Revolutions vs. The Total Revolution
Why do today’s misbegotten revolutionary ideologies produce only nihilism?
This is Part II of III in the series, The Origins of Our Crisis. Part I is available here, and Part III will be published next week.
In Part I of this series, I presented evidence that a specific type of revolutionary ideology — what I call total revolution, with its associated embrace of nihilistic violence — is attempting to “become world” by playing out today in our streets. I cautioned that this ideology threatens to overtake and subsume legitimate peaceful protests aimed at concrete and realizable social change. Here, in this second part, I’ll examine these two irreconcilable movements currently vying for position as the solution to racism and other societal ills.
We should begin by drawing a distinction between (1) political revolutions as sociological or historical phenomena, and (2) the philosophical idea of total revolution that undergirds various modern ideologies.
Simone Weil noted that these two revolutionary conceptions, which are entirely opposed to one another, often use identical slogans and subjects for propaganda. Although both march under the name revolution, “one consists in transforming society in such a way that the working class may be given roots in it; while…
