid., 235.
56
Cf. Lamartine’s rhetorically charged, but not inaccurate claim: ‘All was thus
blind, except the Revolution itself. The virtue of the Revolution was in the idea
which forced these men on to accomplish it, and not in those who actually
accomplished it; all its instruments were vitiated, corrupt, or personal; but the idea
was pure, incorruptible, divine. The vices, passions, selfishness of men were
inevitably doomed to produce in the coming crises those shocks, those violences,
those perversities, and those crimes which are to human passions what
consequences are to principles. If each of the parties or men, mixed up from the
210 Chapter Nine

sin and God are, at best, meaningless, or simply stupid and wrong: the
accumulation of unbearable sufferings have created bursting points which
have resulted in unpredictable responses and innovations; and without the
burstings, the innovations would never have been undertaken. Blandly put:
we sometimes learn from evil and folly. That is why after major
catastrophes, armies of authors graze over every aspect of the causes and
consequences of an event. We may wish men were capable of avoiding
disasters and always planning good things; sometimes indeed they do. We
may well wish we were not formed out of the materials that form us. But
so much of what we take for granted was not created idealistically, was not
planned,57 was not done out of creative love—or again, if I may put this
theologically, it is God alone who creates out of pure love, which is a nice
reminder of the perennial fallibility of our nature. It is because of our
imperfections—our laziness, incapacity, folly, malevolences—that we
slumber until crises open new pathways of human association, unpredictable
responses, unimagined discoveries of selves that one simply cannot see in
more moderate times, where the daily routines integrate and facilitate the
injustice and evils that at those times seem bearable enough. Rosenstock-
Huessy, then, begins from the terrible truth, but no less true because it is

first day with these great events had taken their virtue, instead of their impulses as
the rule of their actions, all these disasters which eventually crushed them, would
have been saved to them and to their country. If the king had been firm and
sagacious, if the clergy had been free from a longing for things temporal, and if the
aristocracy had been good; if the people had been moderate, if Mirabeau had been
honest, if La Fayette had been decided, if Robespierre had been humane, the
Revolution would have progressed, majestic and calm as a heavenly thought,
through France, and thence through Europe; it would have been installed like a
philosophy in facts, in laws, and in creeds. But it was otherwise decreed. The
holiest most just and virtuous thought, when it passes through the medium of
imperfect humanity, comes out in rags and in blood. Those very persons who
conceived it, no longer recognize, disavow it. Yet it is not permitted, even to crime,
to degrade the truth, that survives all, even its victims. The blood which sullies
men does not stain its idea; and despite the selfishness which debases it, the
infamies which trammel it, the crimes which pollute it, the blood-stained
Revolution purifies itself, feels its own worth, triumphs, and will triumph.’ Ibid.,
41-42.
57
Cf. The remark from Bilaud-Varenne’s Memoires, the man, whom Dawson says,
‘was perhaps more responsible for [the Terror] than any other member of the Great
Committee except Robespierre’: ‘The decisions for which we have been so
reproached – we did not wish for the most part two days, a day, or several hours
before taking them: it was the crisis alone that produced them.’ Christopher
Dawson, The Gods of Revolution, Introduction by Arnold Toynbee, (London:
Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972), 109.
 Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution 211

terrible, that we have been made by war and revolution. And here, if we
relate this to the twentieth century, Rosenstock-Huessy and Arendt concur:
“Wars and revolutions . . . have thus far determined the physiognomy of
the twentieth century” (Arendt).58 “The world wars have revolutionized the
world. . . . Wars effect like revolutions. And revolutions expresses
themselves in wars” (Rosenstock-Huesy).59 But Arendt, having made the
linkage, refuses to depart from the classical formula that good, rightly
understood and acted upon, does not produce evil, and vice versa, and this
idealism is also discernible in the opening chapter of On Revolution where
she implies that war has become redundant—a noble sentiment; but the
perpetual recurrence of war is something we can be sure of until we have
secured the means for perpetual peace which our world so conspicuously
lacks.60 It is noteworthy that Arendt is even able to recruit Machiavelli into
her somewhat idealized republican classical tradition, by downplaying the
darker side of his teaching, and applauding his understanding of the
staging of appearances in political life.61 By contrast, Rosenstock-Huessy
has no good words for Machiavelli, nor Bodin for that matter. He sees

58
Arendt, On Revolution, 11.
59
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Die europäischen Revolutionen und der Charakter
der Nationen, (Moers: Brendow, 1987 [1960 – 3rd edition]), my translation, 3.
60
Arendt, On Revolution, 16-17.
61
In general, I find Arendt’s reading of Machiavelli totally unconvincing. Of
course he is a republican, but not in the ideal mould that Arendt depicts
republicans. Arendt does not take the relationship between his appraisal of
violence and the need for a pagan revival with sufficient seriousness, partly I think,
because her idealization of the Roman republic also downplays the requisite need
for violence within it (cf. On Revolution, 37). She also completely downplays the
scale and nature of violence Machiavelli justifies and indeed requires (compare his
positive appraisal of Cesare Borgia), in part by not adequately addressing the
different contexts under which political actors must act. She presents Machiavelli
as a kind of Dante redux who simply wants to keep apart Church and state; thus
her claim that “the reason for the Church’s becoming a corrupting influence in
Italian politics was her participation in secular affairs as such” (The Human
Condition, 77), as if Machiavelli’s attack on the holy water and “feminizing” role
of the Church equated with the idea that the Church was full of men too good to
handle worldly affairs. She also find a religious conviction or sensitivity in
Machiavelli that I think is simply not there: “Machiavelli, the sworn enemy of
religious considerations in political affairs, was driven to ask for divine assistance”
(On Revolution, 39)—as if a manner of everyday speech in which one invokes the
name of God is a genuine prayer – thus would we make a Christian of the person
who stubs their toe and yells “Jesus Christ”. Equally unconvincing is her claim
“[m]ost of Machiavelli’s arguments against religion . . . are not directed at those
who really love God more than they love the world or themselves”.
212 Chapter Nine

their valorization of the state as a grim and utterly pagan revival that is
contrary to the messianic revolutionary spirit reaching from Odilio through
Dante to Luther.
Unlike Arendt, Rosenstock-Huessy gives much less weight to
consciousness and intention, and far more to what unintentionally triggers,
or feeds into, and what comes out of an event. That Arendt would spend
her final years working on philosophy, and trying to perfect a theory of the
mind and political judgment, and finds in Kant the rudiments of the model
that needs to be developed, is indicative of what Rosenstock-Huessy
would just see as an idealist variant of classical political thought. By
contrast, it is the forces of life, particularly those that irrupt unexpectedly,
formed and developed within time, that Rosenstock-Huessy sees as
thrusting upon us the vital elements that are ever-changing and that we
must ever work with if we are to survive and flourish. The classical model,
on the other hand, is precisely that: a model. Just as Plato’s demiurge
looked to the Idea prior to the creation of the world, the classical political
philosopher has an idea of goodness prior to creation, and the idea
provides the touchstone of goodness. The same approach is as intrinsic to
Aristotle as it is to Plato; even though he refutes Plato’s ontology, Aristotle
makes the contemplative life the highest form of life and his great-souled
man is the model citizen. Arendt will try to identify the qualities of
political judgment as if there were qualities of judgment that could be
identified, and passed onto students who would then pass them onto
politicians of the future, who would then be saved from error and so on. Of
course, Arendt’s private/public distinction pervades all her thinking, and
her emphasis upon natality is indicative of the importance she ascribes to
the incalculable, and yet her understanding of thoughtfulness and
goodness/virtue is thoroughly classical, and Kantian. Her view of political
life is of a life and an environment sufficiently framed to safeguard against
the heteronomous factors of social life, and where good men will make
good decisions and dedication to freedom will stave off tyranny. But the
gap between what we are doing and what we think we are doing is
invariably how history is made.
In keeping with what I have just said, I think it not surprising that
Arendt’s analysis of the French Revolution takes place within what is
pretty much a historical vacuum. It is as if the toxic sentiment of
compassion simply emerged, and the desire to redistribute property was a
novel development. In fact, Rosenstock-Huessy’s analysis of what he calls
the Italian Revolution, or the “revolutionary Guelphic idea between 1200
 Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution 213

and 1500”,62 while not for a moment suggesting that property distribution
was the sole aspect of the revolution (any more than it was in the French
Revolution)—in both revolutions his analysis revolves around the
identification of a variety of achievements from artistic ones to economic
ones to political ones to social ones to religious ones and others—makes
much of the achievement of citizen rights by peasants in Guelphic states,
arguing that “the Guelphic effort was as real as modern economic
planning:”63

Guelphic Italy discovered the landscape as the background of its cities,

because the landscape was no longer owned by separate and greedy
proprietors. It was changed into the field of political potestas, of “civilitas”.
Landscape became a political and an artistic reality. In looking at the
Guelphs and Ghibellines of Italy we are reminded of the diference between
the Social Revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks in Russia. Here it was the
Social Revolutionaries who were in love with the individual peasant or
village. They distributed the land among individual settlements.64

Arendt knows that the compassion she suggests begins with the French
precursors of the French Revolution is a Jewish and Christian sentiment
which is not solely directed to praying for a hereafter but to changing the
world. But again, her reading of Christianity as intrinsically non-
revolutionary lets her ignore Christian antecedents to those revolutionaries
who want to eliminate human misery. Again, by way of comparison with
Arendt’s claim, I would just refer the reader to Rosenstock-Huessy’s
discussion of St. Francis and Joachim of Fiore and their importance in the
Guelphic revolution. It is true that how the revolutionary sentiment is
articulated within a larger narrative makes it take on a particular character
intrinsically connected to an assemblage of political demands and
institutional articulations which do indeed give it a somewhat unique
character. But, there is another unconvincing aspect to Arendt’s discussion
of the issue of poverty, which is very evident in the final paragraph of
chapter 2 of On Revolution where she refers to

[t]he masses of the poor, the overwhelming majority of all men, whom the
French revolution called les malheureux, whom it transformed into les
enragés, only to desert them and let them fall back into the state of les
miserables . . . .65

62
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 575.
63
Ibid., 580.
64
Ibid., 578-80.
65
Arendt, On Revolution, 114.
214 Chapter Nine

Arendt is making a point about the revolutionary linkage between

misery, historical necessity and revolutionary violence, but it is actually
another point that strikes me as more important. This is that the yardstick
of political success today in all Western countries—that is, in all nations
that have absorbed the legacy of the French revolution—relies heavily
upon the ability to provide sustenance and employment and security to
those who were once merely les malheureux. That is to say, what Arendt
treats as a defect is, in fact, one of the most important successes of the
French Revolution. For all the many shortcomings of modern liberal
democratic states, and for all the inequality that exists within them, the
decision to ensure that we simply do not accept les malheureux (and, as I
have suggested, most Europeans would see the United States as most
remiss in this) is deeply engraved in our very understanding of nationhood
and statehood, and is now viewed as an intrinsic purpose of political
parties. “Was the blood spilled in achieving this worth it?” is a reasonable
moral question, but not one that really has any purpose—for it has been
achieved and blood was spilled.
Just as I have suggested that Arendt is too indifferent to what comes
“out of” the Revolution, the larger narrative and the discussion of its major
features and characteristics, with attention to the gamut of major voices,
and the genesis of the most significant fateful revolutionary elements that
will be constitutive of the demands and achievements of the revolution, is
also rather threadbare in Arendt. Again, by contrast, this is all of great
importance to Rosenstock-Huessy’s analysis. While Arendt speaks at some
length about Rousseau, for example, Voltaire’s name does not appear in
the book, and Descartes is mentioned but twice in passing. One might
argue that Voltaire’s importance to the French Revolution is so obvious
that not every study of the French Revolution should mention it, and that it
is Arendt’s fresh insights that we need to focus upon. There is much truth
in that, but the problem is that Arendt is taking far too much for granted in
her telling of the tale, particularly when it comes to the importance of the
secular and its emergence in France, as if it were the most natural thing in
the world for a secular society to occur. But the fact is that there is nothing
natural about the French Revolution being the first explicitly anti-Christian
revolution in history—just as there is nothing natural about Europe having
been so largely formed by a religion whose seeds were planted in the
context of a revolution by a small number of lower class Jews in a remote
and troublesome part of the Roman empire.
In contrast to Arendt, Rosenstock-Huessy’s narrative of the French
Revolution is one that dissects the soulscape that makes it possible, as well
as the change of soulscape and the indelible impressions that it has left
 Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution 215

behind, which have become intrinsic to our common fate. Because of the
density of Rosenstock-Huessy’s analysis of the French Revolution, it is
simply impossible to provide an adequate commentary of all the elements
that he brings together in his analysis. However, the following table
provides the various subheadings from his English and German accounts
of the French Revolution. As the table demonstrates, we see quite a
different emphasis in the two tellings. (See Table 9-1)

Table 9-1

Out of Revolution Die europäischen Revolutionen

Dramatized history
The womb of Time
The Fight for Europe
The Cradle of Europe: Greece
Frankish Europe
Paris and the Rhine
Versailles
Huguenots and Jesuits
Privileges
The Nation: How the Bourgeois was
made a citizen
Voltaire’s and Rousseau’s Ideas
Freemasonry
The Constitution
The Tyranny of the Decimal System
The “Nature” of France
The French calendar
Capitalism around France
The Emancipation of the Jews
Digression: Alpha and Omega:
Gentiles and Jews
The New Messianism
The “Affaire”
The Three Qualities of Higher Life
The Great Electorate: Who Can
Govern a Nation?
Adam and Eve
The Peasant of Paris
Checks on Individualism
The Victory of Reason
1. Nature in France
2. Theatrical Prelude; Voltaire and
Beaumarchais
3. The Reign of the Ideas of 1789
The French Isle and the Nation State
1. Versailles
2. The Parisian Schools of Higher
Learning
3. The Inheritance of the Middle Ages
4. The Salons
5. The Convent
6. The Nation State in Europe
7. Culture and civilization
8. Private Property
8. The Philosophy of Progress
10. Exhibitions and Museums
11. The Emancipation of the Jews
12. The Individual
13. The Decadence of Love
Bourgeois Society and Class Struggle
1. The Radicalism of class Struggle
2. The Dialectic of Revolution
216 Chapter Nine

What is conspicuous, I hope, even from the mere subheadings, is how

Rosenstock-Huessy’s analysis brings together: the importance of the geo-
political history and context (its Frankish and Carolingian legacy and
contestation with the real heir of Rome, Byzantium, and the shifting,
violently political demands of what he also calls “its frontier problem”66);
collective memory and unresolved traumas; and internal collisions which
seem unavoidable, given the enormous temporal wave behind the various
institutional interests, which have not been merely the outgrowth of some
malignant intention, but, on the contrary, and thus tragically, invariably
solutions to earlier crises. Thus, for example, the success of the University
of Paris in “the democratic movement of the great Councils of the Church”
against popes and cardinals made it both the centre of Christian learning
and ideas and also a fostering source of resentment within Christendom.67
Its ideas would ossify as more innovative and radical theological doctrines
would spring up and create new cities of learning, such as Wittenberg,
Heidelberg, and Marburg. And as its status and stature became threatened
by the Reformers it sparked a bloody massacre, forcing the Huguenots into
exile, forced the monarchy back into the fold of the Church, indirectly
forced a schism between Paris and Versailles, and contributed to the
intensification of Jesuitical (a foreign and detested body) powers. For its
part, the Monarchy intensified its power by drawing representatives from
the clergy and leaders from le pays into its orbit. It is possible that we can
lay moral culpability at the feet of the University of Paris. But to what
purpose? Scholasticism of the sort that prevailed at the University of Paris
is, to state the obvious, no longer a tenable moral threat. Apart from that,
we should not forget that the reactions of the Parisian Catholics were but
one more fire in a general European conflagration of conflicting faiths and
possible future directions which would culminate in the Thirty Years
War—a War which, in turn, would lead to a new kind of human being
incapable of throwing in his lot with either Scholastic, Jesuit, or Reformer.
And yet when one of its most important prototypes Descartes emerges out
of that war he must conceal his originality by feigning affinities with all
three: he adopts the form (though not the substance) of a scholastic in the
Meditations, he touts his debt to Jesuit instruction (while also letting his
readers know that no traditional teachings are worth anything!), and he
speaks of his Catholic faith, yet chooses to live in Reformist countries. If
Descartes created The World (as his posthumously published worked was
so immodestly called), Rousseau made himself the new Adam, and

66
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 149.
67
Ibid., 153.
 Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution 217

Voltaire sought a new class of priests to inhabit the new house of humanity
(first envisaged by Descartes)—all three, for all their internal contradictions
and antagonisms, would become “saints” of the new prevailing order of
the Revolution.
The French Revolution was an event of multiple forces—in its drama
and the role of drama in its actualisation, the new role of the intelligentsia,
its anti-Christian character, its novelties, including the faith in science and
reason, in the virtue of novelty and genius, of sensation and surprise, its
faith in art, in the power of philosophy and ideas (initially the role of
salons, and then of museums and exhibitions), its faith in equality and
individualism, and its achievement of the emancipation of the Jews (of
considerable importance to Rosenstock-Huessy, who draws heavily on
Franz Rosenzweig in the lengthy analysis of the meaning and benefits of
Jewish emancipation), which was itself part of the Revolution’s messianic
self-consciousness. That messianic self-consciousness created a new
vision of the meaning of the nation, and the French nation itself was to be
the messianic force for nationalism; and the Dreyfuss affair—important in
both Arendt’s and Rosenstock-Huessy’s studies of the Revolution—would
show nationalism gone rotten and tribal. But it was not simply the new
modality of political organization that was so important to the Revolution;
there was also the need to spread its scientific triumphs, so conspicuous in
such a seemingly innocuous event as the creation of the decimal system of
measurement. The scientistic and instrumentalist view of nature and life
generally flows through and beyond the French Revolution, but it is the
Revolution that solidifies the Enlightenment dream, taking it from a hope
to a social reality. When Rosenstock-Huessy writes: “The secret of the
French revolution is the organization of discovery. We no longer stumble
from one invention to the next; we have learned to plan our inventions and
discoveries”, he has put his finger on the fact that the mechanistic view of
nature that had been part of the scientific revolution would, after the
French Revolution, become accepted as being the natural way in which a
society saw life.68 Does Rosenstock-Huessy’s awareness of the triumph of
art and science, of inspiration and planning, of nation and citizenship,
mean that he sees all of these things as unmitigated goods? Not at all. Like
Arendt, he sees the horrors of the World Wars as the culmination of the
forces accelerated and intensified by the French Revolution. But that has
no bearing on the fact that we are, for better and worse, constituted
socially and unavoidably now by the French Revolution. We need to know
why neither science, art, nor citizenship nor nationhood will save us—but

68
Ibid., 252.
218 Chapter Nine

science and art and citizenship, whilst deadly idols, are also among the
spirits of our freedom.
Like Arendt, Rosenstock-Huessy also sees that there is undoubtedly a
connection between the French and Russian Revolutions. When in Out of
Revolution he makes the transition from the Russian Revolution to the
French Revolution, he writes:

The modern interest in recurrent life reacts against the interest taken during
more than a century in individual life; for the myth of the French
Revolution was neither racial nor economic. It dramatizes the powers of
genius and individuality.69

The contrast between the two Revolutions emphasizes precisely the

different features which the Bolsheviks themselves would emphasize in
their assessment of the respective Revolutions, which is why, as
Rosenstock-Huessy would put it, “the Russian Revolution, in trying to end
history, was striking against this nightmare of liberty and reason”.70 For, as
indicated above, what the French Revolution would see as intrinsic to
freedom, and the fulfillment of humanity’s powers—individual genius and
novelty, to be expressed by art and requiring museums and exhibitions, as
well as the modern means of assembling and dissembling “the news”—
would be but mere bourgeois ideology for the Russian revolutionaries. We
can see this in a form that Rosenstock-Huessy does not mention, but which
powerfully demonstrates his point. The conflicts in Asia between
nationalist liberation movements and the nation’s communists were
conducted by the communists within the economist/materialist ideological
framework and core appeals laid down by the Russian revolution, and their
enemies (irrespective of the truth of the accusation) were depicted as mere
bourgeois stooges.
But that does not mean that, from Rosenstock-Huessy’s perspective,
Arendt is wrong to emphasize the continuity between the French and
Russian revolutions—the Russian revolutionaries frequently referenced
themselves and the revolution itself to the heroes, dramatics, and stages of
the French Revolution, not to mention their appropriation of the dictatorial
politics of the Jacobins. Indeed, Rosenstock-Huessy observes how
revolutions consistently inherit a spiritual framework (emerging from the
radical wing of the French Revolution) of previous revolutions. At the
same time, in attempting to create an entire new way of social being, it
must sharply distinguish itself from the previous revolution—for from

69
Ibid., 125.
70
Ibid., 253.
 Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution 219

within its own totality, the previous revolution is a failure. The German
version of Rosenstock-Huessy’s study of revolutions provides the
following schema to demonstrate the point about sequence and inheritance. I
will not comment on the points about the other revolutions, and I just wish
to draw attention to the relationships Rosenstock-Huessy depicts between
the American and French Revolutions, and the French and Russian
Revolutions (See Table 9-2):

Table 9-2

Precursors Embodiment
The Cluniacs of Burgundy Rome, ecclesiastical Roman

Italian Spirituals and humanists, Wittenberg and Potsdam Saxon,

the state in Marsiglio of Padua Prussian state

German Calvinist community Westminster, Commonwealth

American Independents
Paris Constitution
Constitution
French social order Moscow economic politics

This sequence exhibits how and why Rosenstock-Huessy sees the great
revolutions of Europe as forming a sequence, and thus as having a
“progressive” character, which in turn is part of their messianic character.
With respect to the issue of the messianic and progressive nature of the
revolutionary impetus, we can see a rather typical difference between
Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy in the following remark of Rosenstock-
Huessy: “The crisis of modern history came when nationalism threw itself
into a fiery messianic crusade for a common future”. 71 While Arendt
recognizes that the French Revolution sets the template for subsequent
revolutions, the significance of the messianic character of the Revolution
remains either unnoticed, or of no relevance to her. And at the centre of
relevance for her is not only the political nature of the event, but one might
say, if we are to think in her terms of reference, those political mistakes
made during the event which she hopes we may learn from and thus not
repeat. The study is intended for citizens and future political actors. Again
we come up against the classical character of On Revolution, which is

71
Ibid., 237.
220 Chapter Nine

highlighted in no uncertain terms at the conclusion of On Revolution with

its reference to Theseus, the founder of Athens, the polis, and a Greek
citation.
This stands in the closest relationship to the fact that instead of starting
from a position in which the republican view of political life is elevated as
of fundamental importance to assess the relative value of a revolution,
Rosenstock-Huessy has a more neutral view of revolution as an event
“which once and for all has wanted to introduce a new life principle into
world history, thus a total transformation”.72 And “[t]he world Revolutions
all start without reference to space with an absolute programme for whole
of mankind, and a vision of a new earth. They all believe themselves to be
the vessel of eternal, revealed, definite truth”—though he adds, “Only
reluctantly do they come back to the old earth. Every revolution makes the
painful discovery that it is geographically conditioned”.73 To the extent
that we now retrospectively see something of intrinsic value in our sense
of collective self that comes out of a revolution, Rosenstock argues that
“the great revolutions achieved something that was necessary”, which is
also why he adds that “the category of necessity is beyond abstract good
and evil”. 74 Arendt’s disappointment with, or censure of the French
Revolution, if seen from Rosenstock-Huessy’s point of view, is that the
very thing Arendt is most disturbed by is the fact that it is a real
revolution, unlike the American Revolution, which Rosenstock-Huessy
depicts as a half-revolution, a half-revolution precisely because

it was unable to create a new language as the Romans, the Bohemians, or

the forerunners of revolution in Paris and Florence had been incapable of
tearing down the traditions of their environment. In that respect America . . .
must be interpreted as an unfulfilled promise, snuffed out between the two
great forms of life and education which were created by England and
France respectively . . . she has lost one political language without finding
another. . . . In France the walls of the Bastille, because they were of stone,

72
Rosenstock-Huessy, Die europäischen Revolutionen, 5.
73
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 457. In other words, Rosenstock-Huessy
introduces the distinction between what really makes an ultimate change (which is
not to deny that aspects of a former world/regime are inevitably restored), and what
is the replication of a previous change, albeit applied to a new locality. Following
this, and deploying Rosenstock-Huessy’s definition, this means that the Cuban
revolution or the 1848 revolutions are really but the geographical extensions and
expansions of transformations of a complete overturning, i.e., a total revolution,
that had occurred previously, elsewhere, and has managed to bring something of
universal value into the world.
74
Ibid., 719.
 Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution 221

allowed of a real total revolution. Dynamite will not accomplish much in a

desert. The same is true of a revolution three thousand miles away from its
base.75

Arendt rightly recognized natality as crucial to political life; she was

also correct to recognize the crucial role played by speech in creating a
new pathway into the future. And while Arendt’s defense of the public
realm, of action over making, and her critique of homo faber and the
modern functionalist view of life, make it understandable why she can be
seen as a radical thinker with the likes of Habermas, Adorno (whom she
personally detested), Benjamin (whom she deeply admired), Marcuse, and
Foucault, her institutional emphasis combined with her insistence upon the
importance of authority and tradition separates her from the more
voluntarist critics of modernity.76 All of this is inflected by what we may
broadly call her Heideggerian view of the relationship between what
Heidegger called “the they” and Arendt’s heroic view of political action.
But, where Heidegger would segue from Being and Time’s political
heroism to the Führer, Arendt sees republicanism as the bulwark against
the totalitarianism that Heidegger succumbed to. Heidegger’s mistake
(playing Plato to Hitler’s Dionysos), for Arendt—and this is how she
would publicly discuss Heidegger’s Nazism—was his haplessness in the
real world.77 This, however, did not change the fact that he could help us
be more mindful, more thoughtful—she not only insists he was a great
philosopher, but her account of homo faber and many of her insights into
the calculative character of modern life and its incipient totalitarianism
generally have their most sophisticated philosophical roots in Heidegger.
Indeed, her rendition of republican political practice is redolent with a
Heideggerian view of authenticity. Still, her sensitivity to the importance
of the institutions balances what has been called her political
romanticism.78 Yet overall, her discussions of giving birth to something

75
Ibid., 661.
76
Irving Louis Horowitz’s designation of Arendt as ‘a revolutionary conservative’
is apposite. Partisan Review, vol. 66, Spring Issue 2, 263-79 (269).
77
Hannah Arendt, ‘Heidegger at Eighty’, in Michael Murray, ed., Heidegger and
Modern Philosophy; Critical Essays (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978),
293-303.
78
Margaret Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (London: J.M.
Dent, 1974), 125. Interestingly, Canovan seems to have changed her mind on this,
and her later work, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), stresses her anti-romanticism
(see esp. 79, 274). But I think her earlier judgment was the more accurate on this,
if we use the word ‘romanticism’ loosely, as she does there.
222 Chapter Nine

new, that is to the process of founding and testatorship, and the matter of
speech, more generally tend to remain abstract or general features of her
account of the importance of political action.
While Rosenstock-Huessy was somewhat contemptible of Heidegger,
Habermas, and Adorno, and silent on the others mentioned above, he
shares their criticisms of modernity’s ultra-functionality and spiritual
corrosiveness. But, unlike Arendt, he is reluctant to single out political
action as the key to founding, even though founding and testatorship are
central concepts in his thinking. Moreover, speech and, more generally,
grammar are said by Rosenstock-Huessy to provide an organon for the
social sciences. In part that is because he sees that grammar is not merely
how we frame our descriptions of reality, but that it is how we form
ourselves and participate with each other and within reality. Even the
major professions are registers of the fronts of reality we communally
form in order to survive and flourish. Thus too Rosenstock-Huessy
emphasises how we are coined through speech, and how naming seals
events, and stamps futures. Thus too he argues that “each human variety
has its particular coagulated speech”, 79 and he takes names and the
calendar as the key to our understanding of history and society. Indeed, the
distinction between history and society, as he argues in his magnum opus,
his two volume Sociology, is an artificial one; for a society is always
historically founded. But unlike Arendt, who hives off and privileges
political actors, thereby enabling the very human desire to apportion moral
responsibility to historical actors, Rosenstock-Huessy tends not to do this.
Of course, some apportionment is inevitably detectable in anyone’s
narrative of events, but Rosenstock-Huessy’s narrative of the French
Revolution is much less a story of personalities within institutions, than
the creative responses to compelling and catastrophic forces.
In conclusion, the point I made earlier about Arendt’s analysis being
shaped more by the Second World War and Rosenstock-Huessy’s by the
Great War is conspicuous in their respective approaches—for the trauma
of the Second World War is one in which the understandable focus is on
the all-too-visible actors who caused not only the War, but also the most
barbaric of actions to their fellow creatures; but the First World War is
such a seamless web of culpability, such an unpremeditated act, that the
dwelling upon intention, consciousness, and even moral apportionment is
of little help. The reason I think that Rosenstock-Huessy’s fourfold
approach to society, which looks at the commonality of our future, the
forces from our past, and the social subjectivity and objectivity of the

79
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 738.
 Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution 223

present in the context of human suffering (what he calls the cross of

reality), is of such value is that the geo-political forces and domestic crises
of our time no longer bear much resemblance to the conditions of much of
the twentieth century, and thus to the totalitarianisms that towered over it.
It is not merely to political action and our political resources we must look
if we are to preserve our freedoms, but to other resources from our past,
which are largely taken for granted—and to understand what we have and
who we are is essential for our survival and possible flourishing into the
unknown of tomorrow.
In the first volume of his Sociology, Rosenstock-Huessy argued that
romanticism and utopianism are two of the myths that did so much
damage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The real antidote against
romanticism is understanding why elements of the past were so vital then,
and what we need to know now; the antidote against utopianism is
knowing what we must seek to preserve as we move from the present into
the future as part of our freedom, and not succumbing to the belief that the
future is without its own terrors and lacks. Those who are caught in the
storm of revolution rarely have the luxury of being able to choose between
past and future; they are the unlucky heirs of bad choices from a past that
now haunts them mercilessly to the point of madness. Arendt had
preferred the stability and sanity and more moderate platforms of the
American Revolution. And she had appreciated many of the very things
which had also inspired the French intellectuals who would participate in
the French Revolution. But the American Revolution, as Rosenstock-
Huessy suggests, did not have to be so totalizing because it did not have
such a weighty haunting past to up-rip in order to build anew—it was an
act of independence against a monarch who resided half a world away, in a
nation whose founding was based upon appeals and institutional building
blocks that were so much less encumbered than Europe by the dead
institutionalized historical weights preceding the Puritan Reformation.
When Arendt, speaking of lost revolutionary treasures, insists that “what
matters is that the European revolutionary tradition in the nineteenth
century did not show more than a passing interest in the American
revolution”, 80 she is making too light of why the American Revolution
could not serve as a model or source of inspiration in the way that the
French could: the Old World was mired in powers intrinsic to its existence,
while the powers the New World overthrew were largely extrinsic. That
makes all the difference in the world. Moreover, it was precisely because
the New World was new enough that it had sufficient social coherence—at

80
Arendt, On Revolution, 216.
224 Chapter Nine

least until the ticking time-bomb of slavery and the divided interests and
loyalties it engendered exploded—to be able to lay down institutions in
which the interests of the nation could find common articulation.
Europeans, on the other hand, had no such luxury.
Indeed, the chaos of the French Revolution largely consists in the
conflict of interests (supranational and socially domestic) as well as
contradictory ideas about the constitution. I do not disagree that in many
ways the victory of the Gironde and the Jacobins was a disaster. Their
respective victories were, for all their violence, however, relatively
momentary; and this is evident if, as I think we must take the Revolution
as a longer wave leading up to 1848 and beyond, in which the dictatorship
of Napoleon, the Restoration of the Bourbons, and the Second and Third
Republics are the attempts to settle the vying volatile interests of political
life in France. One might add that the legacy of the French Revolution
required much undoing of the very aspects of the Revolution that Arendt
finds so reprehensible and unfortunate in order to arrive at something
stable enough, at least until the eighteenth/nineteenth century curse of
nationalism undid, for some time, though not permanently, all the
domestic revolutionary achievements of Europe, not to mention the rest of
the world. But Arendt is also somewhat neglectful in that while she
mentions slavery as a terrible presence in America, she does not mention
that had America remained subject to the Crown, the institution would
have been abolished some three decades earlier. France, as was often the
case with countries of the Old World (though not always—Greece is an
obvious example), had its civil war within the revolution; the Americans
had to wait almost a hundred years for their civil war—and the scale of the
war, one might argue, was proportional to the delay in dealing with what
would become its cause (and I take the protection of local interests,
including the interest in holding slaves, and states’ rights as that cause).
That cause suggests that the very powers of American political life that
Arendt takes such pains to defend were insufficient for dealing with the far
more volatile and violent social energies that the political actors who
bestrode the political stage after the American Revolution were simply not
capable of channeling into less violent conduits.
The fears of those who led the Reign of Terror were real fears, which
does not make Robespierre or Saint-Just any less fanatical. 81 Perhaps

81
Arendt’s analysis of Robespierre serves as a healthy corrective to the wretchedly
confused essay by Slavoj Žižek, Virtue and Terror (London: Verso, 2007), which
transforms Robespierre into a hero—what is required if one is to be truly
revolutionary. I think Arendt absolutely correct to take Robespierre to task for his
dreadful political choices—choices that led as much to his death as to those of so
 Arendt and Rosenstock-Huessy on The French Revolution 225

Arendt’s depiction of the French Revolution, from a moral and even

institutional point of view, is warranted. And my criticisms of Arendt here
are largely to do with the problems I have with what I think is an over-
compartmentalisation of revolutionary events at the expense of what I
think is a necessary “sympathy” toward certain deeply formative
components of our historicity. Arendt also provides an excellent account
of what terrible powers and bad ideas men like Robespierre and Saint-Just
represented once they had ceased to be voices of opposition and had
become proto-totalitarian architects of a state more ready to deal in death
than capable of assisting the flourishing future of a people. But the fit
between the times and men, as terrible as they were precise, were also
momentary, while what came out of the Revolution was as durable as the
times and suffering (and not just the suffering of those who perished
within the Revolution, but the sufferings of those who haunted the
revolutionaries themselves) that went into it.

many others, including some whom, like Madame Roland, had saved his life. One
undoubted tragedy of the revolution was the alignments between personalities,
momentary political alliances, straining and often contradictory social forces,
tensions between North and South, Paris and the countryside, the ever-changing
crowd (at times capable of turning from murderous intent to devotion to king and
queen in an instant), the larger momentum of the revolution itself effected by
external affairs and fear of surrounding enemies and armies, and the war itself. All
this meant that by far the more preferable constitutional options, which would have
saved much blood and delivered real social change, were unsuccessful. The idea
that France was faced with a choice between the sociopathic Robespierre and
Saint-Just, or the venal Danton, or the more rapacious members of the Gironde,
only seems true after the interplay of the aforementioned elements had been played
out. None knew what was going to happen. And to take Robespierre as the model
of the revolutionary spirit, as Žižek does in his partly clownish, partly histrionic,
and partly card-carrying-party-member manner, is to do major disservice to those
countless other revolutionaries who were infinitely more compassionate and astute
than Robespierre about what France needed and where the revolution was going.
 CHAPTER TEN

SALVATION WITHOUT INDIVIDUALS:

THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

GLENN HUGHES

It can been argued that the Russian Revolution of October, 1917, was
the most important event of the twentieth century. In terms of pragmatic
political ramifications, without it there may well have been no coming to
power of National Socialism in Germany, and thus probably no Second
World War; and the Cold War would not have dominated world politics
for half a century.1 The Bolshevik Revolution can be understood to have a
parallel philosophical importance: for not only, in James Billington’s
words, did it introduce “the first decisive break in the ideological unity of
European civilization since the Protestant Reformation”, but it was the first
revolution “ever made in the name of a doctrine of impersonal, materialistic
determinism”.2 It is this latter significance of the Bolshevik Revolution—
its philosophical meaning as a revolution guided by a materialist,
determinist, and impersonal vision of history—that this paper will
examine, in particular with respect to one question. That question is: why
did a revolution that promised salvation from human ills such as injustice,
social and political oppression, economic exploitation, poverty, hunger,
and warfare—a revolution engaged in for the sake of the freedom and
well-being of all humanity—lead to such a thoroughgoing assault on the
value of the individual person, the meaning and value of persons as
individuals? Why did the vision of human salvation that guided Lenin and
the Bolsheviks require that any concern for the individual per se be
dropped from the soteriological equation—manifested in that disdain for
the principles of personal dignity and freedom, and contempt for the

1
Richard Pipes, Three ‘Whys’ of the Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage
Books, 1995), 3.
2
James H. Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary
Faith (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1980), 386, 443.
 Salvation Without Individuals: The Bolshevik Revolution 227

sanctity of human life, which were so regularly and vehemently expressed

by Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders, and which informed with
deadly effectiveness the political and social institutions that emerged from
Bolshevik power?

Revolt Against God

An examination of the Bolshevik Revolution in terms of its
philosophical distinctiveness must begin by situating it in relation to
certain constants in reality—existential constants, and metaphysical
constants. Thus, we must start by regarding the revolutionary beliefs and
aims of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, together with the Marxist doctrines
underlying them, as one response to the human experience of the mystery
of being. Human beings are burdened with the need to make sense of the
reality in which they participate, to understand who they themselves are,
and to find a way to cope with the realization that an understanding of the
whole of reality is unobtainable by human beings. A complete understanding
of reality is beyond human comprehension because humans are both
participants within being and, as Kierkegaard put it, derived beings, 3
dependent for their existences upon a divinely mysterious ground of being.
From the perspective of participation within being, humans are incapable
of answering with certainty such fundamental questions as why a universe
exists, what purpose the drama of history serves, and what meaning any
individual life may have in the ultimate scheme of things. And, as Eric
Voegelin writes,

[t]his situation with regard to the decisive core of existence is more than
disconcerting: It is profoundly disturbing, for from the depth of this
ultimate ignorance wells up the anxiety of existence.4

The history of human cultures evidences a wide variety of strategies

for coping with this existential anxiety, most of them religious. The
informing vision of the Bolshevik revolutionary response to the anxiety of
existence, however, promised to eliminate it. For, on the one hand, it
proclaimed the divine mystery, and thus fundamental human mysteries, to

3
Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological
Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and
Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 13-14.
4
Eric Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, vol. 1 of Order and History, ed. Maurice P.
Hogan, vol. 14 of Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2001), 40.
228 Chapter Ten

be non-existent; and, on the other, it asserted that some human beings—

specifically, the Bolshevik leaders—possess absolutely certain knowledge
about the meaning of human existence and history. The appeal of the
Bolshevik vision, and support for the political “experiment” it engendered,
owed a great deal to its power to soothe the anxiety of existence—a
soothing power that in turn released immense energies and passions of
commitment. In psychological terms, one could say that the Bolshevik
vision and doctrines functioned as a powerful anxiety-reducing drug.
The use of drugs to cope with reality carries certain dangers. One of
them is the eclipse from consciousness of those aspects of reality that are
the source of anxiety—an eclipse that can have momentous consequences.
In the case of Bolshevik revolutionary belief and propaganda, the most
important element of reality that fell under eclipse was the divine ground
of being. It is crucial, philosophically, to recognize the Bolshevik
revolution as, at its core, a revolt against the fullness of the order of being.
To examine the meaning of the Bolshevik revolt and some of its
consequences in this way, it will be helpful to use, as a diagnostic and
therapeutic tool, Voegelin’s description of reality as a “community of
being’ made up of four distinguishable “partners”: “God and man, world
and society”—where God refers to the divine ground of being, man to the
individual person, world to the natural universe, and society to human
community.5
In Western civilization, due to long-term consequences of the combined
influences of 1) philosophical streams of thought originating in classical
Greece, and 2) the Judeo-Christian experiential and theological traditions,
the four partners that make up the primordial community of being have
been differentiated from each other with a greater degree of sharpness than
in any other culture. This acute multiple differentiation may be
summarized as follows.
(1) Developing from Hebrew and Jewish foundations, the Christian
tradition differentiates divine reality as a radically transcendent God who
brings the universe into creation ex nihilo out of a divine perfection of
absolute intelligence, absolute truth and reality, and absolute goodness and
love. This differentiation establishes at the basis of Western culture the
Christian vision of a personal God whose essence is a profound mystery—
a divine mystery revealed, consummately in the Incarnation, as a
transcendent fact that fully answers to the unrestricted human desire to
know and love.

5
Ibid., 39.
 Salvation Without Individuals: The Bolshevik Revolution 229

(2) The source of insight into this radically transcendent God is the
psyche (in the Greek philosophical tradition) or spirit (in the Judeo-
Christian tradition) of the individual person—Socrates, Plato, Jeremiah,
Jesus—who in the inwardness of seeking finds the human center to be an
openness toward transcendent reality. As personal inwardness is
discovered to be the sole locus of the revelation of the personal and loving
God beyond space and time, so the individual person—both as existing in
immediate relation to God, and as participating in divine freedom, reason,
moral apprehension, and creativity—attains the unique value of being
regarded as imago Dei, and thus as being, in each personal instance, “an
inexhaustible center of meaning and worth”. 6 This establishing of the
value of the individual qua individual—especially through the Christian
unfolding of the meaning and implications of the Incarnation—developed
gradually, in the West, into a sustained exploration of the structure,
operations, and capacities of the human subject or self, understood as a
uniquely valuable, self-determining, morally responsible creature, whose
mind reveals and also creates meanings, and who originates values, by
effecting, through moral choice, decision and action, the concrete
realization of good in the world.
(3) The Greek and—even more emphatically—the Judeo-Christian
recognition of the radically transcendent nature of the divine ground of
being established a sharp imaginative split between divine transcendence
and the non-transcendent world. This differentiation released the universe
of space and time into the conceptual autonomy of an “immanent world”,
allowing it to be approached and analyzed in its conceptual “independence”
in two manners: through practical, commonsense intelligence unencumbered
by imaginative entanglement with the numinous mystery of divinity; and
through the rigorous, systematic, scientific discovery of what is invariable
about things and processes in the world—that is, in terms of the intrinsic
properties of things and the regular laws, both of certainty and probability,
that govern the operations, interactions, and developments of things and
processes in nature. In later centuries, through the emergence of the
modern scientific methods of the various natural sciences, the structures
and orders that constitute the material world have been steadily
illuminated on the basis of Western-based science, yielding technological
inventions of ever-more impressive complexity and power.
(4) Finally, the realm of society has been investigated, from the classics
of Greek political study through modern varieties of political science,

6
David Walsh, The Modern Philosophical Revolution: The Luminosity of
Existence (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 8.
230 Chapter Ten

sociology, economics, cultural anthropology, and related disciplines, in

terms of a) both existing and normative forms of social and political order;
b) the relation of the individual to society and polity; c) distinctions and
relations between the technological, economic, political, and cultural
elements and functions of social organizations; and d) the histories of
events, and also the ranges of historical possibilities, to be found in
relations between social groups at all levels: tribes, city-states,
principalities, nations, empires, the global community, and even—at the
theoretical limit—the inter-relation of all peoples of all times and places
conceived as “universal humanity”.7
In Western culture, then, each of these four “partners” in the community
of being has been the subject, over centuries, of ever-more differentiated
exploration and understanding with regard to its distinctive qualities and
functions within the economy of reality. And as this process has continued,
the challenge of attaining an “up-to-date” understanding of each in relation
to its three counterparts has become more daunting. This challenge can be
suggested by imagining what would be entailed in producing a sound
theoretical analysis that coherently relates the most sophisticated insights
in, say, mystical theology, contemporary astrophysics and field theory,
depth psychology and cognitional theory, and political science. It is no
surprise that disciplinary specialization, and sub-specialization, has come
to dominate academic and intellectual work, nor that people succumb to
the temptation to “manage” their desire to make sense of reality by
imaginatively simplifying reality.
Now, the easiest path to such simplification is through allowing one or
more partners in the community of being to “absorb” the meaning of one
or more of the others. For example, experimental psychologists dismiss the
validity of depth psychology and insight into the “inwardness” of human
subjectivity, insisting that individuals can and should be interpreted solely
in terms of what can be known through quantitative methods of analysis
conforming as closely as possible to the modern scientific procedures
developed for the study and explanation of the natural world. Or, for
another example, Biblical “Creationists” ignore the findings of the natural
sciences regarding the evolutionary emergence and development of
structures within the immanent world, and impose a (supposedly) purely
religious interpretation on the origins and ordering of nature.

7
On ‘universal humanity,’ see Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, vol. 4 of Order
and History, ed. Michael Franz, vol. 17 of Collected Works of Eric Voegelin
(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 371-410.
 Salvation Without Individuals: The Bolshevik Revolution 231

During recent centuries, one of the most-employed means of

imaginatively simplifying reality has involved eliminating the divine
partner from the community of being. Causes for this development are
obviously multiple and complex, but two reasons are most pertinent for
our concerns. First, given that the Judeo-Christian tradition differentiates
the divine partner into the reconditeness of radical transcendence—into a
God unconditioned by space and time, unobservable by the senses—it is
inviting for both “common sense” and those enchanted by science to
dismiss such a reality as an illusion. The second reason concerns the
human longing for power. If there is no divine or transcendent reality, then
the natural universe is all that there is—and thus all beings, including
human beings, may be appropriately conceived as essentially material in
substance, and therefore can be thought of as in principle fully
understandable, and eventually controllable, through the application of
human reason in the forms of practical common sense and scientific
analysis.
Of course, all imaginative simplifications of reality constitute a revolt
against its structure: a revolt against the fullness of being, and against the
long history of differentiating understanding with regard to each of the
partners in being. But the most profound, and also the most dangerous,
form of revolt is the last above mentioned: the “decapitation” of being
through the imaginative elimination of the divine partner. And it is this
type of revolt that is spectacularly manifested, with consequences drawn
out on a vast social and historical canvas, in the guiding vision of history,
and the promises and predictions, that informed and motivated the
Bolshevik Revolution. So while the Bolshevik Revolution was a political
phenomenon with political consequences that can be studied as such,
philosophically it constituted a metaphysical revolt against the structure of
being itself—a fact revealed clearly in the supra-political nature of its
declared goals and promises, which may be briefly described.
The explicitly stated, ultimate aim of the Bolshevik Revolution was not
simply the amelioration of social ills through a reorganizing of human and
political relations effected through the replacement of one government
with another, or one type of government with another, but rather the
bringing into being, through revolutionary activity, of both a new human
nature and a new social world, never before seen on earth. The key
Bolshevik claims, based both on a materialist metaphysics and a
deterministic interpretation of history, were (1) that no God or divine
mystery exists; (2) that the Marxist analysis of the sources of human
unhappiness and social conflict, upon which the Bolshevik vision was
232 Chapter Ten

founded, had “solved the riddle of history”;8 (3) that, as a consequence,

Bolshevik leaders were in possession of indubitable knowledge concerning
the outcome of human history, in both form and content, as an attainment
of the perfected human good for all; and (4) that the actualization of this
historical outcome—permanent salvation from human ills such as
injustice, oppression, exploitation, poverty, and war, as well as from the
“anxiety of existence” springing from ignorance about ultimacies of
meaning—would result from Bolshevik-led revolutionary action and
success. Thus the Bolshevik Revolution was far from signifying, for its
leaders, simply another example of “the massive, blow-striking, temporally
fixed and materially outlined upheaval of society in which one political
regime is replaced by another”;9 rather, it constituted a revolt against the
very conditions of life within which society and government had always
historically existed. What it aimed at and promised was nothing less than a
“dissolution of the existing order” of being, 10 where the order to be
dissolved included both 1) reality in the fullness of its distinguishable
“quaternarian structure”,11 and 2) the nature of human existence on earth
as a perpetual tension of seeking and yearning, of imperfect and
incomplete knowledge, of uncertainty about ultimate meanings, of moral
striving, and of the unresolved tension between bodily-based limitations
and spiritual longings.
The essential proclaimed aim of the Bolshevik Revolution is, therefore,
not best described as a reconfiguration of government or institutions, but
as a transfiguration of human existence, which at the same time would
constitute a redemption from the human condition as hitherto known. It
was a revolution that was, in the strictest terms, soteriological in character:
that is, concerned with the salvation of human beings out of an imperfect
and into a perfect state of existence. Herein lay, of course, its tremendous
appeal, and the source of that intensity of passionate commitment to its
cause that has often been described, appropriately, as a secular counterpart

8
‘Communism . . . is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as this solution.’
Karl Marx, ‘Private Property and Communism,’ in Marx Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts (1844); in Marx, Writings of the Young Marx on
Philosophy and Society, ed. and trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, corrected edition, 1997), 304.
9
Eric Voegelin, ‘Gnostic Politics,’ in Voegelin, Published Essays, 1940-1952, ed.
Ellis Sandoz, vol. 10 of Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 2000), 235.
10
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man
(Providence, RI: Berg Publishers, Inc., 1993 [1938]), 112 [emphasis added].
11
Voegelin, Israel and Revelation, 39.
 Salvation Without Individuals: The Bolshevik Revolution 233

to intense religious devotion. Insofar as the eclipse of God took hold

psychologically, and a person’s ultimate concern was successfully directed
into the emotional and imaginative channels of anticipating the
transfigured realm of perfected existence as promised by the Bolshevik
vision of communist society, there could, and often did, emerge a
“revolutionary faith” as impassioned and unwavering as religious faith can
be. 12 This was faith in a salvation that involved, of course, no trace of
divine action, presence, or grace—a salvation for humans revealed by
humans, and humanly brought to pass through revolutionary activity: a
soteriology without God.
In its symbolic structure and details, however, the Bolshevik soteriology
may be recognized as deriving from, and should theoretically be understood
as a transmutation of, the Christian soteriology that had emerged, from
within the interrelated openness between all four partners of the primordial
community of being, as a profoundly differentiated symbolic response to
the mystery of being. The parallels between Bolshevik “faith” and
soteriology and the Christian original from which they derived have often
been noted, but it will be useful to mention some of them.
First: the Christian vision of history is informed by prophetic
revelations of an “apocalypse”, a final cataclysm at the end of history in
which God destroys evil ruling powers and ushers in a “kingdom” wherein
the righteous will live in perfect justice and peace. The symbolism of
prophetic apocalypse, in which the process and end of history are
completely revealed, is echoed in Bolshevik ideology. One has the figure
of the “prophet’ Marx, who has “solved the riddle of history”; and his
soteriological vision of history’s “end” as a “final cataclysm” of world
revolution that will bring a metabole panton, a transformation of all things,
entailing (in Marx’s words) the “dissolution of the hitherto existing order
of the world” and its replacement by the communist realm of perfect
justice and peace.13 This perfected human realm, it is declared, will be
characterized by the complete absence of personal ownership of property
and thus of social divisions and class conflict—indeed of human conflict
of any kind. Since for Marx, human history, including all strife and
enmity, is the history of class conflict; and since, without classes, there
will be no basis for conflict; the classless communist realm will both
“end” history and allow human beings to live in perfect solidarity, without
strife, malice, or anxiety about the purpose of existence. Bolshevik leaders

12
Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 387.
13
See Tilo Schabert, ‘Revolutionary Consciousness’, Philosophical Studies (The
National University of Ireland) 27 (1980): 129-42, at 139.
234 Chapter Ten

claimed to be the present, authoritative bearers of the prophetic message,

who would guide the transition from the old to the new world.
In accordance with Marxist teaching, the revolution will be effected, or
rather enacted, by the coming to political power and activities of the
existing social class of the proletariat—the dispossessed workers (industrial
and agricultural) in capitalist society whose class antagonists are the
“owners,” the bourgeoisie. The proletariat, Marxist doctrine proclaims, is
already “without property” in any essential sense, and therefore its
consciousness is pure enough for it to constitute a “really revolutionary
class”. When the proletariat does, by means of revolution, make itself the
ruling class, it will abolish private property and all the “old conditions of
production,” establish true “democracy” and equality, and so introduce a
realm of social association “in which the free development of each is the
condition for the free development of all”—i.e., paradise on earth.14 Lenin
and the Bolsheviks claimed to constitute and enact the meaning and will of
the proletariat in its role and destiny as the carriers of revolutionary
transformation.
Second: just as Christian religious faith entails more than prophets of
apocalypse and a vision of the salvific end of history, so too, as a complete
“system of faith”, Bolshevism offered its own set of elements and symbols
of belief, though of a radically secular character. Voegelin provides a
concise summary: Bolshevism had

its god—the class; its devil—the bourgeois; its prophets and redeemers—
Marx and Lenin; its Bible—Das Kapital; its Judgment Day—the revolution;
its paradise—the classless society.

Thus it “explain[ed] to its faithful the evil of the world, [gave] them a
spiritual hope of redemption from evil, and point[ed] the way to the
heavenly kingdom”. 15 The parallels do not stop there; as Alexander N.
Yakovlev notes, Bolshevism developed “its icons, its tombs, its relics . . .
its heresies and dogmas, its orthodoxy, its catechism, its system of
persecuting heretics, its repentance and renunciation”. 16 It even had, in
Lenin, a messianic figure who could—after his death in January, 1924—

14
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. Samuel H. Beer
(New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1955), 9, 20-21, 24, 31-32.
15
Eric Voegelin, ‘Popular Education, Science, and Politics,’ in Voegelin, Published
Essays, 1934-1939, ed. Thomas W. Heilke, trans. M. J. Hanak, vol. 9 of Collected
Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), 84.
16
Alexander Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia, trans. Catherine A.
Fitzpatrick (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 43.
 Salvation Without Individuals: The Bolshevik Revolution 235

personify, in the symbol of his body (scientifically mummified and on

permanent display in Red Square in Moscow), the collective totality of all
the “saved” in a manner equivalent to the Christian symbol of the mystical
body of Christ. This symbolic equivalency is explicit in a proclamation
issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR,
published in the central government newspaper Isvestiya in late January of
1924: “Lenin lives on in the soul of every member of our Party. Every
member of our Party is a particle of Lenin. Our entire Communist family
is a collective embodiment of Lenin”.17 The members of the revolutionary
Communist Party, symbolized in and as Lenin, were those faithful whose
activities based on unwavering belief in Marxist-Leninist dogma would
bring into being the purely material salvation promised as the goal of
historical development.
While, in noting how Bolshevism mimics the Christianity of which it is
a secular deformation, it is psychologically accurate to refer to Bolshevik
“revolutionary faith”, we must emphasize that, in the minds of Bolshevik
leaders and their followers, there was no need for reliance on “faith” or
“belief” at all, since they assumed themselves to be in possession of
complete and certain knowledge about the process of history and its end in
the communist paradise. The eclipse of God, by removing all mysteries of
divine transcendence from the field of being, had removed all obstacles to
the speculative aim of a thorough and definitive grasp of the nature and
outcome of historical process, since it left individuals, society, and
nature—all of them understood materialistically—as the sum total of
reality. On the principle that the workings of the material universe are fully
accessible to scientific reason, the Bolsheviks could claim that full and
indubitable knowledge of the process of history, and the soteriological
meaning of its own revolutionary actions and leadership, had been
achieved through Marxist-Leninist analysis. This gave the Bolsheviks a
profoundly self-assured sense of control over the meaning of history.
Divine control had been replaced by human control; salvation dependent
on divine love and grace had been replaced by salvation dependent on
Bolshevik knowledge. In diagnostic terms, we may say that Bolshevik
doctrine manifested a speculative attempt to bring the mysteries of
divinely transcendent meaning fully under human control through the
“immanentization” of ultimate meaning, allaying thereby the fundamental
anxiety of existence.18

17
Paul Froese, The Plot to Kill God: Findings from the Soviet Experiment in
Secularization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 41, 205.
18
On the revolutionary attempt to immanentize the meaning of existence by
‘bringing our knowledge of transcendence into a firmer grip than the cognitio fidei,
236 Chapter Ten

The appeal of Bolshevist doctrines depended heavily on the

assumptions that human beings and historical development were in
essence thoroughly material processes whose governing laws and
structures had been fully penetrated by the science of Marxist-Leninist
dialectical materialism. Already in the Europe of the latter half of the
nineteenth century, major circles of the intellectual community were
dominated by “a shared thirst . . . for some scientific, secular set of beliefs
about history and social change that purported to universal validity”.19 In
other words, there was a fervent and growingly widespread hope that
science—’understood as a system of knowledge based on sense data and
quantitative analysis’20—could yield the same kind of indubitably certain
and universally true knowledge in the area of human living as it had for
centuries been producing in the realm of physical phenomena. The
confidence and assertion that science, so understood, can achieve this has
been labeled scientism. Scientism is the reductive attempt to interpret and
treat non-physical phenomena as if they are nothing but physical
phenomena, and in its more radical form it proclaims all spiritual
substance, divine or human, to be illusory. So defined, the scientistic
attitude and creed reaches an apotheosis in the political interpretation of
existence and history in Marxism. As Voegelin writes:

[W]e have to understand that the creators of the new [political] symbols of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries insist most fervently that what they
produce is . . . science. The main pride of Marxian socialists as against any
other brand of socialists is the scientific character of Marxism; and Marx is
famed as the creator of scientific socialism.21

Thus from the Bolshevik point of view, the revolutionary seizure of

power in Russia in October, 1917, and the guidance of society by its
leaders afterward, was applied science. All policies and tactics were
justified by the claim of possessing unquestionable scientific knowledge of
the iron laws of historical development as one sector of material nature;
and the Bolshevik leaders saw themselves, and were viewed by their

the cognition of faith, will afford’, see Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics,
in Voegelin, Modernity Without Restraint: The Political Religions; The New
Science of Politics; and Science, Politics, and Gnosticism, ed. Manfred
Henningsen, vol. 5 of Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2000), 185-86, 189.
19
Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men, 401 (emphasis added).
20
Eric Voegelin, ‘The Growth of the Race Idea’, in Voegelin, Published Essays,
1940-1952, 56.
21
Ibid.
 Salvation Without Individuals: The Bolshevik Revolution 237

followers, as scientist-rulers, for whom society was “no longer a blind

piece of nature, but mastered, like the chaotic world of matter, by human
knowledge”.22 Soviet citizens after the revolution were taught that to doubt
the perfected scientific enlightenment of Lenin and the other Soviet
leaders—especially through harboring some doubt about the illusoriness of
religious ideas or teaching—was tantamount to scientific ignorance. 23
Nadezhda Mandelstam, widow of the poet Osip Mandelstam (whom Stalin
destroyed in 1938), explained in her memoirs of the Soviet 1920s and 30s
that it was especially the prestige and allure of the idea of science that
enthralled and convinced the followers of the Bolsheviks:

In the pre-revolutionary era there had already been this craving for an all-
embracing idea which would explain everything in the world and bring
about universal harmony at one go. That is why people so willingly closed
their eyes and followed their leader . . . . The idea in question was that
there is an irrefutable scientific truth by means of which, once they are
possessed of it, people can foresee the future . . . . All were agreed on the
superiority of the new creed which promised heaven on earth instead of
otherworldly rewards. But the most important thing for them was the end
to all doubt and the possibility of absolute faith in the new, scientifically
obtained truth.24

Thus, the readiness of many followers of the Bolshevik leaders to

embrace their every pronouncement as absolute truth, and to carry out
their directives with unwavering commitment and energy, derives in large
part from confidence that the dialectical science of Marxist-Leninist theory
had definitively answered all questions about the nature of society, the
meaning and goals of history, and the human good. This meant that, for
such adherents, the deepest human questions, anxieties, and doubts had
been put to rest once and for all—that fundamental truths about human
existence or the cosmos would never have to be brought into question
again.

Revolt Against the Individual

At the core of the Christian vision of human existence and reality from
which Bolshevism derived the pattern and symbols of its secularized

22
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 69.
23
Froese, The Plot to Kill God, 26.
24
Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, trans. Max Hayward
(New York: Atheneum, 1980), 165.
238 Chapter Ten

“faith”, and against which its metaphysical revolt was above all directed,
lies an affirmation of the infinite value of each individual as a person. It is
an affirmation deriving from the recognition that the inwardness of every
person—the inwardness of the free and rational subject, capable of moral
apprehension and decision and creative self-determination—is an immediate
participant in the transcendent personhood of the divine ground.
Already the Greek philosophical tradition, as it flourished in the
teachings of Plato and Aristotle, conceived of the human as a being whose
reason (nous) consists in participation in the divine Reason (Nous) that
orders and governs the cosmos, making humans capable of both the
rational apprehension of reality and the moral ordering of self and society.
The source of a person’s moral and noetic excellence, for Plato, is the
openness of the noetic soul, the psyche noetike, to transcendent divine
reality. Through that openness, the seeking of reason can become aware of
the ultimate divine measure of truth, of justice, of love; and thus, precisely
through this openness, the excellent person can become both a mediator to
society of what human virtue entails, and a living representative of divine
truth. Only through the openness to transcendence, as Voegelin sums up
the Platonic-Socratic position, does man find “his true nature through
finding his true relation to God”.25
The Christian experiences and revelations sharpen and increase this
emphasis on the value of the person, through differentiating the presence
of divine personhood in the inwardness of every human individual per se,
irrespective of rational or moral capacities, social status, or any of the
happenstances of concrete existence. In the Christian vision, every person
is absolutely valuable, has an irreplaceable and infinite worth, by virtue of
being imago Dei—created “in the image and likeness of God”—and
through being related as a person to the absolute divine Person whose
essence has been revealed, supremely through the Incarnation, to be
perfect Love. The Christian view recognizes each human person to be a
“Thou” opening onto the divine reality that transcends time and history
and the entire world; and it makes clear that the divinely-oriented, ultimate
meaning of human existence and history is revealed only through
individual personhood. For Christianity, therefore, each individual may be
said to be the pivot of history, the value for which history and society
exist. It is from this conception of the infinite value of each person that
modern political ideas of human dignity and human rights came to be
articulated. The Western conception of human dignity—so ubiquitous now
in political discourse—originated as an inescapably spiritual conception.

25
Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 141-42.
 Salvation Without Individuals: The Bolshevik Revolution 239

This is why respect for personal dignity cannot properly be separated from
a distinct kind of “reverence”, in Kant’s words, for the “unconditional and
incomparable worth” of a person—a worth grounded in his or her
participation in the absolute freedom and absolute value of divine reality.26
Any denial of the “mysterious principle” of divine presence in each
person, as made actual through the openness to transcendence in personal
inwardness, would undermine every social and political principle that
seeks to articulate or defend the dignity of the person, the sanctity of
individual human life, and the universality of human rights.27
From both of the primary sources of Western culture, then—Greek
philosophy and the Christian tradition—has arisen the principle that the
individual is the measure of society, and this in three distinct senses.
First, it is individual character that provides the basis for a theoretical
interpretation of any specific society, insofar as “in its order every society
reflects the type of men of whom it is composed”, and whenever a
“theorist wants to understand a political society, it will be one of his first
tasks, if not the very first, to ascertain the human type that expresses itself
in the order of this concrete society”. This insight that a political society
may be usefully viewed as a “macroanthropos’ was elaborated by Plato in
Republic, encapsulated in his phrase that a polis is “man written large”
(Republic 368c-d); and it reflects the understanding that if one desires to
live in a lawful, virtuous, and decent society, one must ensure that its
populace and leadership are dominated by lawful, virtuous, and decent
individuals.28
Second, it is the well-ordered individual, whose soul is sufficiently
attuned to the divine ground of reason and goodness—who evidences both
practical and theoretical wisdom, who is sensitive to the commands and
even the subtlest stirrings of conscience, and in whom the existential
virtues of faith, hope and love in openness to divine transcendence have
become manifest habits—who “furnishes the standard for measuring and
classifying the empirical variety of human types as well as of the social
order in which they find their expression”. The individual is thus the
measure of society in a critical sense: that is, it is the exceptionally
authentic or excellent person—Aristotle’s term was spoudaios—who

26
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton
(New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 36, 102-103, 106-107.
27
Gabriel Marcel, The Existential Background of Human Dignity (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 128: ‘[I]t is my own profound belief that we
cannot succeed in preserving the mysterious principle at the heart of human dignity
unless we succeed in making explicit the properly sacral quality peculiar to it’.
28
Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, 136-37.
240 Chapter Ten

serves (for all who have eyes to see) as the only dependable “instrument of
social critique”.29
Finally, both Greek philosophy and the Christian tradition make it
evident that, in the last analysis, it is society that exists for the good of the
individual, and not the other way around. Because it is each person who is
the locus of divine self-revelation, whose individual consciousness is an
incarnating of divine being within temporal being, the overriding purpose
of well-ordered polities and economies is to provide for the secure and
normative development, the personal good, of each of the individuals who
make up its members. Jacques Maritain indicates this in declaring that

in the person there are some things—and they are the most important and
sacred ones—which transcend political society and draw man in his entirety
above political society—the very same whole man who, by reason of
another category of things, is a part of political society. By reason of certain
relations to the common life which concern our whole being, we are a part
of the state; but by reason of other relations [to] things more important than
the common life, there are goods and values in us which are neither by nor
for the state, which are outside of the state.30

The latter “goods and values” to which Maritain refers pertain to the
individual’s immediate relation to divine being and love, a relation
pointing to the fact that the ultimate meaning and destiny of personal
existence, in light of the Christian differentiation of divine reality, demands
to be imagined and understood as a mystery of personal fulfillment in
communion with a God beyond all earthly conditions.

29
Ibid., 137-38 (emphasis added). Voegelin refers to these first two ways in which
the individual may properly serve as the measure of society—that is, in both an
interpretive and a critical sense—under the unified heading of ‘the anthropological
principle’, and describes this principle as the ‘creed of the new epoch’ introduced
by Plato and Greek philosophy. The advent of this epoch constiutes a signal
advance, through its development of a philosophical-critical analysis of the nature,
structure, and normative functioning of the human psyche, from the epoch of less
sophisticated, ‘cosmological’ interpretations of the origins and varieties of social
order. Later Christian insights did not annul, but rather enhanced, the
‘anthropological principle’ through the introduction of what Voegelin calls
‘soteriological truth’, which revealed the fact of interpersonal mutuality in human
relations with the divine, as well as showing—through the Incarnation—the full
measure of divine truth in human form. See Voegelin, The New Science of Politics,
136-52.
30
Jacques Maritain, The Person and the Common Good, trans. John J. Fitzgerald
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1966), 73 (emphasis added).
 Salvation Without Individuals: The Bolshevik Revolution 241

Considering these facts in the context of Western culture’s detailed

differentiation of the four partners that constitute the primordial community
of being, we can recognize at once the intimate link between the two
partners, “God” (the divine partner) and “man” (the individual). The
divine partner is revealed as God—and not as a multitude of intracosmic
or polytheistic divinities, or as an impersonal transcendent principle such
as the Upanishadic Brahman or the Chinese Tao—only through divine
revelation in the inwardness of individuals open toward, and responsive to
the “calling” and “drawing” of, a loving and personal transcendent divine
ground. Conversely, the long Western history of growing emphasis on the
value of each individual, accompanied by increasingly differentiated
philosophical and psychological analyses of the nature and internal
operations of the human soul or subject, derives directly from the
recognition that the personal subject is the locus where divine reality
manifests itself—where the infinite, loving presence of transcendent being
is encountered, and through which, supremely in the epiphany of Jesus,
God’s salvational concern and promise for individuals, as well as for the
drama of history as a whole, is revealed. As noted, all modern ideas of
universal human rights, of the right of each individual not only to life but
also to all the protections and freedoms required for full and proper self-
development, derive from this recognition of each person as imago Dei.
And the related crucial point follows: this understanding of each person as
an openness to and revelation of transcendence carries with it the
Christian soteriological hope and promise, through which personal and
historical meanings are oriented toward a fulfillment in the mystery of
transcendent divine being.
Now we can grasp why the Bolshevik revolutionary vision and
doctrines entailed not only a ceaseless attack on the idea of God, and on
religious belief and practice, but why this in turn was accompanied—had
to be accompanied—by an equally relentless attack on the idea of the
value of the personal self, or the individual qua individual.
First: the God of radical transcendence—the divine reality that would
give the lie to the entire materialist basis and world view of Marxist
teaching and Bolshevik revolutionary belief—is revealed only through that
personal, inward openness to transcendence that makes each individual a
unique and infinitely valuable participant in, and exemplar of, divine
personhood. Therefore the value of individual personhood, which is
founded on the recognition that the soul or self is ontologically constituted
through the openness of rational and spiritual consciousness to
transcendence, had to be be denounced and eclipsed, if people were to be
242 Chapter Ten

seen as essentially material beings with a thoroughly material value and

historical destiny.
Second: the Christian soteriology envisions the ultimate unity of
persons in spiritual terms, that is, as unified in their communion with and
in God. But the Bolshevik soteriology envisioned human unity in completely
material and earthly terms. Human salvation, in its view, consisted in the
earthly elimination of all conflicts between persons deriving from
ownership of property, the existence of social classes, and such personal
emotions—greed, jealousy, envy, pride—as keep society’s members from
living in perfect harmony and peace, from living as one. Inevitably, then,
the idea of the value of the individual per se; all notions of individual
rights and freedoms; the duties of individual conscience; the idea that
excellent individuals are the proper instruments of social critique; were
associated in Bolshevik ideology with “bourgeois” selfishness, greed,
ownership, practices of exploitation, and so on—that is, with all the
sources of conflict and division between persons that would impede their
social unification in radical “communist” equality and happiness.
It is no surprise, then, to find in Bolshevik revolutionary rhetoric and in
ideas informing Soviet policies the eclipse of the divine partner in the
community of being linked tightly to an attempt to eclipse as completely
as possible the recognition of the individual as a distinct partner in the
economy of reality—that is, an attempt to contract the fullness of being not
only through eliminating the concept of God, but also through eliminating
the concept of individual existence as much as possible by interpreting
people consistently in terms of their being merely a “natural resource” or
“raw human material”.31
The attack on individuality as such pervaded post-revolutionary
Russian and Soviet culture, and operated on many levels. The dictatorship
that took power showed from the beginning a “hatred for the individual”
that manifested itself, primarily and most importantly, in a disdain for the
most elementary principle of the Christian and liberal democratic
traditions: that individuals have a right to life.32 Many comments of Lenin
and his fellow-Bolsheviks could be quoted to the purpose, but perhaps a

31
Alexander Yakovlev, former member of the Communist Party Central
Committee turned critic, describes the Soviet ‘supercentralized, militarized state,
for which . . . individuals . . . [were] merely an easily renewable natural resource’.
Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism, 202. Trotsky’s reference to persons as ‘raw
human material’ is quoted in Paul Hollander’s Foreword to Alexander N.
Yakovlev, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia, trans. Anthony Austin (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), xv.
32
Yakovlev, A Century of Violence, 236.
 Salvation Without Individuals: The Bolshevik Revolution 243

statement of Trotsky’s, which unites contempt for the individual with

contempt for religion, may serve to represent the shared attitude of the
Bolshevik leaders: “We must put an end once and for all,” he wrote, “to
the papist-Quaker babble about the sanctity of human life”. 33 In the
Bolshevik view, there was nothing intrinsically valuable about an
individual’s life, because the individual per se was irrelevant to the
meaning and purposes of human destiny, which concerned only the mass
of society conceived as a unitary whole. “An individual”, as Alexander
Yakovlev writes, “did not matter when the entire society had to be
changed. The glorious march toward great distant goals left no time or
place for anybody’s personal world”.34
Theoretical roots of the Bolshevik indifference to a personal right to
life can already be seen in Marx’s unconcern with the inner life, or
psychology, of persons. People “as the individual bearers and creators of
values, ideas, a way of life . . . [simply] never became an object of interest
for Marx”, who fixated on the materiality of human living conditions,
productive activity, and social interactions, and then on the transformations
to “human nature” that might be effected through “modifications in the
nature of social relations”.35 From a Marxist and Bolshevik perspective,
according significance—and devoting careful study—to the nature and
operations of psychological interiority would betray a wayward concern
with “bourgeois individualism”. One consequence of this attitude was a
peculiarly naïve view, clouded by ideological dreaming, regarding the
degree to which human character was malleable. The Bolshevik and early
Soviet leaders were convinced, for example, that religious belief could be
eradicated from the human psyche in a relatively brief period of time, a
belief bolstered, as the American psychologist Hadley Cantril wrote in
1960,

with the assumption that there are no important internal forces for personal
development that they need[ed] to worry about or respect, hence relieving
themselves of any limitations on the extent to which transformation [of
human nature] can occur.36

33
Trotsky quoted in Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty
Million (New York: Talk Miramax Books, 2002), 35.
34
Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism, 194-95.
35
Ibid., 30, 59.
36
Hadley Cantril, Soviet Leaders and Mastery over Man (Rahway, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1960), 43; quoted in Froese, The Plot to Kill God, 3.
244 Chapter Ten

Another consequence was that words and concepts associated with the
most crucial aspects of interior life—those pertaining to moral and
spiritual apprehension and self-governance—were dismissed as either
meaningless or manifestations of selfish “bourgeois” individualism. As
Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote, recalling life in the 1920s and 30s: “[T]erms
such as “honor” and “conscience” went out of use at this time,’
disappearing from newspapers, books and schools, as the function of the
idea of conscience “had been taken over first by ‘class feeling’ and later by
‘the good of the state’ . . . .” Indeed, she continues, the entire heritage of
insights embedded in Christian morality—including, of course, the
commandment “Thou shalt not kill”—“was blithely identified with
bourgeois morality” and “dismissed as a fiction”.37
If the significance of insights and feelings involved in interior moral
and spiritual life are dismissed, then the theoretical question naturally
arises: how must wrongdoing be understood? Invalidating ideas relating to
moral and spiritual conscience, along with the idea of God, renders
meaningless notions of “personal guilt” and “sin”. And so it is that we
find, in Bolshevik ideology and teaching, a consistent attribution of
“faults” in outlook or behavior to material, external conditions: specifically,
to circumstances of class birth, family background, or association with
corrupt institutions. Rosenstock-Huessy correctly points out that this
outlook entails a reversion to “an older, pre-subjective meaning of sin” (or,
to be more precise, of fault and shame, since “sin” is a category belonging
to a conception of the soul as related to God): in Soviet Russia, he writes,
people were condemned and punished “for the form of character and
outlook into which [they] were introduced in the historical course of social
events”. This means that someone was judged for wrongdoing or wrong-
thinking, not as a “soul” or a “person”, but in an “impersonal” manner: as
simply “an atom” of the “material subconscious labor force” that is to be
continually “judged, reorganized, redistributed”. 38 There is in fact no
place, within this thoroughly utilitarian and impersonal perspective on
human fault, for the concept of personal morality strictly speaking, as this
presupposes the validity of conscience-based relationships of individuals
to coordinates of right and wrong that have metaphysical or spiritual
reality beyond mere practical utility defined in statist terms. Lenin
confirmed this by declaring that “in Marxism there is not a grain of
morality’.39 Still, some notions of “right” and “wrong” must be demarcated

37
Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope, 67, 165-66.
38
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 51 (emphasis added).
39
Lenin quoted in Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism, 57.
 Salvation Without Individuals: The Bolshevik Revolution 245

within the context of the revolutionary vision; and the terms “moral” and
“immoral” remain powerful and persuasive signifiers; and so, we also find
Lenin summing up the Bolshevik view by stating, simply: “Everything that
contributes to the building of a Communist society is moral, everything
that hinders it is immoral”.40
The value of any human being, then, in the Bolshevik revolutionary
outlook that came to define Soviet policies and practices, was exactly, and
no more than, his or her contribution to the “redemption” of the species
through its envisioned transformation into the new type of “species-being’,
the new man, that in perfect social unity would en masse make up the
communist society. Consequently, new meanings of “good” and “evil”
came into force that introduced and sustained “a strictly technocratic
treatment of the individual as an instrument of production”, as an “atom of
raw materials”, in light of which everything was permitted that was
“economically useful”.41 People became matériel: they were regarded, and
treated, as building-blocks, as “concrete”, 42 for the society coming into
being through revolutionary guidance and activity. In Kantian terms, the
“irreplaceable worth” that constitutes personal dignity was replaced by
“price”—with “price” a simple function of perceived contribution,
physical or intellectual, to state aims and goals.43 For the great majority of
the population—peasants, industrial workers, and, in rapidly increasing
numbers, prisoners of labor camps—what this meant was that a human
being’s value was determined purely by his or her capacity to perform
manual labor. Testimony to the social triumph of this view is eloquently
given by Varlam Shalamov, who served for seventeen years in the slave-
labor camps known as the Gulag, in the dreaded Kolyma region of
northeastern Siberia:

We learned [in the camps] one other amazing thing: in the eyes of the state
and its representatives a physically strong person was better—yes, better—
more moral, more valuable than a weak person who couldn’t shovel twenty
cubic meters of dirt out of a trench in a day. The former was more moral
than the latter. He fulfilled his “quota,” that is, carried out his chief duty to

40
Lenin quoted in Froese, The Plot to Kill God, 44.
41
Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism, 49.
42
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 114: ‘The Revolution transforms men
into concrete. Everything is to be as tangible as concrete, and everybody, too. . . .
Living souls, with individual faces, smiling and sobbing like personal beings, lose
their form and vanish as soon as the stamp is pressed upon them. Like a trip-
hammer, the daily process of industrialization mechanized . . . faces into
nationalized labour-forces’.
43
Kant, Groundwork, 102-103.
246 Chapter Ten

the state and society and was therefore respected by all. His advice was
asked and his desires were taken into consideration. . . Thanks to his
physical advantages, such a person was transformed into a moral force in
the resolution of numerous everyday questions of camp life. Of course, he
remained a moral force only as along as he remained a physical force.44

The same rule held, however, in “freedom” as in prison: a human

being’s worth was understood in strictly functional terms, with
“functionality” determined by the (not-altogether-consistent) policies and
perspectives of those holding the reins of power.
We may sum up: Bolshevik revolutionary ideology, by denying the
value of individual existence, and by eclipsing through argument and
practice recognition of the individual person as a differentiated, sacred,
and primary partner in the community of being, rendered theoretically
invalid and unusable the “anthropological principle” which recognizes the
order of the individual psyche as the proper basis of social interpretation
and the normative basis of social critique. The Bolshevik world view
attempted to banish, in its reductively materialist cosmology and historically
determinative soteriology, two of the four partners in the primordial
community: God, and the individual as individual.
Within the logic of Bolshevik ideology, then, through a process of
metaphysical elimination, and in line with its scientistic convictions,
explanatory or theoretical principles for understanding and evaluating
social life and social order (the third partner in the community of being)
could be drawn from only one source: the natural world (the fourth and
remaining partner). Nature—material nature, as an ordered realm of
physical forces and laws, chemical compounds, and organic entities, with
their regular processes of development and interaction, all as understood
through the procedures of the modern natural sciences—was installed by
the Bolsheviks as the authoritative interpretive paradigm both for
describing what social life is and for prescribing what social life, under
revolutionary guidance, should become. For after all, in Marxist teaching,
society is essentially and exclusively of nature; human beings, essentially
material creatures, have nature alone as their ontological ground; and the
oneness of all human beings in communist society should be conceived not
only as the achievement of the perfected social realm, but also as the
reaching of complete harmony between humans and the multilayered
orders and processes of the natural world.

44
Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, trans. John Glad (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, Inc., 1980), 58 (emphasis added).
 Salvation Without Individuals: The Bolshevik Revolution 247

This is why, as Rosenstock-Huessy points out, Bolshevik rhetoric

constantly promoted the “revolutionary identification of Society with
Nature”, and persistently employed metaphors drawn from the world of
physical processes and natural organisms to portray the meaning of social
life and interactions. This “equation between society and nature” followed
necessarily from the ideological eclipse of both God and the individual
personality in its inwardness and value. And the authority of the equation,
of course, rested on that of “science”—meaning, in this case, on the
scientistic reduction of reality to a “Nature” fully explainable by predictive
mechanical laws and numerical statistics. This idea of “Nature” has little
to do, needless to say, with the “Nature” appealed to by European and
American Romanticists; it was Nature understood as a perfectly efficient,
regularly functioning machine. The salvation of humanity would entail its
perfect conjoining, at last, with its material origins. As Rosenstock-Huessy
writes, in a certain key sense the Bolshevik revolutionary vision may be
summed up in the dictum: “Society must become nature”.45

Consequences
Once the Bolsheviks had seized power, the practical consequences of
trying to shape a society based on their world view and soteriology quickly
began to become apparent. The 70-year history of Soviet political
oppression and social derangement is well known, so our purposes will be
served by describing a few illuminative facts regarding two topics:
consequences of the Bolshevik/Soviet disdain for individual life and
freedoms, and the official persecution of religious institutions, practice,
and belief.
Immediately after the coup d’etat of October 25, 1917, Lenin and his
partners, governing officially as a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, began
eliminating personal and social freedoms, starting with freedom of the
press and freedom of speech: all opposition journals were shut down on
October 28. Members of other revolutionary parties, such as the Social
Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, who had expected to enjoy, before
long, some share of governing power, were surprised to find that the
Bolsheviks intended to retain sole power—and not only that, but to rule
without any regard for either legal proprieties or democratic values. Lenin
announced his view straightforwardly: “The dictatorship—and take this
into account once and for all—means unrestricted power based on force,

45
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 69-70, 72, 115 (emphasis added).
248 Chapter Ten

not law”.46 It soon became clear that Lenin, along with all who embraced
the Bolshevik mode of rule, “saw as irrelevant nonsense the freedoms of
which the intelligentsia and many revolutionary workers had long
dreamed”47—the most central of these being, of course, the freedom to
remain alive without fear of arbitrary imprisonment or death by
government diktat.
Little more than a month after taking power, Lenin “pointed out that
the authorities lacked a special agency to deal with sabotage and counter-
revolutionary activity”; thus, on December 7, 1917, the Cheka (Extraordinary
Commission), a secret police—forerunner of the OGPU, NKVD and
KGB—was established. Its task was “eliminating opposition to the
October Revolution”, with the exact nature and scope of the task
intentionally kept vague and its use of terror insisted upon by Lenin as the
principal means of rendering socially immobile all those who were
hostile—or who might be hostile—or who might become hostile—to the
regime. 48 Extra-legal executions and arrests performed by the Cheka,
which were intended to intimidate and terrify the populace at large, began
immediately and expanded in number rapidly.49 Some estimates place the
figure of those killed by the Cheka just between the years 1918 and 1920
as high as 300,000.50 A good indicator of the overall view of Bolshevik
leaders regarding the value of individual life may be found in a comment
from a 1918 speech of Gregori Zinoviev, one of the ruling elite, as the
country headed for Civil War: “We must carry along with us 90 million
out of the 100 million Soviet Russian population. As for the rest, we have
nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated”.51 To put it simply, in

46
Lenin quoted in Amis, Koba the Dread, 33.
47
Vasily Grossman, Everything Flows, trans. Robert Chandler (New York: New
York Review Books, 2009), 163.
48
Robert Service, A History of Twentieth-Century Russia (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1997), 69.
49
In August, 1918, Lenin wrote to one comrade: ‘We must make every effort . . .
impose mass terror immediately, shoot and deport hundreds of prostitutes who
have been getting soldiers, former officers, and so on drunk . . . .’ On the same day
he wrote to another: ‘ . . . launch merciless terror against kulaks [wealthier
peasants], priests, and White Guards. Suspicious individuals to be locked up in
concentration camp outside city’. And on the next day: ‘Hang (by all means hang,
so people will see) no fewer than 100 known kulaks, fat cats, bloodsuckers’.
Yakovlev, A Century of Violence, 21.
50
Service, A History, 108.
51
Zinoviev quoted in Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986), 24.
 Salvation Without Individuals: The Bolshevik Revolution 249

the words of Alain Brossat, under Lenin and the Bolsheviks the “value of
human life collapsed”.52
Eventually, as is well known, the insinuation into everyday life of the
destructive power of the state police in the Soviet Union grew to absurd
proportions: at times in the USSR of the 1930s, one could be arrested for
telling a joke about Lenin or Stalin, for questioning official statistics, for
being the spouse or child of someone arrested, or simply because one was
reported for suspicious behavior by an unneighborly neighbor. During the
Terror-Famine of 1932-33, one could be sentenced to ten years in the
labor-camps, or even shot, for using the word “famine.” The numbers of
arrests and executions of “enemies of the people” were often ordered by
quota. By the end of Stalin’s Great Terror of 1937-38, 5 percent of the
population had been arrested as “enemies of the people”.53 Forced labor
became an official form of punishment under Lenin in 1918, and the slave-
labor camp system for prisoners—known as the Gulag—was systematized
and dramatically expanded beginning in the late 1920s. The Gulag
burgeoned into 476 camp complexes, with thousands of separate camps,
and by 1941 was the largest employer in the world. Over the years it
existed, the total number of slave-laborers in the Gulag is estimated by
Anne Applebaum at 28.7 million.54
Adding up state-ordered executions; deaths in the labor-camps; the
consequences of terror campaigns against, and suppression of, revolts by
peasants; the state-organized Terror-Famine of the early 1930s; deaths
resulting from the extirpation and forced transportation to almost
uninhabitable regions of the country of both “undesirable” elements of the
population and entire ethnic communities; the abandonment of POWs
captured by enemy forces in the Second World War, and their
imprisonment or execution after repatriation; and various other atrocities,
Alexander Yakovlev—former longtime member of the Communist Party
Central Committee (1953-1973, 1985-91), and one of the engineers of
perestroika under Gorbachev—concluded that the Soviet system was
responsible for the murder of at least sixty million citizens.55 The official
rationale for all this, of course, was the necessity of harsh measures for
transforming society into the communist paradise described by Marx and
Lenin. Salvation would come—but only through the ordeal of conflict; and
human nature being what it is, and not changeable after all, such conflict

52
Brossat quoted in Amis, Koba the Dread, 34.
53
Amis, Koba the Dread, 61, 178, 240.
54
Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), xvi, 65,
299, 580-84; Amis, Koba the Dread, 72.
55
Yakovlev, A Century of Violence, xv.
250 Chapter Ten

was perpetual; revolution became “permanent revolution”; and suppression

of “enemies of the people” necessarily remained a permanent feature of
social life. “The final vision” (Rosenstock-Huessy writes) “is a peaceful
earth: but the whole period between today and the end is bloodshed, force,
treason, struggle and fight. Not until history is ended can there be peace”.56
And history refused to end.
At the level of experiences and ideas, the deepest threat to the political
persuasiveness of the Bolshevik world view and soteriology was always,
of course, genuine Christian soteriology. It was inevitable, then, that from
its earliest days the Bolshevik regime began to suppress religious activity,
expropriate Church wealth, kill and terrorize clergy, and destroy or convert
to other uses religious buildings. An illustrative sample of Lenin’s specific
directives appeared in a March 19, 1922, order to the Politburo regarding
seizure of the Church’s valuables and the destruction of clerical resistance
through terror:

The conference is to reach a secret decision to the effect that the removal of
valuables, and especially those in the wealthiest abbeys, monasteries, and
churches, must be carried out with merciless determination, stopping at
nothing whatever, and in the shortest possible time. Therefore, the more
representatives of the reactionary clergy we manage to shoot, the better.
We must give these people, right now, such a lesson that for decades to
come they will not dare even to think of resistance.57

By 1940, about 97 percent of the Russian Orthodox Churches that were

operating in 1916 had been closed.58
But the power-structure built on Bolshevik ideology—with its official
suppression of religious activities along with its denial of many other
values and freedoms valued in Christian and democratic traditions—was
bound to come to an end eventually, as it did in the 1990s. For metaphysical
revolts are in the long term unsustainable; they invite their own reversal,
since the normative openness of inquiring human consciousness toward
recognition of the full scope of reality will continually reassert itself, and

56
Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution, 110.
57
Quoted in Yakovlev, A Century of Violence, 160 (emphasis added).
58
Froese, The Plot to Kill God, 8-9. Lenin’s personal contempt for God and
religion was as fervid as his revolutionary ardor and attack on religious
institutions: ‘Every religious idea’, he wrote, ‘every idea of God, even flirting with
the idea of God, is unutterable vileness . . . vileness of the most dangerous kind,
‘contagion’ of the most abominable kind. Millions of sins, filthy deeds, acts of
violence and physical contagions . . . are far less dangerous than the subtle,
spiritual idea of [God] . . . .’ Lenin quoted in ibid., 44.
 Salvation Without Individuals: The Bolshevik Revolution 251

thus will undermine reductive and deformed world views, even under the
most oppressive conditions. The Bolshevik revolt, after all, expressed a
fundamental lie about the order of being—and, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn
once pointed out, the power of such a lie depends for its perpetuation on
violence, 59 and in the long run people do grow tired of constant and
senseless violence. Eventually, a sufficient number of disabused citizens,
as in the Soviet Union, will effect a toppling of the bases of such political
power, and choose to embrace the tensions of partial peace and incomplete
justice, and the anxiety arising from existential ignorance about ultimate
meanings—that is, the actuality of the human condition—as preferable to
political existence constructed on and justified by the affirmation of a
basic lie about the order of reality and human possibilities.

59
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture, trans. F. D. Reeve (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1972), 32-33.
 CHAPTER ELEVEN

LOOT THE LOOTERS:

OUT OF REVOLUTIONS
WITH OR WITHOUT WEALTH, HEALTH,
KNOWLEDGE, LIBERTY, AND JUSTICE—
GENERALIZATIONS FROM THE RUSSIAN
REVOLUTION AND APPLICATIONS
OF GENERALITIES TO RUSSIA

MICHAEL BERNSTAM

To rephrase Vilfredo Pareto, all revolutions are social frauds. They

merely transfer wealth and power over people’s income from one elite to
another. As if to prove Pareto’s point, the makers of the Russian revolution
condensed Marxism to the slogan “expropriation of expropriators”, or, for
the natives, “Loot the Looters!”, and then took power over people’s
income in toto. In Pareto’s framework, this is a self-perpetuating cycle.
Revolutions are self-perpetuating social frauds.1 And to add to Pareto: All
revolutions are social frauds except when they end transfers of people’s
income. But then they break the perpetual cycle and end revolutions. That
is, it is never just loot the looters. It is always either loot the looted or end
the looting. Examples of the first type of revolutions include the Russian
revolution, the Chinese revolution, other Communist and socialist
revolutions, the French revolution at the Jacobin stage, the National-
Socialist revolution, various Latin American revolutions, anti-colonial

1
Vilfredo Pareto, Manual of Political Economy (New York: A.M. Kelley, 1971)
[1906]; Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society: A Treatise on General Sociology
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935)[1916]; Vilfredo Pareto, The Rise and Fall of
the Elites: An Application of Theoretical Sociology (Totowa, New Jersey:
Bedminster Press, 1968) [1900]. The dates in brackets refer to first editions.
 Loot the Looters 253

revolutions, the Iranian revolution, and many others. Examples of the

second type of revolutions include the Dutch revolts, the Glorious
Revolution in England, and the American revolution.2
What Pareto put at the center of revolutions can be called in accounting
terms the mechanism of income redistribution from the populace by the
elites including government control over this transfer. This paper uses the
special case of the Russian revolution to highlight the historic conflict
between income redistribution and the ending of it in the shaping of the
modern world. This approach places the Russian revolution in the general
context of comparative revolutions.3 The contrast between the two types of
revolutions, redistributive and non-redistributive, corresponds to the great
divergence in the world today in terms of wealth, health, knowledge,
liberty, and justice, among other numerous dimensions. This essay consists
of five sections in the order of practical importance: 1) the results, 2) the
causes, 3) the magnitudes, 4) the evolution (and its core problem,
enforcement), and 5) the origins of revolutions. The Russian case reveals
the very magnitude and multitude of each issue, “total revolution”.4

2
Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands, 1780-
1813 (New York: Knopf, 1977); Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the
French Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1990); Alvin Rabushka, Taxation
in Colonial America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Steven C. A.
Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2009).
3
For literature on comparative revolutionary movements, see especially James
Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New
York: Basic Books, 1980); on comparative revolutions, see, e.g., Crane Brinton,
The Anatomy of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1965); Theda Skocpol,
States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and
China (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Theda
Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Jack A. Goldstone, Revolutions and
Rebellion in the Early Modern World (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1993); Jack A. Goldstone, ed., The Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions
(Washington: Congressional Quarterly, 1998); Jack A. Goldstone, ed., Revolutions:
Theoretical, Comparative, and Historical Studies (Belmont, California:
Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2003). For the Russian revolution per se,
authoritative summaries are Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian
Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1995); Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A
History of the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996); Rex
Wade, The Russian Revolution, 1917 (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
4
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man
(New York: W. Morrow & Co., 1938).
254 Chapter Eleven

The Results. The Great Divergence

Of and Out Of Revolutions
If the modern world did indeed come out of revolutions, as
Rosenstock-Huessy inferred,5 it came out quite differently according to
their two types, redistributive and non-redistributive. On every measurable
social score—wealth, health, knowledge, liberty, justice, and many
others—the divergence and dispersion between nations today is greater
than ever before in history.6 To illustrate both points—the revolutionary
change and the great divergence—Figure12-1 demonstrates the wealth
traffic in the last two thousand years from the data set assembled by Angus
Maddison.7 Figure12-2 combines global wealth and health captured at the
moment of truth, 1990, the end of Communism. These figures extend the
Hobbesian distinction from the conceptual state of the world to the actual
post-revolutionary states of the world. Namely, they show that in the
countries that came out of redistributive revolutions, relative to the
countries out of non-redistributive revolutions, life was indeed “. . . poor,
nasty, brutish, and short’.8

1. Wealth
Figure12-1 offers indexes of living standards, measured as per capita
GDP, by major world regions in selected years from 1 AD to 2001.9 The

5
Ibid.
6
The selection of these five dimensions does not imply their precedence over
culture, spirituality, and social equality. These are simply the most quantifiable
historical characteristics and the scores are the least controversial.
7
Angus Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics (Paris: OECD,
Development Centre Studies, 2003); Angus Maddison, Contours of the World
Economy, 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007); Angus Maddison, Historical Statistics of the World
Economy, 1-2008 AD (2010), at http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/.
8
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme and Power of the Common
Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
[1651], part I, chapter 13, paragraph 9. For a recent quantitative confirmation, see
Steven Pinker, ‘A History of Violence’, Edge, Edge Master Class 2011, September
27, 2011, at http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker.
9
All data are in comparable constant international (Geary-Khamis) dollars in the
1990 prices. These dollars have the same purchasing power as the dollar in the
U.S. in 1990. The Geary-Khamis international dollars combine the purchasing
power parity and the international average prices of commodities. The data for this
 Loot the Looters 255

world average per capita GDP in year 1, $467 in 1990 international

dollars, is taken as the baseline = 1. The linear scale in Figure12-1a
highlights the absolute gap between the West and the Rest in the last 200
years. The logarithmic scale in Figure12-1b makes transparent how the
economic gap emerged and widened since the rise of the West after 1500,
after the first Western social revolutions, the Revolt of the Netherlands of
1566-1609 and the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688-89.
Global per capita GDP increased 13-fold, from $467 in 1 AD to $6,132
in 2001 in 1990 international dollars. Per capita GDP in Western economies
(including Japan, Hong Kong, and other Asian Tigers) increased 50-fold,
to about $23,500, and per capita GDP of the rest of the world rose only 8-
fold, to about $3,750. Figure12-1b shows that before modern revolutions,
in 1600 and in 1700, the difference in the level of per capita GDP between
Western economies and the rest of the world was 1.8:1. By 1870, it was
about 3.8:1. By 1950, 5:1. And in 2001, 6.3:1. The gap widened
continuously between rich non-redistributive economies and relatively
poor redistributive economies after their socialist and anti-colonial
revolutions.
Figure 11-1 shows that the Soviet Union outperformed less developed
economies of Latin America, Africa, and Asia both in long-term economic
growth and per capita GDP and underperformed Western market
economies.10 Industrial development, high investment, technological
advancement, military buildup, and economic growth were priorities for
central plan economies, most likely due to global revolutionary claims of
Communist revolutions, the National-Socialist revolution in Germany,
and, later, the Iranian revolution. But economic priority does not make an
economic superiority. In 1870 and 1913, before the Russian revolution, the
ratio of per capita GDP of the U.S. and Western Europe to Russia was
about 2.5:1, remained roughly the same in 1950 and 1973, and widened
towards 3:1 in 1989, at the end of the Soviet Union.11 Despite major

sub-section are calculated from Angus Maddison, in Maddison, Historical

Statistics of the World Economy, 1-2008 AD.
10
Robert C. Allen reached similar conclusions after a detailed statistical and
institutional comparison of pre-revolutionary Russia and the Soviet Union with
regional economic developments in Latin America, Asia, and Europe. Robert C.
Allen, Farm to Factory: Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003).
11
The data for 1990 derive from Maddison, Historical Statistics of the World
Economy, 1-2008 AD. They are different from the Penn World Table data in figure
2, which use a different methodology and show a smaller gap between the West
and Russia, about 2.5:1. Different data sets are used for figures 1 and 2 because
256 Chapter Eleven

educational, scientific, and sectoral (e.g., the space industry) technological

advances, the Soviet Union, the product of the Russian revolution, had
never been able not only to catch up with the West but even to narrow the
income gap.

2. Health
Health, as we know it, is a modern, post-revolutionary phenomenon.
Before the twentieth century, the average expectation of life at birth, which
is the most comprehensive measure of health, was under 30 years (40
years in the few advanced countries, the U.S. and Western Europe). One-
third of newborn children died in infancy and fifty percent before reaching
age 10, and people took it as normal and did not see it as a tragedy.
Modern sanitation, public health, science, medicine, and nutrition changed
this even for the poorest of the wretched of the Earth. Today the poorest
live longer than the richest did in nineteenth-century Europe. But the
relative differences matter because it is human life that is literally at stake.
Figure12-2 plots per capita GDP (at purchasing power parity) and life
expectancy at birth for 161 countries in 1990, the time of the end of
treatment for the nations exposed to Communist revolutions, medically
speaking. The plot portrays the familiar, quadratic Preston curve:12 a) life
expectancy increases rapidly when income (per capita GDP) rises from
abject poverty (sanitation, public health, vaccination, medicine, nutrition
improve); b) these increases slow down at the middle-income level (the
quality of treating regular diseases does not increase greatly per additional
dollar of per capita income); and, c) at a high income level, income
differences do not influence life expectancy because, when the effect of
medical advances is reached at a given time, the country differences in life
expectancy depend more on lifestyle than on income.
This is universal. Next comes the comparative revolution dissection.
Figure12-2 divides all 161 countries into five groups: 1) Western market
economies which underwent non-redistributive revolutions or developed in
the areas of their influence (e.g., Western Europe, Canada, Japan, etc.),
depicted by blue dots; 2) satellite oil economies depicted by black dots—
countries whose per capita income is magnified by global energy demand,
not by their own development (they can be ignored here); 3) technological

figure 2 shows individual countries, and the Maddison data set, being more recent,
does not contain the former East Germany and West Germany, while the Penn
World Table used in figure 2 does not go back in history as does figure 1.
12
Samuel H. Preston, ‘The Changing Relation Between Mortality and Level of
Economic Development’, Population Studies 29 (1975), 241-48.
 Loot the Looters 257

central plan economies such as the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe,
depicted by large red dots; 4) non-technological central plan economies
such as China during and in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution,
Cambodia, etc., depicted by small red dots; and 5) less developed
economies of Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia, products of anti-
colonial revolutions, depicted by green dots. The latter three groups come
out of redistributive revolutions.
The most telling result of this dissection is clustering of countries by
both per capita income and life expectancy. Non-redistributive countries
have the highest level of both, with life expectancy between 75 and 80
years. Technological and most non-technological central plan economies,
despite their big income differences, have a similar lower level of life
expectancy, from 60 to 74, and Russia, in the middle, has 68. Less
developed economies, all with relatively low income, vary greatly in life
expectancy, from 34 to 75, overlapping with non-technological and
technological central plan economies, and behind Western market
economies. The most interesting comparison of two types of systems is
between countries of the same genetic and cultural inheritance: West
Germany vs. East Germany and South Korea vs. North Korea. The
difference is roughly $10,000 in per capita income and 5 years in average
life expectancy in favor of non-redistributive systems. Russia, for a
country with major advances in education and science, is also a major
laggard in wealth and health. This comes in addition to colossal population
losses due to terror, wars, deportations, man-made famines, and other
destructive policies, which are variously estimated in tens of millions of
human lives.

3. Knowledge
Knowledge can be measured in terms of inputs, such as education,
skills, and other human capital (e.g., literacy rate, years of schooling for
working age groups, enrollment in secondary and tertiary education, etc.),
and in terms of output, such as advances in science, technology, and
culture. Inputs are easier to measure than output. Inputs matter for the
quality of labor force and hence for economic growth and, eventually, the
level of per capita GDP, the wealth of the country, its living standards.
Output of knowledge matters more and more broadly. It advances not only
the national economy, and technology is predominant for that, but also the
global economy, the world, and humanity.
The Soviet Union combined high levels of educational and other
human capital inputs, major advances in science, major sectoral advances
258 Chapter Eleven

in technology (primarily the space industry), and comprehensive

indoctrination and ideological straitjacketing. The explanation of this mix
is simple instrumentality. The government promoted the type of
knowledge inputs and output that was instrumental for industrial and
military development and straitjacketed all knowledge output that could
undermine its power to control people’s income and lives. This is trivial.
What is non-trivial is the global effect for the world and humanity, the
contribution of the country and its revolution to humankind and human
development. This is the ultimate evaluation of different revolutions.
Table 11-1 juxtaposes two types of revolutions. One can be called
systemic/social revolutions, and this type of revolution across the entire
social system is what we usually mean by “revolutions,” such as the
French, American, Russian, Chinese, German, Mexican, etc. revolutions.
The other type can be called sectoral/technological revolutions and is
meant metaphorically. It means a major change in knowledge, technology,
and production, e.g., the shift from hunting-gathering to agriculture,
known also as the Neolithic revolution; the Industrial revolution; the
Green revolution; etc. Table 11-1 sub-divides the social system revolutions
into redistributive and non-redistributive, exemplified by the Russian,
Chinese, and other communist and socialist revolutions, vs. the Glorious
and the American revolutions.
This simple taxonomy reveals a basic, if neglected, fact of history and
human development: All technological revolutions which enhanced
civilization and enriched human society in more ways than one are
associated with non-redistributive social revolutions or countries that came
from and developed in their world. None of the technological revolutions
can be associated with redistributive social revolutions and their countries.
Everything good for humankind, in the final analysis, came out of non-
redistributive revolutions and their world. Nothing good for humankind
came out of redistributive social revolutions. Again, this is non-trivial.
This is about billions of additional human lives. Louis Pasteur and Joseph
Lister, through their discovery and practical application to public health of
the germ theory of disease, saved billions of lives, reduced mortality, and
increased life expectancy at least twofold, and contributed to the greatest
population explosion in human history. World population increased from
1.3 billion in 1870 to 2.5 billion in 1950, even after two world wars, and to
4.5 billion in 1980, when the effects of public health spread over the post-
colonial world.13 In parallel, the Green Revolution, advanced breeding of

13
Maddison, Historical Statistics of the World Economy, 1-2008 AD; U.S. Census
Bureau, Population Division, ‘Historical Estimates of World Population’,
 Loot the Looters 259

Table 11-1: A Taxonomy of Revolutions

Systemic/social revolutions
Sectoral/technological
revolutions
Redistributive Non-redistributive
The Dutch revolt, or The
The Commercial Revolt of the Netherlands,
The French revolution,
revolution, ca. 13th–17th 1566-1609
1789-99
centuries The Dutch Revolution,
1780-1813
The Scientific
The Mexican The Glorious revolution,
Revolution, 1543–late
revolution, 1910-29 1688-89
17th century
The Agricultural
The Chinese The American revolution,
revolution, late 17th–late
revolution, 1911-28 1775-83
18th centuries
The Financial revolution, The Russian
Il Risorgimento, 1815-71
1688–late 18th century revolution, 1917-91
The Polish Solidarity, the
The Industrial revolution, Velvet revolution, and
The Chinese
mid–18th century-mid– other anti-Communist
revolution, 1927-76
19th century revolutions in Central
Europe, 1989-90
The Second Industrial Other Communist
revolution, or The revolutions, 1918-19,
Technical revolution, 1945-90, including the
mid-19th century–early Cuban revolution,
20th century 1959–ongoing
The Second Scientific
The National-Socialist
revolution, mid-19th
revolution, 1933-45
century–ongoing
The Green revolution, The Spanish Civil War,
late 1930s–ongoing 1936-39
The Information Anti-colonial
revolution, 1940s– revolutions, 1940s-
ongoing 1970s
The Neolithic revolution, or The First Agricultural revolution, ca. 10,000 B.C.–
5,000 B.C.
Note: The dates and designations are debatable in the literature. They do not
inform or influence further discussion.

International Data Base (2009), at http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/worldhis.html,

http://www.census.gov/idb/worldpop.php.
260 Chapter Eleven

plants and crop management, initiated by Norman Borlaug since the late
1930s and widely adopted around the world since the 1960s, saved
additional billions of lives. World grain production more than tripled from
692 million metric tons in 1960 to 2.2 billion metric tons in 200914 and
world population reached 6.8 billion, nearly tripled from 1950. Without
the Green Revolution, using all prior technology, the Earth could feed 4
billion people.15 It now feeds nearly 7 billion. It is projected to readily
support 8 and 9 billion in the forthcoming decades, more than twice what
it could have sans the Green Revolution. One can call the sequence in the
first column of Table12-1 the world humanitarian revolution.

4. Liberty
Liberty is measurable in the literature to varying degrees by various
weighted indexes.16 One can single out sophisticated research of the Fraser
Institute, especially Raymond D. Gastil and Lindsay M. Right, and Alvin
Rabushka.17 To avoid controversy and complexity, only basic, negative
liberty is considered here, in the sense of freedom from government and
other social authority.18 As Edmund Burke observed, “Abstract liberty,

14
U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), World Agricultural Outlook Board,
World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (February 2010), 8, at
http://www.usda.gov/oce/commodity/wasde/latest.pdf.
15
Haldore E. Hanson, Norman E. Borlaug, and R. Glenn Anderson, Wheat in the
Third World (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1982).
16
For a broad overview, sources, and actual indexes, see ‘List of Indices of
Freedom’, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_indices_of_freedom.
17
Raymond D. Gastil and Lindsay M. Wright, ‘The State of the World Political
and Economic Freedom’, in Michael A. Walker, ed., Freedom, Democracy and
Economic Welfare (Vancouver, British Columbia: The Fraser Institute, 1986), 85-
119; Alvin Rabushka, ‘Philosophical Aspects of Economic Freedom’, ‘Freedom
House Survey of Economic Freedoms’, and ‘Preliminary Definition of Economic
Freedom’, in Walter E. Block, ed., Economic Freedom: Toward a Theory of
Measurement (Vancouver, British Columbia: The Fraser Institute, 1991), 23-37,
57-71, 87-108.
18
In the absence of consensus, the following four-level working taxonomy may
work. Liberty is negative freedom from government and other social authority
across human activities. Freedom is positive liberty of human activities. Rights are
different and constitute the third level. Rights are enforceable social contracts.
Liberty and freedom mean that the government does not obstruct nor penalize
activities. Rights mean that the government does more than that, it guarantees
activities, protects them, and enforces their existence. This is the difference
between political or social liberties and civil rights. For example, in various
 Loot the Looters 261

like other mere abstractions, is not to be found. Liberty inheres in some

sensible object”.19 Liberty is separable in multiple dimensions: a) political
liberty, b) civil liberties (of religion, expression, associations, employment,
civic participation regardless of gender, marriage regardless of races and
other origins, etc.), c) social liberties (e.g., divorce, birth control,
educational choices, etc.), d) intellectual freedom, e) cultural freedom, f)
economic liberty (of transactions including domestic and foreign trade,
labor and capital and financial markets, etc), and others.
By all measures, except several civil and social liberties, of which
more momentarily, the Soviet Union and other countries out of
Communist, socialist, and other redistributive revolutions were maximally
non-free. The state of political liberty is best summarized in a quip by a
Soviet leader in an official speech in 1927 where the grim substance is
reinforced by the jolly mockery:

Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, there can be, say, two or four
political parties, but only on one condition: one party will be in power and
all the rest in prison.20

Great population losses from terror, deportations, man-made famines,

and effective genocide in Communist and numerous socialist and post-
colonial countries (e.g., 3.9 million killed in the Second Congo War, 1998-
2003,21 to take the latest example) confirm a basic empirical rule:
Redistributive revolutions and redistributive economies require an extreme
degree of mass oppression and repression for their enforcement.

societies the government controls personal relations and penalizes free love. But
nowhere does the government protect and enforce it. It is a liberty, a freedom, but
not a civil right. On the fourth level, there are privileges. These are rights limited to
social segments and specific individuals (e.g., driving or even voting limited by
age, gender, etc.). Now, a more controversial point: Since civil rights, freedom, and
liberty have never been nor currently are a universal property of all societies and
all human beings, then, from an ontological and existential perspectives, they are
all privileges.
19
Edmund Burke, ‘Speech on Conciliation’, in The Works of the Right Honourable
Edmund Burke, 9 vols. (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854-1862), vol. I (1854), 464.
20
M. P. Tomskii, in Pervaia Leningradskaia Oblastnaia Konferentsiia VKPb, 15-
19 Noiabria 1927 Goda, Stenograficheskii Otchet [The First Leningrad Provincial
Conference of the Soviet Communist Party, November 15-19, 1927, Verbatim
Records] (Leningrad, 1927), 28.
21
B. Coghlan, R. J. Brennan, P. Ngoy, et al., ‘Mortality in the Democratic Republic
of Congo: A Nationwide Survey’, Lancet 367 (9504) (2006), 44–51.
262 Chapter Eleven

Economic liberty, as will be shown later in section 3, can be measured

directly. In each country at each specific time, it is the residual of the
average rate of government control of GDP. The latter can be
approximated as the weighted average of marginal rates of government
control of transactions in the circular flows of funds, weighted by the share
of each transaction in total output. By this measure, to be illustrated in
section 3, the average rate of government economic control and economic
non-freedom in the Soviet Union and other Communist countries ranged
between 80 and 95 percent of GDP and approached 97 percent in North
Korea and 99 percent in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.22
At the same time, the Soviet Union (or, jurisdictionally speaking,
Russia after the revolution of 1917) pioneered and other Communist
countries promoted several civil and social liberties: women’s civil rights,
civil liberties of ethnic minorities, inter-ethnic and inter-religious marriage,
divorce, birth control, etc. Again, the explanation is instrumental. A
comparison with the treatment of other social liberties, e.g., concerning
sexual minorities and abortions, offers a clue. Homosexuals in the USSR
were not only discriminated against but outlawed and severely penalized.
Abortions were legalized in 1920-36, outlawed in 1936-55, and legalized
again thereafter. The government promoted only those liberties that
contributed to the growth of the labor force and industrial development,
especially female participation and that of ethnic minorities, subject to
other concerns, such as population growth in 1936-55, after major
demographic losses due to man-made famine, terror, and war. Or consider
another social liberty: drinking age was never enforced and hardly even
existed. Teenagers were free to drink. Excise tax on alcohol was a major
source of fiscal revenues, industrial investment, and military spending.

5. Justice
Justice, like liberty, is separable and multi-dimensional. 1) Legal
justice is most formal and is given by law and law enforcement. 2) Civil
justice concerns equality of individuals in terms of natural rights,
regardless of origin (class, caste, gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion,
disability, sexuality, etc.). It overlaps with civil liberties and was covered
above. 3) and 4) Economic justice and social justice are remarkably

22
Michael S. Bernstam and Alvin Rabushka, From Predation to Prosperity: How
to Move from Socialism to Markets (2008), annexes 3.1 and 3.2 at
http://media.hoover.org/documents/predation_annex3-1.pdf and
http://media.hoover.org/documents/predation_annex3-2.pdf.
 Loot the Looters 263

enduring concepts, essentially unchanged since invented by Socrates and

Aristotle, respectively. Both are uncorrelated with legal justice and
opposite to each other.23 Following Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Nicole
Oresme, Francois Bernier, John Locke, Adam Smith, Arthur C. Pigou, and
Milton Friedman, economic justice means income commensurate to the
true value of each agent’s production.24
It is objective as it depends on value measures in national income
accounting and is independent of value judgments. Call it Socratic or
commensurate and non-redistributive justice. Social justice, from Aristotle
to various socialist thinkers to John Rawls, in contrast, rectifies income
inequality and other perceived inequities of economic justice through
redistribution of income.25 It is subjective and depends totally on value
judgments and ideology. Call it Aristotelean or rectificatory and
redistributive justice. Its operating objective and criterion is equalitarian
income distribution. Plutarch attributed understanding of the dichotomy
between non-redistributive and redistributive society to as far back as
Solon:

23
A multi-dimensional taxonomy of inequality and a useful distinction between
economic and political inequality in institutions as they influence economic
development is in Daron Acemoglu, Maria Angelica Bautista, Pablo Querubin, and
James A. Robinson, ‘Economic and Political Ineqaulity in Development: The Case
of Cundinamarca, Colombia’, in Elhanan Helpman, ed., Institutions and Economic
Performance (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 181-245.
24
Socrates, in Plato, Republic, 331e; in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vol. 5 and 6
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969); Thomas Aquinas, Summa
Theologiae, Ia2ae, 114, in The Collected Works of St. Thomas Aquinas (Pittsboro,
North Carolina: InteLex Corp, 1992), I, vol. 30, 203; Nicole Oresme, Le Livre de
Ethiques d'Aristotle (New York: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1940) [1370]; Francois
Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire A.D. 1656-1668 [1670] (Westminster:
Archibald Constable & Co, 1891) [1670], 238 and passim; John Locke, Two
Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967) [1690],
Book I, chapter IV, paragraph 42; Book II, chapter V, paragraphs 27-29, (1967),
188, 285-302, 305-307; Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the
Wealth of Nations, general eds. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, textual ed. W.
B. Todd, vols. 1 and 2 [1776] (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) [1776], vol. 1: 91,
111, 540; vol. 2: 586-87; Arthur C. Pigou, The Economics of Welfare (London:
Macmillan and Co., 1929), 135-45, 174-214, 223-27; Milton Friedman, Capitalism
and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 161-62.
25
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press,
2002), Ethics V, ii, V, v; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1971).
264 Chapter Eleven

There was a saying of his current before the election, that when things are
even there never can be war, and this pleased both parties, the wealthy and
the poor; the one conceiving him to mean, when all have their fair
proportion; the others, when all are absolutely equal. 26

5a. Legal justice

Legal justice, except for narrow civil cases, does not exist in the world
of mass oppression. The entire history of the Soviet Union and other
Communist countries is packed with show trials and extra-legal
executions, mass terror, collective punishment, deportations, and forced
labor. China’s Cultural Revolution and the killing fields of Cambodia offer
other extreme examples. The law itself is converted into an instrument of
terror. For example, the infamous Soviet legislation of August 7, 1932,
“On Enforcement of Property Rights of State, Collective, and Cooperative
Enterprises” meted out the death penalty for any theft of and from these
properties.27 The most common occurred when starving peasants cleared
the fields after official harvesting and collected leftover stalks of grain to
feed their families. They were legally executed. The law became known
for decades as “the stalks law” and the date of 8/7 acquired currency
similar to that of 9/11 in the U.S. with the connotation of death, utter
destruction, and the end of normal times. There is no further need to
elaborate and one can rest the case, legalistically speaking.

5b. Social justice

As Pareto predicted, no revolution has ever achieved social justice. It is

not feasible for both economic and political reasons: for economic reasons,
because different people, having different productivities, produce
differences in value-added (defined as contribution of their labor, human
capital, and physical capital to the national economy); for political reasons,
because the elite transfers income from the rest. And yet, the drive for
social justice is the feature of redistributive revolutions, especially Russian
and other Communist revolutions, that attracted mass adherence around
the world. This drive may be evolutionary: people strive for social justice
and cooperative sharing because, in primordial societies, only the strongest
survived and proliferated, which—if physical strength and intelligence are

26
Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (New York: Modern
Library, 1932), 104.
27
Soviet Union, Svod Zakonov SSSR [The Legal Code of the USSR] (Moscow,
1932), no. 62, article 360.
 Loot the Looters 265

uncorrelated—retarded the biological success of the human species.

Evolution is smart but not omniscient. It wires people to survive at the
primordial level but not to progress at the civilization level, which
economic justice fosters and social justice hinders.
After decades of redistributions and purported rectifications, and after
all demographic and economic sacrifices on the altar of equality, the
Soviet Union and other Communist economies did not improve various
measures of actual income inequality. Income inequality was in the same,
relatively low range in both Western market economies and various central
plan economies, which represent the extremes of minimal and maximal
redistribution of income. In the Soviet Union, income inequality was
higher than in Scandinavian countries, but lower than in the U.S.28 The
inter-decile ratios for worker earnings (the ratio of the highest to the
lowest 10 percentile group) were these in 1986 (at the closing of the
Communist shop, commercially speaking): 3.2 in the U.K., 3.3 in the
USSR, 2.4 in Czechoslovakia, 2.6 in Hungary, and 2.8 in Poland. The
inter-decile ratios of household per capita income were these: 3.8 in the
U.K., 3.5 in the USSR, 2.4 in Czechoslovakia, 2.8 in Hungary, and 3.3 in
Poland.29
These measurements include money income and direct fringe benefits
in money and in kind such as health care, education, housing, etc., but
cannot account, for the lack of data, for indirect benefits of the elite in
Communist countries such as preferential housing, quality health care,
discounted quality goods and services, vehicles, recreation, etc. All-
inclusive estimates could raise the inter-decile income inequality ratios in
Communist countries by a factor of 1.5, and the true decile ratio of income
inequality in the USSR and elsewhere would be in the range of 4.5-5.0.
This is higher than in most Western welfare states, on par with the U.S.,
and much lower than in Latin America and other less developed and
historical economies.
A broad international comparison helps explain these results. In the
mid-2000s, the inter-decile ratios of per capita income were 1.4 in
Denmark, 1.5 in Sweden, 2.7 in France, 3.0 in Germany, 3.5 for 30 OECD
countries on the average, 3.6 in South Korea, 3.8 in Japan, 4.5 in Italy, 5.3
in the U.S., 6.8 in Turkey, and 8.3 in Mexico, which is typical for Latin

28
Abram Bergson, ‘Income Inequality Under Soviet Socialism’, Journal of
Economic Literature 22, no. 3 (September 1984), 1052-1099.
29
Anthony B. Atkinson and John Micklewright, Transformation in Eastern Europe
and the Distribution of Income (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
266 Chapter Eleven

American and other redistributive developing economies.30 Thus the true

income inequality in the Soviet Union and other Communist countries was
higher than in most Western market economies but lower than in
redistributive less developed economies in Latin America and elsewhere.
This relationship is again instrumental. Communist governments did not
want to run a too low inequality because they wanted to support the elite
and they did not want to run a too high inequality because they did not
want those elites to become economically and politically independent and
powerful as in Latin America. The Communist dosage of income
inequality is optimal for enforcement of the revolution.

5c. Economic Justice

Economic justice and income redistribution are a twin issue. Adding

the dichotomy of the market economy vs. socialism makes it a triplet
issue.

Table 11-2

Redistributive justice Economic justice, Socratic justice

Income redistribution Non-redistributive income, to each his own
Socialism The market economy

The principle of economic justice remains remarkably unchanged since

Socrates. Modern research added accounting and other technical rigors and
the link to economic growth and the prosperity of nations. Socrates’ justice
means “to render to each his due”.31 Cicero expressed this in nearly

30
OECD, Society at a Glance 2009: OECD Social Indicators (Paris: OECD,
2009), 89.
31
Plato, Republic, 331e: ‘Tell me, then, you the inheritor of the argument, what is
that you affirm that Simonides says and rightly says about justice’. ‘That is just’,
he [Socrates] replied, ‘to render to each his due. . . . Obviously, he does not mean
what we were just speaking of, this return of a deposit to anyone whatsoever even
if he asks it back when not in his right mind. And yet what the man deposited is
due to him . . .’. Socrates’ distinction is between the act of merely returning a
deposit or any other debt and returning it rightly: ‘Ut si iuste depositum reddere in
recte factis sit, in officiis ponatur depositum reddere’. Given the rarity of banking
institutions, ‘reddere depositum’ in Greece typified justice in general for the
financial and other economic conduct. See, e.g., Juvenal, Satire 13.15; Herodotus,
VI.86; Democritus, fr. 265: șȡȦʌȠȚ μİμȞ İĮIJĮȚ μĮȜȜȠȞ Ș IJȦȞİ ȣ ʌİʌȠȚȘμ İȞȦȞ;
also frs. 41, 181, 253. The Earth was viewed as the symbol of justice, the very
 Loot the Looters 267

modern terms: “Justice is the distribution to each one their own”.32 And
Milton Friedman cast it in rigorous terms of national income accounting
and distribution of factor income: “To each according to what he and the
instruments he owns produces”.33 Friedman saw it as the operational
principle of the market economy. This is consistent with Kenneth J.
Arrow’s and Gegard Debreu’s theorem that competitive markets are
conjointly efficient and non-redistributive at all stages of production.34
Economic justice is income commensurate to the true value of
production by each agent and his production factors (labor, human capital,
physical capital, and land). In accounting terms, it is minimization of
income redistribution between agents and production factors. In a more

‘iustissima tellus’ because the soil returns the seed with interest. Hence, returning
the deposit rightly is returning it with interest.
32
Marcus Tullius Cicero, The Nature of the Gods, and, On Divination (Amherst,
NY: Prometheus Books, 1997), De Natura Deorium, Book 3, section 38: ‘Iustitia
est unicuique suum tribuendi’ (‘Justice is each one to whom their own allotting’, or
‘Justice is the allotting to each one their own’, or even ‘Justice is the distribution to
each one their own’.) Ulpian, Institutes of Justinian 1.1: ‘Iustitia est constans et
perpetua voluntas ius suum cuique tribuendi’ (‘Justice is the constant and perpetual
will to allot to each his own’). Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia2ae, 114, I
(1992, vol. 30, 203) extended this line to the real economy, both labor and product
markets: ‘A reward is something repaid to someone in return for work, as a sort of
price paid for it. Thus just as the payment of the just price for good received from
someone is an act of justice, so too payment of a reward for work is an act of
justice’—what became known as the doctrine of just wage. And then John Locke:
‘Justice gives every man a title to the product of his honest industry. . . . The labour
of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever
then he removes out of the State of Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath
mixed his labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby
makes it his property. In being by him removed from the common state Nature
placed it in, it hath by his labour something annexed to it, that excludes the
common right of other men. . . . That labor put a distinction between them
[products of his industry] and common. That added something to them more than
Nature . . . and so they became his private right. . . . His labour hath taken it out of
the hands of Nature, where it was common, and belonged equally to all her
children, and hath thereby appropriated it to himself’. John Locke, Two Treatises
of Government, 188, 305-307.
33
Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 161-62.
34
Kenneth J. Arrow, ‘General Economic Equilibrium: Purpose, Analytic
Techniques, Collective Choices’, from Les Prix Nobel en 1972, in Collected
Papers of Kenneth J. Arrow (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press for
Harvard University, 1983), vol. 2, 222-23.
268 Chapter Eleven

eloquent language, it is appropriation of the fruits of one’s industry.

Francois Bernier was first to link it to economic growth and prosperity:

It is the hope by which a man is animated, that he shall retain the fruits of
his industry, and transmit them to his descendants, that forms the main
foundation of everything excellent and beneficial in this sublunary state;
and if we take a review of the different kingdoms in the world, we shall
find that they prosper or decline according as this principle is
acknowledged or condemned: in a word, it is the prevalence or neglect of
this principle which changes and diversifies the face of the earth.35

Adam Smith strengthened this approach writing after the Glorious

Revolution, which he knew, and at the onset of the Industrial revolution,
which he did not know:

That security which the laws in Great Britain give to every man that he
shall enjoy the fruits of his own labor, is alone sufficient to make any
country flourish, notwithstanding these and twenty other absurd regulations
of commerce.36

Income redistribution charts the opposite world, that of redistributive

revolutions. It is the opposite of Socratic justice and the market economy
and defines socialism. The following table offers a summary of the
previous discussion.
Although the notion originates in modern welfare states, income
redistribution has been prevalent in most societies. It can be governmental
or non-governmental, e.g., collective, private, or by various networks. It
integrates primordial common output, forced production such as state-
forced production under central planning and private-forced production
under slavery, suppressed wages and agricultural prices, expropriations of
output and property, onerous taxes, violence and fraud, diversion and rent
seeking, corruption and inflation, a panoply of subsidies and cross-
subsidies in less developed and former central plan economies, including
massive West German subsidies to the former East Germany, tribal
transfers in Africa and the Middle East, redistributive (to quote Thomas
Jefferson, parasite) networks, collective oligopsonies and oligopolies in
post-central plan Russia and in Latin America, and innumerous other
predation arrangements—in short, in a word of Renee Dumont, socialisms

35
Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire A.D. 1656-1668, 238.
36
Adam Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
vol. 1, 540.
 Loot the Looters 269

(plural).37 As with Moliere’s The Bourgeois Gentleman, who says, “for

more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing about
it”, much of social science, public policy, and history literature has been
describing for centuries one or another case of income redistribution.

Table 11-3

Income comprises the total return to

Income is the purchasing power of
agents during a period of time in
terms of output of all other agents
and their own.
Income redistribution means the
transfer of purchasing power in
money or in kind from those who
produced additional value-added
output for it to and by those who did
not.
production factors, returns to production
factors such as labor, human capital,
physical capital, and land, that is,
returns to the value-added, and returns
to non-production.
Income redistribution transfers returns
from providers of a given production
factor in a given transaction to non-
providers of this or another factor in this
transaction, from producers to non-
producers of the given value-added.

Income redistribution is subtraction of income from producers and providers of

given factors and the value-added and addition of this income to non-producers
of extra output and non-providers of factors in this transaction and non-
producers of the given value-added. Income redistribution constitutes the
divergence between income and the true value-added, measured as competitive
costs of given production factors. In simply means getting something for
nothing and nothing for something. This mechanism creates a cost to producers
and factor providers and an opportunity cost to non-producers and factor non-
providers in this transaction. It is a cost and an opportunity cost of additional
production to workers, investors, and entrepreneurs.

This mechanism impairs productive incentives of both parties for labor,

investment in physical and human capital, and innovation, impedes economic
growth, and underlies non-productive social systems.

37
Rene Dumont with Marcel Mazoyer, Socialisms and Development (London:
Andre Deutsch, 1973). Thomas Jefferson wrote that sound economic principles
‘will protect the public industry from the parasite institutions now consuming it,
and lead us to that just and regular distribution of the public burthens from which
we have sometimes strayed’. The letter is dated 1818, but the date of book
publication is 1817. Thomas Jefferson, [Letter to the Publisher], in Destutt Tracy,
A Treatise on Political Economy (Georgetown, DC: Joseph Milligan, 1817), 1, at
http://olldownload.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=sho
w.php%3Ftitle=121&Itemid=27.
270 Chapter Eleven

Income redistribution is central for revolutions because, to invoke

Vilfredo Pareto again, they either transfer wealth and power over people’s
income from one elite to another—that is, re-channel income
redistribution—or end the entire fraudulent parasitic enterprise, to borrow
Thomas Jefferson’s characterization. The issue of parasite institutions,
networks, and elites moved recently, if belatedly, to scholarly literature.38
It corresponds to evolutionary biology which taxonomizes biological
interactions, or symbiosis, by mutualism (both species benefit, e.g., bees
and flowers), commensualism (one side benefits, the other is neutral, e.g.,
birds and trees), and parasitism (most plants and animals). Income
redistribution in the specific case(s) of the transfer of income from
producers to the elite, including through the government, is the case in
point. It links biological evolution to social revolution, or, rather, the other
way around.
Income redistribution and thus the extent of economic (in)justice is
directly measurable both in the gross terms of overall transactions and in
the net terms of income transfers to the elites. The gross measurement
informs the magnitude of revolutions and the degree of socialism in the
economy. The net measurement looks—almost literally as Figure12-3
illustrates—into distribution and redistribution of the national pie between
social groups. It identifies winners and losers from the revolution and
shows how the objectives of revolutions ended up, that is, finds
quantitatively whether it was “loot the looted” or “end the looting”. Call
them gross and net economic (in)justice.

5cĮ. Gross redistribution of income

The gross is the average rate of income redistribution in all transactions

in the flows of funds, which approximates the average rate of income
redistribution in GDP. Income redistribution is measurable in every
transaction as the difference between the true value-added, evaluated as
competitive costs of given production factors, and the income of producers
and non-producers from this transaction. The average rate of income
redistribution is the weighted average of these marginal rates of income
redistribution between all agents across all transactions in the entire flows
of funds, weighted by the share of the given transaction in the total value-

38
Halvor Mehlum, Karl Molke, and Ragnar Torvik, ‘Parasites’, in Samuel Bowles,
Steven N. Durlauf, and Karla Hoff, eds., Poverty Traps (New York: Russell Stage
Foundation and Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 79-94; Tarun
Khanna and Yishay Yafeh, ‘Business Groups in Emerging Markets: Paragons or
Parasites?’ Journal of Economic Literature 45 (2007), 331-72.
 Loot the Looters 271

added output.39 Section 3 below discusses and illustrates the magnitudes of

income redistribution in gross terms in the Soviet Union and other
Communist, socialist, and Western market economies.40 Apart from the
welfare state segments, the latter ended up with minimal rates of income
redistribution after their revolutions.41 On the other extreme are a)
primordial common output societies, b) voluntary plantation communes
such as the Plymouth colony and Russian consumption communes under
War Communism in 1918-20, and c) various historical episodes of
enslavement of free people. In all these cases, the degree of income
redistribution in kind is obviously close to 100 percent.
North Korea and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge approach 95 and
98 percent of income redistribution in GDP. Forced delivery of output to
the government and state confiscation of total output above the declared
level of subsistence during War Communism in Russia, 1918-20, and the
Reign of Terror in France, 1793-94, also approach 98 percent of income
redistribution in GDP. The Soviet Union during various periods of its
history and other Communist economies from China (before 1977) and
Eastern Europe conducted income redistribution in the range from 80 to 95
percent of GDP. These were purely redistributive revolutions indeed.

5cȕ. Net transfer of income to the elite, inside and outside the
government

Figure12-3 shows distribution and redistribution of the national pie

between social groups in a sample of eleven countries after redistributive
and non-redistributive revolutions. Russia enters twice, in 1989 as part of
the Soviet Union under central planning, and in 2005 after central planning

39
Two additional accounting points: 1) transactions include a) involuntary
transactions such as confiscations of output and income, and b) non-exchange
subsidies; 2) home production is included in gross value-added, measured by its
imputed competitive market value, and home consumption of home production is
treated as zero income redistribution.
40
Bernstam and Rabushka, From Predation to Prosperity: How to Move from
Socialism to Markets.
41
The welfare state is ambiguous. It does redistribute income but the bulk of this
redistribution recycles income for the middle class in various programs which
amount to mandated social insurance. Still, the relationship between economic
growth and the share of the welfare state income redistribution in GDP in industrial
democracies of North America and Western Europe is strongly negative. Torsten
Persson and Guido Tabellini, ‘Is Inequality Harmful to Growth? Theory and
Evidence’, American Economic Review 48 (1994), 600-621.
272 Chapter Eleven

ended but the extent of income redistribution did not. China in 2002
remained a Communist country, but central planning ended in 1977 and
income redistribution was minimized since then, revolution reversed. The
dividing line between the two groups of national pies in the figure
corresponds to the dividing line in the table between countries after
redistributive and non-redistributive or reversed revolutions.

Table 11-4

Countries of redistributive Countries of non-redistributive or

revolutions reversed revolutions
Russia, Iran, Mexico, Argentina, U.S., U.K., Germany, Spain, Japan,
Egypt China

The figure conveniently depicts shares of labor income (including that

of workers, farmers, and self-employed proprietors) and capital income
(including that of owners of capital assets, land, and financial assets) and
net indirect taxes as slices of the national pie. In national income
accounting terms, labor income sums up wages (compensation of
employees) and gross mixed income, that is, income of self-employed
proprietors including farmers. Capital income includes profit (net
operating surplus) and depreciation (consumption of fixed capital).
This dissection addresses directly the net transfer of income from
producers of the true value-added to non-producers of the true value-added
for this income at the stage of generation of income.42 This can
approximate the net transfer of income from the rest of the population to
the elite, both inside and outside the government. The mechanism of this
measurement is factor income redistribution. It can be defined as the
difference between (a) income shares in GDP of production factors such as
labor and physical capital (with land and financial assets lumped together
with capital for simplicity) in specific countries and (b) what can be called
the production function distribution of factor income shares. The latter
distribution shows simply what percentages of GDP would be generated
by labor and by capital (lumped with land and financial assets) if they
produce what they can technically produce given their diminishing returns
to scale—that is, what they can produce without income redistribution.

42
Additional net transfers between social groups occur at various production and
end-use stages, e.g., between the same factor producers in different industries and
sectors, between consumers and producers through prices and subsidies, and
between consumers through taxes and subsidies.
 Loot the Looters 273

The secular global empirical rule for that is the ratio 2:1 of labor share to
capital share in GDP.43 Labor, which sums up wage and salary earning
employees, self-employed proprietors, and farmers, produces around 60
percent of GDP, capital (including depreciation and lumped with land)
produces about 30 percent of GDP, and the residual 10 percent is an
accounting adjustment for indirect taxes on import and production.44
Figure12-3 shows that Western market economies such as the U.S., the
U.K., Germany, Spain, and Japan, and now China correspond to this rule.45
Labor income share constitutes over 60 percent of GDP and capital income
share, under 30 percent.46 The ratio is indeed 2:1, and it is the absence of
looting. The Soviet Union (technically, the Russian Federation when it
was still part of the USSR in 1989), and such countries as Iran, Mexico,
Argentina, Egypt, and now post-central plan Russia exhibit a vastly and
uniformly different distribution of factor income shares. Labor income
constitutes between 45 and 50 percent of GDP, capital income makes up
40 to 45 percent of GDP (over 50 percent in Iran), and the ratio of labor
income to capital income shares in GDP approaches 1:1 . Using the 60/30
proportion as the production function distribution of factor income shares
against the actual data, the Soviet Union, Iran, Mexico, and others

43
Robert M. Solow discovered this rule both as an analytical structure of the
aggregate production function and as a long-term historical record in the U.S.
Robert M. Solow, ‘Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function’,
Review of Economics and Statistics 39 (1957), 312-20. It also corresponds to the
cross-national data around the contemporary world when adjusted for various non-
market distortions. See Douglas Gollin, ‘Getting Income Shares Right’, Journal of
Political Economy 110 (April 2002), 458-74.
44
For a technical discussion, see Stephen L. Parente and Edward C. Prescott, ‘A
Unified Theory of the Evolution of International Income Levels’, in Philippe
Aghion and Steven N. Durlauf, eds., Handbook of Economic Growth, vol. 1B
(Amsterdam, Boston: Elsevier North-Holland, 2005), 1371-1416, at 1387-88.
45
France and Italy, not shown in figure 3 for the lack of space, are similar in
income shares to the U.K. U.N. Division of Statistics, National Accounts Statistics:
Main Aggregates and Detailed Tables, 2006 (New York: United Nations, 2008),
pt. II, 65, and 390-91.
46
Minor adjustments have to be made for estimating factor income distribution.
Capital income of self-employed proprietors including farmers needs to be
subtracted from labor income and added to capital income. This adjustment factor
may be around three percent of GDP, due to a high share of farm income in GDP
in agricultural economies and a high capital intensity of farm income and
proprietorial income in industrial economies. After this adjustment, the shares of
labor income and capital income in Western market economies and post-central
plan China would come to 60 and 30 percent of GDP, respectively.
274 Chapter Eleven

transferred about 15 percent of GDP from producers to the governmental

and private elites. In the Soviet Union and other central plan economies,
the bulk of the this transfer was used not for personal consumption of the
elite but for hypertrophied inefficient investment and military hardware,
which amounts to ideological consumption of the government, on par with
the construction of the pyramids.47 In less developed socialist economies,
this transfer, more than anything else, explains why the poor are so poor
and the rich are so rich. In both cases, it is loot the looted.
The 15 percentage-point of GDP deviation of actual from technical
factor income shares ensues from such historically widespread channels of
income redistribution as wage suppression and agricultural price
suppression, also known as the price scissors and urban bias.48 This
deviation comprises redistribution of factor income, to wit, subtraction of
income from workers, self-employed proprietors, and farmers and addition
of this income to owners of capital and land without their producing
market value-added for this income. Adam Smith was first to point to
factor income redistribution in this contrasting pattern of income shares in

47
When people point out the modest personal lifestyle of Joseph Stalin, they do not
take into account the cost of his monuments. His successors substituted multi-
million copies of their books, which were not exactly page turners.
48
On both wage suppression and agricultural price suppression, the definitive
article is Raaj Kumar Sah and Joseph E. Stiglitz, ‘The Economics of the Price
Scissors’, American Economic Review 74 (1984), 125-38. Rich analysis and data
on agricultural price suppression are in Rene Dumont, False Start in Africa, 2nd ed.
(New York: Praeger, 1969); Rene Dumont with Marcel Mazoyer, Socialisms and
Development (London: Andre Deutsch, 1973); John R. Harris and Michael P.
Todaro, ‘Migration, Unemployment, and Development: A Two-Sector Analysis’,
American Economic Review 60 (1970), 126-42; Michael Lipton, Why Poor People
Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1976); Haldore E. Hanson, Norman E. Borlaug, and R. Glenn Anderson,
Wheat in the Third World (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1982); Robert H.
Bates, Beyond the Miracle of the Market (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1989); Robert H. Bates, Open Economy Politics (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1997); Robert H. Bates, Markets and States in Tropical Africa: The Political
Basis of Agricultural Policies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981 and
2005); Vali Jamal and John Weeks, Africa Misunderstood (Or Whatever Happened
to the Rural-Urban Gap?) (London: MacMillan Press, 1993); Charles M. Becker,
Andrew M. Hamer, and Andrew R. Morrison, Beyond Urban Bias in Africa:
Urbanization in an Era of Structural Adjustment (Portsmouth, New Hampshire:
Heinemann, and London: J. Currey, 1994); Michael P. Todaro, Economic
Development (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Weseley, 1997).
 Loot the Looters 275

the Western market vs. less developed economies and link it to economic
performance.49
Wage suppression and agricultural price suppression operate in an
array of transactions through various state and non-state mechanisms.
They include government employment monopsonies and government
wholesale monopsonies or employment and wholesale oligopsonies of
various formal and informal redistributive private networks, or state-
private and private-state symbioses. They have been long-prevalent in
Latin America, parts of Asia, Africa—pre-colonial, colonial, and post-
colonial alike—in central plan economies of the Soviet Union, Eastern
Europe, and China, and, lately, inherited in post-central plan Russia.
Notice that, apart from the Soviet Union in 1989, at the end of the
Communist era, the data in Figure12-3 refer to the latest available year, all
in the twenty-first century. Both non-redistributive revolutions that ended
the looting and redistributive revolutions that perpetuated looting the
looted have long shadows.

6. The inversion of Marx in Russian, other socialist,

and Western revolutions
This contrast of patterns of income shares in Figure12-3 reverses the
core postulate of Karl Marx that competitive labor and capital markets
minimize the labor income share, maximize the capital income share, and

49
‘The great fortunes so suddenly and so easily acquired in Bengal and the other
British settlements in the East Indies, may satisfy us that, as the wages of labour
are very low, so the profits of stock are very high in those ruined countries. The
interest of money is proportionally so. In Bengal, money is frequently lent to the
farmers at forty, fifty, and sixty per cent, and the succeeding crop is mortgaged for
the payment. . . . This perhaps is nearly the present state of Bengal, and of some
other of the English settlements in the East Indies. In a fertile country which had
before been much depopulated, where subsistence, consequently, should not be
very difficult, and where, notwithstanding, three or four hundred thousand people
die of hunger in one year, we may be assured that the funds destined for the
maintenance of the labouring poor are fast decaying. The difference between the
genius of the British constitution which protects and governs North America, and
that of the mercantile company [British East India Company] which oppresses and
domineers in the East Indies, cannot perhaps be better illustrated that by the
different state of those countries’. Smith, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of
the Wealth of Nations, vol. 1, 91, 111.
276 Chapter Eleven

maximize extraction from labor.50 It is opposite economies, from central

planning to less developed socialist economies, that are united in this
pattern of factor income redistribution. Milton Friedman’s thesis that
competitive market economies operate on the principle “to each according
to what he and the instruments he owns produces”51 is consistent with
empirical evidence on income shares in Western market economies.
Socratic justice, to each his own, is at work exactly where Marx saw it
backwards, while his followers perpetuated what he concocted to exorcize.

The Causes. A Neo-Paretian Mechanism of Revolutions,

Russia and Beyond
Aristotle discovered “in all these cases the cause of sedition [stasis] is
always to be found in inequality”.52 Given policy relevance, the causes of
revolutions do not yield an analytical consensus. Seminal studies explored
both comparative revolutions53 and the Russian revolution per se54 from
various social and historical perspectives.
However, one elaborate framework, developed one hundred years ago
by Vilfredo Pareto,55 seems remarkably to fit not only all social
revolutions known to him but also all major ones that were yet to come.
The list can include the Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution, other

50
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, The Process of
Capitalist Production as a Whole (New York: International Publishers,
1967)[1894], 49-69 and passim.
51
Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom, 161-62.
52
Aristotle, Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), Book 5, chapter 1,
paragraph 11. Other translations translate stasis as revolution.
53
Brinton, The Anatomy of Revolution; Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution
in the Netherlands, 1780-1813; Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French
Revolution; Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of
France, Russia, and China; Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World;
Goldstone, Revolutions and Rebellion in the Early Modern World; Goldstone, ed.,
The Encyclopedia of Political Revolutions; Goldstone, ed., Revolutions: Theoretical,
Comparative, and Historical Studies; Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial
Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2009).
54
Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution; Figes, A People’s Tragedy:
A History of the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924; Wade, The Russian Revolution,
1917.
55
Pareto, Manual of Political Economy (1906); Pareto, The Mind and Society: A
Treatise on General Sociology (1916); Pareto, The Rise and Fall of the Elites: An
Application of Theoretical Sociology (1900).
 Loot the Looters 277

Communist revolutions, the National-Socialist revolution, the Spanish

Civil War, anti-colonial revolutions, the Iranian revolution, and even the
post-Communist revolution in the Soviet Union-cum-Russia. Very seldom
since Adam Smith has a social science framework had such a predictive
power confirmed by subsequent natural experiments, with hardly any
exception. All that is left for this section is to arrange this framework
diagrammatically, add the specifying and organizing concept of income
redistribution,56 call it the Neo-Paretian mechanism of revolutions, and
attach a few comments. Figure12-4 lays out the Neo-Paretian framework.

1. Proximate and basic causes

Proximate causes are behavioral and accidental, basic causes are
systemic.57 For example, for fertility analysis, proximate causes are the
mean age at first marriage, the proportion of women married, nutrition,
health, infant mortality, breast feeding patterns, birth control patterns, etc.
Basic causes determine the choice to have or not to have the next child and
include per capita income, the cost of raising children, female education,
female participation in the labor force, and competitive conditions between
families for, and competitive investment into, the success of children. For
economic growth, proximate causes include population growth (and hence
labor force growth), investment in physical capital, education and other
human capital, and global stock of technological knowledge. Basic causes
include endowments of geography (with natural resources, land, and
population density), history, and culture, and also the determinants of the
choice to produce or not to produce additional output: policies, institutions,
and patterns of income redistribution which create incentives for
accumulation of physical and human capital, work ethic and effort,
technological invention, and practical innovation.
The distinction between proximate and basic causes is implicit in
Pareto’s analysis. Although he did not differentiate them explicitly,
implicitly he held this distinction and hierarchy. Indeed, the following
shows that it is inherent in his framework. But his focus is on proximate
causes, and the total mechanism in Figure12-4 is a reconstruction with
interdependencies and feedbacks, which can be called neo-Paretian.

56
Even this insertion, although new, is not novel, for it is implied in Pareto’s work,
and only because of the lack of the concept of income redistribution at the time it is
conflated with income inequality.
57
Social scientists often call them ‘ultimate causes’ but this cuts off the analysis,
because basic causes are pen-ultimate at best, whereas ultimate causes are
ontological.
278 Chapter Eleven

2. Proximate causes
Proximate causes line up in Figure12-4 as follows:
1) The short-sighted self-interest of the elites leads to their
entrenchment, and thus social immobility, often amounting to a dynastic
aristocracy, self-reproduction, eventual homogeneity within the elites,
adverse selection of the least efficient types, and, finally, degeneration and
dysfunctional development of the elites.
2) Internal conflicts emerge along these lines, and hence the arrow in
the row of proximate causes from item 1 to item 2 in the figure. Elites
split, some energetic and ambitious members fall out. These splinters are
joined by dissatisfied descendants of the middle classes which arise out of
economic development. Notice a postscript to Pareto at the bottom of
Figure12-4: economic development with the rising middle classes and
their splinters-cum-revolutionaries may explain the higher frequency of
revolutions in modern times. In all, the elites and their adjoining middle
classes are accompanied by the process which revolutionizes some of their
splinter elements. These splinters become revolutionaries with fervent
ideologies and social demagoguery to appeal both to the new recruits and
to the masses.58 These ideologies may be newfangled, e.g., Marxism and
Communism, National Socialism, and their mixes in various anti-colonial
revolutions and Third World revolutions, or they may draw on and revise
traditional doctrines, such as jihadism, towards social revolutionary
objectives. The choice of ideologies is often instrumental vying for mass
appeal. This relationship forms a positive feedback loop marked by the
double-ended arrow between items 2 and 3 in the row of proximate causes
in the figure.
3) When the entrenched elites do not share wealth broadly and
revolutionary splinters can capitalize on mass grievances and convert them
into social, economic, and political claims, the ever-present, latent or pent-
up, mass discontent transforms into mass mobilization. Again, the positive
feedback loop is at work between items 3 and 2, entailing their mutual
reinforcement. This shortens the distance between discontent and a riot, a
riot and an uprising, and an uprising and a revolt, up towards a full-scale

58
Even The Declaration of Independence was overwrought on the account of
British absolute despotism and absolute tyranny. Samuel Johnson was less subtle:
‘How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?’
Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny: An Answer to the Resolutions and Address
of the American Congress [1775], in The Works of Samuel Johnson (Troy, New
York: Pafraets & Company, 1913) [1775], vol. 14, 93-144. This point, in turn, was
and still is widely used in favor of redistributive revolutions.
 Loot the Looters 279

revolution.
4) Apart from these social developments, there are always random
events which may pass by without consequences, but, given items 1, 2,
and 3, may act as trigger points and mechanisms. The arrow from these
trigger points to mass mobilization, from item 4 to item 3 in the row of
proximate causes in the figure, indicates this potentiality. These random
events, a random walk through history, include wars, natural and social
calamities including crop failures, global shocks (e.g., spread of
revolutions from outside; the Great Depression; financial contagion,
default, and mass impoverishment), resource shocks (the rise of global
mineral resource prices and/or collapse of local commodity prices, an
overall deterioration of the terms of trade, and impoverishment), and
various policy shocks leading to loss of livelihood and life. Trigger points
and mechanism are a random walk, but this exactly explains why the
timing of so many revolutions, including the French and the Russian,
came, to an observer, unpredictably.

3. Necessary and sufficient conditions

A combination of these four developments produces a social
disequilibrium which ends up in a revolution. These four proximate causes
constitute necessary conditions and jointly sufficient conditions for the
occurrence of revolutions. To wit, nary a social revolution has ever
occurred without all four of them being present, and revolutions have
never failed to occur when all four conditions were present. This is a
simple empirical rule, verifiable by evidence from comparative revolutions
and readily falsifiable by counter-examples. It is important that this
framework yields a falsifiable proposition. It can be readily tested and
refuted.
Its special feature is that it has predictive power and can predict every
revolution but only after the fact, after the revolution had occurred. The
presence of the random trigger mechanism described above and listed in
Figure12-4 makes revolutions unpredictable in advance. Their timing,
shape, and scope are inherently unpredictable. This conjunction of
predictive power observed after the fact and unpredictability in advance is
in itself a point that corresponds to the actual course of events in
comparative revolutions.
Both the set of the four necessary and sufficient conditions and the
unpredictable trigger points seem to closely fit all social revolutions on the
list in Table12-1, those that Pareto knew, such as the French, Dutch,
British, American, and Italian, and those that came after his work, the
280 Chapter Eleven

Russian, the Chinese, and other Communist, socialist, and anti-colonial

revolutions, and, to a large extent, the National-Socialist revolution. The
Iranian revolution is, paradoxically or not, a most fitting example. The
anti-Communist revolutions in Eastern Europe and Russia also make a
close fit.

4. Basic causes
Aristotle, Pareto, and their followers viewed high inequality of income
and high social and political inequality at the base of social revolutions
and their causes. As a general insight, the point is 2,350 years old. Pareto’s
contribution was to find and quantify high income inequality in most
historical and contemporary societies and to derive proximate causes from
this basic cause. High income inequality transmits into social disequilibrium
and revolutions through the three proximate causes and their link with the
fourth proximate cause, the random trigger. Figure12-4 depicts this
relationship by downward arrows from basic causes to the row of
proximate causes.
However, high income inequality is merely a statistical representation
of social conditions. Governments and elite groups conduct social inequality
and political inequality, but they do not conduct income inequality.
Instead, they conduct income redistribution which is broader in its control
over people’s income and may redistribute income without creating high
inequality. Empirically, while high income inequality was a necessary
precondition of many revolutions, it was not such for all revolutions, but
income redistribution was. The most conspicuous examples are the
American revolution, which was indeed a tax revolt,59 and the anti-
Communist revolutions in Russia and Eastern Europe in 1989-91. Income
inequality was relatively low in both cases (as documented above in the
case of Communist economies). But social and political inequality were
high and redistribution of income by the government was high, and hence
the joint effect of these conditions was that the power of the government
over people’s income was high.
High income redistribution adds to basic causes, and is the central
basic cause which leads to proximate causes of revolutions. Figure12-3
and discussion thereof earlier delineated transfer of income from producers
to non-producers of output for this income, both governmental and non-
governmental elites. High income redistribution is implied in high income
inequality exactly because the latter is a statistical representation of the

59
Rabushka, Taxation in Colonial America.
 Loot the Looters 281

former. This point is added in red letters in Figure12-4 to the basic causes,
and this completes the causal link.

5. The qualitative effect and the feedback loop

What perpetuates redistributive revolutions is their qualitative effect
and the feedback loop of income redistribution. Redistributive social
revolutions merely transfer wealth and power over people’s income from
one elite to another, usually through policies and institutions (described
above) which transfer factor income shares. This perpetuates high income
redistribution and ends up where it started: that is, the qualitative effect of
revolutions recycles as the basic cause of revolutions. The right-hand
arrow in Figure12-4 depicts this positive feedback loop which completes
the neo-Paretian mechanism of social revolutions.
The opposite outcome, which breaks out of this redistributive cycle, is
also consistent with this framework. It follows that revolutions that end or
minimize income redistribution, like the Glorious and the American
revolutions did (and ended slavery eighty years later), do not transfer
income and power over people’s income to a new elite from the old. They
break up the redistributive circuit. The feedback from the effects of non-
redistributive revolutions to causes is to minimize them in turn. The basic
causes of social revolutions phase out. The neo-Paretian approach fits both
redistributive and non-redistributive revolutions.

6. Resolved and unresolved empirical issues

The course of events after the publication of Pareto’s complete
framework in 1916 can be viewed as the natural experiment, indeed a
series of natural experiments in Russia, Germany, Hungary, China, Spain,
Iran, and numerous Latin American, Asian, and African countries. The
Russian revolution was the first natural experiment in line after Pareto’s
treatise was published in 1916. To this big natural experiment, which
started in 1917 and ended, by different views, in 1922, 1953, or 1991, one
can add a small test. Most recent and authoritative literature that
summarizes the Russian revolution60 can be reviewed against Pareto’s
framework in Figure12-4. This literature strives to explain why and how
the Russian revolution of 1917 and thereafter had taken place. It does not

60
Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution; Figes, A People’s Tragedy:
A History of the Russian Revolution, 1891-1924; Wade, The Russian Revolution,
1917.
282 Chapter Eleven

cite Pareto and does not apply his framework. And yet, if one is to write
the summary of the findings in this literature, one would end up with
Pareto’s framework in Figure 11-4. The rest in this literature is the rich
factual documentation. Judgments and evaluations of the good, the bad,
and the ugly in the Russian revolution differ in the literature. Emphases
and approaches also differ, either toward the more political, or more
social, or more historical. But the social science analysis ends up with the
explanatory conditions that Pareto envisaged.
The causal issues of the Russian revolution are largely resolved. New
research may add additional empirical panorama and explain specific
events better than the existing literature. However, the causes of the
Russian and other revolutions predict if revolutions occur when they occur
(after they had already occurred), not why the revolutionaries actually won
in a given revolution. The latter is a separate issue, just as an explanation
of why one or another or both sides start a war is different from why this
or that side won. The neo-Paretian framework adds no insight as to why
the Communists won in Russia in 1917, and why they and not their
various opponents won in the five-year civil war that followed.
This remains a major unresolved empirical issue. The literature lists
many specific explanations why the Communists won in 1917-22 but they
remain unsatisfactory, because they apply to other revolutions such as the
Spanish civil war in which the other side, the Nationalists, won and the
Republicans lost. A checklist of factors is similar in the Russian and
Spanish revolutions and civil wars. 1) In both cases, the revolutionary side
was the government and the counter-revolutionary side rose against it. The
government could tax the population and mobilize human and physical
resources easier than the opposite side. 2) In both cases, the revolutionary
government held major cities including the capital. 3) Both sides in both
countries had large organized military forces which sustained long, multi-
year confrontations. 4) There was a partial mass support of both sides in
both countries and also popular resistance to both sides. 5) There were
internal conflicts and confrontations on each side. 6) There were terror,
brutality, and oppression from both sides in both countries for enforcement
of their causes and beyond. 7) Both sides in both countries made major
policy and military errors and sustained serious setbacks. Many a time, the
outcome of the war could turn either way. 8) The struggle was complicated
by ethnic and regional conflicts within each country which played against
both sides. 9) There was foreign assistance to both sides (in the
Communist case in Russia, the international brigades, as in Spain). The
Nationalists in Spain received more foreign military assistance than the
Whites and other anti-Communist forces in Russia, but the Republicans
 Loot the Looters 283

also received more foreign military assistance, especially from the Soviet
Union, than did Russian Communists in their revolution. 10) The
Nationalist side in Spain and the White side in Russia had a national and
religious appeal. There were many other similarities, and the Spanish
Republican side had one major advantage over Russian Communists:
legitimacy. But the latter won and the former lost.
The literature says what is there left to say—that is, that the winning
side was better organized, better managed, more efficient in mobilization
of resources, and more forceful in achieving its objectives. Which is all
true, after the fact, but this is equivalent to saying that the strongest side
won in both countries, or, simpler, it won because it won. It is probably the
case that the causes of Communist victory in the Russian civil war are
separate from the causes of the Russian revolution. Still, a victory in a civil
war cannot be explained predominantly in military terms like a foreign
war. Social forces and social causes that led to the Communist victory in
Russia in 1917-22 in the aftermath of the Russian revolution remained an
unresolved empirical issue left for future research. This suggestion can be
easily repudiated by naming existing research, which has a more
satisfactory explanation than that the winning side was stronger and
performed better.

The Magnitudes. The Russian Revolution

in the March of All Others
The great magnitudes are the most obvious, the most accepted, and the
least-studied defining criterion of revolutions. The Russian revolution
serves as a useful starting point—for the changes it wrought are
quantitatively and qualitatively larger than life, often literally, on every
conceivable dimension of human society.

1. Dimensions
Any construct of human society includes numerous dimensions,
variously important in the eye of its constructor. One possible list of
dimensions, not necessarily more inclusive or more efficiently structured
than others, and probably overlapping, can run like this: 1) The level of
economic development measured by per capita GDP; 2) the level of
economic development measured by the shares of industry, agriculture,
and services in GDP; 3) the level of human development measured by
various indicators of education, health, civil rights, and civic participation
of the broad population; 4) the level of human development measured by
284 Chapter Eleven

the equality of use of civil and political instruments regardless of gender,

ethnicity, race, social group, religion, physical disability, sexual preferences,
and other articles of personal origin; 5) the level of technological
development measured by the proportional access of citizens to advanced
global technology and accumulation of human capital for this access; 6)
the level of institutional development and the type of property rights (e.g.,
state, local government, cooperative, or private ownership) as opposed to
common property; 7) the level of legal development and the rule of law
including contract enforcement; 8) the extent of political power measured
by the extent of control by the government over civic, social, and political
life, the converse of which is the extent of political liberty; 9) the extent of
governmental regimentation of ordinary daily life such as housing, dress
code, eating arrangements, gender relations, upbringing of children, and
other family matters; 10) the extent of governmental reshaping of the
ethnic and racial composition of the population, up to deportations or
extermination of various demographic groups; 11) the extent of
governmental control of intellectual and cultural activities; 12) the extent
of governmental control of religious life; 13) the extent of penetration by
official ideology of science, intellectual activities, and cultural life; 14) the
extent of indoctrination of the citizenry by official ideology through work
and non-work activities, education and mass media; 15) the extent of
conversion of official ideology into a secular pseudo-religious cult with
doctrinairism and quasi-worshiping rituals; 16) the forcefulness of the
attempt to change and recreate human nature, to make a new man (and
woman); 17) the extent of governmental control of economic transactions,
the converse of which is the extent of economic liberty; 18) the extent of
state-forced production such as forced labor, forced savings, forced
investment, forced delivery of output, and forced production of output; 19)
the extent of income redistribution from producers to, and by non-
producers of, value-added for this income.
Revolutions change the society in great magnitudes on all or many of
these dimensions in various direction, increasing or reducing the
quantities. It is these magnitudes of multi-dimensional change that make
them total revolutions. The Russian revolution, and its resulting state of
the Soviet Union (1917-1991), especially in the periods of War
Communism in 1918-1921 and under Joseph Stalin in 1929-1953, was an
unquestionable champion in dimensions from number 8 through number
19. Only Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, China during the period of
the Cultural Revolution in 1966-76, Albania, and North Korea went
further than the Soviet Union on most of them, and Nazi Germany outdid
the Soviet Union on dimensions number 10 and 15.
 Loot the Looters 285

2. Taxonomies
This multi-dimensional approach to revolutions yields or enables
several taxonomies.
The first taxonomy derives from dimension number 19 on the above
list: the extent of income redistribution from producers to, and by non-
producers of, value-added for this income. This taxonomy was introduced
earlier in Table12-1 and can now be quantified. A major increase in the
extent of income redistribution or perpetuation of great magnitudes of
income redistribution after the change of elites defines redistributive
revolutions listed in column 2 of Table12-1. Major decreases or
minimization of income redistribution on this dimension characterize non-
redistributive revolutions in column 3 of Table12-1. To recapitulate, the
extent of income redistribution in GDP can be approximated as the
weighted average of marginal rates of income redistribution in all
transactions in the flows of funds between all agents, weighted by the
share of given transactions in the total value-added output. Major change
or perpetuation of income redistribution can be empirically defined as
exceeding 15 percent of GDP in accordance with factor income shares in
Figure12-3.
The next taxonomy helps make a quantitative or at least a quasi-
quantitative distinction in various events and upheavals between
revolutions, major and minor coups d’etat, and political and economic
reforms.

Table 11-5

Major change affecting at least Extent of income redistribution (#19)

15 percent in
No Yes
No 1. Minor coup 3. Economic reform
Extent of government
political power (#8) 2. Major coup or
Yes 4. Revolution
political reform

1) When power changes hands from one elite to another or from one
political group to another in a social upheaval, and the extent of
government political power (dimension number 8) and income redistribution
(dimension number 19) do not undergo major changes, it is a minor coup
d’etat. Examples abound in Latin America, Asia, and Africa in both non-
redistributive (e.g., South Korea before democracy was established) and
redistributive countries.
286 Chapter Eleven

2) When the extent of income redistribution does not significantly

change but political liberalization or a shift to a more dictatorial power
takes place, this constitutes a political reform or a major coup. The term
“reform” is neutral. It is merely taxonomic. Its appearance along major
coups does not discount the effect of oppression of the population as a
result of dictatorial coups.
3) When the power structure remains the same, be it a representative or
an authoritarian government, but the extent of income redistribution
increases or decreases by at least 15 percent of GDP, it is an economic
reform. It may be a rollback of the welfare state which is often called the
Reagan revolution and the Thatcher revolution, or a shift from centralized
central planning to labor management in Communist Yugoslavia under
Joseph Broz Tito, or a shift to reformed central planning, known as the
New Economic Mechanism or goulash socialism in Hungary in 1968-89,
or a reform from terror-enforced central planning under Joseph Stalin to a
more-incentive oriented central planning with the welfare state under his
successors. In this taxonomy, an increase in income redistribution during
industrialization and collectivization of agriculture under Joseph Stalin,
what was often called the Second Communist Revolution, and similar
squeezing during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in
China under Mao Zedong, also represent economic reforms within the
existing Communist systems. Economic reforms can be non-redistributive
and redistributive in direction. A socialist economic reform in Chile under
Salvador Allende was redistributive.
4) When both political and economic systems undergo major changes
in a historical upheaval, affecting at least 15 percent of GDP and relevant
political interactions, either increasing or decreasing the extent of both
income redistribution and political power, this taxonomy defines this
conjunction as a full-scale, genuine revolution. This conjunction sub-
divides into various combinations. For example, ironically, the Augusto
Pinochet coup in Chile, which increased dictatorial political power and
reduced income redistribution, qualifies here as a non-redistributive
revolution. Ditto the Nationalist victory in the Spanish civil war. Again,
this is not to discount victimization of the population. Counter-revolutions
are revolutions by definition, because the magnitude remains, only the sign
changes. The Egyptian revolution starting in 1952 and ending perhaps in
1971, the Iranian revolution since 1979, and other anti-colonial and
redistributive revolutions readily demonstrate relevant changes on both
dimensions in this taxonomy. Whether or not the reign of Juan Peron in
Argentina qualifies is an empirical question of measurement of economic
and political changes during his rule. However, the Russian revolution, the
 Loot the Looters 287

Chinese revolution, other Communist revolutions, including the Cuban

revolution, the National-Socialist revolution in Germany, and even the
Fascist revolution in Italy all qualify by this definition, measurement of the
magnitudes, and taxonomy. All revolutions listed in Table12-1 fit this
measurement and taxonomy.

3. Multi-dimensional mapping
The next taxonomy is more narrow but it enables a more detailed
multi-dimensional mapping. It is based on various combinations in the
positions of countries on dimensions 17 and 19, the extent of government
economic power and control over economic transactions as a share of GDP
and the extent of income redistribution as a share of GDP, respectively. To
recapitulate, the extent of governmental economic control can be
approximated as the weighted average of marginal rates of government
control of transactions in the circular flows of funds, weighted by the share
of each transaction in total output. The average rate of income
redistribution is the weighted average of marginal rates of income
redistribution between all agents across all transactions in the entire flows
of funds, weighted by the share of the given transaction in the total value-
added output. Figure12-5 charts this two-dimensional world in and out of
revolutions.

The Evolution
The principal problem of survival and longevity of redistributive
revolutions is enforcement of their power. Apart from external shocks,
they adapt to internal shocks and constraints such as active and passive
resistance, and thus evolve.

1. The enforcement problem

Herewith a brief sketch which must be expanded and refined by further
research. The issue is not only why revolutions win or lose but how, if
they win, they sustain: how revolutionary or post-revolutionary regimes
operate and evolve. Like a contractual government is enforced through the
political and judicial systems, non-contractual systems also solve
enforcement problems and create rules. Russia helps show how
enforcement is solved and the system evolves.
Enforcement is specific. To say that revolutions are forced instead of
contractual, is only the beginning; and to say, like the revisionists do, that
288 Chapter Eleven

there was a sort of an implicit contract with participation, is also a

beginning, still needing to explain specific mechanisms of enforcement
which include force and contract and natural evolution and adaptation, and
why some mechanisms work and others do not. From this, one can go and
see how the Russian revolution took shape. It is an evolution of a
revolution, or within a revolution.

2. The mechanism of enforcement and its evolution

1) First, it was War Communism when the government confiscated and
redistributed output but did not impose production quotas.
Vladimir I. Lenin, the founder of the Russian revolution and the Soviet
Communist state, articulated it in 1921:

In the beginning of 1918 we counted on a certain period when peaceful

development would be possible. . . . Partly under the influence of
overwhelming military tasks and of that seemingly desperate situation in
which the republic then was, at the end of the Imperial War [WWI], under
the influence of these circumstances and an array of others, we made a
mistake that we decided to produce an immediate direct transition to
Communist production and distribution. We decided that peasants through
the requisition delivery quotas [po razverstke] will give us the necessary
quantity of bread, and we redistribute [razverstaem] it across industrial
plants and factories—and, voila, this will make for us a Communist
production and distribution.

Can’t say that we precisely so definitively and vividly had drawn such a
blueprint for ourselves, but approximately in this spirit we actually acted.
This is unfortunately a fact. I am saying: unfortunately, because an
experience not quite long led us to the conviction of the error of this
edifice, which contradicts what we wrote earlier about the transition from
capitalism to socialism when we assumed that without a period of socialist
accounting and control it would be impossible to approach even the lowest
stage of Communism.61

There was forced delivery but no enforceable mechanism of forced

production. This had failed, as Lenin pointed out in 1921 but did not
explain why. It failed because without forced production (output quotas),
people reduce production to subsistence to avoid confiscation of surpluses
through forced delivery.

61
Vladimir I. Lenin, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii [Complete Collected Works], vol.
44 (Moscow, 1963), 157-58.
 Loot the Looters 289

2) Then, after a mixed period of the NEP, they found that they needed
to impose output quotas (forced production, central planning). And thus
Communist central plan economies came out as we know them. But it is
hard to impose output quotas on family farms. Hence, collectivization of
agriculture became necessary. It was found by trial and error, by
evolutionary adaptation.
3) Then enterprise managers tried to reduce output quotas because
these are taut quotas. There are three ways to enforce output quotas. One
way, as Hitler explained, contrasting himself with Stalin, is to retain
private property and make private owners responsible for fulfilling the
plan. Another is to have collective ownership and make wages and
bonuses dependent on performance—a Yugoslavian workers management.
The third way, Soviet-type, is state ownership; but then there are no
owners to hold responsible and managers are sabotaging output quotas.
The enforcement mechanism becomes crucial. Stalin used permanent
purges. Khrushchev used regular shake-ups of institutions and managers.
4) This last method actually gave the best economic growth: no purges,
but no tenure, and no networking, when there is constant re-organization.
Mao Zedong combined purges and shakeups all at once, in a peculiar mix.
Brezhnev gave managers some tenure, but this was a bad incentive, and
economic growth slowed down. Andropov and Gorbachev tried to
accelerate it by disciplining managers and workers, but then Gorbachev
tried to reform, and this dismantled the system of forced production.
5) Once the totality was lost, it started to unravel. It was spontaneous
de-centralization, from ethnic clashes (for redistribution of resources, land,
grants, power, etc.) to provinces holding up output and not trading for
money with other provinces, only for barter, which means that central plan
enforcement dissipated in 1989-90, and the economy collapsed. Whereas
North Korea stands—by starving its citizens like Stalin did.

3. Comparative enforcement in Nazi Germany

and the Soviet Union
Nazi Germany found a more efficient model of forced production
under central planning than the Soviet Union and achieved higher
economic growth and industrial development.62 Central planning in Nazi

62
Richard J. Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1994); Richard J. Overy, The Nazi Economic Recovery, 1932-1938
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Adam J. Tooze, The Wages of
290 Chapter Eleven

Germany combined near-total government with universal redistribution of

income, but based both on private property. This secured better incentives
than Communist central planning based on state ownership. Owners and
managers in Nazi Germany had more incentives in meeting quotas of
forced production and forced delivery than bureaucratic managers in
Communist central plan economies. This is why Joseph Stalin shot
managers to enforce central planning, while Hitler employed profit to the
same end.
Specifically, the Nazi regime preferred family-owned firms as opposed
to shareholding corporations because it is easier for the government to
control production under concentrated rather than dispersed ownership.63
Further concentration was achieved through forced cartelization of private
industries under government planning.64 Smaller private businesses were
also integrated into vertical and horizontal guilds. The government forced
private companies to make subsidized loans to a conglomerate of new
industrial plants which was jointly owned by the government and private
concerns (Herman Goering Werke). At the same time, the government
subsidized plant expansion, research, and development among private

Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Allen Lane,
2006).
63
‘I absolutely insist on protecting private property. It is natural and salutary that
the individual should be inspired by the wish to devote a part of the income from
his work to building up and expanding a family estate. Suppose the estate consists
of a factory. I regard it as axiomatic, in the ordinary way, that this factory will be
better run by one of the members of the family than it would be by a State
functionary—providing, of course, that the family remains healthy. In this sense,
we must encourage private initiative. On the other hand, I am distinctly opposed to
property in the form of anonymous participation in societies of shareholders. This
sort of shareholder produces no other effort but that of investing his money, and
thus he becomes the chief beneficiary of other people’s effort: the workers’ zest for
their job, the ideas of an engineer of genius, the skill of an experienced
administrator. . . . Such gains belong by right to the nation, which alone can draw a
legitimate profit from them. In this way, at least, those who create these profits—
the engineers and workers—are entitled to be the beneficiaries. In my view, joint-
stock companies should pass in their entirety under the control of the State’.
Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941-1944: His Private Conversations (New York: Enigma
Books, 2000), 362-63.
64
This summary draws on Gerhard Mollin, Montankonzerne und Drittes Reich:
Der Gegensatz Zwischen Monopolindustrie und Befehlswirschaft in der Deutschen
Rustung und Expansion, 1936-1944 (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht,
1988); and Klaus P. Fischer, Nazi Germany: A New History (New York: Continuum,
1995), 374-83.
 Loot the Looters 291

firms across industries; financed construction; and provided relief to

private farms and agricultural businesses.
All these subsidies accrued in exchange for meeting output quotas.
This is the principal systemic feature of central planning familiar from the
experience of Communist countries. It combines investment subsidies and
the cash flow subsidies for paying off arrears (known as the soft budget
constraint). In addition to output quotas of forced production, the Nazi
government capped profits, managed investment, and imposed wage and
price controls. Forced labor also resembled Communist countries, even in
minor details. Work books (Arbeitsbuch) restricted job change. All males
had to participate in compulsory labor service; youth were also inducted
into seasonal agricultural service. Like Communist central plan
economies, Germany functioned as a nation-enterprise, but it consisted
largely of privately owned firms.

Conclusion
To invoke Vilfredo Pareto again, all revolutions are social frauds. They
merely transfer wealth and power over people’s income from one elite to
another. The makers of the Russian revolution inadvertently proved
Pareto’s point when they condensed Marxism to the slogan “expropriation
of expropriators”, or, for the natives, “loot the looters!”, and then took
power over people’s income in toto. In Pareto’s framework, this is a self-
perpetuating cycle. Revolutions are self-perpetuating social frauds. And to
add to Pareto: All revolutions are social frauds except when they end
transfers of people’s income. But then they break the perpetual cycle and
end revolutions. That is, it is never just “loot the looters”. It is always
either loot the looted, or end the looting.
What Pareto put at the center of revolutions can be called, in
accounting terms, the mechanism of income redistribution from the
populace by the elites and of government control over this transfer. This
essay used the special case of the Russian revolution to highlight the
centrality of income redistribution vs. the centrality of ending it in shaping
the modern world. This approach placed the Russian revolution in the
general context of comparative revolutions. The contrast between the two
types of revolutions, redistributive and non-redistributive, corresponds to
the great divergence in the world today in terms of wealth, health,
knowledge, liberty, and justice, among other numerous dimensions.
The rejection of Communism from the body of society in Russia and
elsewhere also tried to break the century-old revolutionary cycle, as if to
recall the Sermon:
292 Chapter Eleven

Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but

inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are
grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? So, every sound tree
bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears evil fruit. A sound tree cannot bear
evil fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear
good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. (Mt. 7:15-19)
 CHAPTER TWELVE

DEVELOPMENT WITH CHINESE

CHARACTERISTICS:
ASIA’S SINIC REVOLUTIONS IN GLOBAL
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

WILLIAM RATLIFF

Many historians have trouble seeing the woods for the trees in their
fields of study, but not the two scholars who most inspired this book—Eric
Voegelin and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. Their lifelong concerns were to
examine how humans fit into the long flow of history. In the 1930s
Rosenstock-Huessy argued that each European revolution he analyzed had
“started permanent cultural processes to mould a specific character out of
plastic humanity”. Believing itself to be the “vessel of eternal, revealed,
definite truth”, he argued that each was ultimately a “creative act that sets
free new potentialities of mankind”.1 Here I will examine the possibility
that revolutions in what Voegelin called “the Chinese area” might be
regarded as a step in that sequence of revolutions. In his study of ecumenic
empires, Voegelin wrote:

1
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man
(New York: William Morrow and Company, 1938), 457, 467, 714. Harvard law
professor Harold Berman wrote that Rosenstock-Huessy believed the historian
‘should count not only days and years but also, and above all, generations and
centuries if he is to ‘avoid the Scylla of disordered detail and the Charybdis of
meaningless generalities’. Harold J. Berman, Law and Revolution (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003), 21. In a similar but somewhat
narrower context, David Shambaugh, in his China’s Communist Party: Atrophy
and Adaptation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 23, notes that
‘most studies of Chinese politics today focus on increasingly smaller units of
analysis and fail to generate broader views or predictions. . . . The China field in
the United States seems to know more and more about less and less’.
294 Chapter Twelve

Parallel in time with the rise of ecumenic empires in the Near East and the
Mediterranean, the Chinese area . . . transforms itself into an imperially
organized civilization that understands itself as the empire of the tien-hsia
[everything under Heaven], of the ecumene.

He continued that “China was never one society among others; from its
beginnings the history of Chinese society was for its members, to the best
of their knowledge, the history of mankind”.2
Before moving ahead I will define several repeatedly-used terms. I
define “culture” broadly as the mix of values, beliefs, attitudes,
motivations and commitments that are shared by most members of a given
society and to a substantial degree guide their thinking and actions. My
study focuses mainly on the long tradition of Chinese culture that has
provided critical links and catalysts across Asia and the millennia in
economic, institutional and other terms. I often refer to this tradition with
the term “Sinic”, as did Harvard East Asian historian Edwin O. Reischauer
in 1974, a tradition found mainly in the PRC, Taiwan, Japan, Korea,
Singapore, Hong Kong and Vietnam. 3 I also often use “Confucian” to
designate traditional Chinese culture, for that philosophy was central to
Chinese beliefs and institutions for some 2,500 years. Confucianism is the
most inclusive, commonly-used term available, aside perhaps from
“tradition”, which is also found in these pages. A century ago, many
educated Chinese considered Confucianism an “old curiosity shop” of
worn-out, indeed downright reactionary, ideas,4 but in recent decades it
has regained some of its previous value for analysis and propaganda, as
discussed below. I say little about two other major forces in China, namely
Daoism and Buddhism, because as Columbia University Sinologist
William Theodore de Bary has noted, “they had less of a role in defining

2
Eric Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, vol. 4 of Order and History, ed. Michael
Franz, vol. 17 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 2000), 340, 353; see chap. 6 (‘The Chinese Ecumene’) and chap. 7
(‘Universal Humanity’).
3
Edwin O. Reischauer, ‘The Sinic World in Perspective’, Foreign Affairs 52
(1974), noted that ‘the higher cultures’ of China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam
‘derive basically from the civilization of ancient North China’. Reischauer defined
‘Sinic’ Asia as those peoples and nations ‘shaped over the millennia by Confucian
ethical concepts and the tradition of a centralized empire’. Private conversations
with Reischauer lead me to conclude that he would consider all seven entities
mentioned here to be Sinic.
4
See Zhou Cezong, The May Fourth Movement; intellectual revolution in modern
China (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1960).
 Development with Chinese Characteristics 295

those institutions and ideas most involved in the civil societies of East
Asia as a whole and their modern transformation”.5
Finally, I must note that I have substituted the phrase “Development
with Chinese Characteristics” (DCC) for the PRC’s omnipresent “Socialism
with Chinese Characteristics” because the former phrasing makes it clear
that my focus is not on a couple of decades of CCP rule but on a couple of
millennia of Chinese tradition. My phrase more accurately describes how
Chinese tradition has contributed to many of the broad changes that have
occurred in China itself and also in East and Southeast Asia over the past
century, and how those changes are often related to the distant past. Top
CCP analysts have acknowledged privately the accuracy of DCC while
concluding that the party is not likely to use the phrase in the foreseeable
future or ever. 6 An examination of this tradition and its modern
manifestations enables me to then describe in broad terms what has
happened in different parts of Sinic Asia and note (1) relationships to
tradition, (2) relevance to other so-called developing countries, and (3)
why China attracts more attention than other often more profoundly
developed and even more “revolutionary” Sinic countries. All of this will
factor into my consideration of whether the twenty-first century may bring
a convergence of the Western and Asian ecumenic ages that Voegelin
mentioned. Should this happen, it would indeed constitute an important
step toward the affirmation of what he called a “universal humanity in
history”.7

China and Economic Development

Throughout the nineteenth century, China was plagued by dynastic
decline and Chinese leaders and people were often overwhelmed by

5
William Theodore de Bary, East Asian Civilizations (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1988), ix.
6
Roughly a decade into the new millennium, a Chinese colleague lecturing at the
CCP Central Party School in Beijing wrote to tell me that he and his colleagues
were comparing the phrases ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ and
‘Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics’. He asked which I thought best and I
replied that I considered ‘Development with Chinese Characteristics’ more
accurate. He immediately reported back that many of his colleagues agreed. Since
then I have talked with two directors of the Party School who also agreed that the
‘development’ phrase is the most accurate today, but they continued that, since the
CCP’s ultimate mission is ‘socialism’, the current terminology will remain as
pointing to that ultimate goal.
7
See Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 410.
296 Chapter Twelve

rapidly expanding instability and sometimes bloody uprisings. The worst

of the latter was the Taiping Rebellion (1850-64), which took about thirty
million lives. 8 China’s domestic unraveling both invited and was
exacerbated by foreign interventions and occupations. The first half of the
twentieth century was similarly mixed. There were the dramatic demise of
the traditional dynastic system, wars among Chinese groups—culminating
in the civil war between the CCP headed by Mao and the Guomindang
(GMD, formerly abbreviated KMT) under Chiang Kai-shek—and the
brutal Japanese invasion. From 1931 until the end of World War Two, the
CCP and Japan disrupted GMD reform efforts that were nonetheless far
more successful than is usually acknowledged (see below). Japan thus
enabled the CCP to survive almost certain extermination by the GMD, so
weakened the latter as to hasten its flight to Taiwan at the end of the
1940s, and guaranteed the victory of the CCP that after more than sixty
years still rules China in what in some respects resembles a new dynasty.
This recent history has given many observers the impression that the
Chinese people have always been among the world’s poorest and most
downtrodden, but that conclusion is unwarranted. Two decades ago,
University of Michigan Sinologist Albert Feuerwerker argued that
between 1000 and 1500 C.E.

no comparison of agricultural productivity, industrial skill, commercial

complexity, urban wealth, or standard of living (not to mention
bureaucratic sophistication and cultural achievement) would place Europe
on a par with the Chinese empire.

However, Feuerwerker continued that what occurred in China then was

“pre-modern growth”, which is to say that though total production
increased at times, there was “little change in per capita production and
consumption”.9 In a study for the Paris-based Organization for Economic
Co-Operation and Development (OECD), Angus Maddison concluded:

Already in the tenth century, it [China] was the world’s leading economy
in terms of per capita income and this leadership lasted until the fifteenth
century. It outperformed Europe in levels of technology, the intensity with

8
Richard McGregor, in his The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist
Rulers (New York: Harper, 2010), 230, called the Great Leap Forward ‘the worst
man-made famine in recorded history’.
9
Albert Feuerwerker, ‘Chinese Economic History in Comparative Perspective’, in
Paul Ropp, ed., Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese
Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 225-26, 235.
 Development with Chinese Characteristics 297

which it used its natural resources and its capacity for administering a huge
territorial empire.

However, Maddison continued, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth

centuries Europe “gradually overtook China in real income, technological
and scientific capacity”. In the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth
centuries, “China’s performance actually declined in a world where
economic progress greatly accelerated”.10
Here I will note, but not try to answer, one of the great puzzles of
world history, documented in terms of per capita growth by Maddison.
Why did a country that had produced so much in wealth, science, culture
and other areas for two thousand years largely abdicate future scientific
developments—but not all cultural and other achievements—to the West
from roughly 1500 C.E. to the beginning of the twenty-first century? The
collapse of China’s productivity plagued the great writer on Chinese
science, Joseph Needham, as it has many other historians in all fields. To
what degree was it a sense of culturally and historically-based superiority,
as suggested by the Qianlong emperor’s smug rejection of British envoy
Lord Macartney’s proposals for bilateral relations in 1793 with the
comment, “We possess all things . . .”. If I cannot provide a definitive
explanation of why China shifted into low gear in scientific developments,
we can see the consequences of its shift in most of the matters discussed in
this essay.
Mao Zedong’s era, and particularly the catastrophic Great Leap
Forward and Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, left China devastated
and economically far behind non-communist Sinic Asia. 11 Even before
Mao launched the Great Leap, non-communist Sinic Asia had begun
profound economic and political reforms. Only after the demise of the
Great Helmsman in 1976 did the CCP adopt a more pragmatic, market-
oriented economic program on an increasingly global scale. Vietnam
finally followed suit a full decade later, and in 2011 only North Korea
among Asia’s Sinic countries stubbornly persisted in hopeless stagnation.
Between 1980 and 2010 China’s average annual growth rate, according to
official figures, was just about 10%. Gordon Chang has argued that the
official statistics “may understate the extent of the expansion due to

10
Angus Maddison, Chinese Economic Performance in the Long Run: 960-2030
AD. Second edition, revised and updated (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2007), 15.
Michael Bernstam explores Maddison’s findings in more detail in another chapter
of this volume.
11
See Frank Dikotter, Mao’s Great Famine (London: Bloomsbury, 2010).
298 Chapter Twelve

undercounting the most vibrant part of the economy, the private sector”.12
But Maddison and many others think the PRC figures inflate the actual
rate of development. An OECD study in 2007 tries to adjust the per capita
GDP growth rate to account for what it considers scarce and manipulated
data, putting the average growth between 1978 and 2003 at 6.6%. The only
economies in the world that came even close to that growth rate during
those decades, according to Maddison’s figures, were those in South
Korea (5.6%), Taiwan (4.7%), Singapore (4.2%) and Hong Kong (3.9%).13
All of these high-performers are non-communist Sinic countries that had
been as poor as typical African and Latin American countries just decades
earlier—until they alone among “developing” countries leaped into the
developed world. Despite rapid recent growth, the PRC and Vietnam have
not yet even come close to doing the same.
General living standards in the PRC rose dramatically during the
1980s, a period of fervent entrepreneurship that University of Hawaii
Professor Kate Zhou has called “a spontaneous, unorganized, leaderless,
non-ideological and apolitical movement” driven by what I will discuss
below as “People’s” or “Market” Confucianism.14 However, after a growth
explosion through entrepreneurial capitalism in the Chinese countryside
during the 1980s, the course shifted again, though less drastically, after the
Tiananmen tragedy. Beginning in the 1990s the highly productive private
sector, particularly in the countryside, was increasingly replaced by an
urban-based state capitalism that depended more heavily on the CCP, state
involvement in industry, and foreign direct investment (FDI). The national
GDP continued to grow at roughly ten percent, but the average Chinese
got a significantly decreasing percentage of that growth.15
An economic and propagandistic leap forward for the PRC occurred
with the global financial crisis that exploded on the world in 2008,
triggered by events in the United States but soon involving most of the
world. China’s temporary slump in exports bottomed out by mid-2009 and
exports were back in positive territory by the end of that year. A 2010
study of Asia and the Pacific by the World Bank, called Emerging
Stronger from the Crisis, argued that developing East Asia, and
particularly China, were “leading the global rebound, and returning to the

12
Gordon Chang, ‘Google and China’s Changing Economic Paradigm’, China
Brief, The Jamestown Foundation, 1 April 2010, at 7.
13
See Maddison, Chinese Economic Performance, 62.
14
Kate Zhou, How the Farmers Changed China (Boulder, Colorado: Westview
Press, 1996), 1 and passim.
15
Yasheng Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 237.
 Development with Chinese Characteristics 299

pre-crisis levels of real GDP” far more rapidly than the developed world.16
In large part that continued into 2011. The PRC nonetheless faces
mounting domestic challenges.

Sinic “Tiger” Asia: Economic Development

“Revolution” has affected all aspects of life around Sinic Asia and
usually gone farther everywhere in the region than in China, Vietnam and
North Korea, where “revolution” is more an article of faith than fact. In
fact, despite its dramatic record of change, the PRC is often closer to
traditional authoritarianism and contemporary Southeast Asia than to
modern East Asia in the scope and depth of its reforms.17 To be sure, the
challenges were and remain vaster and more complicated in China, but
another major reason China and Vietnam lag behind other Sinic nations is
the greater continuation of some progress-resistant aspects of Marxism and
Chinese tradition.
All the fireworks in China over the past quarter century have drawn
attention from the far more profound reforms in non-communist Sinic
Asia. Though Japan was the first Sinic country to modernize after its 1868
Meiji Restoration, explosive growth in the broader Sinic world only began
after World War II when South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, newly
democratic Japan, and Singapore launched reforms that produced the
“tigers” of modern Asia. Much of the inspiration for these reforms came
from fear that recently installed communist regimes in China, North Korea
and then Vietnam, with their grandiose economic promises, might be the
wave of Asia’s future. By the time the tragic economic failures of Soviet
and Maoist communism became apparent, non-Communist Sinic Asia was
joining the developed world. That is, some East and even Southeast Asian
nations were demonstrating the potential of market-oriented reforms, at
first with a leading but then a fading state role, long before PRC (and later
Vietnamese) leaders began to partly understand that the much vaunted but
dogmatic “socialism” was the main barrier to real economic development
in their countries.
Just what changes have the non-communist Sinic countries done that
are so impressive? In 1945, most countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin

16
World Bank, Emerging Stronger from the Crisis (Washington, D.C.: The World
Bank, 2010), 3, 4.
17
Harvard Vietnam Program, Choosing Success: The Lessons of East and
Southeast Asia and Vietnam’s Future (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Kennedy School,
2008), parts I and II.
300 Chapter Twelve

America were largely or totally undeveloped economically. That is no

longer true of one portion of one continent, namely the countries of Sinic
Asia, as shown by a comparison of changes in per capita GDP (PPP) of
representative worldwide countries over the past fifty years. For example,
in 1960 the South Korea per capita GDP was the same as Nicaragua’s, just
under Brazil’s and twice Egypt’s, while today it is ten times Nicaragua’s,
2.5 times Brazil’s and 5 times Egypt’s. In 1960 Hong Kong’s per capita
GDP was just a little above Mexico’s and about half of Argentina’s, but
today it is about 3 times higher than each. In 1960, Singapore’s was below
Mexico’s and about the same as South Africa’s, while today it is 4 times
Mexico’s and 6 times South Africa’s. That is, in 2010, according to the
IMF, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and South Korea were in the
top 26 countries of the world in per capita GDP: South Korea’s per capita
GDP (no. 26 in the world, the lowest of the five Sinic countries) was more
than 4 times China’s (no. 94) and some 9.5 times Vietnam’s (no. 130).
Clearly, at the beginning of the twenty-first century the non-Communist
Sinic countries “boast dynamic, powerful, effective states, and highly
advanced societies” with largely democratic political systems, while China
and Vietnam, and other “developing” countries, are far behind.18
In 1997 and 2008, the Tiger countries faced serious though temporary
economic challenges. The apparent, short-sighted “lessons” for many
around the world were, in the words of Stefan Halper, a Senior Fellow at
the Cambridge Centre of International Studies, that “China’s market-
authoritarian model provides rapid growth, stability and the promise of a
better life for its citizens”.19 This sentiment was voiced by South African
President Jacob Zuma after his visit to China in August 2010, when he
remarked that the global financial crisis cast grave doubts on Western
institutions. The leaders of developing countries, he said, are now much
more seriously asking, “Is the political discipline in China a recipe for
economic success?”20 Chinese leaders certainly were and are acting more
decisively than political figures in the Western world.

18
Harvard, Choosing Success, 7, 8. The per capita GDP figures were accessed on
25 June 2011 at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_percapita.
The GDP figures come from NationMaster.com. Accessed on 7 September 2008, at:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_gdp_per_cap_ppp_cur_int-per-capita-
ppp-current-international.
19
Stefan Halper, The Beijing Consensus: How China’s Authoritarian Model will
Dominate the Twenty-First Century (New York: Perseus, 2010), x.
20
The Star, Johannesburg, 27 Aug 2010.
 Development with Chinese Characteristics 301

In addition to the broadly successful non-communists Sinic nations,

several other Southeast Asian countries also undertook some productive
reforms before China and Vietnam and had periods of rapid growth, a
major portion of them taking place in Overseas Chinese communities.
However, as a Harvard University report noted in 2008, these countries
“have yet to achieve the economic, political, and social transformation that
sets [Sinic] East Asia apart from the rest of the developing world”.21

Culture Matters
As Harvard Professor Tu Wei-ming wrote in the mid-1990s,

The [Asian] region’s ability to sustain the world’s highest growth rate since
the 1950s has merited serious attention by developmental economists,
comparative sociologists, and political scientists. It is not the growth rate
itself, however, but the various structural and functional reasons underlying
this ‘economic miracle’ and the emerging form of life it engenders that
present a particularly thought-provoking challenge.22

In this spirit I will examine the culture and institutions that I conclude
contributed so much to catapulting the reforming Sinic nations into the
developed world and contributed both positively and negatively to growth
in China, Vietnam and other nations worldwide.
Throughout history, culture has been a major factor in how peoples,
nations and civilizations worldwide respond to the challenges and
opportunities of life, a reality that is sometimes recognized but more often
ignored or even denied. Discussions of the role of culture can become
contentious for a variety of often interrelated reasons, a few of which are
noted here. For many people, as Harvard economist David Landes has
written, “Criticisms of culture cut close to the ego and injure identity and
self-esteem”.23 For many analysts, particularly economists, culture seems
to be an amorphous factor that cannot be quantified and thus factored into
analyses with any certainty. But there are similar problems trying to

21
Harvard, Choosing Success, 7.
22
Tu Wei-ming, ‘Preface’, in Tu Wei-ming, ed., Confucian Traditions in East
Asian Modernity: Moral Education and Economic Culture in Japan and the Four
Mini-Dragons (Cambridge, Massachusetts.: Harvard University Press, 1996), ix-x.
23
David Landes, ‘Culture Makes Almost All the Difference’, in Lawrence
Harrison and Samuel Huntington, eds, Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human
Progress (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 2. Also David Landes, The Wealth and
Poverty of Nations (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998).
302 Chapter Twelve

quantify God, love, vengeance, loyalty, ambition, fanaticism and/or

adherence to various ideologies or religions. Nonetheless, any of these
singly or in combination can and often do have a far greater impact on
economic and other decisions and actions by individuals and governments
than all the empirical data and evidence on the Internet.
While the emphasis here is on what has happened in Sinic nations, it
must be emphasized that throughout world history varying civilizations
have had sometimes fluctuating levels of progress-prone and progress-
resistant characteristics, taking progress to mean significant development
in national economies and standards of living.24 Ethnic and other groups
that have been the most inclined toward a vigorous work ethic which
contributes substantially to economic productivity, and other qualities
discussed below, have included Jews, Calvinists, Basques, Lebanese,
Sikhs, and Sinic peoples, among others.25
Most leaders in developing countries promise better lives for the
people under their control. While each country has its own specific
challenges, there is ample evidence from study and experience that some
economic policies are much more productive than others. That is, if
leaders really want economic development then it is essential to “get the
economics right”, even though doing so may require some trial and error,
as occurred in China with Deng’s “crossing the river by feeling the
stones”. Knowledge of the relative effectiveness of market, populist and
authoritarian approaches to economic development, for example, were just
as available fifty years ago to Mexicans and Egyptians as to South
Koreans, Taiwanese, and Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. So why were the
latter so much more successful in selecting, adapting and implementing
productive policies, and thus able to join the developed world, while no
other “developing” countries did the same?
In large part because cultures that are often progress-resistant or
progress-indifferent—like the dominant ones in most of the so-called

24
The first major study was by German sociologist and political economist Max
Weber. The typology used here was developed by Argentine Mariano Grondona,
‘A Cultural Typology of Economic Development’, in Harrison and Huntington,
eds, Culture Matters, 44-55; his analysis is very close to Lucian Pye’s discussion
of cultural traits that facilitate or impede development. See Pye, Asian Power and
Politics: The Cultural Dimensions of Authority (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The
Belknap Press, l985), 13.
25
For a comparison of many Sinic and Jewish characteristics, see Wendy Robin
Abraham’s 1989 PhD dissertation from Columbia University entitled The Role of
Confucian and Jewish Educational Values in the Assimilation of the Chinese Jews
of Kaifeng, Supplemented by Western Observer Accounts, 1605-1985.
 Development with Chinese Characteristics 303

“developing” world—often discourage economic and social practices that

can lead to developed world status. Thus, though culture is not the only
factor to influence economic policies chosen by a country and their
effectiveness, it often trumps what outsiders consider more quantifiable
evidence that can be drawn from economic and historical experiences and
studies. Seemingly obvious economic decisions, for example, are often
twisted by, or sacrificed to, a cultural or political goal, perhaps without the
decision-makers fully realizing this is so. For example, Mao Zedong
(China), Ho Chi Minh and Le Duan (Vietnam), Kim Jong Il (North
Korea), and Fidel Castro (Cuba), among others may not have understood
that their economic development programs were thwarted by the most
progress-resistant aspects of traditional culture and institutions (discussed
below), fortified by the most retrograde aspects of so-called Marxism.26
Even when national leaders tend toward “getting the economics right”,
a culture influences how seriously a potentially effective policy is
implemented by leaders and people. Often a development program is at
most incompletely implemented because commitment flags or ends after a
period of moderate improvement, or because conditions did not change
quickly enough and the reforms were prematurely abandoned. Oxford
fellow Laurence Whitehead argues that historically Latin America has
been “receptive to the importation of ‘modern’ techniques, but not
necessarily to undertaking the social and cultural adjustments that they
require if they are to operate as expected”. In 1996, then-Peruvian
President Alberto Fujimori, of Japanese ancestry, stressed the importance
of patience and persistence in successful reforms when he told me that it is
harder to get things done in Latin America than in Asia because “Latin
Americans are not as patient as Asians”.27 While discussing PRC-launched
development projects in Africa, Deborah Brautigam repeatedly notes that
“without exception they declined when the Chinese left”: equipment

26
Sometimes they knew very well. A former top official in Cuban Intelligence
wrote that ‘On many occasions Fidel has deliberately made economic decisions he
knew would weaken the economy just so the people, who did not know any better,
would not prosper and thus would feel they had to rely on his “wise leadership” to
survive’. Juan Antonio Rodriguez Menier and William Ratliff, Inside the Cuban
Interior Ministry (Washington, D.C.: The Jamestown Foundation, 1994), 7.
27
Laurence Whitehead, ‘Latin America as a mausoleum of modernities’, in Luis
Roniger and Carlos Waisman, eds., Globality and multiple modernities (Brighton,
UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2002), 39. Interview with Alberto Fujimori
conducted in August, 1996, in Lima, Peru, by Hoover Institution fellows William
Ratliff and Timothy Brown. See William Ratliff, ‘Fujimori Speaks’, The Wall
Street Journal, 23 August 1996.
304 Chapter Twelve

stopped working or fields filled up with weeds, and they were only set
right when Chinese managers and workers returned to do the job.28
The challenges of change and culture were suddenly highlighted at the
beginning of 2011 by the so-called “Arab Spring”. The hopes of the
“Spring” re-focused some (but too little) attention on five Arab Human
Development Reports drawn up by more than a hundred Arab scholars and
experts—the first four volumes under lead author Egyptian Nader
Fergany—and released between 2002 and 2009 by the United Nations
Development Programme. The first report laid the foundation for
subsequent reports when it observed that “Culture and values are the soul
of development” and “provide its impetus, facilitate the means needed to
further it, and substantially define people’s vision of its purposes and
ends”. The 2002 AHDR continued that “success in meeting today’s
challenges will depend on the ability to shape, and adapt to, the demands
of the new economics and the new politics”. The Arab world’s failures of
recent decades (and centuries) can be understood in large part because
“traditional culture and values, including traditional Arab culture and
values, can be at odds with those of the globalizing world”. In her
foreword to the 2002 report, Rima Khalaf Hunaidi, the Jordanian director
of the UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Arab States, concluded that “the
predominant characteristic of the current Arab reality seems to be the
existence of deeply rooted shortcomings [that] . . . pose serious obstacles
to human development”.29
This is not cultural determinism—meaning that culture cannot be
altered and sets the unchanging direction of a people’s history—nor is it a
value judgment, but rather an observation drawn from working in this
field. Former USAID official Lawrence Harrison has produced a series of
books on the impact of culture arguing the case stated by the late U.S.
academic and politician, Daniel Patrick Moynihan:

The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that

determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics
can change a culture and save it from itself.

28
Deborah Brautigam, The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 195.
29
Nader Fergany, et. al, Arab Human Development Report, United Nations
Development Programme, Regional Bureau for Arab States (New York: United
Nations Publications, 2002), vii, 6, 8.
 Development with Chinese Characteristics 305

That is, the leaders and people in progress-resistant cultures can turn
their economies and lives around if they are determined to do so, though it
is not easy.30

Sinic Culture and Economic Development

In his 2006 talk at Yale University, President Hu Jintao noted the role
of culture in a country’s history: “The culture of a nation tells a lot about
the evolution of the nation’s understanding of the world and life, both past
and present. Culture thus embodies a nation’s fundamental pursuit of mind
and dictates its norms of behavior”.31 Wang Jisi, the Dean of the School of
International Studies at Beijing University, wrote several years earlier that
“the characteristics of Chinese thinking prompt me to seek their roots more
in Chinese culture than in Communist ideology”. He continued that
“Lucian Pye illustrates how in their cultural setting Chinese officials insist
that they are acting in accordance with ‘high principles’ in foreign affairs
when others might think they are being pragmatic”, and then concluded:
“In the traditional Confucian worldview, the principal causal force of
history was the moral conduct of leaders”, and “Chinese policy makers
and strategists rely heavily on Chinese cultural heritages as the reservoir of
wisdom”. Still, as Shanghai’s Fudan University Professor Zhao Suisheng
notes, “Chinese leaders believe in a set of principles in international
affairs, but consideration of its national interest causes Beijing to make
pragmatic compromises”.32

30
Moynihan is quoted in Lawrence Harrison, The Central Liberal Truth (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2006), facing the ‘Introduction’. Also see Jorge G.
Castañeda, in Mañana Forever? Mexico and the Mexicans (New York: Knopf,
2011), 261, who argues that Mexico can achieve full modernity only ‘if its
character and culture become instruments of change, no longer of immobility’.
That success, he concludes, is ‘just over the horizon’, but he adds that ‘the last haul
is the toughest one’.
31
Hu Jintao, speech at Yale University, 21 April 2006. One may see the full text of
Hu’s major report in October, 2007, by Googling: ‘Speech by Chinese President
Hu Jintao at Yale University’. Hu elaborates on these and other points in his report
to the 17th CCP Congress. This in turn sounds like Professor Douglass North
receiving his Nobel Prize in Economics in 1993, who expained that culture, as
‘collective learning—a term used by Hayek—consists of those experiences that
have passed the slow test of time and are embodied in our language, institutions,
technology and ways of doing things’. Douglass North, Nobel Prize Award
Ceremony Lecture on 9 December 1993.
32
Wang Jisi, ‘International Relations Theory and the Study of Chinese Foreign
Policy: A Chinese Perspective’, in Thomas W. Robinson and David Shambaugh,
306 Chapter Twelve

In fact, China stands out among world civilizations for having the
world’s most complex mix of strong progress-prone and progress-resistant
qualities, a virtual Manicheanism that will be elaborated upon below.
Historically, many Chinese individuals or families moved abroad and left
behind most of the progress-resistant factors. Then they utilized the
progress-encouraging characteristics to become very successful in business
and other fields. After Deng Xiaoping took over from Mao and to a
significant degree opened the Chinese economy, Chinese at home were
allowed to become far more productive, and already prosperous overseas
Chinese invested heavily in the “new” PRC via persisting connections in
China.
So we are left with the question of why the non-communist Sinic
nations successfully jumped into the developed world in less than a half
century of independence while other so-called developing nations have not
done so in decades to centuries of independence?33 I suggest that capable
non-communist Sinic leaders succeeded largely because they set their
minds on development and, in an objective and non-ideological way,
searched for the economic and other policies most likely to bring
success—in large part by simply removing the obstacles to individual
initiative—and then focused on steadily and diligently implementing those
policies over whatever period was necessary to succeed.34 In large part it
was culture that kept them at it. A top Iranian leader visiting China in 2007
lamented, “We started our debate about private business about the same
time as China. . . . We argued; they [the Chinese] just got on with it”.35

eds., Chinese Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1998), 493, 501, 502. Suisheng Zhao, China’s National Security Strategy
and Diplomatic Engagement, University of Miami Center for Hemispheric
Policy’s China-Latin America Task Force Policy Papers, March-June 2006, 15.
33
One may argue that Argentina was in the developed world a century ago, but it
fell back to the ‘developing’ world during the twentieth century. See Carlos
Waisman, Reversal of Development in Argentina (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1987).
34
A prominent Singapore diplomat and educator emphasizes the importance of
high quality leadership—a central focus of Confucianism—and suggests that ‘The
best way to construct [the very productive] East Asian narrative is to compare the
performance of East Asian elites [over the long-term] with the elites of Latin
America’. Kishore Mahbubani, ‘From Confucius to Kennedy: Principles of East
Asian Governance’, 135, included in papers from the World Bank 2006 ‘East
Asian Vision’ collection, accessed on September 28, 2010, at:
http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTEASTASIAPACIFIC/Resources/226262-
1158262834989/EA_Visions_11.pdf.
35
Halper, Beijing Consensus, 129 [emphasis added].
 Development with Chinese Characteristics 307

Confucianism: the Soul of Sinic Asia

One must look to Chinese tradition to better understand the
unprecedented changes in most of East and much of Southeast Asia since
the end of World War II. The role of Confucianism and Chinese tradition
more broadly in various national forms has been important throughout
Sinic Asia despite the fact that some Asians deny it, resent being reminded
of it, or have never even thought of it.36
China’s unification in 221 B.C.E. under Qin Shi Huang was a critical
turning point for an already ancient civilization and for much of East and
Southeast Asia. Basic beliefs and institutions, which in some cases even
then had roots reaching back centuries or a millennium, were pulled
together during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E.–221 C.E.). It was then that
Confucianism became the official ruling ideology in an often strained
relationship with strong-arm despotic “Legalism”, as noted below. These
set the stage for most of the next two thousand years despite significant
adaptations over time and some periods of disunity, for dynasty followed
dynasty in what seemed to be a never-ending cycle.37
The primary common denominator of Sinic tradition over the millennia
was Confucianism. Tu Wei-ming remarked on a deeply felt “Confucian
persuasion in government, education, family rituals, and social ethics”
which added up to “a worldview, a social ethic, a political ideology, a
scholarly tradition and a way of life”. Tu continued that

36
Edwin O. Reischauer, in Rieschauer and Marius B. Jansen, The Japanese Today:
Change and Continuity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 204, refers
to this when he writes: ‘Almost no one [in Japan] considers himself a Confucianist
today, but in a sense almost all Japanese are’. Gilbert Rozman, in Rozman, ed., The
East Asian Region: Confucian Heritage and its Modern Adaptation (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991), 26, notes that ‘Even if the point is reached at
which consciousness of the Confucian roots of particular attitudes has faded, the
continued presence of such attitudes can be taken as a sign in a single country or a
region that the tradition endures’. Graham Hutchings, in his Modern China: A
Companion to a Rising Power (London: Penguin, 2001), 86, concludes regarding
Confucianism that ‘as a diffuse set of values which frame instincts and govern
personal behavior, it remains embedded in the hearts and minds of almost every
Chinese, despite—and perhaps because of—the experience of Communism’.
37
The famous fourteenth century Chinese historical novel The Three Kingdoms
famously began: ‘The Empire long divided, must unite; long united, must divide’.
Luo Guanzhong, Three Kingdoms: A Historical Novel (abridged edition), trans.
Moss Roberts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 3.
308 Chapter Twelve

the modern Chinese intelligentsia has maintained unacknowledged,

sometimes unconscious, continuities with the Confucian tradition at every
level of life: behavior, attitude, belief, and commitment. Indeed,
Confucianism is still an integral part of the ‘psycho-cultural construct’ of
the contemporary Chinese intellectual as well as the Chinese peasant; it
remains a defining characteristic of the Chinese mentality.

Patricia Ebrey wrote of “a strong core of common culture shared by

nearly all Chinese, a very large component of which related to the family”.
Elsewhere, I have added that

the profound, lingering, largely positive legacy of Confucian culture is not

always consciously present, but it is there among leaders and people and
guides goals and actions in ways that are rarely equaled in Latin America
or India.38

In my analysis here I will distinguish among three broad categories of

Confucianism—Philosophical, Imperial and “People’s” or “Market”—and
then focus on the last two, which respectively are the primary repositories
of progress-resistant and progress-prone inclinations and institutions. The
productive consequences of these traditional characteristics are seen today
in all classes in the Sinic world and wherever minority Sinic populations
reside. 39 An underlying conviction of this chapter is that these
characteristics have been a critical factor in raising hundreds of millions of
East Asians up out of poverty, though I join many others in believing they
often discourage creativity and can make people greedy and little inclined
toward the “harmony” so often advocated by Confucian tradition and
lauded by the PRC government.

The Three Confucianisms

1. Philosophical Confucianism, the product of what Asians call the
School of Scholars (rujia), dates back even before Confucius (d. 479
B.C.E.) to the “classics” the Master and his followers repeatedly cited in

38
Tu Wei-ming, ‘The Confucian Tradition in Chinese History’, in Ropp, ed.,
Heritage of China, 112, 136. Patricia Ebrey, ‘China’, in Rozman, ed., The East
Asian Region, 47-49. William Ratliff, ‘Confucianism + Capitalism = Economic
Development’, The Far Eastern Economic Review Forum, December 21, 2007.
39
On the impact of smaller and larger cultures in societies—with an emphasis on
the Sinic—see Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market
Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (New York: Anchor
Books, 2003).
 Development with Chinese Characteristics 309

their teachings. Other leading figures in the School of Scholars included

Mencius (d. 289 B.C.E.), Xun Zi (d. 237 B.C.E.), and the latter’s two most
famous students, Li Si and Han Fei Zi, who were largely responsible for
drawing up the Qin Dynasty’s despotic statecraft of “Legalism”. A pivotal
scholar a millennium later, in the Song Dynasty (960-1297), was Zhu Xi
(d. 1200 C.E.) who “compiled” the so-called Four Books which from the
thirteenth to the twentieth centuries were the essential Confucian classics
for all who wished to rise in society by passing the imperial exams and
serving in the government bureaucracy. 40 “New Confucianism” is the
fledgling Confucian philosophical revival often dated to a manifesto
published by four prominent scholars in Hong Kong in 1958, and is found
today in several sometimes overlapping forms.41
Another more obvious, and in some respects overlapping, aspect of
New Confucianism is evident in an emerging program by the PRC
government to restore the importance in China of a deep civilizational
heritage and to project that image around the world. This grows in part
from the government’s doubtless often genuine domestic and international
references to “harmonious society” and other traditional Confucian
themes. Of more open educational (and propagandistic) purposes are the
hundreds of Confucius Institutes and Classrooms founded worldwide for
teaching Chinese language and culture. Another example of Confucianism’s
continuing impact in the broader Sinic world is its influence on the
personal and professional lives of individuals, including the Korean United
Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.42
2. Imperial Confucianism is what Harvard historian John Fairbank
called the alliance struck in the Han Dynasty between the “all-
encompassing state philosophy” of Confucianism and Legalism. In this
marriage, the Confucians were responsible for the “good governance” in

40
The Four Books are The Great Learning, Doctrine of the Mean, Analects of
Confucius and Mencius.
41
On this movement, Western audiences will most easily access the English-
language writings of Tu Wei-ming. Aspects of it have been analyzed in Thomas
Metzger, A Cloud Across the Pacific: Essays on the Clash between Chinese and
Western Political Theories Today (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2005);
John Makeham, Lost Soul: ‘Confucianism’ in Contemporary Chinese Academic
Discourse (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008); and
Daniel Bell, China’s New Confucianism: Politics and Daily Life in a Changing
Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2008).
42
See Xinhuanet release (www.chinaview.cn) of 29 June 2008 entitled ‘UN chief
seeks wisdom, guidance from Confucius’. Among the things Ban Ki-moon says he
learned from Confucius are that one should embrace people of all beliefs and that
one must seek global harmony and peace.
310 Chapter Twelve

most dynasties while the institutions and forces of the Legalists kept order.
Thus Legalism became a critical aspect of Chinese imperial governance
for two millennia. Fairbank added that Confucian scholar bureaucrats
often considered “the great mass of the common people as passive
recipients of the benevolent despotism they sought to guide”, a usable
definition of state paternalism.43 That legacy persists today in the PRC,
where the CCP has taken over the paternal duties previously mandated by
Heaven to the Emperor.
3. People’s and Market Confucianism are not philosophical or courtly,
entirely Confucian, or even exactly the same. They consist of the deeply
ingrained, mainly but not only Confucian-derived beliefs and assumptions
that over the centuries guided—or at least strongly impacted—people’s
personal and public lives in various ways throughout the Sinic World. For
many centuries the majority of Chinese relied on these norms to survive
distant, often indifferent or repressive governments and bitter living
conditions. Some hierarchical aspects of “People’s” Confucianism—such
as the compartmentalization of women—were totally regressive and thus
are not included in “Market” Confucianism, the latter being those aspects
of original Confucianism that have been most important in planning and
carrying out recent reforms. This market role was strong in the mid-
twentieth century, when post-World War II reforms began in parts of East
and then Southeast Asia. Mao Zedong tried to crush it with his “socialist”
policies, and some say he was successful.44 Others of us believe much of
the tradition thrived outside the PRC and even in China itself and after
1949 became the cultural common denominator of the East and Southeast
Asian reformers that in large part set them off from most other peoples
around the world.

Progress-Prone Aspects of Sinic Tradition

The most important Sinic qualities that have inspired and/or contributed
to successful economic growth in modern Asia fall to a very large degree
in the realm of Market Confucianism, and in the broadest terms relate to

43
John King Fairbank, China: A New History (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1992), 62, 96. The term ‘imperial Confucianism’ originated in a
series of lectures given by James Legge in the 1870s, but for the nineteenth century
Scottish Sinologist who specialized in the Classics, the term was much more
benign.
44
For example see Makeham, Lost Soul, 1-2.
 Development with Chinese Characteristics 311

the work ethic and family relationships.45 In 1974 Professor Reischauer

wrote of the main characteristics of Confucian culture in Foreign Affairs,
noting

a strong emphasis on family solidarity, on filial piety, on subordination of

the individual to the group, on the ideal of group harmony as opposed to a
balance between conflicting rights, on social organization, on careful
political (as opposed to religious or purely cultural) integration, on hard
work as a value in itself, on frugality, and on education as morally uplifting
and the proper road to personal and family success.46

I have elsewhere isolated the aspects of tradition that were most

progress-friendly, namely

the beliefs that (1) education is the expressway to success; (2) goals should
be far higher than mere survival and pursued with single-minded diligence
and a relentless work ethic; (3) merit should be sought and rewarded; and
(4) frugality and focus must guide the expenditure of funds and energies.47

Some of these qualities received sudden attention in early 2011 when

Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua wrote her memoir about being a
“tiger mother” raising two daughters in the States, emphasizing a Sinic
focus on the importance of education, hard work, discipline, frugality in
the use of time, and other factors that were major contributors to the rise of
entire Asian “tiger” economies during the past fifty years. 48 In August
2011, Agustin Carstens, Governor of the Central Bank of Mexico and

45
On Chinese culture as ‘an inseparable component of the new entrepreneur class’,
see Kate Zhou, China’s Long March to Freedom: Grassroots Modernization (New
Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 113 and passim.
46
Reischauer, ‘The Sinic World in Perspective’. Also see Reischauer, The
Japanese Today, 170, 204. Thomas A. Metzger, in ‘Continuities between Modern
and Premodern China’, in Paul A. Cohen and Merle Goldman, eds., Ideas Across
Cultures (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990), 283, writes
about ‘traditionally inherited norms’ with ‘the goal of instrumental rationality,
especially emphasizing family cohesion, frugality and savings, hard work, respect
for authority, respect for education, academic competition, competition in the
economic marketplace, and certain bureaucratic skills’.
47
William Ratliff, ‘Confucianism + Capitalism’.
48
See Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: Penguin Press,
2011). In the mountains of invective following the publication of Chua’s book,
focusing mainly on pedagogy and her alleged ‘child abuse’, I found no comment
on this broader significance of ‘tiger mothers’ of all sorts in making the modern
world.
312 Chapter Twelve

former Finance Minister of Mexico, said he believed the Tiger countries

had been so successful, particularly in contrast to Latin American nations,
because Sinic peoples emphasized education, saved, were frugal with their
money, and had a productive work ethic.49
Taiwan National University’s economist Liang Ming-Yih recognizes
that scholars in several disciplines have increasingly become convinced
that some traditional Confucian beliefs contributed significantly to Sinic
Asia’s remarkable economic growth. But in a 2010 study, he pointed out
that economists have generally found this discussion “often sweeping and
lacking in rigor” because it was “difficult to design testable hypotheses”.
In recent years, he continued, “better techniques and more data” have
changed things and made it possible to “examine the cultural aspect of
factors that promoted East Asia’s economic miracle”. 50 Liang’s own
econometric study incorporating these techniques tested the importance of
Confucian concepts of education and meritocracy, as well as family and
kinship relationships, on economic development.
Liang proposes a reconciliation of the thought of German sociologist
Max Weber, who wrote a century ago on how culture influences economic
development, and that of modern analysts by drawing attention to two
development “modes”, one “leading”—the role of the Western world—
and one “follower”—the effective borrowing and application of Western
technologies by responsive Asian countries. That is, the “tigers” did not
create the technologies they used to develop so rapidly, but rather
borrowed, adapted, and vigorously implemented them in their countries, a
long-recognized characteristic of Japan. Liang states that “Confucian
traditions [were] uniformly present and quite dominant in all these
economies” and adds that, after passing through the “miracle growth”
stage, which raised the East Asian countries to the developed world, they
“settled into the slowed-down maturity phrase”.
The author draws two conclusions: (1) while the traits of Confucian
tradition “were helpful in promoting follower mode growth”, they will
impede the development of a “leading mode growth” in the future; and (2)
when policymakers from other countries look to the East Asian experience
for lessons, they must factor in both the economic policies implemented
and “the cultural aspects that played a part in East Asia’s achievements”.
Other nations that seek success in development need not become

49
William Ratliff, interview with Carstens on 14 August 2011 at the Hoover
Institution, Stanford University.
50
Liang Ming-Yih, ‘Confucianism and the East Asian Miracle’, American
Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 2/3 (2010): 207, 232.
 Development with Chinese Characteristics 313

Confucian, but they must make the right economic choices and show
similar commitment and skill in implementation.51
Just one example of one of the progress-promoting aspects of Sinic
culture mentioned by all commentators above—education—will have to
suffice here. In December 2010, the OECD’s Program for International
Student Assessment reported the results from the 2009 PISA testing of 15-
year-olds in 65 countries worldwide.52 The most widely reported results
were that Shanghai students had scored the highest in all three main
categories tested: overall reading, mathematics, and science. While
Shanghai is not all of China, these results give a good idea of what
Chinese students will be doing in the future. More important for my
argument, however, are the scores of the Tiger and Latin American
countries and what they tell us. The highest-scoring countries in the 2009
PISA exams were: Reading: Shanghai (1st), South Korea (2), Hong Kong
(4), Singapore (5), Japan (8) and Taiwan (23); Math: Shanghai (1),
Singapore (2), Hong Kong (3), South Korea (4), Taiwan (5) and Japan (9);
and Science: Shanghai (1), Hong Kong (3), Singapore (4), Japan (5), South
Korea (6) and Taiwan (12). In all categories, the highest Latin American
country—reading (Chile), and math and science (Uruguay)—was in the
mid-40s, and all Latin American countries were in the bottom third of
those tested.53 A 2011 report by the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean said the “gap” between Latin America and the
OECD countries “is wider than that with other emerging regions, like
Southeast Asia”. CEPAL implicitly acknowledges the fundamental
difference not just between Latin America and Southeast Asia, but also the
Sinic countries of East Asia, which only fifty years ago were as
underdeveloped as Latin American nations but now are in the completely
different league of developed states.54

51
Liang, ‘Confucianism’, 216, 232-33, and passim.
52
International experts have often questioned the accuracy of international tests,
but this PISA report was praised by former U.S. Department of Education officials
for Republican Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and also by
President Barack Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan. See Sam Dillon,
‘Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators’, New York Times, 7 December
2010.
53
OECD, PISA 2009 Results: Executive Summary (Paris: OECD Publishing,
2010), 8.
54
OCDE/CEPAL, Perspectivas Económicas de América Latina 2012: Transformación
del Estado para el Desarrollo (New York: OECD Publishing, 2011), 92, 94.
314 Chapter Twelve

A U.S. study has argued that countries with the highest-testing students
in science and math will not necessarily develop more rapidly and well
than countries with somewhat lower scorers. And the study concludes that

achievement indicators do not capture the extent to which schooling

promotes initiative, creativity, entrepreneurship and other strengths not
sufficiently curricularized to warrant cross-national data collection and
analysis.

At the same time, these analysts believe that countries in the bottom
third of the ratings are seriously at risk, and that is where all Latin
American and many other so-called “developing” countries are.55
Finally, analysts raise a long-debated question, namely whether the
high scores Asian students so often get on tests largely reflect the efficacy
of hard study and memorization on analytical thinking. The director of the
OECD’s international educational testing program, Andreas Schleicher,
says

the real significance of these results is that they refute the commonly held
hypothesis that China just produces rote learning. Large fractions of these
students demonstrated their ability to extrapolate from what they know and
apply their knowledge very creatively in novel situations.

The intellectual creativity or relative sterility of Asians has also

emerged in discussions of patents; in 2011 the total number of patent
applications in China for the first time exceeded the number in the United
States. But what does that really mean? Some analysts praise “the sheer
volume of innovative activity in [China which] is being spawned by a
brave new world of creative talent”. However, a China Daily article in
2011 reported that “corporate and academic opinion [holds] that over 50%
or even 80% of Chinese patents are junk”.56

55
Francisco Ramirez, et al, ‘Student Achievement and National Economic
Growth’, American Journal of Education 113 (2006): 16.
56
Schleicher quoted in Dillon, ‘Top Test Scores’. For a positive reading on
patents, see a Thomson Reuters study in 2010 entitled ‘Patented in China’
(http://ip.thomsonreuters.com/chinapatents2010/China_Report_0810.pdf), and for
the negative view see Jody Lu, ‘Who is making junk patents?’
(http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/m/cip/2011-03/06/content_12126586.htm).
Looking more broadly at the Sinic impact on creativity, Liang, ‘Confucianism’,
233, writes ‘the traits of Confucian tradition that originally were helpful in
promoting follower mode growth will start to exert an impeding effect on the
leading mode growth’.
 Development with Chinese Characteristics 315

Confucianism and the CCP

Since taking power in 1949 the CCP has had a very mixed relationship
with Confucius, ranging from Maoist ranting at Confucius’s “stinking
corpse” during the Cultural Revolution, and the Red Guard destruction of
much of the Master’s hometown of Qufu,57 to today’s frequent positive
references to the classics by politicians and professors even at the CCP’s
Central Party School in Beijing. American Sinologist Charles O. Hucker
observed in 1975 that “it can be argued that the Chinese found in
Communism the approach to the solution of their modern problems that
was least incompatible with their traditional, distinctively Chinese ways”.
Along that line, intellectual historian Thomas Metzger pointed out that as
early as 1955 Tang Junyi,

one of modern China’s most astute thinkers [and one of the authors of the
New Confucian Mandate in 1958], said that Marxism appealed to so many
Chinese because it accorded with the traditional ideal of the whole world as
a morally harmonious whole.

George Washington University Sinologist David Shambaugh notes that

the CCP may be a lonely long-term survivor among the world’s
communist parties if it can adapt and transform itself “from a classic
Leninist party into a new kind of hybrid party”. We must remember, he
continues,

that this new hybrid is growing in the large garden (to continue the
metaphor) of Chinese political culture and history. China had a government
and a political culture long before it encountered Leninism and the CCP—
although as Lucian Pye has reminded us, the indigenous Confucian
political culture was very conducive to embracing Leninism. This cultural
and historical reservoir feeds the soil in which this new hybrid is
growing.58

57
Today Qufu has been rebuilt and is a tourist destination, though when I was
there in March 2010 I saw only one other Westerner. One exhibit recreates a life-
like outdoor ‘classroom’ with the Master lecturing to several dozen disciples.
58
Charles O. Hucker, China’s Imperial Part: An Introduction to Chinese History
and Culture (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1975), 430; Thomas A. Metzger,
‘Confucian Culture and Economic Modernization: An Historical Approach’, in
Conference on Confucianism and Economic Development in East Asia (Taipei:
Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research, Conference Series #13, 1989), 177;
Shambaugh, China’s Communist Party, 6.
316 Chapter Twelve

That is, many aspects of Imperial Confucianism fit the CCP’s

institutional profile and governing needs today. Wang Jisi writes that “in
the Chinese context, a theory is not much different from a doctrine, an
ideology, or a set of propositions serving as a guiding principle for action”
and thus the “mission” of CCP leaders is “to discover objective laws and
follow these laws in making policies”.59 Like imperial governments, the
CCP today considers itself a morally righteous, self-selected elite group
that took power by overthrowing a corrupt and exploitative regime, thus
winning a “Mandate of History” that legitimized it. The CCP now
maintains a paternalist regime inside its own modern “Forbidden City”
called Zhongnanhai. The CCP anticipates remaining in power indefinitely
since that is Chinese tradition, and party leaders, like old emperors, both
like and believe that they are entitled to hold power, in large part because
they think they alone can create a virtuous, harmonious society that serves
what the leaders consider the people’s interests. Its “core themes” are
expanding and protecting national wealth, development, power, dignity,
and harmonious unity. As Shambaugh says, in the end core visions like
these “resonate deeply in China and do lend the current party leadership
legitimacy and continuity with the past”.60 Finally, as long as the economy
keeps growing, non-political freedoms are significant, and there is no real
option for greater political freedom, there is good reason to believe that
traditional tolerance of this paternalism will continue in most of the
population, despite some pressures for democratization. If the economy
should fall on long-term hard-times, however, the party’s legitimacy might
well be called into question—as in traditional times—and there might be
another passing on of the Mandate of Heaven. Or hard times might incline
people to welcome a strong party to get people out of the economic crisis.

Socialism with Chinese Characteristics

Chinese leaders throughout the ages have relied more than most
Western counterparts on the use of slogans or metaphors, ranging from
“paper tiger” and “walking on two legs” to “Mao Zedong Thought” and
the “Scientific Outlook on Development”.61 Perhaps the most omnipresent

59
Gustaaf Geeraerts and Men Jing, ‘International Relations Theory in China’,
Global Society 15, no. 3 (2001), 259. Wang Jisi, ‘International Relations’, 488, 483.
60
Shambaugh, China’s Communist Party, 169.
61
The recent inundation of references to ‘Scientific Outlook on Development’ as a
key factor of Marxism—noted by Voegelin and discussed elsewhere in this volume
by Glenn Hughes—is just the most recent effort by a still often dogmatic ideology
to march under the banner of infallible science.
 Development with Chinese Characteristics 317

PRC slogan in 2011 is “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”, introduced

several decades ago by Deng Xiaoping and enshrined in China’s 1982
National Constitution. The latter is a grab-bag of goals and commitments
and outlines “socialist modernization” of all sectors under the CCP guided
by Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.62 Wang Jisi notes that

[i]n Chinese political and cultural tradition, simple generalization is much

better respected than abstract sophistication. A political leader will be
widely acclaimed if he can simplify the most complicated problems by
condensing his thoughts into a few words.63

Thus, while many in the West dismiss these slogans as “sound bites”,
Wang urges caution:

It would be misleading to assume that Chinese ethical expressions in

theories and statements are self-righteous rhetoric merely to serve
propaganda purposes. Indeed, these expressions reflect the Chinese way of
viewing and constructing politics and have their roots in Chinese political
culture.64

Party/State Paternalism
History records the constant contest between varying degrees of liberty
and tyranny in societies, and the relationship of these systems to people
and their well-being. From China to the Middle East and Latin America,
authoritarian and/or paternalistic governments—with “enlightenment”

62
According to the PRC Constitution, ‘The basic task of the nation is, according to
the theory of building socialism with Chinese characteristics, to concentrate its
effort on socialist modernization. Under the leadership of the Communist Party of
China and the guidance of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, the
Chinese people of all nationalities will continue to adhere to the people's
democratic dictatorship and follow the socialist road, persevere in reform and
opening to the outside, steadily improve socialist institutions, develop socialist
democracy, improve the socialist legal system and work hard and self-reliantly to
modernize industry, agriculture, national defense and science and technology step
by step to turn China into a socialist country with prosperity and power, democracy
and culture’. Amended text of 1982 PRC Constitution retrieved in November 2010
at: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/constitution/constitution.html.
63
Wang Jisi, ‘International Relations’, 491. The disinclination to engage in
abstract thought is discussed in Hajime Nakamura, Ways of Thinking of Eastern
Peoples (Honolulu: East-West Center Press, 1964), 185ff, and passim.
64
Wang Jisi, ‘International Relations’, 493.
318 Chapter Twelve

furnished by religions, philosophies, the march of history, or just a

preference for authoritarianism—are not disposed to share power. Often,
as the Grand Inquisitor asserts in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers
Karamazov, people don’t even want freedom and responsibility but wish
to be cared for by authoritarian leaders and/or governing elites. Is this not
a key cultural quality of Russian thinking that even today feeds a yearning
of many for the likes of Vladimir Putin? In traditional China, whoever
could win the Mandate of Heaven was entitled to rule until the mandate
was seized by someone else. But while leaders and even ruling houses
changed, the system basically did not. Indeed it has not changed to this
day, for the CCP indirectly claims to hold the Mandate and most people
accept this as being desirable or inevitable. The same seems to be true in
the other communist Sinic countries, Vietnam and perhaps even North
Korea. The 2008 global financial crisis that spilled from the West into the
rest of the world fortified the conviction in many countries of the need for
strong state involvement in national economies. Even the World Bank and
Asian Development Bank lauded China for its state-led recovery from the
2008 financial crisis and for taking the lead in global recovery. The non-
communist Sinic states adopted paternalistic policies in their early
development periods, too, but then in most respects reduced the state’s
role. The communist parties in China and Vietnam, however, insist that
their role must continue because they alone can effectively implement an
integrated and far-seeing program leading to socialism.

Utopianism
Experience has led Chinese to speak often of “eating bitterness” (chi
ku), and yet Confucianism is a fundamentally positive philosophy. Charles
Hucker wrote, for example, that “Maoism perpetuates China’s age-old
optimism about the perfectibility of man and society”, and Metzger notes
that “optimistic this-worldliness” is one of the “continuities bridging
modern and pre-modern Chinese thought”. The latter scholar argues that
Confucius’s idea that “people could become morally perfect and establish
morally perfect government . . . was based on an optimistic faith he
conflated with the historical record”. This “optimism, logically consistent
with the Confucian belief that the highest moral-political goals are
attainable in the present, was the indispensable basis of Mao’s utopianism
and personal appeal”.65 Chinese traditions clearly recognize the pervasive

65
Charles O. Hucker, China’s Imperial Past, 430; Metzger, ‘Continuities’, 288,
290, and 379n42.
 Development with Chinese Characteristics 319

presence of suffering and injustice but insist that with the right leadership
“the highest moral-political goals are attainable in the present”. This
“Confucian this-worldliness”, Metzger concluded, “remains prevalent in
China today”. Along this line, De Bary comments on the traditional and
modern Chinese belief that “man can achieve Heaven-on-Earth”.66
The traditional conviction that the highest of goals are possible on
earth is also manifested in some obvious ways, such as in the names of the
governing halls of the Forbidden City, as every tourist there must have
noticed: Hall of Supreme Harmony, Hall of Central Harmony, Hall of
Preserving Harmony, Palace of Heavenly Purity and the Palace of Earthly
Tranquility. Compare these to the names used in major government
buildings of the Western world: the West Wing in the White House, the
Blue Drawing Room in Buckingham Palace, the Large Apartment of the
King in Versailles Palace or the Old Study Room in the Vatican. The
Chinese names are not simply “quaint”, as many in the West suppose, but
provide a clue to how Chinese often think.

The CCP and the GMD

After the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, degrees of utopianism
became perhaps the fundamental difference between the CCP and the
GMD with broad and profound domestic and international manifestations.
Financial Times reporter Richard McGregor has written that the
underlying CCP message today is that “the Party alone stands between the
country and the kind of murderous, impoverishing instability that has
engulfed China at numerous times in its history”.67 While this assertion
cannot be conclusively proven or disproven, even raising the claim invites
a response from doubters, and the evidence is piling up that the claim is
not true. Pontificating from atop Tiananmen in 1949, Mao asserted that the
CCP had enabled the Chinese people once again to “stand up” tall in the
world. But there are many reasons to believe that Chiang Kai-shek would
have done the same with far less bitterness. In order to make even a
tentative judgment we must examine what we know Mao did on the
mainland and what Chiang tried to do when he was on the mainland
before, during, and just after the wars against Japan and the CCP. Then,

66
Metzger, ‘Continuities’, 287, 288, 277-278. Also see Metzger, ‘Confucian
Culture’, 168. McGregor, The Party, 230. De Bary, East Asian Civilizations, 13.
Hughes examines this Marxist conviction elsewhere in this volume.
67
McGregor, The Party, 27.
320 Chapter Twelve

and most importantly, what happened in Taiwan. We can only touch on

these issues lightly here.
For decades, many “scholars” simply proclaimed Chiang’s self-
consciously Confucian-inspired reforms a failure. However, an increasing
number of historical studies are showing that, in the words of Frank
Dikotter, “the first half of the twentieth century was a period of openness
which allowed people, things and ideas to move in and out of the country
as never before”. Material goods were becoming more available to many
beyond the elites, and progress was being made in the rule of law and
governance, despite the GMD’s wars against the Japanese and the CCP.68
After losing the civil war on the mainland, and a nasty early conflict in
Taiwan, Chiang almost immediately began the closely guided but
ultimately very productive changes that led, step-by-step, to the first free-
market democracy in Chinese history.69
Thomas Metzger and fellow Hoover Institution Sinologist Ramon
Myers have explained that

Confucianism had both a transformative side, calling for the total

elimination of selfishness in society, and an accommodative one, accepting
the persistence of some evil while promoting gradual, piece-meal reforms.
Mao’s policies were largely transformative; KMT [GMD] policies,
accommodative.

That is, Chinese tradition

included a popular culture made up especially of Confucian familism, a

Taoist-Buddhist religion and a competitive market economy. The CCP
sought to abolish this popular culture, while the KMT largely endorsed it.

68
For an overview of recent revisionist research on conditions in China during the
pre-Mao decades, see Frank Dikotter, The Age of Openness: China before Mao
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), passim. Also see below.
69
In their The First Chinese Democracy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1998), 296, 301, Linda Chao and Ramon Myers note Chiang’s ‘Confucianized
democracy, which advocated a single party governing by virtue of its superior
moral qualities and the indirect election of the nation’s leaders by a national
assembly’. They then show how four patterns of political change—‘a responsible
opposition, a political culture compatible with democracy, competing political
parties participating in free elections, and respect for a constitution’—led to the
first democracy in Chinese history. Also see Jay Taylor, The Generalissimo:
Chiang Kai-shek and the Struggle for Modern China (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009).
 Development with Chinese Characteristics 321

The CCP claimed to be the “central force” of the revolution to

inculcate “a spirit utterly free of the slightest selfishness”, and the evils it
tried to exterminate were those of the popular culture and all other
thinking it considered anti-Marxist.70 Here Mao’s militant utopianism led
to tragic CCP governing excesses.
In the late 1970s and 1980s the CCP’s ideology was pragmatically
modified, but not abandoned. Yasheng Huang has concluded that when it
comes to inequality, Gini coefficients show that “China has now surpassed
or is in the process of surpassing the level in Latin America, the region
widely known as having the worst income inequality in the world”. That
is, state capitalism in the PRC “is effective in boosting GDP growth but is
very bad at growing personal income”.71 Taiwan and other Asian tigers
have been much more effective in creating balanced, equitable societies,
which in turn has enabled them to join the developed world. Thus there is
no reason to conclude from modern history that the CCP is indispensable
for China’s emergence as a developed nation, and some reason for
concluding that it is making China’s modern passage much more painful.

Summary and Conclusions: Development with Chinese

Characteristics
For millennia, Chinese civilization and its institutions have resisted or
adjusted to domestic and foreign challenges, but they have seldom or
never shown such rigidity and flexibility as since the end of the Chinese
Civil War in 1949. The CCP conquest of China in 1949 and the flight of
the GMD to Taiwan opened the door to two modern, and in many ways
very different, versions of the contemporary potential of traditional Sinic
civilization: the era of Mao Zedong made the archetypical brutal emperor
Qin Shi Huang seem tame by comparison, and the reforms of the non-
communist Sinic Tigers went far beyond any changes made during the
traditional imperial period. Even since the reforms of Deng Xiaoping and
his successors, though to a lesser degree, these two tracks have largely
differentiated communist and non-communist Sinic development as a
whole in Asia during modern times. The most obvious contrast between
the two tracks is what has occurred in the fully Chinese geographical areas

70
Thomas A. Metzger and Ramon H. Myers, ‘Introduction’ to Myers, ed., Two
Societies in Opposition: The Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China
After Forty Years (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1991), xiii-xlv.
71
Huang, Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics, 256; and Huang, ‘Chinomics:
The Fallacy of the Beijing Consensus’, The Wall Street Journal, 19 June 2010.
322 Chapter Twelve

of the mainland and Taiwan. But the most impressive changes in some
respects are those of the independent non-communist Sinic nations as a
whole—which of course includes Taiwan—since they demonstrate the
potential broader impact of Sinic tradition beyond strictly Chinese
territory. In fact, while the PRC and Vietnamese regimes insist on calling
themselves “revolutionary”, Asia’s non-communist Sinic governments
have been far more truly revolutionary in their actions and accomplishments.
Nonetheless, the PRC attracts the lion’s share of international attention.
1. Since the end of the Second World War, the underdeveloped nations
of the world in general followed a variety of different political and
economic roads in their efforts to maintain the status quo or undertake
social and economic change. But only a handful during that period—the
non-communist Tiger nations of East and Southeast Asia—vaulted away
from the mass of underdeveloped countries into the developed world.
Their most important common denominators were (1) decisions to adopt
market, export-oriented economic policies, (2) long and deep links to the
traditional culture of China as adapted for their particular people and
conditions, and (3) much better than average leaders by world standards.
The rest of the so-called “developing” countries of Africa, the Middle
East, other parts of Asia and Latin America—the latter with some two
hundred years of independence—varied greatly in their goals, policies and
accomplishments. Their one common denominator of particular relevance
here is that none of them made it into the developed world. Even those that
tried to carry out potentially productive economic policies failed to
implement enough changes completely enough, whether out of choice or
lack of firm and prolonged commitment. 72 What at least tentative
conclusions can we draw from these experiences?
2. Joining the developed world in terms of per capita GDP and general
level of living conditions requires the adoption of a suitable form of

72
As a result of concerted market-oriented reforms launched by the ‘Chicago
Boys’ in the mid-1970s, Chile has come closer to joining the developed world than
any other country in Africa, Latin America, or the Middle East, save Israel with its
own very progress-prone culture. In an address at the Harvard Kennedy School in
September 2011, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera remarked on how easily
countries improve their conditions for a while and then stall. He said only Japan,
Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore have made the leap from the
underdeveloped to the developed world in recent decades and that he wants Chile
to be the sixth by 2020. Alvin Powell, ‘Chile’s President Pushes Progress’,
Harvard Gazette, 26 September 2011. Also, Council on Foreign Relations, ‘A
Conversation with Sebastián Piñera’. 22 September 2011, accessed on 16 November
2011 at: http://www.cfr.org/chile/conversation-sebastin-piera/p26115.
 Development with Chinese Characteristics 323

market economics. The experiences of the non-communist and communist

Sinic countries through the rule of Mao are case studies in the far greater
growth potential of market over command economies. Indeed, even
Chinese (and Vietnamese) leaders learned that lesson, but only part way.
Even today, the traditional view of an elite mandate to rule persists, and a
major state role in reforms is by CCP definition essential in search of a
long-term goal of creating socialism.
3. Culture in the sense of a society’s broadly shared values, beliefs,
attitudes, motivations and commitments will play an essential role in the
successful or unsuccessful implementation of economic policies that could
lead to the developed world. Though it is not easily quantified, this is
nonetheless a reality that is becoming more widely accepted, despite
ongoing disputation and sometimes anger. For many people culture is very
sensitive, since it embodies the essence of one’s civilization, and what are
taken as critical comments on it are often considered insulting to person
and/or culture. For most economists, culture cannot be quantified and thus,
since its role in economic change presumably cannot be proved or
disproved empirically, the factor is simply sidelined. Both of these
responses are largely misguided and as dangerous as burying one’s head in
the sand. In his afore-cited econometric study, Liang found that “getting
the economics right” was critical for substantial and sustained economic
growth, but that it was not enough on its own to enable a poor country to
join the developed world in a period of decades—or perhaps ever. The
general Sinic focus was found to be also an essential enabling factor for
the Tigers in Asia’s specific geographical and historical circumstances—as
similar values and work ethics have been critical in developments in other
non-Sinic, progress-prone cultures throughout history.
That is, since the end of World War II, the non-Communist Sinic
countries have been uniquely impressive in their broad, deep, and in most
respects continuous commitment to developing education, infrastructure
and urbanization, competitiveness of business firms, financial stability,
state effectiveness and popular equity.73 Sinic per capita GDP growth and
broadly based improvements in general living conditions were unequalled
elsewhere in the “developing” world. Even China, the mother-lode of
Sinic civilization, has not done as well across that broad agenda, nor have
other so-called developing countries that have managed fairly impressive
GDP growth rates, at times only to stall or slide backwards after a period
of significant (but usually narrowly based) development.

73
Harvard, Choosing Success, parts I and II.
324 Chapter Twelve

4. The non-communist Sinic “revolutions” of Asia since the end of

World War II are perhaps the most important broad economic and social
phenomena of the past century. With varying versions of flexibility they
have (1) looked to world historical experiences and adapted the most
productive economic ideas they found—and their own historical
experiences—to a variety of conditions in the most populous region of the
world, (2) productively married these ideas to modern technology for their
own national use, (3) driven reforms forward with a generally Stoic, merit-
and goal-oriented ethic that emphasized opportunity, education, hard work
and long-term commitment in pursuit of major and lasting change, and (4)
accomplished this revolutionary change peacefully—domestically and
internationally—in an increasingly integrated and yet volatile world.
5. But if traditional Sinic culture is so conducive to bringing economic
progress, one may ask why non-Communist Sinic countries were so slow
beginning their modernization? Also, why were the communist Sinic
nations of China and Vietnam even slower getting started and why has
their development been so limited in political and social areas—assuming
those are desirable goals of development? And finally, why is communist
North Korea, with its own long history of Sinic influence, currently the
world’s Number One example of brutal dictatorship and stagnant
wretchedness?
First, as Liang argued, the Sinic countries have been “followers”, not
originators, in the modern world, so the foreign model itself had to be
identifiable before it could be to be followed. Japan led the way in turning
to the West for models of development (and imperialism) in the mid-
nineteenth century, in line with its very long history of borrowing from
other countries, in the earlier millennium meaning from China. Then
reforms had to be at least in significant degree effectively implemented, as
in post-Meiji Japan—to ultimately tragic results. Other Asian countries
were not independent until more recently or, as in the case of China, chose
not to undertake deep reform until after the collapse of the last dynasty in
1911 (also see below), by which time domestic conditions were too
unstable to permit attempted reforms to succeed.
6. The substantial but on balance less impressive developmental
successes in the PRC and Vietnam can also be explained in large part by
the complex mix of characteristics of traditional and modern civilization in
China. That is, Sinic culture is not only potentially highly progress-prone,
it is also, in some critical respects, highly progress-resistant, as
demonstrated by the repressive aspects of legalism in imperial China and
its modern state counterpart today. Under Mao, the progress-prone aspects
of culture were considered an unacceptable threat to unitary rule and thus
 Development with Chinese Characteristics 325

they were crushed. Chinese policies have been more moderate since the
late-1970s, but the leaders still consider one ideology implemented by one
party as essential for the ultimate construction of the CCPs goal of
Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, as is clearly stated in the party
Constitution. For example, opportunities for individuals and families are
now much more widely available than under Mao and many very
productive small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have resulted. However,
these SMEs must compete on a very uneven field with state-owned
enterprises (SOEs) that are subsidized by the state and given far greater
access to real estate, loans, etc.74 Contrast this to the freeing of “market
Confucianism” by the tigers and their resulting entry into the developed
world.
Yasheng Huang has shown that “Capitalism with Chinese
Characteristics” is often different from “Capitalism with Sinic Tiger
Characteristics”, though he doesn’t put it quite that way. Most importantly
for the long term, the indigenous small, medium and large private sector is
thriving in East Asia, resulting in better incomes and more equality for the
people, while the often heavy hand of the state sector is more common in
the PRC. The irony, and possible cause for hope, is that even within the
PRC there is the Zhejiang or Wenzhou “model” which is a lot closer to the
East Asian “tigers” than conditions in most of China. Thus within the PRC
there is a more productive alternative to the Shanghai experience—”the
quintessential state-led capitalism’. That is, as Huang says, “the Shanghai
model is not antithetical to capitalism per se; it is just antithetical to the
virtuous kind of capitalism” and represents in fact “the political triumph of
the Latin American path, anchored on the prominence of statist
interventions, huge urban biases, and distorted liberalization in favor of
FDI at the expense of indigenous entrepreneurship”.75
7. If the Tiger countries offer a markedly better example of broadly
based development, ranging from life opportunities and living standards to

74
Thayer Watkins of the San Jose State University Department of Economics puts
it this way: The SOEs are ‘like a big, broken-down truck that is blocking the road
to development in China. Some traffic can find its way around the wreck but the
difficulty that it creates grows with time. People are reluctant to destroy the truck
because of the thought of how useful it would be if only it worked’. Thayer
website accessed on 19 November 2011:
http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/chinasoes.htm. I would only add that many
CCP leaders still profess to believe that SOEs will indeed work in the end, and
indeed will be the foundation for the future Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.
75
Huang, Capitalism, 228-29, 231, 276, and passim.
326 Chapter Twelve

the relatively impartial rule of law and broader civil and human rights,
then why is the “Chinese model” (or “Beijing Consensus”) drawing so
much more international attention? While the CCP claims that its
“socialism” will ultimately bring broader equity and social justice to the
world, today it is the tigers—which have themselves become increasingly
dependent on the PRC—that are coming much closer to those goals
without the state dominance and the talk of “socialism”. But the attraction
of China is simple. The PRC is so huge, its successes and potential so
impressive, its challenges so great, its rapidly expanding international
trade, FDI, and aid so alluring and consequential, and the possibility of its
success (or collapse?) so overwhelming, that it has become the
undisputedly most dynamic and closely watched single developing country
in the world. For the United States and the world as a whole, one of the
most tragic aspects of America’s and the West’s profligacy and
irresponsibility over the past couple of decades, resulting in the 2008
crash, has been the discrediting of private sectors generally in favor of
state sectors. This has increased the already significant example of the
PRC model to leaders and people who might otherwise pay closer
attention to Taiwan or South Korea. The tilt toward greater state control in
much of the world is fed by the fact that the PRC led the renewal in Asia
after the collapse of 2008. Also, the PRC’s authoritarian state capitalist
model attracts some current leaders and their cronies in the “developing”
world because it seems to justify their retention of power while at least
claiming to serve the interests of the people.
8. Great international interest in the PRC experience necessitates
further commentary on what it may portend. Chinese leaders say that, in
the end, China will add another and culturally superior layer to current
development, that is the “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”. But this
“socialism”, as described in the CCP Constitution and other documents
and statements, is founded on a utopianism that is very similar to the most
haunting and yet unrealizable aspects of traditional Confucian and Marxist
teachings. The CCP insists that China must not only incorporate Taiwan
but transcend it and soar beyond what PRC leaders consider the
materialistic “cultural wasteland” found in Taiwan, the other Sinic Tigers,
and the West. But while many believe China itself has become one of the
most materialistic countries in the world, the PRC promises to create a
more moral and harmonious society that is as ill-defined as the
“communism” of Karl Marx, and for the same reason. The goal of absolute
universal harmony is so unrealistic that it cannot be described in more than
vague generalities and is so unrealizable that even to try to impose it on
real people would require an authoritarian rule that would seek to deny,
 Development with Chinese Characteristics 327

repress and overcome all discordant realities, natural and human. This
proclaimed CCP goal suggests one reason why many in the PRC still
revere Mao in spite of the “mistakes” they admit he made after taking
power in 1949. His goals were not wrong, supporters say, he just tried to
achieve them too early, too quickly, a claim made also by the Vietnam
Communist Party.76 Mao’s insights, his supporters continue, open the door
to the more perfect world of the “great unity” (da tong) that Chinese and
some others have sought for millennia.
Supporters of this view ignore critics who warn that utopianism has
sometimes led to destructive fanaticism in the past and could do so again.
One may argue that utopianism can inspire people to strive for better lives
and that it only becomes a potential problem if people pursue it
relentlessly as if it were a real option, as Mao did in the Great Leap
Forward and Cultural Revolution. Throughout history, Confucian and
“legalist” practice and institutions have intermingled to create what many
considered the “dark side” discussed above, which stands in sharp contrast
to the high culture and progress-prone aspects of Chinese tradition. To a
large degree this was what many Chinese rejected during the May Fourth
Movement which peaked in the “incident” of May 4, 1919. Notably, it
inspired Lu Xun, China’s foremost early twentieth century author, to write
in Diary of a Madman that between the lines of the Confucian Classics,
with all their talk of “virtue” and “morality”, there is the refrain “Eat
People (chi ren)”. The darkest side of “legalist” and communist repression
dominated China during the Mao period and survives today in North
Korea. Shades of this intolerance still drift across the landscape in the PRC
and Vietnam. To the degree that CCP leaders continue to seek guidance
from utopian and pseudo-scientific Marxism, often useless Mao Zedong
Thought, and even traditional utopianism, the result could be domestic and
international policies that are quite the antithesis of the harmony
Confucius and the CCP proclaim as their goals. One of the most fervent
advocates of increasing the influence of Confucianism in the modern
world, William Theodore de Bary, has written passionately of China’s
need to overcome this negative side by “a slow, long-term modification of
new state structures through the humanizing of their administration. If this
change does not develop”, he concluded,

76
See William Ratliff, Vietnam Rising: Culture and Change in Asia’s Tiger Cub
(Oakland: The Independent Institute, 2008), 17-20.
328 Chapter Twelve

China will suffer from a despotism far worse than anything seen in
traditional dynasties, because it will be far more totalitarian and
technocratic in its controls.77

Thus seeking international harmony is fine unless leaders actually seek

to impose—by whatever means—what Voegelin called the “immanentization
of the eschaton.”78
Finally, have the Sinic “revolutions” of recent decades set free what
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy called “new potentialities of mankind”? To
some degree they have, for better and, perhaps, for worse. All reforming
Sinic governments have dramatically reduced poverty in their countries,
far beyond what as happened in most of the so-called developing world,
with the non-communist governments in particular enhancing personal
freedoms and opportunities. On the other hand, the PRC in particular has
also created environmental and public health nightmares in urban and rural
areas. Of special if often downplayed importance, the Sinic experience has
demonstrated once again that certain cultural traits—in this case those of
traditional China as adapted over the ages in different Asian localities—
can promote or impede economic and spiritual changes that may
significantly improve or worsen the lives and spirits of peoples worldwide.
If PRC leaders today truly mean to promote harmonious national and
international conditions, as they claim, they must absolutely reject the
traditional and especially modern Marxist urges to impose their vision of
Heaven on Earth in China and in the world beyond.79

77
De Bary, East Asian Civilizations, 121.
78
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1952), 163, and chapters IV and VI passim.
79
In The New Science of Politics, 168, 124, Voegelin wrote of the modern Marxist
version of Gnosticism where ‘the nonrecognition of reality is a matter of principle’
even as believers or ‘dreamers’ pursue an ‘activist redemption of man and society’.
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

REVOLUTION OR REDEMPTION?
THE MIDDLE EAST1

ARIE AMAYA-AKKERMANS

Ƞ੄ ʌȡ૵IJĮ ȝ੻Ȟ ȕȜȑʌȠȞIJİȢ ਩ȕȜİʌȠȞ ȝȐIJȘȞ,

țȜȪȠȞIJİȢ Ƞ੝ț ਵțȠȣȠȞ, ਕȜȜૃ ੑȞİȚȡȐIJȦȞ
ਕȜȓȖțȚȠȚ ȝȠȡijĮ૙ıȚ IJઁȞ ȝĮțȡઁȞ ȕȓȠȞ
਩ijȣȡȠȞ İੁțૌ ʌȐȞIJĮ, țȠ੡IJİ ʌȜȚȞșȣijİ૙Ȣ
įȩȝȠȣȢ ʌȡȠıİȓȜȠȣȢ, ઝıĮȞ, Ƞ੝ ȟȣȜȠȣȡȖȓĮȞ:
—Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound2

I The Promise of Redemption

If the idea of human freedom in full color ever occupied a prominent
place in the imagination of an otherwise secular and apathetic public, it
was during the early days of 2011 when not one, but several simultaneous
events of revolutionary promise took to the center stage of our TV screens
all over the world. Most of us, many of whom were children of the digital
age, were caught by surprise and were immediately bombarded with yet a
thousand daily images of revolutions not only fresh out of the camera, but

1
This essay is dedicated to Maikel Nabil Sanad, peace activist and political
prisoner since March 28th 2011 at El Marg Prison, Egypt and to artists Katherina
Olschbaur and Ibi Ibrahim. I am indebted to Sara Labib, Rawah Badrawi,
Mohamed Kamel, Dalia Ezzat, Alaa Murad, Lisa Clayton, Jaco Stoop, Tamer
Fouad, Nervana Mahmoud, Tariq Khonji, Mohamed Al-Khalifa and Menna Alaa
for the great discussions, fruitful controversies and often polemic arguments that
led to writing this book chapter.
2
445-450: “First of all, though they had eyes to see, they saw to no avail; they had
ears, but they did not understand; but, just as shapes in dreams, throughout their
length of days, without purpose they wrought all things in confusion.” Aeschylus,
with an English translation by Herbert Weir Smyth, Ph.D. in two volumes, 1.
Prometheus Bound. (Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press,) 1926.
330 Chapter Thirteen

also fresh out of history. The Arab revolutions became without question
the most important event of the year, and for many of the actors involved
probably the defining turning point in their whole lives.
As a rule, we understand revolution or political revolution, as a
fundamental change in power structures taking place within a short period
of time; in other words we describe the revolutionary operation as a
change of an old regime that is replaced by new political structures and,
even though, this was the case in the Middle East – as seen on TV – it
would take little effort to get an idea that the revolutionary promise was
not only political and that is why I speak of human freedom in the abstract,
rather than merely of revolution. The astounding number of young men
and women followed by their elders and then by people of the most
diverse political and religious persuasions that took in unison to the streets,
were demanding more than simply a change of government or constitution.
They were, as per their chants recorded live by international media,
demanding freedom, justice and peace. They wanted to change life.
How to change life without changing the world and radically altering
its morphology? We are dealing here not only with forms of political
imagination such as revolution, but also with elementary choices of truth
that are not politically neutral, nor do they subordinate the environment,
politics, morality and religion to instrumental concepts of reason; these
choices are founded on a utopian sphere of thought or imagination rather
than on alternative realities3.
Paradoxical as it is, this revolutionary praxis finds its reality in a
concrete articulation between political activism in terms of social justice,
human rights and the struggle against poverty, and, of course, the
perspective of liberation which requires either religious, philosophical or
ideological foundations at the very limits of human action: “I want
something much more radical, more far-edged, yet more true, namely
where the limits themselves become a marker of truth.”4
It seems that what we mistake for a simple revolutionary exercise
compromises the foundations of social life and with it the concepts by
means of which the world becomes understandable and livable.
The world remains as large and yet as finite as the limits of human
action in it, so that the limits of the world become the limits of our
history5. More than being just the artifice in which human life happens, the
world acquires meaning in being man’s first home and this meaning

3
Philip Goodchild, “Truth and Utopia”, Telos 134 (Spring 2006) pp. 65
4
Sandra Lehmann, Personal Correspondences, 12.04.09
5
Ibid.
 Revolution or Redemption? The Middle East 331

affects all other meanings that we might attach to it; this is but a great
challenge in which the world has to be made home-like; man must want
this world to be his home, as a human world that it already is, the one from
which men derive the benefits of sociability6.
It is precisely this quality of the world as the place where my
subjective lifetime finds a horizon within the larger order of objective and
measurable time of history, what drives men out of the comfort of the
household into taking part in the significant chain of events, that connected
with other significant events, constitute the one world we share and history
as well.7 Human action, born out of the desire to transgress the impositions
of bad luck and fate that every life has, is transformed into meaningful
events capable of entering the world stage and making it more hospitable
and livable, in spite of how we are unable to measure or predict the
consequences of such terrible force.
This is precisely what happened when Mohamed Bouazizi, a humble
Tunisian vendor, set himself on fire on December 17th 2010, protesting the
confiscation of his wares and the harassment and humiliation inflicted on
him by a municipal officer. This would have never been the subject of
countless articles, discussions and now even books, weren’t it for the fact
that his act became a catalyst for the Tunisian revolution, intensifying the
anger and violence that after his death on January 4th 2011, led to the step
down of long-time President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on January 14th
2011, after 23 years in power.
The Tunisian revolution was by no means an isolated incident and
taught us how to differentiate between casualty and the moment when
history catches up with its makers:

Nevertheless, the forces and the power that forge history wait for science to
make up its mind as little as did Christopher Columbus waited for
Copernicus. Each time the forces of history cause a new breach, the surge
of energies brings new lands and new seas into the visual field of human
awareness, the spaces of historical existence undergo a corresponding
change. Hence, new criteria appear, alongside of new dimensions of
historical and political activity, new sciences, new social systems; nations
are born or re-born. 8

6
Sandra Lehmann, Der Horizon der Freiheit: Zum Existenzdenken Jan Patockas,
Orbis Phaenomenologicus, Königshausen & Neumann, 2004, pp. 30-31
7
Agnes Heller, A Theory of Modernity, Blackwell, 1999, pp. 173-184
8
Carl Schmitt, “What is a Space Revolution?” in Land and Sea, Plutarch Press,
translated by Simona Draghici, 1997, pp. 29. Carl Schmitt, “Land und Meer, Eine
Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung”, Reclam, 1954.
332 Chapter Thirteen

The learnt advice of experts and scientists is no longer to any avail

here, or as in the words of Tocqueville,

As the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future, the mind of man
wanders in obscurity.9

That day when Bouazizi set himself on fire, little did he know that the
fire in which he engulfed himself would spread to each and every corner of
the Middle East and North Africa in a movement today collectively known
as Arab Spring. From Rabat, Morocco, where protesters demanded the end
of autocracy and a change in the constitution, to the wealthy shores of
pearl-sized Bahrain, where the center of the capital Manama was engulfed
in week-long protests demanding political reform and an end to
sectarianism, and everywhere in-between, the Middle East was suddenly
captured by an unprecedented moment of political power seizing the street
and spreading from country to country, from city to city, from village to
village, from neighbor to neighbor.
The Western observers, curious as they are, were divided in opinion
about the meaning of the different uprisings. More than they were
concerned and skeptical about the developments, they were perplexed; as
time went by it became clear the opinions of the experts comfortably
assembled in ivy-league universities, think-tanks and prestigious journals
were not to more avail than those of people in the streets, political
bloggers, social media gurus and well-informed housewives. Everyone
was taken by surprise.
The mood that prevailed during the early days of 2011 could be more
aptly expressed by Hannah Arendt with words from her last public
appearance, commemorating the bicentenary of the American Revolution
and with deep reservation about the state of affairs of the revolutionary
treasure: We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points in
history which separate whole eras from each other. For contemporaries
entangled as we are, in the inexorable demands of daily life, the diving
lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after
people stumble over them do the lines grow into walls which irretrievably
shut off the past. At such moments of history when the writing on the wall
becomes too frightening, most people flee to the reassurance of day-to-day
life with its unchanging pressing demands.10 The world seemed to have
taken a sinister turn but yet it was not only the Tunisian revolution, since
that hadn’t been so strategically important or risky a country, what became

9
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II, Book 4, c. VIII, 1840
10
Hannah Arendt, “Home to Roost”, Bicentennial Address, June 26, 1975
 Revolution or Redemption? The Middle East 333

a turning point; it was rather the felicitous day of January 25th when
inspired by the example of Tunisia and still angered at the death of a
young businessman, Khaleed Said, who was beaten to death by the
Egyptian security forces in 2010, thousands of Egyptians took to the
streets and demanded that following the example of Ben Ali, long-time
Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, would step down. On the evening of
February 11th the Egyptian leader announced his resignation through his
aide and fled the public eye.
After Egypt, the fire of revolution embodied in a desire for freedom
from tyranny, spread quickly like fireworks and then soon thereafter the
streets of Bahrain, Libya, Yemen and Syria were also filled with angry
protesters carrying on the torch of Mohamed Bouazizi demanding political
freedoms, human rights and a better future for their country. On a smaller
scale, the protests also spread to Morocco, Jordan, the United Arab
Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and surprisingly also to the State of Israel
where the ttile of an old pop song “Walk like an Egyptian” was taken up.
The protesters all over the region reclaimed the right to autonomy – in
what they termed self-determination all over the region – and immediately
what could have been – and was – quickly dismissed by many as sporadic
uprisings and revolts, was officially termed revolution. It was the year of
the Arab revolutions and a magic spell of democratic change would spread
all over, replacing almost immediately the ugly face of tyranny, in which
friend and foe alike had been deprived of freedom and condemned to a
weak status quo that while not totalitarian, it was far from democratic and
free – bearing in mind that it was immediately assumed that the two words
were charged with identical meaning, and that both would be achieved by
revolutionary means. The case for a revolution was made everywhere and
the newly appointed revolutionaries hastened to the task.
In spite of everything, the revolutionary success was met with praise
from all over and a carnival of liberal opinions was set in motion; some
arguing the case for nascent democracies and others warning of the
Islamist threat but overall they welcomed the Middle East to the ivy-
league of democratic nations and most likely, many of the illuminati,
began to plan quick holidays in the newly liberated lands with the altruistic
intentions to support democracy with their credit cards. It was a moment of
euphoria everywhere. The question however was never raised, on whether
it was only politics what we are dealing with here or if it could be that it
was the birth of an even more terrible human force, yet being subordinated
to the order of politics.
The revolutionary illusion proved to be short-lived: The local dictators,
as we might call them, were as quick to respond as their subjects were to
334 Chapter Thirteen

take to the street: Massive unrest was met with brutal crackdowns that left
not only thousands of civilians dead, but also led to a full-fledged war in
Libya; a brutal crackdown in Bahrain at the hand of the Peninsula Shield
Force that sent troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates;
on-going unrest in Syria has continued more or less unmolested daily with
dozens and sometimes hundreds of casualties actively targeted by the
regime, and a civil war seems imminent. Lastly, the iconic revolution of
Egypt has turned into a bitter political game that has produced alarming
stagnation from whatever perspective you look at it.
It is not only the casualties that should be taken into account but the
dangerous political games that have sparked sectarian strife nearly
everywhere between Sunnis and Shiites or between Muslims and
Christians; though these conflicts are not new or unknown, they have been
acutely intensified along the lines of ethnic and religious affiliation loosely
understood as political camps and violently exploited according to what
the tactics of the day required, with the only purpose to drift attention and
emphasis elsewhere. Propaganda machines in the good style of Madison
Avenue politics have been set off at home and abroad while the old Soviet-
styles of defamation, false accusations, mock trials and the alternative
realities offered by state TV have continued unmolested in each and every
country, with a nervous emphasis on the lies of the so-called
revolutionaries that in nearly every case were blamed on the work of
foreign hands, conspiracies, complots and the never unfashionable figure
of the traitor.
The counterrevolutionary reaction was not limited only to spreading
propaganda and suppressing protests: Night raids on private homes and
unlawful arrests, extended detainment and torture of dissidents, political
activists and journalists became a daily event; state-sponsored terror
carried out not only by police, armies and security forces but also by
private citizens was not unheard of. It is not that the horrors of war and
government-sponsored brutality are a strange guest in the Middle East,
however, the status quo sustained for so long since the end of colonial rule
in the region helped us to grow more or less used to it not only because we
seldom heard about it but also because the commonly held view of the
Middle East as one vast “Arabian” region in which, with the exception of
Israel, everyone speaks more or less the same language, shares more or
less the same culture and practices more or less the same religion. Though
the awareness about the variety of peoples and countries has increased, the
Middle East is still seen as an open travel book in an innocent combination
of Hegel and Lawrence of Arabia.
 Revolution or Redemption? The Middle East 335

Combination as innocent as the coinage of the term Arab Spring, that

does not only strike us as too Romantic a way to describe complex
political processes that often led to bloodshed but also constitutes neither a
novelty in the genre of political journalism nor does it belong to the
repertory of 2011’s inventions. According to Joshua Keating, the term was
first used by conservative political commentators in the United States
during the Bush administration, to describe a short-lived flourishing of
democracy movements in the region and particularly in Lebanon with the
Cedar Revolution in 2005. 11 In reference to the same article, Foreign
Policy’s own Marc Lynch, published a brief op-ed titled “Obama’s Arab
Spring” alluding to the short-lived momentum of 2005, two days after
Bouazizi’s death and long before this so-called Arab Spring would be in
full swing.12 The term then became popular all over international media
around March, and not without irony, after the initial euphoria was already
wearing out. 13
The matter is further complicated not only by the obscure association
with the commentators of the Bush administration – the invasion of
Afghanistan and Iraq as precedents do not sit well with the middle classes
of the Middle East – but also by the fact that the term Arab Spring
suggests that the different revolutions can be encapsulated within one Arab
movement, that is, as a Pan-Arab nationalist movement, and it has become
clear by now that whatever nationalist aspirations exist in the different
parts of the region are local rather than regional.
The greater Middle East is an entity as complex and diverse as that
thing we call the West and whilst the Arabic language and Islam are a
common denominator in so vast a region, the spread of Islam and Arabic
have engendered local traditions and languages that not always and not
everywhere fall under the definition of Arab. It is also suspect that under
the same lens of Western Arabism, the mainstream analysis of Western
media and the political establishment is always enfranchised on whether
and why liberal democracy is possible in this or that country, reasoning
than more often than not concludes why it is not possible. These cultural
and political impositions entirely miss the point of the heterogeneous
nature of the factors that convene not only toward revolution but which are

11
The article he refers to is titled “The Arab Spring of 2005”, by Charles
Krauthammer, The Seattle Times, March 21st 2005. The Cedar Revolution was
triggered by the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri on
February 14th, 2005.
12
Marc Lynch, “Obama’s Arab Spring”, Foreign Policy, January 6th 2011.
13
Joshua Keating, “Who first used the term Arab Spring?”, Foreign Policy,
November 4th 2011
336 Chapter Thirteen

constitutive of human action itself. It seems as if for many, it is a premise

of belonging or adapting to the modern world that all the values of
modernity have to be adhered to, and that those values can be imported or
simply translated, the same way that popular shows are dubbed for
audiences in not so popular parts of the world.14
Even though liberal democracy may be very desirable everywhere, it is
nowadays not only possible to think that the continuity of the modern
world does not necessarily depend upon it – as exemplified by the Iranian
Revolution, China and the Arab rentier states – but also imperative to
understand that a system so formal and essentially rational as liberal
democracy would hardly follow as the immediate consequence of
revolutionary upheaval, especially in a region not particularly rich in
democratic, secular or emancipatory traditions as those that preceded the
constituencies and rationality of legitimacy of 20th century liberal
democracies.
Beyond the scope of the strictly political-organizational, it is naïve to
assume that when it is not a clan of politically-bred revolutionaries or
ideological elites, but millions of people that take to the streets with the
sole intention to change life, they would be satisfied with political gains
and what not in the repertory of policy. The same everyday life that they
averted to change is constituted by and contained in something far more
heterogeneous than systems or institutions; it is a free arena where systems
and institutions intersect in the habitual life-world but do not fundamentally
give it meaning.15 It is still very early in time to know with any degree of
certainty if the uprisings have succeeded in delivering their revolutionary
promises, or even whether they have brought observable results in the
course of a single year; the devastating number of casualties, instability,
political stagnation, the threat of full-fledged Islamism in the form of
Shaaria states, and above all the liberal illusions sustained about the short-
term future of the region with particular reference to Egypt and Libya,
leave us with a mildly bitter after-taste about the guests invited to this
party. What we do know beyond reasonable doubt is that we have entered
into a whole new field of historical experience and observation that can be
hardly shunned from our TV screens as we please.

14
Agnes Heller, Ibid. pp. 139
15
John Grumley, Agnes Heller: A Moralist in the Vortex of History, Pluto, 2005,
pp. 33. Even though Grumley uses “life-world” in the native context of Heller’s
early Marxism (as articulated in “Everyday Life”, 1979) I refer here to life-world
as the amalgamation of World-time and Life-time from Heller’s later period (A
Theory of Modernity, Blackwell, 1999, pp. 173-184) that draws on Hans
Blumenberg, Lebenszeit und Weltzeit, Suhrkamp, 1986.
 Revolution or Redemption? The Middle East 337

The question here remains whether this new and vast field of history
does in fact translate into a revolutionary situation or if what we are
dealing with here is something broader both at the regional and global
level that brings into question the markers of truth, freedom and the world
for all the players involved, pointing at the decay and incapability of our
notions of the political to deal with that free arena of the everyday in
which systems and institutions are but secondary to human configurations.
The answers of history are never to be had in books, but yet one can only
wonder what is it that crossed the mind of the humble vendor Mohamed
Bouazizi when he set himself on fire on that particular December 10th
2010 and that in no time drove millions of people out of their home to sing
loud “Freedom”, “Peace”, “Allah is Great”.
I doubt that he would have joined the procession of political analysts in
drafting proposals for new constitutions, democratic republics and
transitional councils. It seems to me that as if collectively reading the
thoughts of many in his generation that had never experienced freedom, he
saw that the elements that constitute our “vita activa” on earth stood in
need of redemption from and within the inevitable quest for meaning.
Only the possibilities of human action possess the power to remedy if only
temporarily the helpless fragility of human affairs and as such, they
redeem not man but allow man to redeem the world from its inherent
meaninglessness – making it into that hospitable man-made home where
politics can happen.16 The pointer of redemption always glitters when the
voice of a man reaches into the direction of history, compelling men to act
together, even as he is being consumed by the fire. Symbolic as it was,
Mohamed Bouazizi’s desperate act brought into the world something that
was not there, something of a miracle – he promised them the world.

On Revolutions
It seems now that on the basis of our lack of experience with the lived
reality of revolutionary traditions – and of revolutionary moments as a
whole – we have been left at the mercy of several fallacies that if anything,
obscure our understanding of revolutionary traditions. Hundreds of articles
and at least a dozen books have been published since January evaluating
the results of the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa; it is not
even necessary to recount them for it is possible to find them in every

16
Daniel Brandes, “On Messianic Strains in Arendt’s Theory of Political Action”,
Journal for Jewish Thought, Vol. I, April 2010, pp. 2
338 Chapter Thirteen

newspaper, magazine and journal the world over. What is unmistakably

common between them all is the established consensus of revolution.
A revolution is understood as a fundamental change in power that takes
place within a short period of time, as opposed to reform. This view,
though usually equated with the French Revolution, dates back to Aristotle
who distinguished between two types of constitutional revolutions – the
complete change from one constitution to another and the modification of
an existing constitution.17 By constitution here we do not mean our modern
framework of fundamental principles according to which a state is
governed but rather Law (ȞȩȝȠȢ) as the foundation of all political life;
what fails to account for the complexity of factors involved in the
contemporary political experience of authoritarianism that is deeply rooted
within specific types of legal rationality18. If a case could be made for the
Egyptian and Libyan revolution to have succeeded, then this would be the
type of revolution applicable to them.
Richer approaches are proposed by Tocqueville and Tilly. Tocqueville
argues that there are three types of revolution: political revolutions, sudden
and violent revolutions that seek not only to establish a new political
system but to transform an entire society and lastly also slow but sweeping
transformations that take several generations to bring about. 19 Charles
Tilly, on the other hand, more our contemporary, suggests that we
differentiate between a coup d’état, a civil war, a revolt and a great
revolution (revolutions that transform economic, social and political
structures, such as the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution or the
Islamic revolution of Iran). 20 While their compartmentalization, though
somewhat arbitrary, remains valid for all times, it is interesting to notice

17
Aristotle, The Politics, V, tr. T.A. Sinclair, Penguin, 1972, pp. 190
18
Max Weber distinguishes between three types of belief in the legitimacy of a
political system, as follows; legal domination, traditional domination, charismatic
domination; in Richard Bendix, Max Weber: an intellectual portrait, University of
California Press, 1977, pp. 295. The authoritarian situation in the Middle East
fluctuates between the three, far from a totalitarian situation as that described by
Arendt, it might be more accurately described in the words of Richard Löwenthal
as “authoritarian bureaucratic oligarchy” or “post-totalitarian authoritarianism”.
What Löwenthal argued about Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain is true today
about the modern Arab states: “Those countries have not gone from tyranny to
freedom, but from massive terror to a rule of meanness, ensuring stability at the
risk of stagnation”, in Walter Laqueur, The Fate of the Revolution: Interpretations
of Soviet History from 1917 to the Present, Scribner’s, 1987, pp. 243
19
Roger Boesche, Tocqueville’s Road Map: Methodology, Liberalism, Revolution,
and Despotism, Lexington Books, 2006, pp. 86
20
Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492-1992, Blackwell, 1995, pp. 16
 Revolution or Redemption? The Middle East 339

that whenever we speak of revolution in the Middle East today, we are

referring exclusively to political revolutions in the sense of Tocqueville –
the old regime that is replaced by the revolution and that is a question of
ideology more than a question of structures21.
Accordingly, political revolution is loosely defined then as an upheaval
in which the government is replaced but in which property relations are
left intact; articulated by Trotsky as opposed to social and permanent
revolutions22. The social revolution on the other hand, is one in which old
property relations are overturned, and lastly the permanent revolution is
that embodied by in the socialist state, after the political and social
revolution are realized, paving the way to replace an old regime with a
permanent state of revolution in which not only institutions but also
consciousness would be changed, in an uninterrupted process in which
democratic and socialist state would merge.23 It is important here to note
that Marx himself had claimed, on the other hand that: “Life is not
determined by consciousness but consciousness by life.”24
The examples of political revolutions are as diverse as the results
thereof, however, what is strictly political about them, remains a matter of
debate. If we understand politics as the Leviathan of the State, public
administration and the institutions of government, then those revolutions
are clearly political, so political that in fact every time there’s a change of
government, ruler or constitution, we might be speaking of a revolution,
which is hardly the case.
When we speak of politics, less troubled by the shadow of recent
catastrophe, it would not be inexcusable to speak of politics as a more
elementary operation: politics is the in-between, the space that there is
between men.

It is indeed very difficult to understand (or have a representation thereof)

that we are really free anywhere, without being either liberated by
ourselves or dependent on the arena in which we are apparently free.

21
Francois Furet & Francoise Melonio, “Tocqueville’s Workshop” in Alexis de
Tocqueville The Old Regime and the Revolution, University of Chicago, 2001, pp.
11-19
22
L. Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, New York,
1969, pp. 71-72
23
Rolf H. W. Theen, “The Idea of the Revolutionary State: Tkachev, Trotsky, and
Lenin”, in Russian Review, Vol. 31, No. 4, Oct. 1972, 391-396
24
Karl Marx, “The German Ideology”, in Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 2nd ed.,
OUP, 2000, pp. 181, in Philip Goodchild, Ibid. pp. 77
340 Chapter Thirteen

Freedom is given to us only in that intermediate, in between space of

politics.25

Said in other words, politics is the space in which we are collectively

free. When we adapt ourselves to look at the political beyond the
instrumental apparatus of liberal democracy and as a fundamental, yet not
inherent, human operation, it is clear that what we understand as
revolution and as political revolution, is ought to be put under the lens and
reviewed carefully.
The same abstractions of the political as a procedure that permeate the
tradition of political thought to think about revolution are at work here, not
only because of the primacy of the political as an administrative-functional
realm but also because of the conception of revolution as a vertical
Messianic principle, in which one age of the world is superseded by
another by a stroke of luck, a lightening or a sudden violent movement.
The uprisings and revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa are not
merely demanding political implementation of applicable procedures but
the abstract and yet so ultimately human concerns with freedom and rights.
Freedom, as the non-foundational foundation of the modern world,
seems to be the universal demand of all contemporary revolutions: The
modern world is based on freedom: that is, freedom is the arché of the
modern world. Yet freedom is entirely unfit to serve as an arché, because it
is the foundation which does not found. As a Grund – to speak with both
Hegel and Heidegger – it opens the Abgrund: that is, the ground that opens
the abyss. And since the modern world is based on freedom, on an arché
which cannot found, it remains a world without foundation, a world which
continuously has to reinvent itself.” 26 The revolutionary demands for
freedom make an example of the modern antinomy and perpetuate as ends
what should be the means and as means (constitutionality, legality,
liberties) what should be the ends.
The emphasis of revolutions on freedom (in liberal theory, questions of
limited government) and orders of private property (in Marxist theory, the
social question) has infinitely diminished their capacity to create and erect
themselves as “constitutio libertatis.” Firstly, the establishment of a
limited government that would make space for individual liberty does still
not establish politics as the in-between of men or political freedom as
such. Secondly, the question of private property is so essential to freedom

25
Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, Vol. 1, 1950-1973, Piper, 2002. Notebook 1,
§21, August 1950 (translation is mine)
26
Agnes Heller, “The Three Logics of Modernity and the Double Bind of the
Modern Imagination”, Collegium Budapest, Public Series No. 23, 2000, pp. 3
 Revolution or Redemption? The Middle East 341

as we understand it today (both as personal freedom and civil liberties)

that its abolition would be the equivalent of returning to a pre-modern
social arrangement where the living space and as such the arena of politics,
would not be the world as a man-made arrangement and structure but
rather the earth and nature. In this scenario, politics and the question of
political association would be irrelevant or at least secondary to our mere
survival as species, therefore political action in all its forms would be
rendered immediately ineffectual.27
For Hannah Arendt, the revolutionary treasure is the exposure to
fundamental political capabilities – individuals acting together, on the
basis of mutually agreed common purposes, in order to establish the
concrete space of freedom, the public space in which men in the plural can
establish the freedom necessary for politics, however it is not freedom
itself but rather the space where freedom is acted out.28
In this sense Arendt picks back the Greek transformation of the old
regime into a new polis in which the matters of justice and the State are the
dominion of all the free citizenry; while the approach is interesting and not
anchored in the abstract language of freedom and rights, she overestimates
politics as a free arena in which all the questions of human beings can be
solved, performing an exercise in aestheticizing the political and at that
making it perfunctorily sterile.29 Nevertheless it is important to notice that
Arendt makes a case against negative notions of political freedom (as in
liberalism) in which freedom is guaranteed only by rights and not enabled
as the political freedom of association and participation in matters
political:30

Revolution und Evolution sind aber zwei Teile desselben Vorgangs. Man
kann die eine nicht ohne die andere haben (Revolution and Evolution are

27
For a detailed explanation of the problem of private property in modernity and
its reception in Hegel, see Gillian Rose, “Politics in the Severe Style” in Hegel
Contra Sociology, Athlone, 1981, pp. 48-91. For an outline of Hannah Arendt’s
criticism of both liberal and Marxist understanding of revolution, see Albrecht
Wellmer, “Arendt on Revolution” in Dana Villa (ed.) The Cambridge Companion
to Hannah Arendt, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 220-221
28
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Penguin, 2006, pp. 207-271
29
See Dana Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political, Princeton
University Press, 1996
30
Albert Wellmer, ibid. pp. 217; Hannah Arendt, “The Rights of Man: What Are
They?”, Modern Review, 3/1, summer 1949.
342 Chapter Thirteen

but two parts of the same process. You cannot have one without the
other).31

A revolutionary moment is that when human beings (and not just

society or a society) set upon themselves to the task not of changing ways
of thinking, let alone systems, but the seizure upon an issue that had until
that point remained unsolved for us as a species, and in politics, with us as
parts thereof rather than as sub-species in the genus of political animals.32It
is hard to think that out of the cycle of action and reaction, in which one
regime is merely replaced by another, periods of Enlightenment will not be
followed by periods of obscurantism and the other way around. A
revolution, such as that of Aeschylus at the conclusion of the Oresteia, in
which the new order is merged with the old order into a continuum, is
what we call both evolution and revolution: “With the end of the Great
Revolutions, the old law and the new law came together in a new
ensemble.”33
A revolution is not simply an exercise in political organization or re-
organization but a transgression on the mythical Leviathan of the times;
not a sudden transformation of the spirit of the times as if a religious
conversion but the actualization of itself in both the spatial and the
temporal; a New Testament for every generation.34 Accordingly, what we
remember as the Great Revolutions are not necessarily political events but
those moments in which space (geography, society, physics) caught up
with time (politics, thought, art) or the other way around: We remember
Copernicus, Luther and the daguerreotype. On the other hand, in politics,
when a revolutionary calls for an immediate break with the past, it is
almost an obvious symptom that hocus pocus will not suffice and that
eventually time will catch up with the newly established organizations,
institutions and alternative forms of political rationality.
Every revolution has been preceded by a long period of evolution in
which we have witnessed not only the change or transformation, but in
such a way that the order of reason, according to which we learn and

31
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts, vol. II,
Lambert Schneider, 1964, pp. 190-195
32
See Hannah Arendt’s analysis of ȝȑȡȠȢ and ȖİȞȩȢ from Plato’s “Politics”, 263, in
“Denktagebuch”, Vol. 1, 1950-1973, Piper, 2002. Notebook 1, §24, September
1950
33
Harold Berman, Law and Revolution, Vol. II, Harvard University Press, 2003,
pp. 374
34
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, ibid. pp. 193
 Revolution or Redemption? The Middle East 343

experience earthly life is changed. 35 The great political upheaval and

drama remains and by large, not the most significant aspect of revolution;
what becomes truly significant is the manner after which the Revolution
turns into a spectacle or the way in which it is received all around by
spectators who do not participate in it. The truly heavy weight of
Revolution does not rest in the success or failure of the revolutionary
aspirations themselves or in their institutional frameworks but in what
happens in the heads of those who do not participate in it or, are at least
not in principal actors. 36

Revolution and Redemption

What is it that took place in the Middle East and that we understand as
revolution? It is true that revolution does not elicit a particularly positive
association in the Middle East where after all, the vast majority of the
regimes have been installed in the course of the 20th century by a
revolution of one among many kinds previously described. The revolutions
were as varied as the countries but what unifies them is the result –
authoritarianism and tyranny nearly everywhere, of both the pseudo-
secular and pseudo-religious kind, entrenched in pan-Arab nationalism
spreading from Morocco to Oman under the same premises – of the
troubled legacy of the 19th century European Imperialism and after 1948,
the ambiguous pretense of pan-Arab unity that in its resistance to the
existence and preservation of Israel has never made up its mind to choose
between anti-Imperialism and anti-Semitism, choosing selectively between
the two.
This Pan-Arab nationalism is no different from the Orientalism that led
to the coining of expressions such as Arab Spring, firmly anchored in the
politico-theological assumption that Islam served as the glue that unified
all Arabs under one language and one faith; what after the uprisings of
2011 and the temptation of armed conflict between different countries,
sects and tribal groups has proven to be yet a fallacy. As much as we
would like to believe that the uprisings all over are spontaneous and
unprecedented, as Rosa Luxemburg would try to persuade us of, the
writing on the wall has been there for a few decades already. Sparks of

35
Harold Berman, “Renewal and Continuity: The Great Revolutions and the
Western Tradition”, in M. Darrol Bryant and Hans. R. Huessy (eds.), Eugen
Rosenstock-Huessy: Studies in His Life and Thought, Toronto Studies in Theology,
vol. 28, pp. 21
36
Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, Semiotexte, 1997, pp. 93-94
344 Chapter Thirteen

revolts have occurred periodically nearly everywhere and have been

brutally suppressed as soon as they have occurred, with the exceptional
circumstance that mass media fueled via social media, intelligent phones
and the widespread usage of the Internet in a new tech-savvy generation
has made it impossible to turn a blind eye to it this time – much as it would
have been convenient for foreign-policy makers in the already turbulent
West. One could argue that the revolutionary uprisings would be a matter
of time.
Where did all this mess start then? Clearly it wasn’t all the job of
Mohamed Bouazizi alone. Soon thereafter protests erupted everywhere in
which the emotional component of moral transgression and the rationale of
political demands blended into one; the protests as per classical definition
were “[n]on-routinized ways of affecting political, social and cultural
processes.”37
The demands were virtually the same everywhere – better rights,
democratic institutions and also often enough, the end of sectarian
discrimination based on religion and it could be said that the protests were
very successful in that: “[s]uccessful protest has the capacity to mobilize
public opinion through unorthodox forms of action and thus puts pressure
on decision makers.”38
However we must take into account that they were not an occasional or
isolated event, in most cases the protests lasted for weeks and months were
met with increasing violence and their demands were most obviously not
met. Their achievement was at a very essential level. They were a “special
form of communication, different from deliberation, discussion and other
forms of public, political exchanges.”39
Political exchange becomes controversial terminology when applied to
the historical situation of the Middle East in which the political space in a
vast majority of the countries (with the sole exception of Lebanon and
Kuwait) is a little less than a limited space of informal participation
unified as consultative apparatus within the state party or the state
ideology. When protesters made their demands for better rights, it of
course included the much debated freedom of speech that made the
headlines in more than a few Western countries, such as the Netherlands
with the trial of Geert Wilders and Norway with the Utoya massacre

37
Della Porta D. and M. Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction, Blackwell,
2006, pp. 165
38
Ibid. pp. 163
39
Jon Olafsson, “Protest for Protest’s Sake: Does Activism Require Rational
Justification?”, in Rearticulations of Reason: Recent Currents, ed. Leila Haaparanta,
Helsinki Societas Philosophica Fennica, 2010, pp. 261
 Revolution or Redemption? The Middle East 345

perpetrated by Anders Breivik. We are here presented with the first

antinomy carried along with the concept of political protest. A protest in
which freedom of expression is demanded transgresses itself as the
protester demands something that goes beyond free speech. Protest actions
are usually more than just the exercises of free-speech; they are beyond the
mere expression of an opinion.40
Once a protest is in motion, the demands made imply the notion or at
least the possibility of free speech, and whether such free speech exists or
not, once a protest or a protest group is recognized as threatening, it has
acquired a formal power that goes beyond the right of expression.41 When
this happens to be the case, demands might be met or not, according to the
relevance allocated to formal power, and while yet merely at the level of
protest action, the kind of communication established becomes almost
unmistakably a threat to the order of rationality in which the State is
anchored and brutal reactions are not meant to destroy this rationality but
rather to re-order it anew. In order for protest to be transformed into either
social movements or revolutions, to be heard so to say by its own voice, it
must promise something different than itself; it must implicate a form of
power.42 This form of power must be distinguished from violence.
According to Arendt, the difference between power and violence lies in
that: 1. Violence is measurable and calculable and, on other hand, power
and imponderable and incalculable. This is what makes power such a
terrible force, but it is there precisely where its eminently human character
lies. 2. Power always grows in between men, whereas violence can be
possessed by one man alone. If power is seized, power itself is destroyed
and only violence is left. 3. From the above follows that violence is always
objective; it is identical with the means that it utilizes – force – whereas
power comes to life through action itself and is constituted by action. It
can vanish at any moment, it is pure unmediated action. A modern
example of how power helped to destroy violence is Ghandi. He never
advocated for an impotence of the Christian kind. He rather thought that
the power of the masses in India is the only thing that could bring British
violence to an end.43 If the protests reclaimed the right to free speech in
transgressing free speech into action and then violence is meted out as a
response, how do peoples then create forms of powers that do not dissolve
themselves?

40
Ibid.
41
Ibid. pp. 268-269
42
Ibid. pp. 269
43
Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch, Vol. 1, 1950-1973, Piper, 2002. Notebook 12,
§5, November 1952 (translation is mine)
346 Chapter Thirteen

The answer to this question is not simple: The power of the masses in
the Middle East in fact created and sustained the kind of non-violent action
and hence of power that Arendt is alluding to, however the potential of the
revolutionary power was lost when this brief and fleeting political power
was transformed into action as an abstract demand for freedom, political
institutions and negative liberties rather than establishing the acting in
common and the in-between space of men at long last regained as the
revolutionary treasure itself; thus making out of the revolution – wherever
it happened – an external exercise in political transition and not the
necessary re-working and positing of the internal contradictions that
constitute human sociability and that are infinitely superior qualitatively
speaking to the pursuit of politics. This is no reason for surprise: Similar
was the fate of the French Revolution and partially, of the American
Revolution; from here is derived my suspicion about the potential of
strictly political revolutions, to change the face of the earth.44
A political transition from dictatorship into a form of government so
homogeneous as liberal democracy passed as revolution in the Middle East
is as futile as a change of regime once again: The obvious preconditions
for personal and political freedom are not a given fact as many of the
newly minted breed of liberals want to convince themselves: Islam as such
finds itself in the middle of a fierce battle against Western values, not
being aware enough of the inner modernization of faith steamrolling over
the whole earth that has passed the conflict of radical universals as false
traditional beliefs; the language of politics has moved to the center of
human interests rendering all aspects of life political and in doing such,
rendering politics completely apolitical by politicizing private life and
privatizing the public realm; human rights, abstract as they are, have
become almost universally the only aim of the revolution and of politics
while it remains true that they are the condition of all political life and not
the result thereof. The greatest political power seen since the beginning of
the 20th century quickly watered itself down to instrumental relations
between powers of state and legal rationality.
What has been lost here is not the political as such but the human
possibility of finding the “middle term” between sociability and abstract
rights or freedoms. It only suffices to read the infinite number of articles in
which political, social, historical and economic matters are discussed at
length with reference to the uprisings in the Middle East: Not for one
moment has anyone paid attention to the decay and presumptuousness of
the idea of man as a political animal, the most apolitical, anti-social and

44
Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, Penguin, 2006, pp. 207-271
 Revolution or Redemption? The Middle East 347

incommunicative of all forms of existence. There is nothing more

revolutionary than the joy of life and the capacity of enjoyment in a world
made already turbulent by violence, death and famine. Running away from
the inner turmoil of life into a political space already impoverished by bad
human relationships is not a release from repression but rather its
confirmation – it is a form of hedonism contrary in every way to human
vocations and to the inclinations toward the good and the beautiful.
The most revolutionary of all men are those totally immersed in the
daily struggles of life, those riddled by prejudice and burdens, out of the
simple fact that they live in the world, with everything that it has to offer
them, freely and of their own accord, not upon the basis of abstract notions
of humanity but in the indeterminateness of their human personality;
willingly or unwillingly they give something to society, help it grow. On
the other hand, those political animals, the new breed of Middle Eastern
leaders, activists, writers and poets all of whom are politicians, live only
for the world and not in the world; they are immersed full time in political
activities and reason accordingly without any free time for reflection, to
live among others and with them; they are no longer able to distinguish
reality from concept and can never become the kind of leadership needed
in a turbulent world – they have lost their personality and with it the
charisma and character necessary for politics in having become identical
with political opinion.
In comparison with them, even those who spend all day with their
children in front of a TV set are far more humanized because they have
preserved a fragment of their intimacy and their capacity for joy.45 It is
only in them, and not in newly minted political heroes, that there is any
revolutionary potential for mankind as a species; survival depends entirely
on them as they have not completely departed from the world as we know
it. Another political revolution made its way, after another and yet one
another. Even though they are not saying it, the people are clearly aware
that the current regimes, fresh as they are, civilian and what not, will have
to be overthrown just like the old ones, over and over and over, that is,
until there will be a revolution. That revolution is not going to be a
political statement and perhaps there will not even a protest, the revolution
that the Middle East requires will begin in silence and no one will
remember its name.
The revolution remains in captivity, trying to make up his mind
whether he will vote on the next elections and for whom; whether his
candidate will be Islamist or Liberal, what the Mosque will say, and the

45
Agnes Heller, Interview “The Revolution of Everyday Life”, 1979
348 Chapter Thirteen

Church. The Middle East remains exactly the same, only that the military
uniforms have paved the way for a new generation of smaller dictatorships
that grow in the backyard of every house and in the back of every person;
the protests and the social movements continue unmolested, in every
square, the world over, ultimate symptom of the poorly revolutionary
character of the times.
The political analysts are not entirely wrong when they claim in their
weekly dossiers that the horizon of the revolutions was lost when it
became entrenched in finding political solutions to something that
unleashed from the resentment of economic inequality. This highlights not
necessarily a lack of imagination in the arena of contemporary politics but
also that in the mind of the everyman, the notion of sovereignty and as
such, of innovation, remains untouched; the ambitions about the
redemption of human action did not necessarily find a voice in the political
framework of revolution and therefore, no results in the sphere of politics
will ever be enough to satisfy the thirst for a larger and richer order of
freedom that would require to abandon the safety of the faith in liberty as
an individual human property that is not preceded by an improvement in
the invisible in-between of men and their relationships.
Until this new law and not just one another constitution, comprising the
order of reason and history will enter the field of revolutionary experience
we will find ourselves overthrowing one government after another,
hanging from a thread and walking into the dark. It seems as if Arendt was
onto something when she related the quest for human rights to new
political principles, yet to be found:

Human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new
political principle, in a law on earth, whose validity this time must
comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly
limited, rooted in and controlled by newly territorial entities.46

This request, without further ado, is no different than the revolution

that Rosenstock-Huessy expressed forcefully when he spoke about
revolutions. They are not accidents of the kind which interests the reporter
or the police, they are not sensational irruptions of an evolution which
went on before and is resumed afterwards. They change the face of the
earth. Evolution is based on revolution. It is sheer non-sense to put before
us the choice between Evolution and Revolution. Revolution and Evolution

46
Hannah Arendt, The Origin of Totalitarianism, Harcourt, 1973, pp. ix
 Revolution or Redemption? The Middle East 349

are reciprocal ideas. 47 That and nothing less is echoed by Franz

Rosenzweig: whereas the myth of peoples is continuously changing, parts
of the past are continuously forgotten, and others are memorialized into
myth, here the myth becomes eternal and does not change any longer; and
whereas the peoples live in revolutions in which the law continuously
sheds its skin, here reigns the law that no revolution could repeal, and that
can probably be evaded but not changed.48 Will this Law, both timeless
and the by-product of history visit the uprisings in the Middle East and
North Africa? It is this foundation perhaps what Aristotle referred to as the
law that is changed upon revolution and not merely the performative
exercise of politics. The great promise implied here in this Law as both a
redemptive and revolutionary exercise that cannot be satisfied by the
political alone, becomes clear when we begin to look at every people’s
desire for freedom and peace rather as an ultimate quest to redeem the
world and themselves from the inevitable limitations and constraints of
their own history – to mend imperfect destinies by turning them into
destinations, for every human destiny is in its own way, very imperfect. 49

47
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Life Lines: Quotations from the Works of Eugen
Rosenstock-Huessy, ed. Clinton C. Gardner, Argo Books, 1988, pp. 50
48
Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, Univ. of Wisconsin, 2005, pp. 323
49
Margarete Susman, “Die messianische Idee als Friedensidee. Julius Goldstein
zum Gedächtnis”, Der Morgen, October 1929
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

THE WORST REVOLUTION OF ALL?

MANAGERIALISM
AND THE “BODY WITHOUT EARS”1

CHRISTOPHER HUTTON

Introduction
In 1990 I observed an immigration official at the Shenzhen border (the
land border between the then British colony of Hong Kong and mainland
China) who, after inspecting and stamping the passport, would lean back
and toss it with a slight spin back towards the traveller. Today one is met
with modern blue uniforms, professional demeanor, sometimes a greeting
in English, and generally ultra-rapid processing. A recent innovation in the
immigration control culture of the People’s Republic of China is a system
for recording customer satisfaction. The traveller is invited to provide
feedback on the immigration official’s performance by pressing one of a
row of three or sometimes four buttons. The police ID number is also
shown. The categories in the four-button model are: Greatly satisfied (㠀
ᖖ㺉ព), Satisfied (㺉ព), Checking time too long (㖞斜ኴ攧), Poor
customer service (⾩ᗘ୙ዲ), each illustrated with an abstract face-icon or
“emoticon”. The device bears the caption “You’re welcome to comment
on my work” (㫊㏄⮡ᡃⓗᕤస徃⾜孬௴).
Anyone (citizen or not) passing through the immigration is thus
positioned as a consumer of the state’s services, and the immigration
official becomes a front-line provider of those services, answerable to the
consumer via the accumulation of data which the consumer provides to
backstage authorities at various levels. These data can be amalgamated and

1
This essay draws on many illuminating discussions with Wayne Cristaudo relating
to our wider joint project on the philosophy, history and sociology of managerialism.
 The Worst Revolution of All? 351

aggregated at different levels of abstraction for a variety of audit purposes.

The performance indicator inevitably creates hierarchies of achievement
with the strong visual appeal of objectivity and being easily reviewable
when represented in statistical tables, especially when tracked over time.
This reform can be read as a reflection of the increasingly competitive
job market in China, in both the private and state sector, and can be set
against a past symbolized by both communist-bureaucratic inertia and
traditional Chinese guanxi (the use of relationship networks). This new
accountability can be identified as a symptom of transparency and openness.
The feedback process reflects marketisation and the widening use of
managerial reforms in contemporary China. These reforms redefine and
integrate practices and linguistic habits across public-private boundaries,
and in so doing reframe the roles of state actors and private citizens.
The optional possibility of providing feedback on the services offered
by the state complicates semiotically what was previously a more
straightforward encounter between an individual traveller and the state.
The traveller was previously positioned as supplicating an individual
official for the state’s permission to pass the border. Now the traveller has
in some sense a controlling gaze over the official, while at the same time
both traveller and official are submitted in different ways to the ultimate
authority of the state. The traveller may take the opportunity to record their
opinion, wondering at the effect of negative feedback either on their own
progress through immigration, or on the career progress of the officials (or
their supervisors at various levels).
The fact that a foreign visitor is being invited to offer direct criticism
of an official of the People’s Republic of China is highly disorienting,
especially given that, in the PRC, border security falls under the Ministry
of Public Security. This use of consumer feedback can be seen on one
level as the repackaging of state power within a consumerist frame for
more effective “soft” control of both traveller and official. Authority
determines the parameters of its interaction with the consumer of its
services by controlling the mode, timing and format of the interaction, and
commodifying and formalizing the resulting data. The traveller may
decide to ignore the audit system as oppressive of the officials, but it is
perfectly possible to audit the percentage of responses per number of
travellers processed, and compare this across different officials, shifts,
airports, etc. In that sense, the traveller cannot definitively opt out of this
new system, a symptom of the all-embracing grip of such managerial
reforms.
352 Chapter Fourteen

Reflexive modernity & managerialism

Terms like “reflexive modernity”, “remodernisation”, “second
modethatrnity”, or (in some usages) “postmodernity” reflect an understanding
that modernity at a certain point turns on itself and begins to modernize
and radicalize itself:

It begins to transform, for a second time, not only the key institutions but
also the very principles of society. But this time the principles and
institutions being transformed are those of modern society. 2

Shields offers this account:

It posits a normative and homeostatic modernity which is now changing or

being ‘updated’ or ‘re-modernized’ in ways which utilize the same
processes that produced ‘first modernity’ but are now reflexively leading to
a qualitatively distinct ‘second modernity’.3

This has been termed “liquid modernity”, a stage of development

characterized by highly mobile nomadic and extraterritorial elites,
increased spatial differentiation as commercial spaces like shopping malls
dominate the public experience of space, and gated communities or
“voluntary ghettoes”.4 The citizen is reconceptualised as consumer, as part
of a social order that is fundamentally at odds with the ideology of the
traditional welfare state.5 Reflexive modernity, in this paper, is understood
primarily in terms of the dominance of the consumerist-contractual
understandings of citizens, and the rise of managerialism and juridification.
Reflexive modernity retains the commitment of modernity to procedural
and substantive rights, equality, and transparency. However, these
concepts and the associated discourse are co-opted within a managerialist
reform as part of a wider “audit culture”. Following the “managerial turn”,
public institutions and corporations create explicit statements of their goals

2
Ulrich Beck, Wolfgang Bonss and Christopher Lau, ‘The Theory of Reflexive
Modernization: Problematic, Hypotheses and Research Programme’, Theory
Culture Society 20/2 (2003): 1–33, 1.
3
Rob Shields, ‘Boundary-thinking in Theories of the Present: the Virtuality of
Reflexive Modernization’, in European Journal of Social Theory 9/2 (2006): 223–
237, 234, fn. 2.
4
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000).
5
Peter Abrahamson, ‘Liquid Modernity: Bauman on Contemporary Welfare
Society’, Acta Sociologica 47/2 (2004): 171-179.
 The Worst Revolution of All? 353

in the form of “vision” and “mission” statements, undertake branding and

market-positioning exercises, codify internal policy, and develop meta-
mechanisms (or feedback loops) for monitoring their own compliance with
stakeholder, societal and institutional aims. Institutional energy is then
strongly focused on the coordinated mobilisation of resources in the
pursuit of a set of articulated goals or outcomes. That these goals are set
out in an explicit manner is fundamental to this process, since without
precise formulations of goals there can be no transparent accountability to
them. The managerial turn is a revolt against the informal, the intuitively
understood, and the unstated, following the maxim “What can be
measured can be managed”. Belief in effability and the transparency of
reasons is one important component of the managerial state, in which “all
of us move through a social space that becomes more saturated with
rules”.6
Managerialism is driven by a profound distrust of the taken-for-
granted, seeing this as a cover for inefficiency and obfuscation. It seeks to
break institutional consensus by setting in motion a set of reflexive
practices and processes that ensure continual review. Institutions are
perceived to have been run unreflexively through an unthinking appeal to
established practices, language and habits. These are habits of language, of
mind, or procedure and of spatial organisation that must be subject to
perpetual scrutiny. One symptom of demands for transparency, accessibility
and openness is the use of the present participle in logos, slogans, tags and
mission and vision statements (“Bringing you increasing levels of
excellence”), which positions the institution and the addressee within an
open-ended reciprocal, if ill-defined, relationship, in which engagement of
the “service-provider” to excellence is unbounded. Discourse boundaries
between domains become blurred as buzzwords (“excellence”, “value
added”), management techniques, and modes of assessment spread from
the private to the public sector, from commercial to educational
institutions, and so on.
The Citizen’s Charter promulgated by John Major as Prime Minister of
the United Kingdom in 1991 was an important stage in the global rise of
managerialism, the revolution that had been in progress since the early
1980s with the rise of New Public Management, particularly in New
Zealand. 7 Among its aims was “to replace bureaucratic public sector

6
Paul Campos, Jurismania: The Madness of American Law (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998).
7
Jonathan Boston, John Martin, June Pallot and Pat Walsh, Public Management:
The New Zealand Model (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1996).
354 Chapter Fourteen

structures with marketised ones”.8 In Hong Kong in 1992 this trend was
reflected in a series of Performance Pledges from the incoming colonial
governor Christopher Patten. The Labour government’s “Service First”
initiative in 1998 recast the original Citizen’s Charter, illustrating
managerialism’s need for constant reflexive reform, as old policies and
buzz-words begin to appear stale and routine. India’s Citizen’s Charters,
originally promulgated in 1997, define “citizen” as

the clients or customers whose interests and values are addressed by the
Citizen’s Charter and, therefore, includes not only the citizens but also all
the stakeholders, i.e., citizens, customers, clients, users, beneficiaries, other
Ministries/Departments/Organisations, State Governments, UT [Union
Territory] Administrations, etc.9

A recent British reform in this open-ended series of initiatives involves

“Customer Service Excellence”, a benchmarking process which is
intended “to bring professional, high level customer service concepts into
common currency with customer-facing public services by providing a
unique improvement tool”.10 These managerial reforms have had a clear
impact worldwide, involving the branding of public services as a product.
Accompanying mission statements have proliferated, appearing in railway
stations, hospitals (which in the UK have their own patients’ charter)11 and
municipal offices, along with performances pledges and related statistics.

Juridification
Juridification refers to the increasing encroachment of legal modes of
thought upon institutions, public spaces and social practices. The
contractual elements of modern civic culture, in which citizens are
positioned as consumers of public services, have led to a shift towards
explicitness, transparency of purpose, market-oriented commercial phrasing,
and therefore new forms of public language. Two related features of
reflexive modernity come together here, namely the blurring of the

8
Anne Barron and Colin Scott, ‘The Citizen's Charter Programme’, The Modern
Law Review 55/4 (1992): 526-546, 526.
9
http://goicharters.nic.in/chartermain.htm
10
http://www.cse.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/ homeCSE.do
11
Barbara Stocking, ‘Patient's Charter: New Rights Issue’, British Medical Journal
303/6811 (1991): 1148-1149.
 The Worst Revolution of All? 355

boundary between law and regulation, 12 and the encroachment of legal

ways of thinking, legal language, and the legal mindset on the everyday
public world. Given that the rule of law is a mark of modernity,
juridification within reflexive modernity reflects law’s elaboration of its
most modern features, including its proliferation of procedural rights,
scrutiny of the reasoned basis of administrative action and its diversification
into regulation, administrative control, arbitration, voluntary codes of
practice, and civil exhortation. The rise of judicial review of administrative
action reflects this reign of reasons: even if an administrative body is not
required to give reasons for its decision, the system at some level must
nevertheless explain the reason for not giving reasons. For example, a
court will have to justify its decision not to require a public body to give
reasons.13 There is no way to calculate the overall cost-benefit to society of
aggressive juridification through judicial review.14 As with tort law, there
is also no clear “bright-line” outer limit to the expansion of this domain.
If liquidity is a diagnostic of this unsettled reflexive modernity, then
questions of “boundaries and border-making” are at its heart. 15 The
boundary between law and non-law is itself unsettled and indeterminate, as
law extends into and formalizes social practices in different domains, and
is also hybridized by its interaction with institutional codes, quasi-juridical
discourses, media images, and fantasies about what the law is, does and
could be made to do, resulting in what might be termed “hallucinatory
law”.16 This brings with it the assumption “that whatever the domain of its
intervention, the further incursion of legal regulation is necessarily a social
and political good”, introducing

a form of reasoning that subjects the plural disciplines and identities of

social life to the homogeneous and hierarchical norms of a self-defining
and increasingly asocial discourse of law.17

12
Bronwen Morgan and Karen Yeung, An Introduction to Law and Regulation:
Text and Materials (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
13
Martin Loughlin, ‘Procedural Fairness: A Study of the Crisis in Administrative
Law Theory’, The University of Toronto Law Journal 28/2 (1978): 215-241.
14
Cass Sunstein, ‘On the Costs and Benefits of Aggressive Judicial Review of
Agency Action’, Duke Law Journal 3 (1989): 522-537.
15
Schields, ‘Boundary-thinking in Theories of the Present’, 224.
16
See William Haltom and Michael McCann, Distorting the Law: Politics, Media,
and the Litigation Crisis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004).
17
Peter Goodrich, ‘Law-induced Anxiety: Legists, Anti-lawyers and the Boredom
of Legality’, Social & Legal Studies 9/1 (2000): 143–163.
356 Chapter Fourteen

The domain of law expands as domains of social activity orient

themselves towards law as the ultimate off-stage arbiter. Non-legal forms
of social control “acquire legalistic characteristics”.18 As Campos argues,
whereas before it was common to speak of “going to law”, now law
“comes to us”: “Legal modes of vocabulary and behavior pervade even the
most quotidian social interactions; the work-place, the school, and even
the home mimic the language of the law, and as a consequence replicate its
conceptual schemes”.19 In this law comes to represent both

a normalisation and a confinement or depoliticisation of social relationships,

a colonisation of everyday life that brings the psychic malaise of law into
ever-further aspects of cultural life.20

Transparency and Alignment

The manager and the consultant form the twin pillars of the managerial
revolution. 21 International consultants form a mobile class of experts
whose position, role and method is the embodiment of the paradigm itself.
Institutional structures put these consultants in an unassailable position,
one which involves a deep but unobserved conflict of interest. They
endorse as objective experts the very product which they have devised and
are now marketing. And what cannot be measured is their achievement,
except through further application of the paradigm of review. Managerialism
involves the empowerment of a new class of professionals. What is
astonishing about this new form of professionalism is that it is totally
generalisable. It is by definition applicable to every form of management,
every institution, and every domain of organised human activity, that is to
companies, prisons, hospitals, factories, schools and universities.
Managerialism directs itself against a world it sees as devoid of explicit
reasons or rationales, and against institutions which operate by following
routines merely because “we have always done it that way”. Together with
the demand for explicit formulation of reasons at all levels of the

18
Alan Hunt and Gary Wickham, Foucault and Law: Towards a Sociology of Law
as Governance (London: Pluto, 1994), 48.
19
Campos, Jurismania, 5.
20
Goodrich, ‘Law-induced Anxiety’, 148.
21
On the world of management consultants, see Matthew Stewart, The
Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting it Wrong (New York: Norton,
2009). For a critique in the context of education, see Bronwyn Davies, Death to
Critique and Dissent? The Policies and Practices of New Managerialism and of
“Evidence-based Practice”’, Gender and Education 15/1 (2003): 91-102.
 The Worst Revolution of All? 357

institution, there comes a new reflexivity in the form of the self-conscious

examination and questioning of given habits and practices. Managerialism
thus offers an implicit theory of perception, and makes a claim about the
possibility of total transparency to the outsider gaze. Given that
institutional members are often perceived to be in the grip of institutional
inertia, reflexivity requires an outside intervention to initiate a cycle of
scrutiny and reform. Insiders are seen as gripped by the dead hand of the
past, following habitual routines and using an ossified language which has
lost its functional connection to the world outside the institution. For
managerialism, insiders literally do not know what they are doing, and
cannot truly see why they are doing it. It is through the agency of outside
consultants that the institution and its members can be brought into a new
alignment. This alignment takes multiple forms. Internally, members are
required to follow the newly articulated goals of the institution and are
accountable to them. It is not sufficient that members work towards these
goals and realize the aims of the institution, they must articulate their
practices in the explicit language of the institutional goals or “outcomes”,
and must also be seen to do so, in the context of ongoing reviews and other
reflexive practices. There must also be alignment with wider practices and
goals set for public institutions, and with the interests of “stakeholders”,
including customers or clients. Reflexivity is brought to bear to break the
shackles of inherited practice, and to initiate an endless series of cycles of
review.
The logic of this model is one of perpetual review, and the vigilance of
reflexivity. For the clearest and most pressing danger for managerialism is
that it becomes a new settled set of practices and institutional discourse.
Like any revolution, it must fear the deadening power of the routinisation
of its own language, and the formidable ability of human groups to
assimilate and appropriate external disruption to their “habitus”. Institutions
are required to strive for excellence, but “striving for excellence” is meant
to imply an open-ended commitment, not a simple leap from mediocrity to
excellence. Excellence as a final state is not the goal, for excellence can
only be relative. It is the commitment to a constant striving that is the true
nirvana of managerialism.
Managerialism ascribes high seriousness and moral virtue to the
commitment of members to institutional practice, and resists irony and
subversion. It creates rituals of engagement in the form of reviews and
report through which units and individuals are subject to a form of moral
scrutiny in terms of their commitment to a set of institutional values. The
questioning of these values is not an acceptable response to processes of
review, since the presumption is that this is a form of resistance to
358 Chapter Fourteen

institutional change. The processes where values are determined and

established institutionally must be kept logically and procedurally distinct
from evaluation of performance in relation to those values. So while
values must be constantly subject to reflexive inquiry, it is not open to
institutional members to challenge those values directly as part of
individual or unit performance review. Further, managerial mechanisms
promote complex forms of consultation and stakeholder input, but in a
context where the ideal of alignment with best practice is already a given.
“Best practice” is an idealisation of what is found “elsewhere”; alignment
with “best practice” takes on the moral force of a command to strive to be
“good” and to reject the arrogance of the individual who believes that their
own moral compass is sufficient. Self-improvement or self-fashioning is
thus meaningless outside the framework of institutional values and
explicitly articulated institutional goals. This process of seeking “best
practice” requires a quasi-Christian humility in respect of a perfection of
values and the full realisation of the human mission. While a steady state
of best practice can never be achieved, what can be achieved is a rejection
of self-centeredness and complacency. Like the search for excellence, the
search for “best practice” must be open-ended. The search to conform to
best practice is the essence of best practice, just as striving is at the heart
of the striving for excellence. The individual constantly falls short, but
strives towards an institutional state of grace, knowing that this can never
be fully or finally attained. Perpetual striving looks to an ideal perpetuum
mobile of managerial reform, with the managerial revolution
institutionalized as a constant reflexive praxis.
Consultation processes undertaken in both the private and public
sectors with regard to managerial reform are at best a form of
reconciliation therapy with respect to changes which are already
underway, and which the institutional logic presents as “irresistible”. This
can be seen from the uniformity of managerial reforms across widely
differing institutions, domains of economic and social activity, and
countries. If consultation were a genuine process opening up the
possibility for real local effects, then globally uniform processes of
managerial reform would be impossible. Within such a framework,
resistance can only be seen as disruptive, immoral or self-interested. Given
that values and mission are the overarching animating force of the
institution, non-compliance is categorized as selfish behavior and a display
of hostility to the institutional community.
Managerialism draws on the traditional left in its critique of established
institutions, its rejection of inherited privilege and caste-based elitism.
From the economic right, managerialism draws metaphors of struggle,
 The Worst Revolution of All? 359

competition and the market, and a sense that there is a cutting edge and a
failing tail to every sphere of human activity. Managerial systems are
haunted by a fear of obsolescence, and the sense that settled practice tends
inevitably to lethargy. Managerialism celebrates its own dynamism and
drive for change, a restless seeking after new forms and new languages,
and the ideal of a struggle for survival in the service of pure meritocracy. It
seeks above all to establish relative values (performance indicators) in the
institutional market place, and to strip away obstacles, practices and
beliefs that obstruct that the attainment of excellence. Stakeholder
evaluation, league tables, surveys of satisfaction, and statistical measures
all contribute to rankings. This evaluative turn reflects the appeal to virtues
of explicitness and transparency which underlie managerialism as a
philosophy. The ranking provides an instant sense of the standing of an
institution or a practice, but also evokes the constant dynamic change of all
systems of relative value.
One powerful factor in the spread of managerialism is therefore its
embrace of dualities. It employs the language of planning and social
engineering (targets, quotas, five-year plans), but also of competition and
market. It combines attention to the values of individualism with
corporatism; it deploys both people-centered and system-centered rhetoric.
Similarly, managerialism is consultative, but also authoritarian; it embraces
and promotes diversity, yet is homogenizing and unifying. It invokes
spiritual and confessional forms such as the “retreat” and the self-
assessment, reflective self-knowledge, and commitment, but in the pursuit
of worldly gains (wealth, success, fame, pragmatism) and league-table
position. Managerialism is simultaneously populist, advocating
empowerment and equality of access, and elitist, applying comparative
measures of performance and an indicator-driven understanding of
excellence. It advocates “joined up” governance, but its primary conceptual
mode is the bullet point in a power-point presentation. Managerialism
employs the language of personification and infantilisation—the university
library becomes “Your learning place”—and the affective discourse of
personal engagement. Yet the language of managerialism is more akin to a
reduplicating virus; it is profoundly impersonal, casting a chill over
informal social and institutional life.

An intellectual critique?
One possible source of a critique of managerial modernity is a tradition
that links Edmund Burke (1729-1797) to Friedrich von Hayek (1899-
1992). Burke is a defender of “prejudice”. The habits and customs of a
360 Chapter Fourteen

society are often not defensible if an explicit rationale is required, yet they
may have a value which is not easily appreciated, until they are removed:

You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that
we are generally men of untaught feelings, that, instead of casting away all
our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to
take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are
prejudices; and the longer they have lasted and the more generally they
have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live
and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that
this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to
avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.22

For Burke, prejudice is not just a passive state, akin to lethargy and
inertia:

Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages

the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the
man hesitating in the moment of decision skeptical, puzzled, and
unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of
unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his
nature.23

Hayek, in effect, seeks to systematize Burke’s insight that abolishing

established and inherited social practice may have unintended negative
consequences not apparent in the rationale for reform. Hayek’s general
category of “constructivism” refers to rational theories of social
engineering. These are in the grip of what Hayek terms the “synoptic
delusion”, the “fiction that all the relevant facts are known to some one
mind, and that it is possible to construct from this knowledge of the
particulars a desirable social order”. 24 Hayek fundamentally denies that
society is transparent in an information sense, in that there is no central
point from which a single intelligence can gather all the relevant
information and formulate and execute a management strategy:

22
Edmund Burke, The Works of the Right Hon Edmund Burke, Volume 1 (London:
Holdsworth and Ball, 1834), 414.
23
Ibid., 414.
24
Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New Statement of the
Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy, volume 1 (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1982), 14.
 The Worst Revolution of All? 361

This structure of human activities constantly adapts itself, and functions

through adapting itself, to millions of facts which in their entirety are not
known to anybody.25

The attempt to do so is in fact harmful, as “civilization rests on the fact

that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess”.26 What is
required is a commitment to a general principle “that freedom can be
preserved only if it is treated as a supreme principle which must not be
sacrificed for particular advantages”. This precludes deciding each issue
“solely on what appear to be its individual merits”, since in doing so

we always over-estimate the advantages of central direction. Our choices

will regularly appear to be one between a certain known and tangible gain
and the mere probability of the prevention of some unknown beneficial
action by unknown persons.

Hayek rejects the possibility of full articulation or complete

explicitness of rules:

Learning from experience, among men no less than among animals, is a

process not primarily of reasoning but of the observance, spreading,
transmission and development of practices which have prevailed because
they were successful—often not because they conferred any recognizable
benefit on the acting individual but because they increased the chance of
survival of the group to which he belonged. The result of this development
will be in the first instance not be articulated knowledge but a knowledge
in terms of rules, the individual cannot state in words but is merely able to
honour in practice. The mind does not so much make rules as consist of
rules of action, a complex of rules that is, which it has not made, but which
have come to govern the actions of individuals because actions in
accordance with them have proved more successful than those of
competing individuals or groups. 27

Hayek’s philosophy of law denies precisely that judges or any other

organizing agents are in a position to make the judgments that rational
planning requires. The ideal is that of a judge-made legal order where the
judge works by “piecemeal tinkering” or what Hayek terms “immanent
criticism”, operating as an instrument of the “evolution of thought”, so that
the judge maintains:

25
Ibid, 13.
26
Ibid, 15.
27
Ibid, 18.
362 Chapter Fourteen

a going order which nobody has designed, an order that has formed itself
without the knowledge and often against the will of authority, that extends
beyond the range of deliberate organization on the part of anybody, and
that is not based on the individuals doing anybody’s will, but on their
expectations becoming mutually adjusted.28

The common law is a prime example of what Hayek terms a

“spontaneous order”, “self-generating order” or “self-generating structure”.

Why the worst?

The managerial revolution represents above all a failure of the
imagination. It is obviously not comparable with revolutions that arise out
of social injustice and political collapse, which have been generally
accompanied by, or have led to, widespread state violence. This revolution,
by contrast, arose in conditions of relative affluence, and represents a
squandering of resources, energy and human idealism on an enormous
scale. Managerialism is not the same as bureaucracy, but rather a powerful
extension of, and exploitation of, bureaucratic modes. It has formed itself
into an autonomous and self-referential administrative order, monitored
and fostered by a consultant class invested in its unchecked proliferation.
The managerial revolution is a black hole of ideology, sucking in and
neutralizing all mainstream socio-political philosophies. In that sense it is
also impossible to be “against it”, in any straightforward ideological sense,
since the oppositional position that one seeks to occupy has already been
absorbed by managerial language: it is difficult to speak out against
inclusivity, accountability, transparency, innovation, strategic planning,
alignment, excellence, and similar concepts.
Managerialism constantly circulates statements about the value of
individual creativity, for example labelling it “thinking outside the box” or
“blue sky thinking”, yet it colonizes that very creativity through the
imposition of visions of strategic innovation. It promotes simulacra of
equality, fairness and transparency; it promises efficiency of resource
allocation, access and accountability, whilst remaining itself immune to
sceptical questioning and the auditing of its own use of resources. It has
swallowed Thatcherism and 1968. It has absorbed and neutralised modes
of self-criticism and social engagement, and through “benchmarking” and
constant auditing, made them instruments of social control and careerism.
All that remains is a Burke-Hayek insistence that the merits of a social
order are not transparent to those who seek to reform it, that the benefits of

28
Ibid, 118-9.
 The Worst Revolution of All? 363

a social order that has arisen spontaneously are not calculable, and that an
improved social order cannot be produced by more detailed planning by a
special caste of experts known as consultants and managers. But to whom
is this observation to be addressed? If you publish enough papers
critiquing managerialism in “top-ranked” journals, you will get promoted
in a managerial university, with your critique being effortlessly assimilated.
How can one address a body without ears?
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

TRANSHUMANISM:
THE FINAL REVOLUTION

KLAUS VONDUNG

From St. Paul and St. Augustine to the Renaissance and further on to
the utopian speculations and ideological programs of modern times, the
idea of a “new man” or “new human being” has played an important role
as a symbol expressing the hope for a radical transformation of human
existence. The revolutionary movements of the last two centuries, in
particular, projected a “new human being” that would harmonize with the
ideological plans for a “new society” morally, socially, and politically. The
means that were used to make people conform to the idea of the “new
human being” were education, indoctrination, and coercion. It is well
known that the ideological and political attempts to create a “new human
being” were not successful and, at the worst, led to concentration camps,
gulags, and even to mass murder.
During the last three decades new visions of a radical structural change
of the human condition have developed, based on the truly revolutionary
progress in computer science and computer technology, as well as in bio-
chemistry and genetics. Although these visions have been generated by
scientific progress, it is often difficult to tell whether they still belong to
the realm of science or are just science fiction. Stephan Vladimir Bugaj,
who identifies himself as a writer, filmmaker and philosopher, formerly
vice-director of IntelliGenesis, a company that explored artificial
intelligence, 1 observed some time ago that the border between science
fiction and “serious” science has become permeable.2 Writers thoroughly
study the newest developments in the pertinent sciences; Margaret
Atwood, for instance, demonstrated profound knowledge of genetics in her

1
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bugaj; 29.01.2010.
2
Stephan Vladimir Bugaj, ‘Was liest die Zukunft?’ Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, 17.04.2001, 54.
 Transhumanism: The Final Revolution 365

novel Oryx and Crake. On the other side, specialists in computer theory
and technology gain inspiration from film and literature, for instance from
the “cyberpunk” literature of authors like William Gibson, who coined the
term “cyberspace” in his novel Neuromancer. 3 Ray Kurzweil, computer
specialist and inventor, who is advertised as “a leading futurist and
transhumanist”,4 sees science fiction films as “always a good source for
inventing the future”.5 Some authors of science fiction novels even have a
professional background, like Gregory Benford, who is Professor of
Astrophysics and Plasmaphysics at the University of California at Irvine.
Other scientists write science books for a general public, like Hans
Moravec, Professor and Principal Research Scientist at the Robotics
Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. All cybernauts or
cyberates—as Bugaj calls these people moving in the inter-space between
science and science fiction—have no problems combining technology and
fantasy.
Now, what are the characteristics of the “new human being” designed
by scientists as well as by authors of science fiction? Max More, founder
and president of the Extropy Institute and mastermind of the “evolving
transhumanist philosophy of extropy”, provides a fairly concise answer. In
1998 he published a Transhumanist Declaration with seven Extropian
Principles. Some of these principles sound sensible and do not go beyond
traditional humanist and democratic values, like “Open Society—
Supporting social orders that foster freedom of speech”, or “Self-
Direction—Seeking independent thinking, individual freedom, personal
responsibility, self-direction, self-esteem, and respect for others”. 6 The
general goal, however, clearly transcends the traditional idea of the human
condition:

Transhumanists take humanism further by challenging human limits by

means of science and technology combined with critical and creative
thinking. We challenge the inevitability of aging and death, and we seek
continuing enhancements of our intellectual abilities, our physical
capacities, and our emotional development. We see humanity as a

3
William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Books, 1984), 46, 51.
4
‘Guest Post: David Orban Reviews Singulariry Summit 2009.’
http://singularityhub.com/2009/10/05/guest-post-david-orban--reviews-singularity-
summit-2009/; 20.10.2009.
5
Ray Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: How We Will Live, Work and
Think in the New Age of Intelligent Machines (London: Orion Business Books,
1999), 143.
6
Max More, ‘The Extropian Principles. Version 3.0. A Transhumanist Declaration’.
1998. http://www.maxmore.com/extprn3.htm; 2; 12.03.2001.
366 Chapter Fifteen

transitory stage in the evolutionary development of intelligence. We

advocate using science to accelerate our move from human to a
transhuman or posthuman condition.7

This will be possible, More believes, by “integrating our intelligent

technology into ourselves in a posthuman synthesis”. 8 The process of
integration, however, works the other way round, most cybernauts believe,
namely through decoding the brain and downloading the mind onto a
computer.
In his book Mind Children, Hans Moravec describes in detail how a
robot brain surgeon opens the skull of a human being, simulates the brain
layer after layer, then excavates it. Eventually the skull is empty, the body
dies. The “mind has been removed from the brain and transferred to a
machine”.9 Now, what do we gain from such a procedure? The goal, as we
know from Max More and other transhumanists, is to enhance our
intellectual abilities and to challenge the inevitability of aging and death.
Compared with genetic engineering, transferring the mind to a computer
has the advantage that it becomes independent from protein and faster than
neurons, because neurons “which can now switch less than a thousand
times per second” never can compete with “the billions-per-second speed
of even today’s computer components”. This means that

a genetically engineered superhuman would be just a second-rate kind of

robot, designed under the handicap that its construction can only be by
DNA-guided protein synthesis. Only in the eyes of human chauvinists
would it have an advantage—because it retains more of the original human
limitations than other robots.10

In comparison, the computerized new human being has no limitations.

The mind that merges with the data universe of the computers achieves
ubiquity: it can be everywhere at the same time, it expands into the
universe, the limits of time and space are abolished. At the same time, it
transcends individuality and becomes immortal, being no longer protein-
based. In Moravec’s words:

Concepts of life, death, and identity will lose their present meaning as your
mental fragments and those of others are combined, shuffled, and

7
Ibid., 1.
8
Ibid., 6.
9
Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligenc
(Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 110.
10
Ibid., 108.
 Transhumanism: The Final Revolution 367

recombined into temporary associations, sometimes large, sometimes

small, sometimes long isolated and highly individual, at other times
ephemeral, mere ripples on the rapids of civilization’s torrent of
knowledge.11

In recent years, much publicity has been accorded Ray Kurzweil’s

prediction on how artificial intelligence will develop in the future.
Probably his prognosis was so successful because he presented it with
literary means. In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines: How We Will
Live, Work and Think in the New Age of Intelligent Machines, first
published in 1999, the author engages in a dialogue with a fictitious
artificial intelligence on several stages of its future development: in the
years 2009, 2019, 2029, and 2099. The themes of these dialogues are not
only technological questions, but also ordinary human needs and feelings:
how one lives as an artificial intelligence, how bodily needs can be
articulated and satisfied, especially sexual needs, what career one can
pursue, how much money one can make and what one can afford from
one’s income, whether one can still consume material goods, etc.
Kurzweil’s speculation goes in the same direction as Moravec’s, but is
even more wide-ranging. The first step, similar to Moravec’s vision,
consists of “scanning a human brain” and “copying its neural circuitry in a
neural computer”.12 Kurzweil expects that

destructive scanning [as Moravec describes it] will be feasible early in the
twenty-first century. Noninvasive scanning with sufficient resolution and
bandwidth will take longer but will be feasible by the end of the first half
of the twenty-first century.13

As early as 2029, “human cognition is being ported to machines, and

many machines have personalities, skills, and knowledge bases derived
from the reverse engineering of human intelligence”. This means: “A
sharp division no longer exists between the human world and the machine
world”. 14 In 2099 the border between physical and virtual reality will
disappear, as well as the border between individual consciousness and the
data universe. Like Moravec, Kurzweil expects that “the identity issue” is
“no longer an issue”, so that—as the artificial intelligence of 2099

11
Ibid., 115.
12
Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, 3.
13
Ibid., 316, note 4; cf. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans
Transcend Biology (New York: Viking Pengui, 2005), 157-67.
14
Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, 222.
368 Chapter Fifteen

explains—“it became clear that counting individual persons wasn’t too

meaningful”. 15 The “software-based intelligence” is non-individual, but
also can become personal; it “is able to manifest bodies at will: one or
more virtual bodies at different levels of virtual reality and nanoengineered
physical bodies using instantly reconfigurable nanobot swarms”. 16 In
general, however, this “transhuman being” “exists as software”,17 which
means that it is immaterial.
Becoming immaterial is valued as a kind of redemption. In a German
science fiction novel, the “project of spirit without body” is called a
“Gnostic project”. 18 Indeed, the speculations about dematerializing the
human mind are pure Gnostic fantasies of redemption: liberation of the
divine pneuma from the prison of the body and the material world. Jeff
Zaleski, a contributing editor of Publishers Weekly, described precisely the
Gnostic driving force in a conversation with John Perry Barlow, author of
the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:

There’s an idea that is achieving common coinage on the Net: that the Net
is somehow going to free us from the tyranny of the body, and of the
material world in general—that we are souls trapped in physical reality and
that by going digital we can break free of the prison of the flesh.19

The benefit that immaterial existence promises is immortality;

Kurzweil predicts that by the year 2099 “life expectancy is no longer a
variable term in relation to intelligent beings”. 20 But immortality is not
enough. Some masterminds of cyberspace like Barlow or Mark Pesce
ascribe godlike character to the global consciousness that will be generated
by the universal networking of computers. 21 Individual consciousness
could participate in this divine quality by connecting itself with the global
consciousness. “Transhuman”, then, turns out to be a synonym for
“godlike”. In Bugaj’s eyes, “the godlike search for a new form of
intelligent life” is a greater philosophical challenge than most other aspects

15
Ibid., 242-243.
16
Ibid., 234.
17
Ibid., 247.
18
Jens Johler and Olaf-Axel Burow, Gottes Gehirn (Hamburg and Vienna: Europa
Verlag, 2001), 268.
19
Jeff Zaleski, The Soul of Cyberspace: How New Technology Is Changing Our
Spiritual Lives. San Francisco: Harper Edge, 1997, 35.
20
Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines, 280.
21
Zaleski, The Soul of Cyberspace, 27-49, 134-153, 180-195, 235-261.
 Transhumanism: The Final Revolution 369

of the cyber-world, and he bluntly states: “Many cyberates are governed

by the desire to get beyond mere humanness and become a god”.22
What does it mean to become a god? It means to become omnipotent.
If computer technology is combined with nanotechnology, this vision
could become true, as Zaleski speculates:

Nanotechnology is coming and, in theory, promises a godlike dominion

over matter, for through it we may be able to build anything whose atomic
structure we can describe—including, in time, brains of any or every sort.23

Or bodies, of course, too, one can add with Kurzweil, so that the
software-based transhuman being can drink a glass of wine once in a
while.
But let’s not be satirical. The whole matter is highly ambivalent. There
can be no doubt that recent developments in computer technology and
robotics, nanotechnology and genetics have brought valuable progress to
our technological civilization, have improved our everyday lives, have
improved health care, and even produced new possibilities to cure or to
ease certain diseases. Speech recognition technology for the blind has been
developed. Some varieties of blindness can be partly cured with the help of
electrodes and computer technology. In a similar way, people who suffer
from some kind of paralysis can retrieve command of their movements.
People with locked-in syndrome or motor neurone disease like Stephen W.
Hawking (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—ALS) can communicate with the
help of advanced computer technology. Robots perform surgery where the
human hand would not be steady or precise enough. Discoveries in
genetics are helping to fight some varieties of cancer. And so on.
The ambivalence characterizing the new technologies and the
speculations about their future development is spectacularly represented
by Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil made meritorious contributions to computer
technology. As early as in 1976, he invented the “Kurzweil Reading
Machine” which reads text to blind people. In 2005 he introduced the
much more advanced reading machine “Kurzweil-National Federation of
the Blind Reader”. He improved the capability and quality of electronic
music synthesizers, inspired by his friend Stevie Wonder. In 1987 he came
forward with the world’s first large-vocabulary speech recognition
program; and in 1996 he developed a new pattern-recognition-based
computer technology to help people with various disabilities. These and
other inventions and developments earned him many awards. In 1998, for

22
Bugaj, ‘Was liest die Zukunft?’ 54 (my translation).
23
Zaleski, The Soul of Cyberspace, 152.
370 Chapter Fifteen

instance, he received the “Inventor of the Year” award from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the following year President Bill
Clinton honored him with the “National Medal of Technology”. In 2001
he received the Lemelson-MIT Prize for a lifetime of developing
technologies to help the disabled and to enrich the arts. Kurzweil has
received honorary doctorates from sixteen universities and colleges.24
On the other hand, there are these visions and prophecies that are hard
to digest for anyone who is not an ardent member of the cyberspace
community. Kurzweil believes that the innovation rate of computer
technology is increasing not linearly but exponentially. In consequence,
artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence at some point;
Kurzweil calls this point “singularity”. In his latest book of 2005, The
Singularity Is Near, a New York Times bestselling book, he prophesies the
singularity for 2045.25 In 2009, he became co-founder and chancellor of
the Singularity University at Mountain View. In cooperation with nearby
Google and the NASA Ames Research Center, this university will research
and foster the development of exponentially advancing technologies.
Kurzweil, born in 1948, hopes to live until the singularity happens in 2045,
because he assumes that the exponentially advanced computer technology
of that time, assisted by nanotechnology, will slow down the aging
process, then reverse it, and finally make him immortal. In order to survive
until 2045, Kuzweil swallows 250 supplement pills every day, drinks ten
glasses of alkaline water, 10 cups of green tea, but also several glasses of
red wine a week, and on weekends he undergoes intravenous transfusions
of chemical cocktails in order to reprogram his biochemistry.26 In case of
an earlier death, Kurzweil’s body will be chemically preserved, frozen in
liquid nitrogen, and stored at a facility of the Alcor Life Extension
Foundation, “in the hope that future medical technology will be able to
revive him”.27
All this is pretty bizarre. Pulitzer Prize winner Douglas Hofstadter
characterized the ambivalence of Kurzweil’s work and also of Moravec’s
books with a drastic comparison:

24
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Kurzweil; 31.01.2010, 2-6.
25
Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near, 5-9, 136.
26
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Kurzweil; 31.01.2010, 9-10; Thomas
Thiel: ‘Wenn der Kühlschrank zweimal klingelt. Die Singularity University bereitet
mit Googles Hilfe auf den Moment vor, an dem Maschinen die intellektuelle
Vorherrschaft übernehmen’. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16.12.2009.
27
Ibid., 10.
 Transhumanism: The Final Revolution 371

It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and
blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad.
It’s an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it’s very hard to
disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they’re not stupid.28

Whether you agree with this critique depends on whether or not you
think it is desirable to become immortal and lead a virtual existence
without a body, because this is the revolutionary driving force behind the
concept of “transhumanism”, as Max More put it in his Transhumanist
Declaration: “We do not accept the undesirable aspects of the human
condition”. 29 Albert Camus has characterized such an attitude as
“metaphysical rebellion”:

Metaphysical rebellion is the movement by which man protests against his

condition and against the whole of creation. It is metaphysical because it
contests the ends of man and of creation.

28
Ibid., p. 11.
29
More: “The Extropian Principles”, p. 3.
 APPENDIX
Figure 11-1a
 Revolutions: Finished and Unfinished, From Primal to Final 373

Figure 11-1b
374 Appendix

Figure 11-2
 Revolutions: Finished and Unfinished, From Primal to Final 375

Figure 11-3

Note: Wages stand for the sum of compensation of employees and gross mixed income (income of self-employed
proprietors including farmers). Profit stands for net operating surplus (gross operating surplus less consumption of
fixed capital). Depreciation stands for consumption of fixed capital. Net taxes stand for taxes on production and
import less subsidies on thereof. For methodology see Douglas Gollin, “Getting Income Shares Right,” Journal of
Political Economy 110, no. 2 (April 2002): 458-474. Sources: All countries except Germany and Russia in 1989 and
1992: U.N. Division of Statistics, National Accounts Statistics: Main Aggregates and Detailed Tables, 2006
(hereinafter NAS: MADT and year) (New York: United Nations, 2008), pt. 1, pp. 56-57, 674-675, 1015-1016, pt. II,
pp. 284-285, 430-431, 824, pt. III, pp. 375 , 950, 996; Germany: NAS: MADT 2004 (New York: United Nations, 2—
6), pt. I, pp. 1047-1048; Russia, 1989: Russian State Committee on Statistics, Rossiiskii Statisticheskii Ezhegodnik
1994 (hereinafter RSE and year) (Moscow, 1994) p. 238; Russia 1992: RSE 1997 (Moscow, 1997), p. 307 and NAS:
MADT 2011 (New York: United Nations, 2003), pt. II, pp. 514-515.
376 Appendix

Figure 11-4
 Revolutions: Finished and Unfinished, From Primal to Final 377

Figure 11-5
 CONTRIBUTORS

Arie Amaya-Akkermans is a freelance writer, journalist and commentator

on Middle Eastern politics and culture. His writings on Arab Spring,
cinema from the Arabian Gulf and contemporary art appear weekly on
Egyptian portal Bikya Masr, news site 5PM Bahrain, Albawaba and in the
newspaper Yemen Times. He runs a blog on literature at The Mantle (New
York) and is a frequent contributor to the blog of the Hannah Arendt
Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. His book The Promise
of Politics: Arab Spring (Cambridge Scholars Publishing) will appear
early in 2013.

Michael S. Bernstam is an economic demographer who has served as an

economic adviser to the governments of Russia, Poland, Azerbaijan in the
1990s, participated in the Iraqi National Economic Survey in 2004-05, and
is affiliated with the Iraqi Institute of Economic Reform. He is now a
research fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. In addition
to numerous articles and essays, his books include: Debt and the Russian
Coal Sector, with Thomas E. MaCurdy (1996); Reform without Shock,
with Vladimir Leksin (1992) Resources, Environment, and Population:
Present Knowledge, Future Options, with Kingsley Davis (1991); The
Wealth of Nations and the Environment (1991); Malthus and the Evolution
of the Welfare State, with Peter L. Swan (1989); and Below-Replacement
Fertility in Industrial Societies: Causes and Consequences, with Kingsley
Davis and Rita Ricardo-Campbell (1986). He is at work on the book From
Predation to Prosperity: How to Move from Socialism to Markets (with
Alvin Rabushka).

Paul Caringella is the longest serving Visiting Fellow at the Hoover

Institution War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. He was Eric
Voegelin’s personal assistant during the last six years of Voegelin’s life.
He is on the editorial board of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin
published by University of Missouri Press, and is the editor of Eric
Voegelin’s Order and History: In Search of Order, (University of Missouri
Press, 2000) and, with Thomas Hollweck the editor of Voegelin’s What is
History? And Other late Unpublished Writing (University of Missouri
Press, 1990). His essays include ‘Voegelin: Philosopher of Divine Presence,’
 Revolutions: Finished and Unfinished, From Primal to Final 379

in Eric Voegelin’s Significance for the Modern Mind (ed.) Ellis Sandoz,
Louisiana State University Press, 1991).

Wayne Cristaudo will be taking up the Chair in Politics at Charles

Darwin University Northern Territory having served as Division Head of
West Studies at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author and editor
of a number of books and articles including The Metaphysics of Science
and Freedom: From Descartes to Kant to Hegel (1991), This Great Beast:
Progress and the Modern State (with Bob Catley) (1997), Great Ideas in
the Western Literary Canon (2002), (with Peter Poiana), Power, Love and
Evil: Contribution to a Philosophy of the Damaged (2007), The Cross and
the Star: The Post-Nietzschean Christian and Jewish Thought of Eugen
Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig (edited with Frances Huessy)
(2010), Religion, Redemption, and Revolution: The New Speech Thinking
of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (2012), A Philosophical
History of Love (2012).

Manfred Henningsen received his PhD under Eric Voegelin in Munich.

He followed Voegelin to Stanford where he was a research fellow at the
Hoover Institute until 1970 when he became a Professor of Political
Science at the University of Hawai‘i in Honolulu. His publications include
books on A. J. Toynbee and universal history (Menschheit und Geschichte,
Munich 1967), European Anti-Americanism since the 18th century (Der
Fall Amerika, Munich 1964) and American political and cultural self-
interpretations since the 17th century (Der Mythos Amerika, Frankfurt
2009). He is preparing a book on comparative regimes of terror and
memory.

Thomas Hollweck was born in 1943 in Germany and died 2011 in

Colorado. He received his PhD under the supervision of Gregor Sebba at
Emory University, Atlanta. He was an Associate Professor in the Department
of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of
Colorado, Boulder. Among his publications is a Thomas Mann (1975) and
essays on Hermann Broch, Frank Wedekind, Stefan George (all published
in the Occasional Papers series of the Voegelin Zentrum of the Ludwig-
Maximilians-Universitaet of Munich). He edited various volumes in Eric
Voegelin's Collected Works. His last publication was Truth and Relativity
and Other Writings in the Occasional Papers of the Eric Voegelin Archiv,
2011.
380 Contributors

Louis Herman is a political philosopher in charge of the Political Science

program at the University of Hawai`i-West O`ahu. He was born and raised
in South Africa, educated at Cambridge, England and initiated into
visionary politics through involvement with the Israeli Kibbutz movement.
He returns periodically to South Africa for his work as executive producer
on an educational/film project Primal Quest. His major work is Future
Primal: How our Wilderness Origins Show the Way Forward (New World
Library, forthcoming, Fall 2012). The book takes its inspiration from the
earth wisdom of the San Bushman hunter gatherers of the Kalahari and
offers a model of a planetary politics based on the convergence of
shamanism and science.

Glenn “Chip” Hughes is a published poet and Professor of Philosophy at

St. Mary's University, San Antonio. In addition to numerous scholarly
articles, his philosophical works include: Mystery and Myth in the
Philosophy of Eric Voegelin (1993), The Politics of the Soul (1999) (ed.),
Politics, Order and History: Essays on the Work of Eric Voegelin (2001)
(ed.), Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient
Societies to Postmodernity (2003), and A More Beautiful Question: The
Spiritual in Poetry and Art (2011). His poetry includes Erato: Twenty
Elegies (2010), Sleeping at the Open Window (2005), and it has appeared
in such journals as Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Poetry Northwest, and
Poets West.

Chris Hutton is Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. In

addition to his interest in the history and politics of Western linguistics, he
is pursuing various projects at the intersection of linguistics, law and
intellectual history. His books include Linguistics and the Third Reich:
Mother-tongue Fascism, Race and the Science of Language (1998), Nazi
Germany, Linguistics and the Third Reich (2005), Dictionary of Cantonese
Slang (with Kingsley Bolton), Race and the Third Reich (2005), Definition
in Theory and Practice (with Roy Harris, 2007), Language, Meaning and
the Law (Edinburgh, 2009).

Thomas McPartland received a Ph.D. degree in intellectual history at the

University of Washington in 1976. He is director of the Whitney Young
School of Honors and Liberal Studies at Kentucky State University. He
has delivered numerous papers and published articles on Bernard
Lonergan, including two books, Lonergan and the Philosophy of Historical
Existence and Lonergan and Historiography: The Epistemological
Philosophy of History. He has made presentations for the American
 Revolutions: Finished and Unfinished, From Primal to Final 381

Political Science Association and at international conferences at Rome,

Mainz, Germany, Toronto, and Hong Kong. He was Kentucky State
University Distinguished Professor of 2002-2003.

Glenn Moots is Professor and Chair of Philosophy and Political Science at

Northwood University in Midland, Michigan. He is author of Politics
Reformed: The Anglo-American Legacy of Covenant Theology (University
of Missouri Press, 2010) and has authored essays for edited collections on
federalism and political theory as well as articles and reviews for Locke
Studies, Perspectives on Political Science, The Journal of Politics,
Hebraic Political Studies, Humanitas, Anglican & Episcopal History, The
Journal of Markets & Morality, and Eighteenth Century Studies. His next
book is an historical, political, and theological study of the idea of a
“Christian nation” and its modification in the case of America.

William Ratliff is a research fellow and former curator of the Americas

Collection at the Hoover Institution. He is also a research fellow of the
Independent Institute. An expert on Latin America, China, and US foreign
policy, he has written extensively on how traditional cultures and
institutions influence current conditions and on prospects for economic
and political development in East/Southeast Asia and Latin America.
Ratliff’s studies include China and Latin America: What Sort of Future
(2012), Vietnam Rising: Culture and Change in Asia’s Tiger Cub (2008),
Doing It Wrong and Doing It Right: Education in Latin America and Asia
(2003), and Law and Economics in Developing Countries (2000) with E.
Buscaglia. He is coauthor of The Civil War in Nicaragua (1993) with R.
Miranda and Inside the Cuban Interior Ministry (1994) with Juan Antonio
Rodriguez Menier, and was an area editor of the Yearbook on
International Communist Affairs.

Matthias Riedl is Associate Professor of History and Director of the

Religious Studies Program at Central European University. Earlier he
taught at University Erlangen-Nuremberg and Duke University. His
research interests are in the intellectual history of Western Christianity, the
relation of religion and politics, and political theology in intercivilizational
perspective. He is author of a monograph on the 12th century apocalyptic
writer Joachim of Fiore (2004) and of various articles on the history of
religious and political thought. He is co-editor of volumes on Prophets and
Prophecies (2005), Humans at War, at Peace with Nature (2006),
Religions - The Religious Experience (2008), God or Gods? (2009), The
382 Contributors

City - Center and Axis of the World (2011), The Apocalyptic Complex
(2012), and Brill's Companion to Joachim of Fiore (forthcoming).

Klaus Vondung studied German Literature, History, and Political Science

at the Universities of Tubingen and Munich. He received his Ph.D. at the
University of Munich. Until his retirement he was Professor of German
Literature at the University of Siegen; he served there as Dean, as Vice-
President, and as Director of the Humanities Graduate School. His visiting
appointments include a Visiting Scholarship at the Hoover Institution,
Stanford University, and Visiting Professorships at the University of
Florida, Gainesville, the University of Houston, Kansai University,
Suita/Osaka, Kwansei-Gakuin University, Nishinomiya, and Zhejiang
University, Hangzhou. He is a permanent Honorary Guest Professor at
Zhejiang University. Apart from numerous books and articles in German,
he has published in English the book The Apocalypse in Germany (2000),
edited Race and State and The History of the Race Idea in the Collected
Works of Eric Voegelin edition, and published many articles in journals
and volumes of essays.
 INDEX
A Chiang, Kai-Shek ....... 296, 319-320
Adams, John........167-169, 177, 182
Adorno, Theodor ................ 221-222
Allah........................... 134-136, 337
Arendt, Hannah ...47, 129, 192- 197,
199-206, 208-209, 211-214, 217-
225, 332, 341, 345- 346, 348,
378
Aristotle.17, 95, 169, 209, 212, 238-
239, 263, 276, 280, 338, 349
B
Bakunin, Mikhail................ 126-127
Balthasar, Hans Urs von.......81, 124
Berman, Harold .......... 169-170, 188
Bernier, Francois ................263, 268
Bernstam, Michael S. .........252, 378
Beza, Theodore .................. 177-178
Bin Laden, Osama ..................34, 36
Bodin, Jean...........................81, 211
Bouazizi, Mohamed .. 331-333, 335,
337, 344
Bouyeri, Mohammed.......... 133-137
Brinton, Crane ............ 192-193, 200
Broch, Herman ........... 128-129, 379
Buchanan, George ..............178, 180
Bugaj, Stephan Vladimir ... 364-365,
368
Bullinger, Heinrich... .171, 173-179,
184, 186
Burke, Edmund ...260, 359-360, 362
Buruma, Ian........................ 134-136
C
Calvin, John ..171,173-179, 189-190
Camus, Albert ....................203, 371
Charles I .. ..22, 160-162, 179, 182-4
Charles II............................162, 180
Charta, Magna .................... 154-155
Christ, Jesus... 20-21, 47, 69, 85, 87,
90, 95, 97-8, 102, 126, 176, 188,
190, 235
Cicero .................................169, 266
Cohn, Norman .................... 126-127
Copernicus....10, 161, 163, 331, 342
Cromwell, Oliver...22, 37, 162, 164,
180, 189
Cushing, Jacob ...................183, 187
D
Dante ...................... 1, 201-202, 212
Deng Xiaoping ....29, 302, 306, 317,
321
Descartes, René .. 214, 216-217, 379
E
Eisenstadt, S. N. . 111-113, 115-116,
118-119, 123
Eliade, Mircea ......................16, 116
Engels, Friedrich ....................... 196
F
Freud, Sigmund ..................... 40, 73
Friedman, Milton........263, 267, 275
G
Goodman, Christopher .174, 177-179
Gorbachev, Mikhail .....27, 249, 289
Guenther, Matthias ................ 67, 76
H
Habermas, Jürgen ............... 221-222
Hamilton, Alexander ................. 138
Hayek, Friedrich................. 359-362
Hegel .. 41, 81-82, 98, 137-140, 197,
334, 340, 379
384
Heidegger, Martin .. 81-82, 221-222,
340
Hinton, Alexander .............. 151-152
Hirsi Ali, Ayaan .........................134
Hitler, Adolf ......28, 33, 36, 83, 148-
149, 151, 221, 289-290
Hobbes, Thomas....67, 77, 157, 162,
191
Huang, Qin Shi...................307, 321
Huang, Yasheng .................321, 325
Hucker, Charles O. .............315, 318
Huntington, Samuel....133, 147, 150
I
Irenaeus of Lyon ....................81, 93
J Mayhew, Jonathan..............182, 184
Jefferson, Thomas ..... 138, 145-146,
168-169, 179, 268, 270
Joachim of Fiore 19, 44, 80, 83-91,
105-106, 129, 213
John, St..................... 95, 97-98, 100
Jonas, Hans... 93, 100-101, 103-104,
106
Jung, C. G...............................59, 73
K Niles, Hezekiah ..................167, 182
Khomeini, Ayatollah ............32, 110
Khrushchev, Nikita ..............27, 289
Knox, John. .........158, 174, 177-179
Kuhn, Thomas..............................77
Kurzweil, Ray .................... 365-370
L Pascal, Blaise........................45, 137
Las Casas, Bartolomé de .... 140-141
Lenin, Vladimir…26-27, 32, 35-36,
149, 204, 226-227, 234-237,
242, 244-245, 247-250, 288
Liang, Ming-Yih ........ 312, 323-324
Lincoln, Abraham ... ..145-146, 168,
191
Löwith, Karl .........................40, 129
Locke, John ... 76-77, 169, 191, 263,
381
Index
Luther, Martin .. 156-157, 171, 191,
212, 342
M
Machiavelli, Niccolò ............77, 211
Mandelstam, Nadezhda ......237, 244
Mao Tse Tung .. 29, 35-36, 149-150,
286, 289, 296-297, 303, 306,
310, 316-317, 319-321, 323-325,
327
Maddison, Angus ....... 254, 296-298
Maritain, Jacques....................... 240
Marsiglio of Padua .............201, 219
Marx, Karl .. 45, 77, 82-83, 233-234,
236, 243, 249, 275-276, 326, 339
Mather, Cotton ...........142, 182, 190
Metzger, Thomas........ 315, 318-320
Mohammad ...................... 30-31, 33
Moravec, Hans ........... 365-367, 370
More, Max.................. 365-366, 371
Müntzer, Thomas ................ 21, 129
N
Napoleon ..............................25, 224
Nietzsche, Friedrich..... .82, 126-127
P
Pareto, Vilfredo . 252-253, 264, 269,
276-282, 291
Plato..16, 56, 77, 95, 124, 209, 212,
221, 229, 238-239
Pol Pot ................ 8, 29, 35, 150-151
Polybius............................ 10, 16-17
Ponet, John ................. 175, 177-178
Prometheus.........................100, 329
R
Reischauer, Edwin O..........294, 311
Robespierre, Maximilien 24-25, 35-
36, 44-45, 204, 209, 224-225
 Revolutions: Finished and Unfinished, From Primal to Final
Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen…1, 22,
54, 57-58, 60, 78, 109-110, 127-
128, 144, 154, 168-173, 180,
185-186, 188-189, 192-194, 199-
203, 206-220, 222-223, 244,
247, 250, 254, 293, 328, 348,
379
Rosenzweig, Franz .....217, 349, 379
Rousseau, Jean Jacques ... 24, 44-45,
77, 191, 214-216
Russell, Peter..........................53, 78
Rutherford, Samuel .. 179, 180, 190-
191
S 78-83, 86-87, 90-100, 103-108,
Saint Francis.........................83, 213
Saint-Just, Louis Antoine ... 25, 224-
225
Schelling, F. W. J. ..................81, 98
Schmitt, Carl ......................129, 147
Schwartz, Benjamin I. 115, 118-119
Shambaugh, David ............. 315-316
Smith, Adam.263, 268, 274, 276
Smith, Page ................................170
Socrates ...........75-77, 229, 263, 266
Spengler. Oswald ............... 192-193
St. Paul .................................92, 364
St. Augustine..................19, 90, 364
Stalin, Joseph . 26-27, 149, 237-249,
284, 286, 289-290
Stiles, Ezra ......................... 185-187
Stoddard Solomon..............181, 190
Stuart, Charles.......... 179, 184, 186
385
T
Theodore de Bary, William...294, 327
Thucydides ....................... 36-37, 47
Tilly, Charles............................. 338
Tocqueville, Alexander de 332, 338-
339
Trotsky, Leo .26, 130, 227, 243, 339
Tu, Wei-Ming.....................301, 307
Tudor, Mary ....................... 174-175
V
van Gogh, Theo .......... 133-134, 136
Voegelin, Eric ... ..40, 54-59, 73, 76,
111-132, 144, 173, 197, 202,
227-228, 234, 236, 238, 293,
295, 328, 378-380, 382
Voltaire....…146, 207, 214-215, 217
Vondung, Klaus..................364, 381
W
Walpole, Horace........................ 184
Wang Jisi.................... 305, 316-317
Weber, Max........................104, 312
Williams, Roger ................. 181-182
Y
Yakovlev, Alexander N. ....234, 243,
249
Z
Zaleski, Jeff ........................ 368-369
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.....331, 333