Political Revolutions Are Not Total Revolution: Here's Why
(OPINION) 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 the other consists in spreading to the whole of society the disease of uprootedness which has been inflicted on the working class.” She also notes that the second type is never a prelude to the first, for “they are two opposite roads which do not meet.” We can think of this distinction as a contrast between those who want to reconstruct something versus those who want to deconstruct everything.
Until the 17th century, political revolutions of the first type were straightforwardly understood as movements in which one ruling class or regime was replaced by another. Given the right social conditions and human motivations, these movements could occur suddenly and usher in rapid social change. Human nature being what it is — inherently flawed and often intransigent — violence may have been necessary to accomplish such changes. But revolutionary violence was understood as a tragic necessity, to be minimized when possible and kept in due proportion — lest the cure be worse than the disease. Bloodshed and destruction were not celebrated for their own sake.
If those in power subjected people to irremediable injustice or the systemic violation of their rights, then such revolutions, and the minimum force necessary to realize them, were ethically justified. At least in principle, one could evaluate the advisability or legitimacy of these revolutions by ethical criteria, including common notions of justice and human rights. One could distinguish between an unjust rebellion carried out by a mob of opportunists and a justified revolution established on defensible ethical principles.
The American Revolutionary War is a typical example of this kind of non-totalizing revolution — with the Declaration of Independence serving as the public articulation of the reasons justifying it. The Declaration makes an ethical case for the throwing off of colonial British rule in order to establish the colonists’s own form of government.
The American revolutionaries justified their use of necessary and proportionate force but never claimed the right to deploy any means necessary. We would rightly judge them adversely had they carried out their revolution for the sake of “unalienable rights” using gruesome tactics of wanton violence or desecration — had they, for example, systematically tortured and killed British prisoners of war, cutting their dead bodies into pieces to feed them to animals.
Furthermore, with traditional revolutions, attempts at converting one’s adversary by appeals to conscience or to shared notions of justice precede the deployment of force. The tragic acceptance of violence follows only when nonviolent means of persuasion and negotiation have been exhausted. American colonial leaders repeatedly attempted, though without success, to appeal to the British monarchy and Parliament before taking up arms in defense of their rights endowed by nature and nature’s God.
The ideology of total revolution is entirely another matter. Here violence is not just accepted as a tragic necessity, but is embraced as a positive and creative force — a force that contains the power to usher in an entirely new and historically unprecedented social order. As I previously wrote,
Historically and philosophically, the elevation of violence follows the ideology of total revolution — understood as a transition from the old order characterized only by oppression, to a qualitatively new order that is so far beyond us that we can barely describe it. Given the revolution’s necessary break from the past in order to usher in the new future, it cannot be carried forward under the banner of traditional ethical principles (peace, freedom, justice, love): these words are empty slogans at best or justifications for the existing oppressive order at worst. Once ethics disappears, violence inevitably follows. If order is merely a thin veneer for oppression, then it too is an abomination to be eliminated: order can only be interpreted as hostile and tyrannical. The goal is to erase the adversary so that nothing from the old world, not even its memory, remains. Thus, anarchic nihilism is not only justified, it is required.
More than merely a political struggle, total revolution is a cosmic struggle — an effort to completely recreate not just society but all of humanity. This is required because the present world (nature, society, history, culture) is judged to be governed entirely by a hostile and cruel order: rigid and tyrannical, alienating and thoroughly oppressive. Consequently, wholesale rejection and desecration, total rebellion against the established order, are justified in the name of liberating humanity from this inherently oppressive world.
Total revolution involves not just a transition from one social situation to a another, but the transition from a lower level to a higher level of existence. Politics replaces religion as the vehicle for human liberation. This entails the philosophical premise of materialism and the rejection of the traditional notion of Providence: the old idea of the divine governance of the world is replaced by the new idea of complete human governance of the world. This kind of revolutionary movement uses men and women, instead of being guided by them: it indiscriminately sacrifices mere mortals in the transition from the present reign of necessity to the indescribable future reign of freedom.
The mere overturning of unjust laws or the establishment of a more just leadership class (i.e., traditional revolution) can at best result in incremental advances toward liberty. But for enthusiasts of total revolution these are insufficient and inadequate. Total revolutionaries believe that complete liberation can be realized only on the far side of the disintegration of every form of the past or present society. Ethics is entirely absorbed into politics: what is good is by definition what serves the goals of the revolution.
As Augusto Del Noce described it, total revolution “denies all rights to present humanity in order to transfer the fullness of rights to a future humanity.” Indiscriminate violence is no longer seen as barbaric, but is a dialectic moment in the advance of progress. In the wake of this violence the new rules of coexistence will be imposed by the strongest side — the enlightened professional revolutionaries, the gnostic elite, the only ones who are fully “awake” to the movement of history.
The philosophy of total revolution finds its seeds in Rousseau and comes to full and unsurpassable expression in Marx. The French revolution functions as its historical seedbed — though one that was left incomplete — and so the coming revolution marches under the banner of the unfinished business of 1789. To ultimately triumph, total revolution must be capable of transforming not just the world but human nature itself.
This explains why advocates of this ideology today find uncanny bedfellows — why, for example, various revolutionary movements purportedly aimed at racial justice find common cause with movements advancing sexual liberation and gender theory — the latter representing contemporary attempts to refashion human nature and overcome all biological limitations. All of these movements seek a kind of meta-humanity created ex nihilo and no longer subject to inherent limitations, including the limitations of bodily existence or sexual differentiation.
Total revolution represents a radical attempt to deny our own permanent human limitations. But human nature — noble, yet fragile, mortal, and wounded — always bats in the bottom of the ninth inning. When the Revolution encounters human beings such as we are and will always remain, it comes to a screeching halt. Enthusiasts of total revolution discover the hard way that they can tear down but they cannot build up. Pure force can never produce justice.
When its utopian dream collapses — as it inevitably does when it encounters reality — nihilism is all that remains. The revolution succeeds only in terms of negation — it destroys, desecrates, denies, devalues — but without replacing the old order with anything positive. A process that stops at the erasure of values that were previously held sacred, but that can accomplish nothing more, constitutes the very definition of nihilism. In the wake of this destructive failure, Marx gives way to Nietzsche as the preeminent philosophical interpreter of our age.
Since it abolishes the old “lower” order but fails to establish the new “higher” order, total revolution can never fulfill its eschatological aspirations. Instead, it serves only to strengthen the worst aspects of the existing society that it sought to overthrow. Del Noce called this the heterogenesis of ends: “Not by chance, the same young intellectuals who earlier preached the revolution in the name of Marx have become reconciled with neo-capitalist society in the name of Nietzsche, making a perfectly smooth transition from their old position to the new. It is a reconciliation via a negative route, but still a reconciliation.” Perhaps the idea of total revolution is the true opium of the people — a tonic for the masses that permits today’s elites to cement their power within the existing social order.
But a conservative critique of utopia or a condemnation of the destruction of revolutionary violence alone is insufficient. Contemporary injustices cry out for redress. The aspirations for justice and freedom that attract adherents to total revolution are ineradicable from the human heart. This ideology lures many people precisely because it speaks to deep human needs: it amounts to a secular religion that promises deliverance and comes complete with its own public liturgies. It holds out the hope (albeit illusory) that the redemption that humankind restlessly seeks is imminently available in this place and in our time, just over the horizon of the future. The fact that the total revolution always fails to deliver does not eradicate these aspirations from the human heart.
Once we come to recognize total revolution’s inevitable failure, we may be tempted by a reactionary pessimism. But we should resist this temptation: rather than an authentic counter-revolution, this merely represents the revolution in the opposite direction. Conservatives often (and reactionaries nearly always) confuse what is eternal for what is merely past, forgetting that all civilizations are mortal. We should instead recognize that the evident failure of total revolution opens the possibility for another way forward.
This path would lead us to rediscover, for the purpose of reappropriation, the best of what humanity is capable of knowing and doing. This will require us to recover enduring and eternally valid ethical principles — not as static artifacts of the past known once-and-for-all, but as living sources of perennial wisdom, which are deepened through application to new historical situations. Our task entails a personal commitment to make these inexhaustible sources vital again, precisely by bringing them to bear on today’s complex problems. Only along this constructive path will we make real, though never fully definitive, progress.
This article was originally published on Arc Digital. It was published as part II of III in the series, The Origins of Our Crisis.
Aaron Kheriaty is an associate professor of psychiatry and director of the medical ethics program at UCI School of Medicine.