Revolution is a perennial idea. Yet there is no doubt that it has had
greater currency at one time than another. We seem now to be liv-
ing at a time in which the idea of revolution is again experiencing an
upswing in popularity. It is therefore appropriate that we consider what
we think about revolution and what we should think about it.
The West has a long tradition of thinking about the idea of revolution,
which is well represented in Great Books of the Western World. One need
only cite the authors who discuss revolution: Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch,
Machiavelli, Hobbes, Shakespeare, Locke, Montesquieu, the authors of
The Federalist, Hegel, Marx, and Engels. In organizing our symposium,
was asked our contributors to continue this conversation.
Our contributors represent different approaches to the idea of revolu-
tion. None of them is as such an advocate of immediate violent political
re~olution. To represent that position, we reprint in Part Four Lenin s
State and Revolution, which was written immediately before the violent
overthrow of the Russian state in 1917.
Although not advocates of violent revolution, two of our authors find
the idea of revolution more attractive than do the other two. Both Illich
and Goodman, at least by implication, view sympathetically some of the
revolutionary aspirations present in the world today, though both con-
tend that these aspirations need redirecting. Toynbee and Buckley take
a more skeptical attitude toward revolution.
The greatest difference among our four authors lies in the focus of
their interest in revolution. Dr. Toynbee, as a historian, takes an admit-
tedly long view of the subject and considers how revolutions have arisen
in the history of civilization. Dr. Illich speaks as a representative of the
Third World, an expression that he dislikes and criticizes, though he
would not deny that the part of the world that it is used to designate
is often held to be the closest to revolution, even of a violent sort. Per-
haps the most remarkable feature of the current concern about revolu-
tion is the emergence of anarchism as an ideal that is considered attractive
and feasible, and this is the subject on which Paul Goodman writes. The
ideal of a society that can function without the use of coercion is one of
the few anarchist ideals shared by Lenin; in fact, it is the essence of what
he, after Engels, describes as "the withering away of the state." The im-
practicability, if not impossibility, of governing without the sanction, if
not the actual use, of force is one of the main contentions of William
Buckley s analysis of what he calls counterrevolutionary doctrine.
The last part of our symposium consists of an attempt to delineate at
least the main contours of the discussion of revolution as it is found in
Great Books of the Western World.
發表於2024-11-07
The Great Ideas Today 1970 2024 pdf epub mobi 電子書 下載
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