Hannah Arendt

ONVIOLtrNCtr
HARCOURT, BRACE, & \\IORLD, INC., NEW YORK

Other books by Hannah Arendt

ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISN,{

BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE

ON REVOLUTION

TFIE HU\IAN CONDITION

EICH]\{ANN IN JERUSALEM

MEN IN DARK TIMI]S

 Copyright @ rg6g, rgTo by Hannah Arendt For Mary
in Friendship

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EFGHIJ
THESE REFLECTIONS rvere provoked by the
events and debates of the last ferv years as seen against
the background of the nventietl'r century, rvhich has be-
come indeecl, as Lenin predictecl, a century of rvars and
revoluti<-rns, hence a centrlry of that violence which is
currently believed to be their common denominator.
There is, hor'vever, another factor in the present situation
which, though predicted by nobody, is of at least equal
importance. The technical development of the imple-
ments of violence has norv reachecl ttre point rvhere no .,
political goal could conceivably corresponcl to their de- ,
structive potential or justify their actnal use in armed,,
r:onflict. Hence, rvarfare-fr-om time immemorial the final
merciless arbiter in international dispr-rtes-has lost much
of its effectivenessand nearly all its glamour. The "apoca-
lyptic" chess game betrveen the superporvels, that is,
betr,veenthose that rnove on the highest plane of our civili-
zation, is being played according to the rule "if either
'rvins'it
is the end of both"; I it is a game that bears no
resemblance to whatever \var games preceded it. Its
"rational" goal is deterrence, n()t victory, and the arms

iHarvey Wheeler, "-I'he Strategic Calculators," in Nigel Calder,

Unless Peace Comes, New York, r968, p. rog.

3
 r a c e , n o l o n g e r a p r e p a r a t i c > t rf o r r v a r , c a n n o r v l r e . l t r s t i -
fied only on the grounds that rnore and rnore deterretrt:e
'fo
is the best guarantee <tf pea<'e. the questi<rn hou' shall
we ever l>e able t() extricate ottrselves frclnr the olrvious
insanity of this position, there is no anslver.
1 Sinc,eviolence-as distin<:t from porver, force, or strelrgth
!-alrvays needs implemenls (as Eng-elspointed otrt long
'"go),'
the revolution of technology, a revolr-rtion in tool-
rnaking, u'as espec:iallymarked in r'varfale. Tlte very sulr-
stance of violent action is rtrled by the means-end (:ateg()l'y,
whose r:hief characteristic, if appliecl ttt httmatr affairs, has
always been that the end is in danger of being over-
rvhelmed by the nleans rvhich it justifies and rvhich are
needed to reach it. Since the end of human action, as
distinct from the end products of fabrit:rtiott, (an llever
be reliably predicted, the means used to achieve political
goals are more often than not of greater relevant:e to the
future rvorld than the intended goals.
N{oreover, while the results of men's actions are beyond
the actor.s' control, violent:e harbors within itself an
additional element of arbitrariness; nowhere dtles For-
tuna, good or ill luck, play a more fateful role in human
affairs than on the battlefield. and this intrtrsion of the
utterly trnexpected does not disappear lvhen people tall
it a "random event" and find it scientifically suspet:t; nor'
c a n i t b e e l i m i n a t e d b y s i m u l a t i o t r s , s c e n a t ' i o s ,g a r l r e
theories,and the like. There is no certainty in tltesc tttat-
t e r s , n o t e v e n a n u l t i m a t e c e r t a i n t y o f m t r t t r a l d e s t r t t tt i o n
under certain calculated circumstances. The very fact that
those er-rgagedin the perfection of tbe means of tlestt'ttttiou
have frnally reat:hed a level of technit:al tlevelopnlent
rvhere their aim, namely, u'arfare, is on the point of clis-
2Herrn Eugen Dùhrings Umwiilzungder Wissenschaf
t (r87i|),I'art
II, ch. 3.
appearing altogether by viltue of the lneal)s at its dis-
posal:Jis like an ironical rc'urinrlcr of tlris all-penading
r r n p r e c l i < , t a l l i l i t y r, v h i c h r v e e u < : o u n t e t t- h e l n ( ) l n e n t \ \ ' e a p -
'l-he
proach the realrn of violent e. chief reasotrrvarfare is
s t i l l r v i t h u s i s n e i t h e l a s e ( r - e td e a t h r v i s h o f t h e h r . t t n a n
s p e c i e s , l l o r a l l i l r e p r e s s i l l l e i n s t i n c t o f a g g ^ r e s s i ( ) nt ,l o r ' ,
f i n a l l y a u d r n o l t - p l a u s i b l y , t l t e s e r i o t t s e c o t r o t n i t :a n c l s o t : i a l
dangers inherent in clisarrnament,r lrtrt the sirnple fat't
that no sul)stitute for this final arbiter in internati()nal
affairs has yet appeared ol) tl)c pol itir:al s(er)e.\Vas not
Hobbes right rvhen he said: "Ct>venants, rvithottt the
sworcl, are but rvords"?
Nor is a substitute likely to appear so long as national
independence, narnely, freedorn florn foreign nrle, and
the sovereignty of the state, narnely, the clairn t() un-
c h e t : k e da n d r r n l i m i t e d p o n e r i n f o r e i g n a f f a i r s , a r e i d e r t t i -
fied. (Tlre [Jnited States of Anrerit:a is arnons the ferv
c:ountries rvhere a proper separation of freedrlrn ancl sover-
eignty is at least theoretically possible insofar as the very
3As GeneralAndré lleaufrc, in "IJattlefieldsof thc rq8os,"points
out: Only "in thosc parts of thc workl not covereclby nuclear cle-
terrence" is war still possiblc, urncl even (his "conventional war-
I a r c , " t l e s l > i t ei t s h o r r o r s , i s a c t u a l l y : r l r e a d y l i m i t e t l b y t h e e v e r -
Present threat of escalation ilrto nuclear war. (ln Cakler, op. cit.,
P. 3.)
a)leport
lront lrorr ùlorntlain. tr-ewYork, rq67, the satire on the
Iland Corporatior-r'san<1 othcr think tanks' way of thinking, is
probably closer to reality, with its "timi<l glance over thc brink of
l)eace," than rnost "scrious" stu<lies.Its chief argument, that war is
so essential to the functioning of our society that we rlare not
:rbolish it unless we cliscol'ercvcn more rnurtlerous ways of dealing
with our problems, will shock only those who have forgotten to
$'hat an extent the rrnemploynrent crisis of the Great Depression
was solved only tlrrough the orrtlrreak of \\'orkl War II, or those
u'lro convcniently neglect or argue away the extent of present latent
rrrremploymentbehincl various forms of featherbedcling.
foundations of the American republic rvould not lre
threatenecl by it. Foreigll treaties, according to the Const"i-
tution, are part and parcel of the lalv of the land, and-as
Justice James Wilson remarkecl in r7o'.t-"to the Cottstitu-
tion of the United States the term sovereignty is totally
unknown." But the times of such clearheacled and proud
separation from the traditional language and conceptual
political frame of the European nation-state are long past;
the heritage of the American Revolution is forgotteu, and
the American governrnent, for better and for rvorse, ltas
entered into tl"re heritage of Europe as though it were its
patrimony-rlnaware, alas, of the fact that Europe's declin-
ing porver r,vas preceded and accompanied by political
bankruptcy, the bankruptcy of the nation-state and its con-
cept of sovereignty.) That rvar is still the ultima ratio, the
old continuation of politics by means of violence, in the
foreign affairs of the underdeveloped countries is no argu-
ment againsc its obsoleteness, and the fact that only small
countries rvithottt nltclear and biological rveapons can still
afford it is no consolation' It is a secret from nobody that
the famous random event is most likely to arise from those
parts of the world where the old adage "There is no al-
iernative to vicrory" rerains a 6igh degree of plausibility.
Under these circumstances' there are, indeed, few things
that are more frightening than the steadily increasing
prestige of scientifically minded brain trusters in the coun-
cits of government during the last decades. The trouble is
tnot that thev are cold-blooded enough to "think the un-
I thinkable," but that they do not think.Instead of indulg-
ilng in such an old-fashioned, uncomputerizable activity,
they reckon with the consequences of certain hypo-
theiically assumed constellations withot-tt, however, being
able to test their hypotheses against ar:tual occurrences'
Thelogicalflawintlresehypotheticalconstrttctionsof
future events is always the same: what first apPears as a
hypothesis-rt,ith or rvithout its irnplied alternatives, ac-
cording to the Ievel of sophistir:ation-tlu'r)s irnmecliateiy,
usually after a ferv paragraplrs, into a "fact," rvhic:h then
gives birth to a whole string of similar non-facrs, with the
result that the purely specrrlative character of the lvhole
enterprise is forgotten. Needless to say, this is not science
but pseudo-science, "the desperate attempt of the social
and belravioral sc:iences,"in the u'ords of Noam Chomsky,
"to imitate the surface features of sciences that really have
significant intellectual content." And the mosr obvious
and "most profound objection to this kind of straregic
theory is not its limited usefr.rlnessbut its danger, for it
can lead us to ltelieve rve have an understanding of events
and control over their flow which rve do not have." as
Richar-d N. Goodr.vin recently pointed out in a revierv arti-
cle that hacl the rare virtue of detecting the "unconscious
humor" characteristic of many of these pompous pseudo-
scientific theories.6
Events, by definition, are occurrences that interrupt
routine processesand routine procedures; only in a world
in rvhich nothing of importance ever happens could the
futurologists' dream come true. Predictions of the future
are never anything but projections of present automatic
processesand procedures, that is, of occurl.ences that are
likely to come ro pass if men do not act and if nothing un-
expected happens; every action, for better or lvorse, and
every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in
rvhose frame the prediction moves and lvhere it finds its
evidence. (Prouclhon's passinu remark, .,The fecundity of
the unexpected far exceeds the statesman's prudence,', is
5 Noarn Ohomsky in ,4nteùcan potL,er
and the Neu À{arrlarins, New
York, r969; Richard N. Coodwin's review of Thomas C. Schelling's
.4rms and Inlluence, Yale, t966, in The New yorher, February i7,
r e68.
fortunately still true. It exceeds even more obviously the
expert's calculations.) To call such unexpet:ted, unpre-
dicted, and unpredictable happenings "randonr events" ol
"the last gasps of the past," condemning them to irrele-
vance or the famous "clustltin <-rfhistory," is the oldest
trick in the trade; the trick, no doubt, helps in clearing up
the theory, llut at the price of rernoving it further and
further from reality. The danger is that these theories are
not only platrsible, because they take their evidenc:e from
actually discernible present trends, but that, becatrse of
theit- iuner <:onsistency,they lrave a hypnotic effect; they
put to sleep <ltrr (:()nlmon sense, lvhich is nothing else ltut
our mental organ for perceiving, understanding, and deal-
ing rvith reality and fa<:tuality.
No one engaged in thought about history and politics
can remain unarvare of the enormous role violeu'e has
always played in human affairs, ancl it is at first g'lance
rather surprising that violence has been singled out so
seldom for special consideration.6 (In the last edition of
the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences "violence" does
not even rate an entry.) This sholvs to lvhat an extent
violence and its arbitrariness lvere taken for granted and
therefore neglected; no one questions or examines rvhat
is obvious to all. Those who saw nothing brtt violence in
hurnan affairs, convin<:edthat they tt'ere "altvays lraphazard,
not seriolls, not precise" (Renan) or that Gocl u'as forcvcr
with the bigger battalions, hacl nothitrg more t() say allottt
either violence or history. Anybody looking for sorrlt' kinrl
of sensein the ïecor(ls of the past was alrnost ll<ltttl<lto See
violence as a marginal phenomenon. Whethel it is Clatrse-
witz calling war "the continuation of politics lry otlrer
6 There exists, of course, a large literature on war ancl rvarfarc, but
it deals with the implements of violence, not witir violence as such.
I
means," or Engels defining violence as the accelerator of
econouric development,? the ernphasis is on political or
econclmic continuity, on the continuity of a process that
remains determined by lvhat preceded vioient action.
Hence, students of international relations have helcl until
recently that "it lvas a maxim that a military resolution in
discord with the deeper cultural sources of national power
could not be stable," or that, in Engels' rv'rcl.s, ..rvherever
the porver stl'uct.re of a country contradicts its economic
development" it is political power with its means of vi,_
lence that will suffer defeat.s
Today all these old verities about the relation betrveen
war and politics or about violence and porver have become
inapplicable. The Second World Wai r.vasnot follorved
by peace but by a cold rvar and the establishment of the
military-industrial-labor complex. To speak of ..rhe pri-
ority of u,ar-making potential as the principal structuring
force in society," to rnaintain that ..economi,, systems,
pol
litical philosophies, and corpora juris serve ancl extend the
war sy.stem,not vice \/ersa," to conclucle that .,war itself
is
the ltasic social system, within which other secondary
modes rf social organization conflict or conspire,'_all
this
sounds much more plarrsible than Engels' or
Clauservitz,s
nineteenth-century formulas. Even màre conclusive than
this simple reversal proposed by the anonymous
author
of the Report from lron A[ottntain_instead of
war being
"an extension of diplomacy (or of
politics, or of the pt,rsuii
of economic objectives)," peace is the continuation
of .rvarl
by other means-is the actual developmenr in
the te.t-,-I
niques of warfare. In the r,vords of the Russian
physicist
Sakharov, "A thermonuclear \var cannot be
considerecl a
continuation of politics by other means (according
to the
7 SeeEngels,op. cit., part
II, ch. 4.
sWlreeler,op, cit., p. roj;
Engels,ibidem.
formula of Clauservitz). It would be a means of rrnivcrsal
suicide." o
Moteclver, n'e know that "a ferv rveapons cotrlcl 'r'"'ipcorrt
all other sour(:es of national power in a ferv lnornents," r0
that biological rveapons have been devised rvhich rvould
enable "srnall groups of individuals to trpset the
strategic balance" and lvould be cheap enough to be pro-
duced by "nations unable to develop nuclear striking
forc:es," 11 that "rvithin a very ferv years" robot soldiers
rvill have made "human soldiers completely cbsolete," 12
and that, finally, in conventional rvarfare the poor coun-
tries are much less vulnerable than the great potvers pre-
cisely becausethey are "underdeveloped," and becarrsetech-
nical strperiority can "be much more of a liability tl-ran an
asset" in guerrilla wars.13 What all these uncomfortable
novelties add up to is a complete reversal in the relation-
ship betn,een porver and violence, foreshador,ving another
reversal in the future relationship between small and great
powers. The amount of violence at the disposal of any
given cotrntry may soon not be a reliable indication of the
country's strensth or a reliable guarantee against destruc-
tion by a substantially smaller and rveaker power. And this
bears an ominous similarity to one of political science's
oldest insights, namely that porver cannot be measured in
terms of wealth, that an abundance of lvealth may erode
porver, that riches are particularly dangerous to the porver
3 Andrei D. Sakharov,Progress,
Coexistence,
and IntellectunlFree-
dom, New York, r968,p. 36.
roWheeler,ibidem.
1rNigel Calder,"The New Weapons,"in op. cit., p. 23g.
12l\'I.W. Thring, "Robotson rhe Nfarch,"in Calder,op. cit.,p. r69.
13VladimirDedijer, "The Poor Man's Power," in Calder, op. cit.,
P.29'
l0
and well-being of republics-an insight that does not lose
in validity because it has been forgotten, especially at a
time rvhen its truth has acquired a netv dimension of
validity by becoming applicable to the arseual of violence
as rvell.
The more dtrlriotts and trncertain an instrtrment vio-
lence has become in internati<lnal relations, the more it has
gained in reputation and appeal in dornestic affairs, spe-
cifically in the matter of revoltttion. The strong Marxist
rhetoric of the Ne'lv Left coincides lvith the steady growth
of the entirely non-N'Iarxian conviction, proclaimed by
N{ao Tse-tung, that "Porver gro\vs out of the barrel of a
gun." To be srtre, Nfarx was aware of the role of violence
in history, brrt this role rvas to him secondary; not violence
but the contradictiolts inherent in the old society brought
about its end. The emergence of a new society was pre-
ceded, but not c:attsed, by violent outbreaks, rvhich he
likened to the laÏror pangs that precede, but of course do
not (:alrse,the event of organic birth. In the same vein he
regarded the state as an instrument of violence in the
command of the ruling class; but the actual power of the i
nrling class did not consist of or rely on violence. It rvas I
defined by the role the rttling class playecl in society, or,
rnore exactly, by its role in the process of pr-oduction. It
has often been noticecl, and sometimes deplored, that the
revolutionaly Left trnder the influence of I\{arx's teachings
rr.rled out the use of violent means; the "dictatorship of the
proletaliat"-openly repressive in l\4arx's rvritings-carne
after the revolution and was meant. like the Roman dicta-
torship, to last a strictly limited period. Political assassina-
tion, except for a felv acts of individual terror perpetrated
lly srnall groups of anarchists, was mostly the prerogative
o[ the Right, lvhile organized armecl trprisines remained
the specialty of the military. The Left rerlrained convinc:ed
"that all conspiracies are not only useless but harmful.
ll
 They [knerv] only too rvell that revolutions
ar.e nor macle thought,ls whereas for NIarx, u'ho tttrnecl Hegel's "ideal-
intentionally ancl arbitrarily, but
that they rvere alrvays ism" upsicle dorvn, it las laltor, the htttnan f<trm <lf me-
and everyrvl.rerethe .ecessary resrrlt
of c:irc.mstnr,.,"ri tabolism rvitlr nature, that fulfillecl this futlction' Ancl
tirely independenr of the rvill and "rr-
guidance of partir;ular
parties and rvhole classes.,'1a though one may argue that all notions of man creating
On the level of theory there rvere himself have in common a rebellion against the very
a fer,v exceptions. factuality of the httman condition-nothing is more ob-
Georges Sorel, r,vho at the beginning
of the centtrry triecl lvhether as member of the species or
to combine N,Iarxism rvith Bergson,i vious than that man,
philosophy
-level oi life_ as an individtral, does rlol on'e his existence to himself-
the resrrlt, though on a nttrch lorver
of s,rphistica_ and that therefore whal Sartre, Marx, and Hegel have in
tion, is odclly similar to Sartre's current
amalgamation of common is more relevant than the particular activities
existentialism and Marxisrn_thought
of class strtrggle in through rvhich this non-fact should presumably have come
military terms; yet he endecl by proposing
nothin!ïore about, still it cannot be cleniecl that a gtrlf separates the
violent than the farnotrs myth oi t'h"
gerr.rol strike, a form
of action rvhich rve toclay rvould essentially peaceful activities of thinkine and laboring
think of o, tr"tor"rginf
rather ro the arsenal of norrviolent from all deeds of 'r'iolence. "To shoot down a European is
politics. nifty yea.s""g,i to kill tlvo birds rvith one stone there remain a dead
even rhis modest proposal earned
iim the ,"prrtotior. îf man and a free man," says Sartre in his preface. This is a
being a fascist, nonvirhsranding
his enthusiast'ic upp.ouàt
of Lenin and the Russian Revàlution. sentence N{arx c:otrld never have tvritten.lc
Sarrre, who in his I quoted Sartre in order to show that this new shift
preface ro Fanon's Tlte I,Vretchecl
of th.e Earth goes mu<.h
farther toward vicllence in the thinking of revoltrtionaries can re-
his glorification of violence than
1 Sorel in his main unnoticed even by one of their most representative
famotrs Refler:tions on I/iolencc_farther
than Fanon him_ and articulate spokesmen,l? and it is all the more note-
self, rvhose argument he wishes to
bring to its conclusion_ rvorthy for evidently not being an abstract notion in the
still mentions "sorel's fascist utteranàs."
This shou,s to history of ideas. (If one turns the "iclealistic" concept of
rvhat extent Sartre is unaware
of his basic disagreement
with Marx on the question of violence, thought upside dou'n, one might arrive at the "materialis-
especially l,hen he tic" concepl of labor; one will never arrive at the notion
states that "irrepressible violence
himself," ..madf,ry,, of violence.) No doubt all this has a logic of its ou'n, but it
thatit ïs tnrough ,ï";iiri"til11T:i
.,become is one springing from experience, and this experience was
of the earth" can men.,, .ih.r" notions are all trtterly unknown to any generation before.
the rnore remarkable becausethe
idea of man creating The pathos and the ëlan of the New Left, their credi-
himself is.strictly in the tradition
of Hegelian and Nfarx_
ian thinking; it is the very basis r:'lt is rluite suggestir,e
that Hegel speaksin this context of "Sich-
of all reftist h'manism.
But according to Hegel man ..produces,, selbstltrorluzieren."
SeeVorlesnnsen der Philoso-
iiber die Gcschichte
himself through phia, erl.Hoflmeister,p. r r4, Leipzig,r938.
14I owe this
early remark of Engels, in a manuscript tGSeeappenclixI, p. 89.
of Â47, to
Jacob Barion, Hcger rmrl die ^ni,i*;rtirrlrc iiaatstehre,
Bonn, r969. 17SeeappendixII, p. 89.

r2 t3
 bility, as it were, are r:losely connected rvith the rveircl The nerv militants have been denounced as alliltt lrtrlr.
suicidal development of rnodern \veapons; this is the first n i h i l i s t s , r e d f a s c i s t s ,N a z i s , a n d , r ' v i t h c o n s i d e r a l l l ) r r r ( ) t ( '
generation to grow trp under the shadow of the atom justification, "Lucldite rnachine smashers,":o and tl)(' sltr
bomb. They inherited from their parents' seneration the clents have cottntered rvith the equally meaningless slog:trts
experience of a massive intrusion of crimi'al viole'ce into o f " p o l i c e s t a t e " o r " l a t e n t f a s c i s mo f l a t e c a p i t a l i s r n , " i r r r t l ,
politics: they learned in high school and in college abour rvith considerably more justiÊcation, "constlmer soci'
concentration and extermination camps, about genocide ety." 21 Their behavior has lteen blamed on all kin<ls ol
and t.rt.re,r' abotrt the 'rvlroresaleslauehter of r:ivilians in social and psychological factors-on too much permissivc-
war without which modern military oper.ations are no ness in their trpbringing iu America and on an explosivc
longer possible even if restricted to ..conventional,' rveâp_ reaction to too much atrthority in Germany and Japan, on
ons. Their first reaction was a revrrlsion against eveiy the lack of freedom in Eastern Europe and too much free-
form of violence, an almost matter-of-course espousal of a dom in the West, on the clisastrous lack of jobs for soci-
politics of nonviolence. The very gïeat successesof trris ology students in France and the superabundance of
movement, especially in the field of civit rights, were fol_ caïeeïs in nearly all frelds in the United States-all of
lowed by the resistance movement against the lvar in Viet_ which appear locally plausible enough but are clearly
nam, which has remained an important factor in cleter_ contradicted by the fact that the student rebellion is a
mining the climate of opinion in this counrry. BLrt it global phenonr.enon. A social common denominator of the
is no
secret that things have changed since then, that the movement seems out of the question, but it is true that
adl-rer_
ents of nor-rviolence are on the defensive, and it 'vorrlcl psychologically this seneration seems everl'rvhere char-
be
futile to say that only the '.extremists" are yielcling
to a
glorification of violence and have discovered-likc Fanon's
Algerian peasânts-that "only violence pays.,' ro Der Spiegel (Felrruary ro, rq6q ff.), and the series "Nlit clem Latein
am Ende" (Nos. z6 and e7, 1969).
20Seeappendix III, p. gr.
]t Tgu* _Chomskyrightly notices amcng the motives for open re- 2r The last of these epithets woulcl make sense if it were meant de-
bellion the refusal"ro take one'spracearongsidethe 'goocr
G..r.rnrr,
we have all learnedto despise."Op. cit.,p. scriptively. Behind it, however, stantls the illusion of Nlarx's society
36g.
of free protlucers, the libcration of the procltrctive forces of society,
le Frantz Fanon, The Wretched
ot' the Earth eq6r), Grove I)rcssecli- which in fact has been accomplished not by tl-rerevolution but by
t i o n , r q 6 8 ,p . 6 r . I a m u s i n gt h i s w o r k b e c a u soe[ i t s g r c a t i n f l u c n c e scienceand technology. This liberation, furthermore, is not acceler-
on the presentstudentgeneration.Fanon himself,howe'er, is ated, but seriously retar<lcd,in all countries that have gone through
m.clr
more doubtful about violence than his adrnirers.It sccnrs ;r revolution. In other words, behintl thcir derrunciation of consurnp-
that
only the book's first chapter, .,ConcerningViolencc,,,has tion stands the ide:rlizetion of procluction, and with it the old
been
widely reatl. Fanon knows of the .,.rnmi*eclanrt total l)ru(ality idolization of 1>roductivityantl creativity. "The joy of destnrction
[which], if not immecliatelycombatted,invariablyleaclsto the de_ is a creativc joy"-yes in<leecl,if one l;elieves that "the joy of labor"
feat of the movementwithin a lew weeks',(lr. ,+ù. is procluctive; destruction is about the only "labor" lelt that can be
For the recent escalationof violencein ihe str,dentrnovement, <tone by simple implements without the help of machines, although
see the instructive series,,Gewalt', in the German news rnachines do the iob, of course, much rnore efficiently.
magazine

t4 l5
 acterized by sheer courage, an astounding rvill to a<:tion,
and by a no less astonnding confidence in the possibility
of change.12But these qualities ar.e not crauses,and if
one
asks rvhat has at:tually brought aborrt this lvholly unex_
pected clevelopment in universities all over the rvorlcl,
it
seems abslrrd to ignore the most obvious and perhaps the
most potent factor, for lvhich, moreover, no precedent
and
no analogy exisr-the simple fact that technokrgicral
, ress" is leading in so many instances
prog_
straighi into clis-
aster; 23 that the sciences, tatrght and Iearned try
this
generation, seem not merely trnable to unclo the disastrotrs
consequences of their orvn technology but have r-ea<:hed
a stage in their development rvhere .,there's no clamn thirrg
you can do that can't l)e turned into war.,'rn (To lre
surel
nothin.q is more important ro the integrity of the
uni_
versities-which, in Senator Fulbright's rvords, have
be_
trayed a public trust when they became dependent
on gov-
22This appetitefor action
is especiallynoticeablein small and rela_
tively harmlessenterprises.Sttr<lentsstruck strccessfullyagainstcam_
pus authoritieswho u'erepaving employeesin the cafeteria
anrl in
buildingsand groundslessthan tlre legal minimum.
The decision
of the Ilerkeleysrrrdents
to join the fighi for transformingan empty
uni'ersity,ownedlot into a .,peoPle,spark,, shoukl lrc
co,,ntcil
amongtheseenterprises, even though it provokerlthe worsrreaction
so far from the authorities.To judge fiom the Berkeley
inci<lenr,
it seems(hat preciselysuch"nonpoliiicar"acriorrs
,nify thc slrrrrent
body bchintl a radicalvang'ard. "A st'dent referencltrm,
wrricrrsaw
the heaviestturnout in the historyof studentvoting,
cent of the nearly r5,ooowho voted favorirrethe uie
forrntl Bq,lrcr_
of tlre làti,as
a people'spark. Seethe excellentreporrby Sheldon
Wolin anrl .fohn
Schaar,"Berkeley: The Battle of pàople,s park,,, New yorlt
lleview
of Books,June r9, r969.
23SeeappendixIV, p.
oz.
2{Tlrus
JeromeLerrvin, of NI.I.T., in the New york Timcs Maga-
z i n e , M a yr 8 , 1 9 6 9 .
l6
:5-than a rigorously
('fl)nlel)t-sP()llsol-edresearclt projects
all con-
crrforced divort:e from lvar-oriented resear(:h and
t o e x p e ( ' t this trl
r r e t ' t e c el n t e r p r i s e s ; l l u t i t w o u l d l r e n a ï v e
the rvar
<hange the nature of moclern science or hincler
.ff,rri, naTve alst> to cleuy that the restrlting lirnitation
rnight rvell leacl to a lolvering of ttniversity standards'16
-flre
only thing this divorc:e is not likely to lead to
is a general n'itllclrarval of fedelal funcls; for, as -ferome
"The Clovern-
Lettùn, of NI.I.T', re(relltly pointed ottt,
l.,t":z-just as the univer-
rnent can't afforcl r)ot t() support
ftrnds; lrtrt tltis
sities cannclt afforcl ll()t to a(:cept federal
meansnomorethanthattlrey..mtrstlearnhorvtosterilize
a diffrctrlt
financial support" (Henry Steele Commager),
the enormotts intrease
lxrt not impossible task in view o[
In short'
of the potv;r of universities in moclern societies')
and
the seemingly irresistible proliferation of technitlttes
rl'ith
machines, far from only threatening ceÏtain classes
unemployment, menaces the existence clf rl'hole nations
and conceivably of all mankind'
It is only natuïal that the ne\v generation should live
rvith greater atrvarenessof the possibility of doomsday th-an
those "over thirty," not because they are yotlnger llut be-
cause this $'as their first decisive experien<-e in tlre worlcl'
(What are "problems" to tts "are buik into the flesh and
l>lood of the yottng.") 38 If you ask a memller of this gen-
eration fivo simple questions: "Flolv do you lvant the
world to be in fifty years?" and "What do you want your
life to be like five years from now?" the ansrvers are quite
2;SeeappendixV, p. 93.
ro.fhe stearlyclrift of lrasicrcsearchfrom tire universitiesto the
is very sigrlihcantancl a casein point'
industriallal.roratories
2 7L o c . c i t .
':8
Steplren Spencler,The l'ear of the Young Rebels' New York' r969'
P.r79.
r7
often preceded by "Provided there is still a rvot-Id," aucl
"Provided I am still alive." In Georpçe Wald's rvords,
"rvhat rve are up against is a generation that is by no means
sure that it has a future." 2e For the future, as Spender
puts it, is "like a time-bomb buried, but ticking arvay, in
the present." To the often-heard question Who are they,
this nerv generation? one is temptecl to answer, Tlrose rvho
hear the ticking. And to the other question, Who are they
rvho rrtterly deny them? the ansl'er rnay rvell be, Those
rvho dt> not knorv, or reftrse to face, things as they really
are.
The student rebellion is a global phenomenon, but its
manifestations vary, of course, greatly from country to
country, often from university to university. This is espe-
cially true of the practice of violence. Violence has re-
mained mostly a matter of theory and rhetoric where the
clash benveen generations did not coincide rvith a clash of
tangible group interests. This was notably so in Gertnany,
'rvhere the tenured faculty had a vested interest in over-
crorvded lectures and seminars. In America, the stttdent
movement has been seriotrsly radicalized wherever police
and police brutality intervened in essentially nonviolent
demonstrations: occrrpations of administration builclings,
sit-ins, et cetera. Serious violence enterecl the scene <lnly
lvittr the appearance of the Black Pr-r'rver
movement on the
campuses. Negro students, the majority of them admitted
lvithout academic qualification, regarded and organized
themselves as an interest group, the representat.ivesof the
black comrnunity. lfheir interest was to lor,ver academic
standards. They rvere more cautiotrs than the rvhite rebels,
but it was clear from the beginning (even hefore the in-
cidents at Cornell University and City College in Nerv
York) that violence rvith them r,vasnot a matter of theory
and rhetoric. Moreover, while the stuclent rebellion in
2eGeorgeWald in The New Yorker,Nlarch zz, 1969.
l8
Western r:ottntries can notvhere count on popular supPort
outside the universities and as a mle encotlnters open
hostility the rnoment it uses violent means, there stands a
large rninority of the Negro commtrnity behind the verbal
or actual violenr:e of the lllack sttrdents.;roBlack violence
can indeed be trnderstoocl in analogy to the lallor vinlence
in America a generation ago; ancl althougl-r, as far as I
knor,v, only Stauehton Lynd has drarvn the analogy be-
tween labor riots and stttdent rebellion explicitly,sr it
seems that the academic establishment, in its curious
tenclency to yield more to Negro demands, even if they are
clearly silly and outrageous,'t2 than to the disinter-ested
and usually highly moral claims of the rvhite rehels, also
thinks in these terms and feels more comfortable rvhen
<ronfronted rvith interests plus violence than 'rvhen it is a
matter of nonvioleut "participatory democracy." The
yielding of university authorities to black demands has
often been explained by the "gtrilt feelings" of the white
community; I think it is more likely that faculty as well
as administrations ancl boards of trustees are half-con-
sciously aware of the obviorts truth of a conclttsion of the
official Report. on Violence in America.' "Force and vio-
lence are likely to be successftrl techniques of social con-
trol ancl persuasion rvhen they have rvide popular sup-
port.":s
The neu' uncleniable glorification of violence by the stu-
dent movement has a curious peculiarity. While the rheto-
noSeeappendix VI, p. 04.
3 r S e ea p p e n d i xV I I , p . q 5 .
32SeeappendixVIII, p. 95.
33See the report of the National Commissionon the Causesand
Preuent.ionof Violence,June, r969, as quoted frorn the New York
Times,June 6, r969.
l9
 Who has ever doubted that the violated dream of violence,
ric of the ncrv militants is clearly inspired ll1' Fanotr' tlicir
lrttt a that the oppressed "dream at least once a day of setting"
theoret.i<:al argtlments t'ontain usually trothitrg -I"his
leftovers. is in- themselves up in the oppressor's pla<:e,that the poor clream
hoclgepoclgeof all kinds of N{arxist
'ivho has ever reacl l\'Iarx of the possessionsof the rich, the persecuted of exchanging
deeà q*ite ltaffiing for anySody
an icleology Nlnrxist "the role of the quany for that of the hunter," and the
or F,ngels. Who could possibly call
i ' " < : l a s s l e si s
c l l e r " s , "S e l i c ' e s t 5 a t " i t - t last of the kingdom where "the last shall be first, and the
that hàs put its f a i t h
first last"? 35 The point, as Marx sarv it, is that dreams
the lunrpenproletariat the rebellion rtill firlrl its ttrlratt
never come true.36 The rarity of slave rebellions ancl of up-
speaïltead," and trusts that "gangsters rvill liglrt thc rvay
risings amons the disinherited and dorvntrodden is no-
for the people"? 3aSartre lvith his great felicity $'ith rvrtrds
torious; on the ferv occasions rvhen they occurred it rvas
has given expression to the nerv faith. "Violen<:e," lrc tlorv
precisely "mad fury" that turned dreams into nightmares
believes, o.t th. strength of Fanon's book, "like A<'hilles'
for everybody. In no case, as far as I knorv, was the force
lance. can heal the rvounds it has inflicterl." If this lt'ere
of these "volcanic" outl)ursts, in Sartre's lvords, "equal to
true, revenge rvould l>e the Cure-all for nrost of orrr ills.
that of the pressure put on them." To identify the national
This myth is more abstract, farther removecl from reality,
liberation movements with such outbursts is to prophesy
than Sorel's myth of a general strike ever lvas' It is on a
their doom-quite apart from the fact that the unlikely
par rvith Fanon's rvorst rhetorical excesses,such as, "hun-
victory lvould not result in changing the world (or the
ger with dignity is preferable to bread eaten it.t slaverY'"
system), but only its personnel. To think, finally, that there
No history and no theory is neecled to reftrte this state-
is such a thing as a "llnity of the Third World," to which
ment; the most strperficial observer of the processesthat go
one could address the new slogan in the era of decoloniza-
on in the human body knorvs its untruth. Brrt hacl he said
tion "Natives of all underdeveloped colrnrries unite!"
that bread eaten lvith dignity is preferable to (rake eaten
(Sartre) is to repeat Marx's lvorst illusions on a greatly
in slavery the rhetorical point would have been lost.
enlarged scale and with considerably less justification. The
Reading these irresponsible grandiose statcttrctrts-and
Third World is not a reality bur an ideology.3?
those I quoted are fairly representative, except that Fanon
still manages to stay closer to reality than most-and look-
ing at them in the perspective of what rve knol' allottt the 35Fanon,op. cit.. pp.
37 tr.,59.
history of rebellions and revolutions, one is tempted to 36SeeappendixIX, p.
96.
deny their significance, to ascribe them to a passine mood,
or to the ignorance and nobility of sentiment of people ex- 37The stuclentscaught betweenthe two superpowersand equally
posed to unprecedented events and developments rvitllout tlisillusionedby East and West, "inevitably pursue some third
icleology,from Nfao's China or Castro'sCuba." (Spender,op. cit,.,
any means of han<lling thern mentally, and ',vlro tlrercfore
p. 92.)Their callsfor N,Iao,Castro,Che Guevara,and Ho Chi N{inh
curiously revive thoughts and emotions from rvhich Marx are Iike pseudo-religious incantations for saviors from another
had hoped to liberate the revolution once and for all' world; they would also call for Tiro if only Yugoslaviawere farther
au,ay and less approachable.The case is different rvith the Black
34Fanon, op. cit., pp. rBo, rz9, and 69, respectively Power movement; its i<Ieologicalcommitrnent to the nonexistent

20 zr
 together with the state. Becâuse of a curious timidity in
theoretical matters, contrasring oddly with its bold courage
The qrrestion remains rvhy so many of the ner'v prcat h-
in prac:ti<:e,the slogan of the Nerv Left has rernained in a
ers of violence aïe unaware of their decisive disagr-eement
cleclamatory stage, to be invoked rather inarticulately
rvith Karl Marx's teachings, or, to Put it another rvay, rvhy
against Western representative democracy (which is about
they cling with such stubborn tenacity to concrepts and
to lose even its merely representative function to the huge
doctrines that have not only been refutecl by factual de-
party machines that "represent" not the party member-
velopments but are clearly inconsistent r'vith their own
ship but its functionaries) and against tl're Easrern one-
politics. The one positive political slogan the new move-
party bureaucracies, which rule olrt participation on
àent has put forth, the claim for "participatory demo-
principle.
cracy" thai has echoed around the globe ancl constitutes
Even more suprising in this odd loyalty to the past is
the most signifrcant common denominator of the rebel-
the Nerv Left's seeming unawareness of the extent to rvhich
lions in the Èast and the West, derives from the best in the
the moral character of the rebellion-norv a rviclely ac-
revolutionary tradition-the council system, the always de-
cepted fact 3e-clashes rvith its Marxian rhetori<:. Nothing,
feated but only authentic outgrowth of every revolution
indeecl, about the movemenr is more striking than its
since the eighteenth centruy. But no reference to this goal
d i s i n t e r e s t e d n e s sP
; e t e r S t e i n f e l s ,i n a r e m a r k a b l e a r t i c l e o n
either in rvord or substance can be founcl in the teachings
the "Frenr:h revolrrrion rq68" in Commonweal (fuly 26,
of Marx and Lenin, both of whom aimed on the contrary
r968), n'as quite right lt,hen he lvrote: "péguy might have
at a society in 'ivlrich the need for pul>lic action and parti-
38 been an appropriate patron for the cultural revolution,
cipation in public affairs lvould have "rvithered arvay,"
with his later scorn for the Sorbonne mandarinate
'The [and]
his formula, social Revolurion will be moral or it will
"Unity of the Third \{rorld" is not sheer romantic nonsense'They
have an obvious interest in a black-white dichotomy; this too is o[
course mere escapism-an escape into a dream world in which se"Their revoltrtionaryidea," as Spender(op. cit.. p. rr4)
srates,.,is
Negroes would constitute an overwhelming majority of the world's moral passion."Noam Chomsky(op. cit., p. 368)quotesfacts: ,,The
population. fact is that most of the tho.sancl draft carcls ancl other clocuments
turned in to the.fustice I)epartment on October zo
38It seems as though a similar inconsistency coulcl be charged to [rq67] came
from men who can escapemilitary service but wlto insisteclon shar-
Nlarx ancl Lenin. Did not Marx glorify the Paris Commrttrc of t87r,
ing the fate of those who are less privileged." The sarne was true
ancl did not Lenin want to gi'r'e "all Power to the sozriels"?Rtrt for
for any number of draft-resister tlemonstrations ancl sit-ins in the
I\,[arx the Commune was no more than a transitory orgatr of rcvolu-
.'a lever for uprooting the economicrtl fountlations universitics ancl colleges.The sit.ation in other counrries is similar.
tionary action,
Der Spiegel describes,for instance, the frustrating ancl often humili-
of ... class rule," which Engels rightly iclentified with the likewise
..t.lictatorshipof the Proletariat." (see The cittil ll'ar in atirrg conditions of the resear.chassistantsin Germany: ,,Angesichts
transitory
dieser I'erhiiltnisse nimmt es geradezu uunder, dasstlie Assistenten
France, in Karl Marx and F. Engels, Selected llorhs, Lontlon, tq5o,
nicht in der uordersten Front der Radihalen slehen." (June 23,
Vol. I, pp. 474 and 4.1o,respectively.)lfhe case of l'enin is more
r969, p.58.) It is always the same srory: Interest groups clo not join
complicarcd. sriu, it was Lenin who emasculated the sozrielsand
the rebels.
gave all power to the Party.

23
 t o e n l i s t " a l l o r ' - - a n i z e cyl < l t r t hg r o u p s " i n t h e i r r a n k s . a :l - l r e
not be.'" To be stue, every revolutionary movement has
absurclity of this proposal is obvious.
been led by the disinterested, who were motivated by com-
is I am nclt srrre rvhat the explanation o[ these inc:onsis-
passion or by a passion for justice, and this, of cottrse'
tencies rtill eventually ttrrn out to be; lttrt I suspect that
àlro ,rn" for lUarx and Lenin. But N'Îarx, as lve knorv'
t h e d e e p e r r e a s o n f o r t h i s l o y a l t y t o a t y p i < . a l l yn i n e r e e n t h -
hacl quite effectively tabooed these "emotions"-if today
arguments as "emo- century doctrine has something to do rvith the concept of
the establishment dismisses moral
Propp'ess,rvith an unrvillingness to part rvith a notion that
tionalism" it is much closer to Marxist ideology than the
u s e d t o u n i t e L i b e r a l i s m , S o c i a l i s r n ,a n d C o m m r r n i s m i n r o
rebels-and had solved the problem of "disinterested" lead-
the "Left" btrt has nolvhere reached the level of plaus-
ers rvith the notion of their being the vanguard of man-
ibility and sophistication we find in the rvritings of Karl
kind, emtroclying the ultimate interest of htrman history'ao
N{arx. (Inconsistency has alrvays been the Achilles' heel of
Still, they too had first to espouse the nonspeculative'
liberal thought; it comllined an unsrverving loyalty to
down-to-earth interests of the working classand to identify
Progress with a no less strict refusal to glorify Flistory in
with it; this alone gave them a firm footing outside society'
Marxian ancl Hegelian terms, rvhich alone c_-ouldiustifv
And this is precisely what tl're modern rebels have lacked
and guaranree it.)
from the beginning and have been unable to find clespite
The notion that there is strch a thing as progress of
a rather desperate search for allies Outsiclethe trniversities.
tnankincl as a rvhole rvas trnkn'*'n prior to the seventeenth
The hostilify of the workers in all countries is a matter of
centut'y, developed into a r-ather common opinion among
record,al and in the Unitecl States the complete collapse
t h e e i e h t e e n t h - ( ' e n t r l r yh o m m e s d e l e t t t e s , a n c l l l e c a m e a n
of any co-operation with the Black Power movement'
almost universally accepteddogrna in the nineteenth. Rut
whose strtdents are more firmly rooted in their own corn'
the clifferen.e bet\\reen the earlier notions and their final
munity and therefore in a better bargaining position at
stage is decisive. The seventeenth century, in this respect
the universities, was the bitterest disappointment for the
best represenrecl by Pascal and Fontenelle, thoueht of piog-
white rebels. (Whether it rvas wise of the Black Porver
ress in terms of an ac('rrm.lation .f kno*,leclge thràugir
people to refuse to play the role of the proletariat for "dis-
the cent'ries, rvhereas for the eiehteenth the *,.rcl impliËd
interested" leaders of a difierent color is another question.)
an "eclrr<'ari.n .f manki'd" (Lessi.g's Erziehrms rlt:s i,Ien-
It is, not surprisingly, in Germany, the old home of the
schengeschlechts) rvhose end l,otrld coincide with man's
Youth movement, that a $oup of students now proposes
coming of apçe.Progress $ras not trnlimited, ancl Marx's
classlesssociety seen as the realrn of freeclom that could
a0SeeappendixX, p. 06. l>e the end of history-often interpretecl as a secrrlarization
-of christian eschatology or
al Czechoslovakiaseemsto be an exception. However, the reform .|elvish messianism-actually
-oueirr"ttt for which the stu(lents fought in the frrst ranks was still bears the hallmark of the Age of Enlightenmenr. Be-
backedby tlre whole nation,without any classtlistiDctions.xlarxisti-
cally speaking,the studentsthere, and probably in all Eastern {eSeethe Spiegel-Inte^,iervwith
Christoph Ehmann in I)er Spiegel,
countries,have too mrrch, rather than too little, support from the Februaryro, r969.
community to fit the N{arxian Pattern.

24 25
ginning with the nineteenth centuïy, horvever, all srr<lr
iimitations disappeared. Nolv, in the r'vords of Pr.trcl6'tt,
mcrtion ts "le fait primitif" and "the larvs of movelncnt
alone are eternal." This movement has neither lteginnine
n o r e n d : " L e m o r r u e m e n t e s t , ;u o i l à t o u t ! " A s t o m a n , a l l
we can say is "rve are born perfectible, l)ut we shall tlever
be perfect." a3 N'Iarx's iclea, llorron'ed from Hegel' that
every old society harbors the seeds of its strccessorsin the
same way every living organism harllors the seeds of its
offspring is indeed not only the most ingenious lnt also
the only possible conceptual gtlarantee for the sempiternal
continuity of progress in history; and siuce the motion of
this progress is supposed to come about through the clashes
of antagonistic forces, it is possillle to interpret every "re-
gress" as a necessary but temporary setllack.
To be sure, a guaïantee that in the final analysis rests
on little more than a metaphor is not the most solid basis
to erect a cloctrine upon, llut this, unhappily, I\{arxism
shares with a great many other doctrines in philosophy.
Its great aclvantage becomes clear as soon as one compares
it with other concepts of history-such as "eternal recur-
rences," the rise ancl fall of empires, the haphazard se-
quence of essentially unconnected events-all of which
can equally be documented and justified, but none of
which lvill gtrarantee a (ontintttrm of linear time and
continuotts progress in history. And the only competitor in
the field, the ancient notion of a Golden Age at the begin-
nine, from lvhich everything else is derived, implies the
rather unpleasant certainty of continrtotrs clecline. Of
course, there are a ferv melancholy side effects in the reas-
suring irlea that we need only march into the ftttttre,
a3P.-.f.Protrdlton,Philo.sophie
du Progrês(r85a),r916,pP. 27-3o,49'
Scc also Wil-
and De Ia ltrstice (r858),ro3o,I, p. 238,respectively.
liam H. Harbold, "Progressive Htrmanity: in the Philosophyof P.-J.
Proudhon,"Reuiewof Politics,Janr.rary, r96q.
26
lvhich we cannot help doing anyhorv, in order to fincl a
better lvorld. There is first of all the simple fact that the
general ftrture of mankind has nothing to offer to indi-
vidual life, rvhose only <:ertain future is death. And if one
leaves this out of acr:ount and thinks only in generalities,
there is the obvi<lus argument against progress that, in the
rvords of Flerzen, "Human development is a form of
chronological unfairness, since late-r:omers are able to
profit by the labors of their predecessors without paying
the same price,"', or, in the words of Kant, "It will
always remain bewildering . . . that the earlier genera-
tions seem to carry on their burdensome business only for
the sake of the later . . . and that only the last should have
the good fortune to drvell in the [completedJ building." +r
However, these disadvantages, which were only rarely
noticed, are more than outweighed by an enormous ad-
vantage: progress not only explains the past rvithout break-
ing up the time continuum but it can serve as a guide for
acting into the future. This is what Marx discovered when t
he turned Hegel upside down: he changed the direction of
the historian's glance; instead of looking toward the past,
he now could confidently look into the future. Progress
gives an ânsr"et to the troublesome question, And rvhat
shall we do now? The answer, on the lowest level, says:
Let us develop what we have into something better,
greater, et cetera. (The, at first glance, irrational faith of
liberals in grorvth, so characteristic of all our present poli-
tical and economic theories, depends on this notion.) On
the more sophisticated level of the Left, it tells us to de-
velop present contradictions into their inherent synthesis.
aaAlexander Fferzenis quoted here from Isaiah Berlin's ,'Introduc-
tion" to FrancoVenturi, Roots of lTevolutions,New York, r966.
ar"Idea for a flniversal History with CosmopolitanIntent," Third
Principle,in The Philosophyof Kant, N{odernLibrary edition.
27
 In either casewe are assuredthat nothing altogether ne\v
and totally unexpectedcan happen, nothing but the "ner:-
essary"resultsof what we already knorv.a6Horv reassuring
that, in Hegel's words, "nothing else will come out btrt
what rvas already there." a7
I do not need to add that all our experiencesin this
century, which has constantly confronted us with the
totally unexpected,stanclin flagrant contradiction to these
notions and doctrines,whosevery popularity seemsto con-
sist in offering a comfortable, speculative or pseudo-
I scientific refuge from reality. A student rebellion almosr
1exclusively inspired by moral considerâtions certainly be-
I longs among the totally unexpectedeventsof this century.
' This generation, trained like its predecessorsin hardly
anything but the various brands of the my-share-of-the-pie
social and political theories,has taught us a lessonabout
manipulation, or, rather, its limits, rvhich we would do
well not to forget. Men can be "manipulated" through
physicalcoercion,torture, or starvation,and their opinions
can be arbitrarily formed by deliberate, organized misin-
formation, but not through "hidden persuaders,"tele-
vision, advertising,or any other psychologicalmeans in a
free society.Alas, refutation of theory through reality has
alwaysbeen at best a lengthy and precariousbusiness.The
manipulation addicts, those rvho fear it unduly no less
than those who have set their hopes on it, hardly notice
when the chickenscome home to roost. (One of the nicest
examplesof theories exploding into absurdity happened
during the recent "People's Park" trouble in Berkeley.
a6For an excellent discussionof the obviotrs fallaciesin this position,
see Robert A. Nisbet, "The Year 2ooo and All That," in Commen.
lzzryr,Jtrne, 1968, and the ill-tempered critical remarks in the Sep
tember issue.
rz Hegel, op. cit., p. roo ff.
When the police and the National Guard, with rifles, un-
sheathed bayonets, and helicoptered riot gas, attacked the
rrtrarmed students-few of them "had throlvn anything
more dangerous than epithets"-some Guardsmen frater-
nized openly with their "enemies" and one of them threw
clown his arms and shouted: "I can't stand this any more."
What happened? In the enlightened age we live in, this
could be explained only by insanity; "he was rushed to a
psychiatric examination [and] diagnosed as sufiering frorn
'strppressed
aggressions.'") nt
Progress, to be sure, is a more serious and a more com-
plex item offered at the superstition fair of <tur time.ae The
irrational nineteenth-cenruïy belief in unlimited progress
has found universal acceptance chiefly because of the
astounding development of the natnral sciences, rvhich,
since the rise of the modern age, actually have been .,uni-
versal" sciences and therefore could look forward to an
unending task in exploring the immensity of the universe.
That science, even though no longer limited by the fini-
ttrde of the earth and its nature, should be subject to
never-ending progress is by no means certain; that strictly
scientific research in the humanities, the so-called Ceistes-
tL,i.çsenschaTtenthat deal rvith the products of the human
spirit, must come to an end by definition is obvious. The
ceaseless,senselessdemand for original scholarship in a
number of fields, where only erudition is now possible, has
a8The inciclentis reportedwithout comment
by worin and Schaar.
op. cit. Seealso Peter Barnes'sreporr ., ,An Outcry,: Thoughts on
BeingTear Gassed," in Newsuteek, June z, r969.
aeSpender(op. cit., p.
45) reporrsthat the French srudentsduring
the l\Iay incidentsin Paris "refusedcategoricallythe icleologyoï
'o.tput' 'progress'and
frendernentl,of such-calledpseudo-forces."
In America,this is not yet the caseas far as progre.ssis concerned.
\ve are still surroundeclby talk about "progressive"and ..regressive"
forces,"progressive"and "repressiverolerance,"and the like.
 ever, of all action, as distinguished from mere behavior, to
led either to sheer irrelevancy, the famcltts ktton'itts- ()l
inteffupt 'ivhat othenvise lvould have proceeded automa-
more and more about less and less, or to the rlevclol>tnctrt
tically and therefore predictably.
rvhich actually destroys its olr.fet t.i"'
of a pseuclo-scholarsl-rip
It is noter.vorthy that the rebellion of the yotrng, to tlte
extent that it is not exclusively morally or politi<ally mo-
tivated, has been chiefly directed against tlte aca<lenric
glorification of scholarship and science, both of rvhich,
though for different reasons, are gravely compromisecl in
their eyes. And it is true that it is by no means irnpossilrle
that we have reached in both cases a turning point, the
point of destructive returns. Not only has the progress of
science ceased to coincide with the progress of mankincl
(rvhatever that rnay mean), btrt it could even spell rnan-
kind's end, just as the further progress of scholarship rnay
rvell end with the destrnction of everything tllat rnade
scholarship worth our while. Progress, in other u'orcls, carr
no longer serve as the standard by which to evaluate the
disastrously rapid change-processeslve have let Ioose.
Since we are concerned here primarily'r.vith violence, I
must warn against a tempting misunderstanding. If rve
look on history in terms of a continuous <:hronological
process, whose progress, moreover, is inevitable, violence
in the shape of war and revolution may appear to con-
stitute the only possible interruption. If this \vere true,
if only the practice of violence rvould make it possible to
interrupt automatic processes in the realm of htrman
affairs, the preachers of violence would have n'on an im-
portant point. (Theoretically, as far as I knotv, the point
was never made, but it seems to me incontestaltle that the
disruptive student activities in the last ferv years are
actually based on this conviction.) It is the function, how-

50For a splendid exemplification of these not merely superlluous but

pernicious enterprises,see Edmund \{ilson, The Fruits of the MLA,
New York, 1968.

80 3l
I T I S against the background of these experiencesthat
I proposeto raise the question of violence in the political
rea!g1,This is not easy; rvhat Sorel remarked sixty years
ago, "The problems of violence still remain very ob-
scure,"51is as true t()day as it rvasthen. I mentioned the
general reluctance to deal with violence as a phenomenon
in its orvn right, and I must nolv qualify this stacement.If _..
we turn to discussionsof the phenomenon of polver, we
soon find that there exists a consensusamong political
theorists frôiri Left ro-Righi to the effecr rhat violènce is
nothing more tiiian ihe;osr flagrant manifestation of
power. "All politics is a'struggle fàr power; the uliiÂate
kind of power is violence," said C. Wright I\Iills, echoing,:,
as it were, Max Weber's definition of the state as "the rule$
of men over men basedon the meansof legitimate, that is r
allegedly legitimate, violence." 52 The consensusis very

51Georges Sorcl, Reflections on Violence, "Introduction to the First

Publication" (19o6),New York, rq6r, p. 6o.
s2The Pouer Etire, New York, rq56, p. r7r; I\fax Weber in the frrst
paragraplrs of Politics as a Vor;ation (rgzr). Weber seems to have
been aware of his agreementwith the Left. He quotes in the conrexr
Trotsky's remark in Brest-Litovsk,"Every srate is baseclon violence,"
and adds, "This is indeed true."

strange; for to equate political power with "the orgalliza-
tion of violence" makes sense ()nly if one follorvs N{arx's
estimate of the state âs an instrument of opPression in the
hands of the ruling class. Let us therefore turn to authors
who do not believe that the body politic ancl its larvs ancl
institrttions are melely coercive superstructures' sec:()ndary
manifestations of some underlying forces. Let tls tLlrn, for
instance, to Bertrand de Jouvenel, whose book Pozrrer is
perhaps the most prestigious and, anyway, the most inter-
esting ïecent treatise on the subject. "To him," he writes,
"$'h<>r:ontemplates the trnfolding clf the ages war presents
itself as an activity of States which pertains to their es-
sen(e." r)r This may prompt us to ask rvhether the end of
rvarfare, then, would mean the end of states. Would the
disappearance of violence in relationships between states
'spell
the ênd of power?
The answer, it seems, will depend on what we under-
stand by power. And porver, it turns out, is an instrutnent
of rule. rvhile rule. we ale told, owes its existence to "the
instinct of dominati,,ll." r5'rWe are immediately reminded
o[ 'lvhat Sartre said about violence when we read in
.|ouvenel that "a man feels himself more of a man when he
is imposing himself aud making others the instruments of
his r.vill," rvhich gives him "incomparable pleastrrc'" 55
"Polver," said Voltaile, "consists in making others act as I
<:hoose"; it is present rvherever I have tlre chance "to as-
sert my own rvill against the resistance" of others, said N{ax
Weber, reminding tts of Clatrse'rvitz'sclefinition of lvar as
"an act of virilence to compel the opponent to do as we
r.vish." The word, we are told by Strausz-Hupé, signifies
t'3Power: The Natural History of lts Growlh (rq45),London, rq52,
P. r22.
5aIbiden, p. gg.
5 5I b i d e n t , p . I r o .
36
-I-o
"tlre porver of man clver n)an." 5(i go back to Jotrvenel:
"To comrnand and to l-reolteyed: rvithout that, there is no
Porver-u'itl'r it no other attribute is needed for it to be. . . .
T h e t h i n g r v i t h o u t w h i c h i t c a n n o t b e : t h a t e s s e n c ei s c o m -
mand." 5i If the essence of p<trver is the effectiveness of
<'ornmand, then there is no greater Potver than that rvhich
grorvs out of the barrel of a gun, and it rvottld be diffi-
r:ult to say in "rvhich rvay the order given by a policeman
is different from that given by a gunman." (I am quoting
'fhe
frorn tlre important ltook Notion of the ,State, by
Alexander Passerin d'Entrèves, the only author I knolv
rvho is aware of the importance of distinguishing benveen
violence aud power. "We have to decide whether and in
'power' 'force',
lvlrat sense can be distinguished from to as-
certain holv the fact of using force according to lar'v
c-hangesthe qtrality of force itself ancl presents us rvith an
entirely different picture of human relations," since
"force, by the very fact of being qualified, ceases to be
foru:e." But even this clistinction, by far tlte most sophis-
ticated and thougl'rtful one in the literature, does not go
'-'6
SeeKarl von ClausewitT,,On l'Var (1832),New York, rq43,ch. r;
Poz.tcrand Cornrnunjty,,
Robert Strausz--Htrpé, New York, r956,p. 4;
tlre cluotation lrom ]\[ax Weber: " LIacht bedeutetiede Chance,
innerhalb einer sozialen Reziehung den eigenen llillen auch gegen
Itr'iderstanddurchzuset:en" is drawn from Strausz-Hupé.
57I chose my examples at randonr, since it hardly matters to which
author one turns. It is only occasionally that one hears a rlissenting
voice.
-l-hus
R. NI. N'fclver states,"Coercive power is a criterion of
the state, btrt not its essence. It is true that there is no state,
wherc there is no overwhelming force. . But the exerciseof force
r l o e sn o t n r a k e a s t a t e . " ( I n T h e L I o d e r n . \ l a l e , L o n d o n , r q : 6 , p p .
zzz-zzg.) How strong the force of this tradition is can lle seen in
Rotrsseau'sattempt to escape it. Looking for a government of no-
rule, he frnclsrrothing better than "une lorme d'association . par
Iaquelle chacun s'unissan.t,i torts rt'obëissepourtant qu'à lui-tnême."
-I'he
ernphasison obediencc, and hence on command, is unchanged.
87
 to the rclot of the matter.Porvet' in Passerin cl'l'.ntrùvcs's
understanding is "qualifred" <lr "instittrtional izecl force."
/ In other rvords, rvhile the autltors qtroted alrove cleliue
lviolence as the most flagrant manilestation of p,,rvei'
i Passerin d'Entrèves defines power as a kind of mitigated
58
violence. In the final analysis, it comes to the saure.)
Shor.rld everybody from Right to Left, Êrom lJertrand de
Jouvenel to i\{ao Tse-tung agree on so basic a point in
political philosophy as the nature of power?
In terms of otrr traditions of political thought, these clefi-
nitions have much to recommend them. Not only do they
derive from the old notion of absolute po\\rer that ac-
companied the rise of the sovereign Ettropean nation-state,
rvhose earliest and still greatest spokesmen r'vere .|ean
Bodin, in sixteenth-century France, and Thomas Holtbes,
'
in seventeenth-century England; they also coincide rvith
\ th_e ter:ms used since Greek antiquity to define the forms
of government as the rule o[ man over man-of one or the
few in monarchy and oligarchy, of the best or the rnany
; in aristocracy and democracy. Today we ought to add the
latest and perhaps most formidable form of such domin-
ion: bureaucracy or the rule of an intricate system of
bureaus in rvhich no men, neither one nor the best, neither
the few nor the many, can be held responsible, and'r.vhich
could be properly called rule by Nobody. (If, in accord
with traditional political thought, rve identify tyranny as
. governmenr rhat is not held to p;ive account of itself, rule
by Nobody is clearly the rnosr tyrannical of all, since there
is no one left lvho could even be asked to answer for rvhat
58The Notion of the Stale,An Introductionto Political Theory was
first publishedin Italian in 196z.The Englishversionis no mere
translation;written by the authorhimself,it is the clefinitiveedition
and appearedin Oxford in r967.For the quorations,seepp. 64, jo,
and ro5.
38
is being done. It is this state of affairs, making it irnpos-
sible to localize responsibility and to identify the enetny,
that is amonە the most potent causesof the ctrrrent rvorld-
rvide rebelliotrs unrest, its chaotic nature, and its danger-
ous telrdency to get out of control and to rtrn amuck.)
N{oreover, this ancient vocabulary was strangely con-
firmed and fortifiecl by the addition of the Hebrerv-
Christian tradition and its "imperative conception of law."
This concept rvas not invented by the "political realists"
l)ut \\'as. rather. the result <lf a mtr<:h earlier. alrnost alrto-
matic generalization of Gocl's "Commandments," accord-
ing to rvl"rich "the simple relation of comtnand and obedi-
ence" indeed suffic:ed to identify the essence of larv.se
Finally, more modern scientific and philosophical convic-
tions concerning man's nature have further streugthened
these legal and political traditions. The many recent dis-
coveries of an inborn instinct of domination and an innate
aggressivenessin the human animal rvere preceded by
very similar philosophic statements. According to John
Stuart N{ill, "the first lesson of civilization [is] that of
obedience," and he speaks of "the two states of the in-
clinations . . . one the desire to exercise power over others;
the other . . . disinclination to have po\ver exercised over
thernselves." 60 If rve 'rvould trust our orvn experiences in l
these rnatters, we should know that the instinct of sub- i
mission, an ardent desire to obey and be rulecl by some l
strong man, is at least as prominent in human psychology I
'
as the rvill to power", and, politicirlly, perhaps more rele-
vant. The olcl adage "Horv fit he is to sway / That can so
rvell obey," some version of which seems to have been
5 sI b i d e m ,p . r 2 g .
û0Consirlerati.onson Representatiue
Cotternn're
ril (r86r), Liberal
Arts Library, pp. 59 and 65.
39
 knclwn to all centuries and all nations,6r ntay
;xrint tr> a
psychological truth: namely, that the lvill to porver and
the will to submission are interconnected. ,,Ready sub-
mission to tyranny," to use N{ill once more, is }>yno rneans
alrvays caused by "extreme passiveness." Conversely, a
strong clisinclination to obey is often act:ompaniecl by an
equally strong disinclination to dominate ancl <:ommancl.
Historically speaking, the ancient institution of slave
economy would be inexplicable on the grotrncls of l\{ill,s
psychology. Its express purpose lvas to liberate citizens
from the burden of household affairs and to permit thern
to enter the ptrlllic life of the community, where all rvere
equals; if it were true that nothing is sweeter than to give
commands and to rule others, the master would never have
left his household.
However, there exists another tradition and another
vocabulary no less old and time_honored. When the
Athenian city-state called its constitution an isonomv.
or
the Romans spoke of the civitas as their form of
g.rrr"rrr_
ment, they had in mind a concepr of power and law
whose
essencedid not rely on the command_obedience relationship
and which did not identify porver and mle or larv
and com_
mand. It rvas to these examples that the men
of the
eightecnth-cerrtury revolutions turned rvhen they
ran-
sacked the archives of antiquity and constitured
a form of
government, a repnblic, .lvhere the rule of larv, resting
on
the power of the people, woulcl put an end to the
nrle of
man over man, which they thought was a ..government ût
for slaves." They too, u4happily, still talkeà abour
obecri-
ence-obedience to larvs instead of men; btrt rvhat
they
actually meant rvas support of the laws to which
the
6rJohn M. Wallace,Destiny
His Choice:The Loyalismof Andrew
Mane.ll, Cambriclge,ro6g, pp. gg-gq.I owe this reference
to the kind
attention of Gregory Des-fardins.
r:itizenry hacl given its consent.62 Strch support is never
unquestioning, and as far as reliability is concerned it can- r
not match the indeed "unquestioning obedience" that an i
act o[ violence can exact-the obedience every criminal
can count on rvhen he snatches my pocketbook with the ,
help of a knife or robs a bank with the help of , g,rr,.'
It is the people's support that lends power to the institu-
tions of a country, and this suppoït is but the continuation
of the consent that brought the laws into existence to
begin with. llnder conditions of representarive govern-i1
ment the people are supposed to rule those rvho govern
them. All political institutions are manifestations and:
materializations of porver; they petrify and decay as soon
as the living power of the people ceasesto uphold them.
This is what Madison meant lvhen he said "all govern-
ments rest on opinion," a word no less true for the various
forms of monarchy than for democracies. ("To suppose that
majority rule functions only in democracy is a fantastic
illusion," as Jouvenel points out: "The king, rvho is but
one solitary individual, stands far more in need of the
general support of Society than any other form of govern-
ment." 63 Even the tyrant, the One rvho rtrles against
all, needs helpers in the business of violence, though their
number may be rather restricted.) Flolever, the strength r,
of opinion, that is, the power of the government, depends
on numbers; it is "in proportion to the number with
which it is assôr:iared,"èn urld tyranny, as Monresquieu i
discovered, is therefore the most violent and least pàwer-
ful of forms <lf government. Indeed one of the most ,
'
obvious distinctions betwee_n power and- violeiice is thâî
62Seeappendix XI, p.
97.
63Op. cit., p.
98.
âaThe Federalrt. No.
49.
4l
power alrvaysstandsin need of numlters, whereasvi<llence
rip-to à"point cranmanage without them ltecatrseit relies
on implements. A iêgally unrestricted maiority rtrle, that
demo*c-racy rvithout a constitution, can be very for-
!-s.,..4-
midable in the suppression of the rights of minorities and
veiv êffectivè in the suffôi:âtion cif clissentrvitl'rotrt any use
of violence. But that does not mean that violen(re and
power are the same.
The extreme form of power is All against. One, the
extreme form of violence is One against All. And this
latter is never possiblervithout instruments. To claim, as
is often done, that a tiny unarmed minority has strc:t:ess-
fully, by means of violence-shouting, kicking Lrp a row,
et cetera-disrupted large lecture classes whoseoverwhelm-
ing majority had voted for normal instruction procedures
is therefore very misleading. (In a recent case at some
German university there was even one lonely "dissenter"
among severalhundred students who could claim such a
strange victory.) What actually happens in strch casesis
somethingmuch mole serious:the majority clearly refuses
to useits power and overpowerthe disrupters;the academic
processes break dolvn becauseno one is willing to raise
more than a voting finger for the stetus guo. What the
universitiesare up againstis the "immense negativeunity"
of which Stephen Spender speaksin another context. All
of which proves only that a minority can have a much
greater potential power than one would expect by count-
ing nosesin public-opinion polls. The merely onlooking
majority, amused by the spectacleof a shouting match
between student and professor, is in fact already the
latent ally of the minority. (One need only imagine what
would have happened had one or a few unarmed Jews in
pre-Hitler Germany tried to disrupt the lecture of an
anti-Semitic professorin order to understand the absurdity
of the talk about the small "minorities of militants.")
It is, I think, a rather sad reflection on the present state
of political sc:iencethat our terminology does not distin-
guish arnong such key words as "porver," "strength,"
"force," "authority," and, finally, "violence"-all of rvhich
refer to distint:t, different phenomena and rvould hardly
exist unless they did. (In the rvords of d'Entrèves, "rnight,
power, authority: these are all lvords to whose exact im-
plications no great rveight is attached in current speech;
even the greatest thinkers sometimes use them at random.
Yet it is fair to presume that tlrey refer to clifferent
properties, and their meaning should therefore lte care-
fully assessedand examined. . . . The correct use of these
worcls is a question not only of logical grarnrnar, but of
historic:al perspective.") ot To use them as synol)yms not
o n l y i n c l i t : a t e sa ( : e r t a i n d e a f n e s s t o l i n g r r i s t i c m e a n i n g s .
which rvould be serious enough, but it has also resulted in
a kind of blindness to the realities they correspond to. In
such a situation it is always tempting to introduce new
definitions, but-though I shall briefly yielcl to tempta-
tion-rvhat is involved is not simply a matter of careless
speech. Behincl the apparent r:onfusion is a firm convic-
tion in lvhose light all distinctions .lvould lte, ar best, of
minor importanc'e: the conviction that the most crucial
political issue is, and ahvays has been, the question of
Who rules Whom? Power, strength, force, anthority,
violence-these are but words to indicate the means by
which man rules over man; they are held to be synonyms
because they have the same function. It is only after one
65OIt. cit., p. ?. Cf. alsop. r7r, where,discussing
the exacrmeaning
of the wonls "nation" ancl "nationality,"he rightly insiststhat "the
only competentguidesin the jungle of so many clifferentmeanings
are the linguistsand the historians.It is to them that we must turn
for help." And in distinguishingauthority and power, he rurns ro
Cicero'spotestasin populo, auctoritasin senatu.
43
ceasesto reduce public affairs t<l the business of clotniniotr
that the original data in the realm of hrrmau affairs rvill
appear, or, rather, reappear, in their authentic diversity'
These data, in our context, may lle enumerated as
ro.lJexs;.
-
Pozuerlorresponds to the human ability not just to act
but to ait in concert. Por,ver is never the property of arr
individual; it belongs to a grollp and remains in existence
only so long as the group keeps together. When we say
of somebocly tlrat he is "in porver" u,e at:tually refer to his
being emporvered by a certain number of people to act in
their name. The moment the group, from r,vhich the
'ivith-
power originated to begin rvith (polestas in pottttlo,
out a people or group there is no por,ver),disappears, "his
power" alscl vanishes. In current trsage, rvhen rve speak of
a "pol'r'erftrl man" or a "powerful personality," we already
use the rvclrd "porver" metaphorically; rvhat we refer to
rvi.tkorrr-mqtaphor is " stren gth. "
Strength)uneqtrivocally designates something in the
singrrtarl-ân individual entity; it is the property inherent
in an object or person and belongs to its character, which
may prove itself in relation to other things or persons, btrt
is essentially independent of them. The strength of even
the strongest individual can always be overporvered by the
many, rvho often will combine for no other purpose than
to ruin strength precisely because of its peculiar inde-
pendence. The almost instinctive hostility of the many
torvard the one has alrvays, from Plato to Nietzsche, been
ascribed to resentment, to the envy of the weak for the
strong, but this psychological interpretation misses the
point. It is in the nature of a group and its po\ver to turn
aSg,gftinclependence, the property of inclivi<lual streneth.
'Force.)which 'rve
often use in daily speech as a synonym
for viôlence, especially if violence serves as a means of
coercion, should be reserved, in terminological language,
44
l'or the "forces of nature" or the "force of circumstances"
(Ia force des r:hoses),that is, to indicate tIç rçlgased
",Uç.fgy
l r v/ n hvsical
r -il{:sTr-.
o r s
-
o c i a l m o v e m e n t s .
'frrthorit\, relating to the most elusive of these pheno-
rnenâ ârid iherefore, as a terln, most freqtrently abused,66
r:an be vested in persons-there is such a thing as persotral
atrthority, as, for instant:e, in the relation l)etrveen parent
and child, between teacher and pupil-or it can be vested
in offices,as, for instance, in the Roman senate (auctoritas
in senattt) or in the hierarchical offices of the Church (a
priest can grant valid absolution even though he is drunk).
I1s !a!lma1k is unqr:estioning recognition by those rvho are
obey; -neither coercion nor persttasion is needecl'
T-L"q -9o
(A father can lose his authority either by beating his child
or by starting to arts^uervith hirn, that is, either by behav-
ing to him like a tyrant or by treatinpç him as an equal.)
T<l remain in authority requires respect for the person or
the office. The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is
contempt, and the srlrest way to undermine it is laughter.GT
eBThere is such a thing as authoritariangovernment,but it cer-
tainiy has nothing in comrnonwith tyranny,dictatorship,or totali-
tarian rule. For a cliscussionof the historical background and
political signiÊcanceof the telm, seemy "What is Authority?" in
Betzueen Pastand Fulure: Exercisesin. Polilical Thought,New York,
rq6B,and Part I of Karl-HeinzLûbke'svaluablestudy,Attctoritasbei
Attgttstin,Stuttgart,
rq68,with extensivebibliography.
67Wolin and Schaar,in op. tit., are entirely right: "The rules are
being broken becauseUniversity authorities,administratorsand
faculty alike, have lost the respecrof many of the students."They
then conclucle,"\Vhen authority leaves,power enrers."This too is
true, but, I am afraicl,not qrrite in the sensethey meant it. What
entered first at Berkeleylvas student power, obviously the strongest
power on every câmpussimply becauseof the students'superior-
numbers.It was in order to break this power that authoritiesre-
sorted to violence,and it is preciselybecausethe university is
essentially an institution basedon authority,and thereforein need
45
 ,,,"Pe\
Violenc,l, finally, as I have said, is distinguished by its
instrumental character'. Phenomenologically, it is close -t-o
sfiéngth, ,irr."'iir" implements of violence, like all other
tools, are designecl and used for the pur-pose of multiply-
ing natural strength until, in the last stage of their d-c-
velopment, they can substitute for it.
It is perhaps not superfluous to add that these distinc-
tions, though by no means arbitrary, hardly ever cor-
respond to watertight compartments in the real rvorld,
from which nevertheless they are drarvn. Thtrs institution-
alized power in organized communities often appears in
the guise of authority, demanding instant, unquestioning
recognition; no society could function r,vithout it. (A
small, and still isolated, incident in Nerv York shows what
can happen if atrthentic authority in social relations has
broken down to the point where it cannot work anv
longer even in its derivative, purely ftrnctional form. A
minor mishap in the subrvay system-the doors on a train
failed to operate-turned into a serious shutdolvn on the
line lasting four hours and involving more than fifty
thousand passengers,because when the transit authorities
asked the passengers to leave the defective train, they
simply refused.) 68 Moreover, nothing, as rve shall see, is
of respect, that it finds ir. so difficult to deal with power in nonvio-
. lent terms. The university today calls upon the police for protection
exactly as the Catholic church used to do before the separation of
state and church forced it to rely on authority alone. It is perhaps
more than an oddity that the severest crisis of the church as an
institution should coincitle with the severesrcrisis in the history of
the university, the or-riysecular institutior-rstill based on aurhority.
Both may indeed be ascribed to "the progressing explosion of the
atom 'obedience'whose stability was allegedly eternal," as Heinrich
Bôll remarked of the crisis in the churches. See "Es wird immer
spâter," in Antwort an Sacharow,Zùrich, 1969.
68Seethe New York Times,
January 4, 1969,pp. r and 29.
nrore common than the combination of violence and
lx)wer, nothing less frequent than to find them in their
pure ancl tl-rerefore extreme form. From this, it does not
follorv that authority, power, and violen<:e are all the
same.
Still it must be admitted that it is particularly tempting
to think of power in terms of command and obedience,
and hence to equate po\\rer rvith violence, in a discussion
of what actually is only one of po\.ver's special cases-
namely, the power of government. Since in foreign rela-
tions as well as domestic affairs violence appears as a last
resort to keep the por,ver structure intact against indi-
vidual challengers-the foreign enemy, the native criminal
-it looks indeed as though violence were the prerequisite
of porver and polver notl-ring but a façade, the velvet glove
which either conceals the iron hand or rvill turn out to
belong to a paper tiger. On closer inspection, though, this
notion loses much of its plausibility. For our purpose, the
gap between theory and reality is perhaps best illustrated
by the phenomenon of revolution.
Sinr:e the beginning of the century theoreticians of revo-
Irrtion have told us that the chances of revolution have
significantly decreased in proportion to the increasecl
destructive capacities oI weapons at the uniqtre disposition
of governments.oe The history of the last seventy yeaïs,
0sThus Franz Rorkenau,reflectingon the defeat
of the Spanish
revolution,states:"In this tremendous contrastwith previousrevolu_
tions one fact is reflectetl.Before theselatter years.counter-re'olu-
tion usrrallydependeclupon the supporr of reactionarypowers,
which were technicallyancl intellectualiyinferior to the forcesof
revolution.This hascl-rarrgeclwith the a<lventof fascism.Now, e'cry
revolution is likely to meet the attack of the most moclern.most
efficient,most ruthlessmachineryyet in existence.It means that
the age of revolutions free to evolve accorclingto their own laws is
over." This was wrimen more rhan thirry years ago (The Spanish
47
with its extraordinary record of successful and rtnsu<:cess-
ful revolutions, tells a different story. Were people mad
who even tried against such overrvhelming odds? And,
leaving out instan('es of full success,hon' catt even a tem-
porar-y success be explained? The fact is that ttre gap
between state-otvned means of violence and wl"rat people
can muster by themselves-from beer bottles to N{olotov
cocktails and guns-has alrvays been so enormous that tech-
nical irnprovements make hardly any difference. Textbook
instructior-rs on "how to rnake a revolution" in a step-l)y-
step progression from dissent to conspiracy, from resistance
to armed uprising, are all based on the mistaken notion
that revolutions are "made." In a contest of violence
against violence the superiority of the government has
always been absolute; but this superiority lasts only as
long as the power structure of the government is intact-
that is, as long as commands are obeyed and the army or
police forces are prepared to use their rveapons. When this
is no longer the case, the situation changes abruptly. Not
only is the rebellion not put down, but the arms themselves
change hands-sometimes, as in the Hungarian revolution,
within a few hours. (We should know about such things
after all these years of futile fighting in Vietnam, where
for a long time, before getting massive Russian aid, the
National Liberation Front fought us with weapons that
were made in the United States.) Only after this has hap-
pened, when the disintegration of the government in
power has permitted the rebels to arm themselves, can
one speak of an "armecl uprising," which often does not
Cochpit, London, rg37; Ann Arbor, r963, pp. 288-z8q)and is now
quoted with approval by Chomsky (op. cit., p. 3ro).He believesthat
American and French intervention in the civil war in Vietnam
proves Borkenau's prediction accurate, "with substitution of 'liberal
imperialism' for 'fascism.' " I think that this example is rather apt
to prove the opposite.
48
take place at all or occurs when it is no longer necessary.
W]:glq ._qn.m_4qd,s.. are no longer obeyed, the means of
v i o l e n c e a r e o f n o u s e; - a g { " t h e . q u g s t i o n o f t h i s o b e d i e n c e
ii not clecicledby the .à-"ià"d-ôbêdience relation but by
-\-'
opinion, and, of c()urse, by the number of those rvho
share it. Everything depends on the power behind the
_violence. The sudden dramatic breakdown of polver that
ushers in revolutions reveals in a flash how civil obedience
-to lar,vs, to rulers, to institutions-is but the outward
manifestation of support and consent.
Where porver has disintegrated, revolutions are possible
but not necessary. lVe knor,v of many instances rvhen ut-
terly impotent regimes were permitted to continue in
existence for long periods of time-either because there
was no one to test their strength and reveal their weak-
ness or because they rvere lucky enough not to be engaged
in rvar and suffer defeat. Disintegration often becomes
manifest only in direct confrontation; and even then, rvhen
power is already in the street, some group of men pre-
pared for such an eventuality is needed to pick it up and
assume responsibility. We have recently lvitnessed how it
did not take more than the relatively harmless,essentially
nonviolent French students' rebellion to reveal the vulner-
ability o[ the rvhole political system, which rapidly dis-
integrated before the astonished eyes of the young rebels.
tlnknowingly they had tested it; they intended only to
challenge the ossified university system, and down came
the system of governmental power, together with that of
.
the huge party bureaucracies-"?tne sorte rte d,ësintëgration
,
rl.e toutes les hiérarchi(s." ro It was a textbook case o[ a,
revolutionary sittration 71 that did not develop into a revo_
? 0 R a y m o n dA r o n ,L a R é u o l u t i o nI n t r o u a a b l e , I
r q 6 g ,p . 4 r .
7rStephenSpender,op. cit., p. ..What was
56, disagrees: so much
more apparent than the revolutionarysituation
[was] the non_
revolutionary one." It may be "difficult to think of a revolution
 lution because there was nobody, least of all the students,
prepared to seize powel and the responsibility that goes
with it. Nobocly except, of course, de Gaulle. Nothing lvas
more characteristic of the seriousnessof the situation than
his appeal to the army, his journey to see Nlassu and the
generals in Germany, a walk to Canossa, if there ever was
one, in view of rvhat had happened only a ferv years lrefore.
But rvhat he sought and received was support, not obedi-
ence, atrd the means were not commands but concessions.T2
If commands had been enough, he would never have had
to leave Paris.
No government exclusively based on the means of
, violence has ever existed. Even the totalitarian ruler,
whose chief instrument of rule is torture, needs a power
basis-the secret police and its net of informers. Only the
development of robot soldiers, which, as previously men-
ïioned, would eliminate the human factor completely and,
conceivably, permit one man with a push button to des-
troy whomever he pleased, could change this fund.amental
ascendancy of power over violence. Even the most despotic
domination we know of, the rule of master over slaves,
who always olrtnumbered him, did not rest on superior
means of coercion as such, but on a superior organization
of power-that is, on the organized solidarity of the mas-
ters.?:rSingle men withclut others to support them never
taking place when . . everyone looks particularly good humoured,"
but this is what usually happens in the beginning of revolurions-
during the early great ecstasyof fraternity.
?2See appendix XII, p.
98.
73In ancient Greece, such :rn organization of power was the polis,
whose chief merit, according to Xenophon, was that it permittecl the
"citizens to act as bodyguarcls to one another against slaves and
criminals so that none of the citizens may clie a violent cleath."
(Hiero, IY, g.)
have enough porver to use violence successfully. Hence,
in dornestic affairs, violence functions as the last resort o[
porver against criminals or rebels-that is, against single
individuals lvho, as it lvere, refuse to be overpowered by'
the consenstrsof the rnajority. And as for actual rvarfare, ,
rve have seen in Vietnam how an enormous superiority in'
the means of violence can Lrecome helpless if confronted
rvith an ill-equipped but well-organized opponent rvho is
much more powerful. This lesson, to be sure, was there to
be learned from the history of guerrilla r,varfare,which is
at least as old as the defeat in Spain of Napoleon's still-
unvanquished army.
To srvitch for a mornent to conceptual language: Power r
is indeed of the essenceof all government, but violence is
not. Violence is by natrlre instrumental; Iike all means, it ,
alrvaysstands in need of gtridance and justification through
the end it pursues. And lvhat needs justiÊcation by some- ,
thing else cannot be the essenceof anything. The end of
war-end taken in its nvofold meaning-is peace or victory;
but to the question And what is the end of peace? there is
no answer. Peace is an absolute, even though in recorded
history periods of warfare have nearly always outlasted
periods of peace. Porver is in the same category; it is, as
they say, "an end in itself." (Thii, of coùrte, is not to
deny that governments pursue policies and employ their
power to achieve prescribed goals. But the power srructure
t*t_qg_l!
pfçc.qdes and ourlasts all aims, so rhar power, far
from being the means to an end, is actually the very con-
dition enabling a grot-rp of people ro rhink and acr in
terms of ihe means-end category.) And since gou"rrr*.rri i,
essentially organized and institutionalized power, the cur-
rent question What is the end of government? does not
make mtrch sense either. The answer will be either ques_
tion-beggingç-to enable men to live together-or danger-
ously utopian-to promote happiness or to realize a
5l
 classlesssociety or some other nonpolitical ideal, rvhich
if tried oLrt in earnest cannot bttt end in sotne kind of
tyranny.
Power needsno justifrcation,being inherent in the very
.*[iêr... of political communities; rvhat it cloesneed is
legitimacy. The common treatment of these trvo lvords as
synonyms is no less misleading and confusing than the
6rcurrerlt equation of obedienceand support. Porversprings
..:/ )1,"p rvhenever people get together
and act in concert' llut
'f"', 'i, derives its legitimacy from the initial getting together'
|."*...6'"'^^'b
I rather than from any action that then may follow. Legi-
timacy, n'tren challenged,basesitself on an appeal to the
past, wl-rilejustihcation relates to an end that lies in the
future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be
legitimate. Its justification losesin plausibility the farther
its intended end recedesinto the frrture. No one questions
the use of violence in selÊ-defense, becausethe danger is
not only clear but also present,and the end justifying the
means is imrnediate.
P_gy_çfand violence, _th,ough thçy a1e distinct phçgo-
mena, -usually appe4.r together. Wherever they are
combined, power, we have found, is the primary and pre-
ldominant factor. The situation, however,is entirely difier-
ent when lve deal r,vith them in their pure states-as, for
instance, rvith foreign invasion and occupation. We saw
that the current equation of violence with power rests on
government's being understood as domination of man
over man by means of violence. If a foreign conqueror is
confronted by an impotent government and by a nation
unused to the exerciseof political power, it is easyfor him
to achievesuch domination. In all other casesthe difficul-
ties are great indeed, and the occupying invader rvill try
immediately to establishQuisling governmenrs,thar is, to
find a native power base to support his dominion. The
head-on clash between Russian tanks and the entirely
nonvicllent resistanceof the Czecl-roslovakpeçp1s is a text-
book caseof a confrontation betrveenviolençç ancl power
in their pure states. But while dominatioq in such an
instance is difficult to achieve, it is not im possible. Vio- ;
lence, lve must remember, does not depend on numbers i,r/
/
or opinions, but on irnplements, and the irnplsments of
violence, as I mentioned before, like all othgl tools, in-
creaseand multiply human strength. Thosq rvho oppose
violence with mere polver will soon find that they are con-
fronted not by men but by men's artifacls, whose in-
humanity and destructive effectivenessincreâ.sein propor- ,
tion to the distance seParating the opponenls. Violence /
can alwaysdestroy porver; out of the barrel of a gun growsi ,
the most effectivecornrnand,resttlting in the most instant i'.-.r
and perfect olredienc:e.What never can groç oqt of it is
power.
In a head-on clash between violence aûd power, the
outcome is hardly in doubt. If Gandhi's enormously
porverful ancl successfulstrategy of nonviolsnt ïesistance
had met with a different enemy-Stalin's R1155ia,Hitler's '
Germany, even prewar Japan, instead of Englancl-t6e
outcome rvould not have been decoloqi2nlion, but
massacïeand submission.However, England in India and
France in Algeria had good reasons for t\si1 restraint.
Rule by sheer violence comes into play where porver is
being lost; it is preciselythe shrinking Poweï of the Rus-
sian government, internally and externally, that became
manifest in its "solution" of the Czechoslovakproblem-
just as it u'as the shrinking power of European imperial-
ism that became manifest in the alternative between de-
colonization and massacre.To substitute violence for
power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it
is not only paid by the vanquisl-red,it is alss paicl by the
victor in terms of his own power. This is especiallytrue
when the victor happens to enjoy domesticxlly the bless-
ings of constitutional government. FIenry Steele C)ortttnager
is entirely right: "If we subvert world orcler ancl destroy
world peace rve must inevitably subvert and clestroy our
orvn political institutions first." 71 The mur:h-feared boom-
erang effect of the "government of sul-rject rat:es" (Lclrd
Cromer) on the home governrnent during the imperialist
era meant that rule by violence in fararvay lands r,vould
end by affecting the government o[ England, that the last
"subject race" would be the English themselves. The
recent gas attack on the campus at Berkeley, 'lvhere not
just tear gas but also another gas, "outlawed by the
Geneva Convention and used by the Army to flush out
guerrillas in Vietnam," rvas laid down while gas-rnasked
Guardsmen stopped anybody and everybody "from fleeing
the gassed area," is an excellent example of this "back-
lash" phenomenon. It has often been said that impotence
breeds violence, and psychologically this is quire true, ar
least of persons possessing natural strength, moral or phy-
sical. Politically speaking, the point is that loss of porver
becomes a temptation to substitute violence for porver-in
1968 during the Democratic convention in Chicago we
could lvatch this process on television ?5-and that violence
itself results in impotence. Where violence is no longer
backed and restrained by power, the well-knolvn reversal
in reckoning with means and ends has taken place. The
lmeans, the means of destruction. nolv determine the end-
with the consequence that the end will be the destruction
of all power.
Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of
violence over power more evident than in the use of
terror to maintain domination, about whose weird suc-
7a"Can We Limit PresidentialPower?"in The New Repttblic,April
6, 1968.
75SeeappendixXIII, p.
98.
cessesand eventual failures rve knolv perhaps more than
any generation befr:re us. Terror is not the same as vio-
lence; it is, rather, the form of government that comes into
being when violence, having destroyed all porver, does not
abdicate but, on the contrary, remains in full control. It
has often been noticed that the effeôtiveness of tèfÏor de-
pends almost entirely on the degree of social atomization.
Every kind of organized opposition must disappear before
the full force of terror can be let loose. This atomization-
an outrageously pale, academic word for the horror it
implies-is maintained and intensified through the ubi-
quity of the informer, lvho can be literally omnipresent
because he no longer is merely a professional agent in the
pay of the police but potentially every person one comes
into contact with. Horv such a fully developed police
state is established and horv it rvorks-or. rather. how
nothing rvorks rvhere it holds sway-can nor,v be learned in
Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, rvhich will
probably remain one of the masterpieces of twentieth-
century literature and certainly contains the best docu-
mentation on Stalin's regime in existence.?cThe decisive ,
difference between totalitarian domination, based on :
terror, and tyrannies and dictatorships, established by
violence, is that the former turns not only against its
enemies but against its friends and supporters as r'vell,
being afraid of all porver, even the power of its friends. ;
T.he_climax of terror is reached when the police state
begins to devour its orvn children, when yesterday's exeç.u-
tioner becomes today's victip. And this is also the mgmenl
lvhen power disappears entirely. There exist norv a great
many plausible explanations for the de-Stalinization of
Russia-none, I believe, so compelling as the realization
by the Stalinist functionaries themselves that a continua-
?ûSeeappendix XIV, p. 99.
 tion of the regime would lead, not to an insurrection,
against rvhich rerror is indeed the best safegtrard,but to
paralysisof the rvhole country.
To sum up: politically speaking,ir is insufficientro say
that power and violence are not the same.Por.verand vio-

l:{
lence are opposites; where the one rules âËso!ùidfy, the
other is absent. Violence appears lvhere power. .ls in
jeopardy, but left to its orvn course it ends in pÇryF-r's
ilI
disappearance.This implies that it is nor correcr ro rhink
of the oppositeof violenceas nonviolence; to speakof non-
violent pâ..t is actually redundantf,Yiolence-candestroy
porver; it is utterly incapable of creating it- Hegel's and
Nfarx's great trust in the dialectial "porver of negation,"
by virtue of rvhich oppositesdo not destroy bur smoorhly
develop into each other becausecontradictions promote
and do not paralyzedevelopment, rests on a much older
philosophicalprejudice: that evil is no more than a priva-
tive modus of the good, that good can come out of evil;
that, in short, evil is but a temporary manifesration of a
still-hidden good. Such time-honored opinions have be-
come dangerous.They are sharedby many who have never
heard of Hegel or Marx, for the simple reason that they
inspire hope and dispel fear-a treacheroushope used to
dispel legitimate fear. By this, I do not mean to equate
violence with evil; I only want to stress that violence
cannot be derived from its opposite,r.vhichis power, and
that in order to understand it for what it is, rve shall have
to examine its roots and nature.

56
:f O S P E A K about the nature and causes of violence in
these terms must appear presumptuous at a moment when
floods of foundation money are channeled into the various
research projects of social scientists, when a deluge of books
on the subject has already appeared, when eminent natural
scientists-biologists, physiologists, ethologists, and zoolo-
gists-have joined in an all-out effort to solve the riddle of
"aggressiveness"in human behavior, and even a brand-new
science, called "polemolog|," has emerged. I have two ex-
cuses for trying nevertheless.
First, while I find much of the work of the zoologists
fascinating, I fail to see how it can possibly apply to olu
problem. In order to know that people will fight for their
homeland we hardly l-rad to discover instincts of "group
territorialism" in ants, fish, and apes; and in order to
learn that overcrowding results in irritation and aggressive-
ness, we hardly needed to experiment with rats. One day
spent in the slums of any big city should have sufficed. I
am surprised and often delighted to see that some animals
behave like rnen; I cannot see how this could either justify
'or
condernn human behavior. I fail to understand rvhy rve
are asked "to recognize that man behaves very much like
a group territorial species," rather than the other way

59
round-that certain animal species behave u".y ,r..,.h lik"
men.?? (Follorving Adolf Portmann, these nelv insights into
animal behavior clo not close the gap bet'rveen man and
animal; they only demonstrate that "much more of lvhat
we knolv of ourselves than we thought also occurs in ani
mals.") zs Why should we, after having "eliminated" all
anthropomorphisms from animal psychology (whether we
actually succeeded is another matter), nor\r try to discover
"holv 'theriomorph' man is"? 7e Is it not ol)viorrs that
anthropomorphism and theriomorphism in the behavioral
scien<'esare but trvo sides of the same "error"? Moreover.
if rve define man as belonging to the animal kingdom, why
should we ask him to take his standarcls of behavior from
auother animal species?The answer, I am afraid, is simple:
It is easier to experiment rvith animals, and this not only
for humanitarian reasons-that it is not nice to put us into
cases; the trouble is men can cheat.
Second, the research results of both the social and the
natural sciencestend to make violent behavior even more
of a "natural" rea<:tion than lve rvould have been prepared
to grant rvithout them. Aggressiveness,defrned as an in-
stinctual drive, is said to play the same functional role
7?NikolasTinbergen,"On War and Peacein Animalsand Man," in
S c i e n c er,6 o : r 4 r r ( J u n e 2 8 , r 9 6 8 ) .
18Das Tier alssozialesl|'esen,Zùrich, rg5g,pp. zg7-238"ller sich
in die Tatsachenaertieft der zLtirdfeststellen,dassdie neuen
Einblicke in die DiflerenziertheittierischenTreibens uns zwingen,
mit allzu einfachenl/orstellungenuon hôheren Tieren ganz ent-
schiedenaufzuriiumen.Damit uird aber nicht elua-uie utweilen
leichthin gelolgert uird-das Tierisclrc rlem Llenschlichcn immer
mehr geniihert.Es zeigt sich lediglich,dass uiel mehr von dem,
zuasuir aon uns selbsthennen,auch beim Tier aorkommt."
70See Erich von Holst, Zur Verhaltensphysiologie
bei Tieren und
IlLertschen,
Gesammelte Abhandlungen,Vol. I, Mûnchen, r969, p.
239.
I 6l
I
in the horrselrold of natule as the nutritive and sexrral
instincts in the life process of the individual and the
species. Brrt unlike these instincts, rvhich are acrivated by
compelling bodily needs on one side, by outside stimulants
on the other, aggressive instincrts in the animal kingdom
seem to be independent of such provocation; on the con-
trary, Iack of provocation apparently leads to instinct
frustration, to "repressed" aggressiveness,rvhich according
to psyr:hologists causes a damming up of "energy" rvhose
eventual explosion will be all the more dangerous. (It is
as tlrorrgh tbe sensatiorr of hunger in man wotrld increase
with the decrease of hungry people.) 80 In this interpreta-
tion, violence without provocation is "natural"; if it has
Iost its rationale, basi<:allyits function in self-preservation,
it becomes "irrational," and this is allegeclly the reason
why men <:anbe more "beastly" than other animals. (In the
Iiterature we are (:()nstantly reminded of the generous be-
havior of rvolves, who do not kill the defeatecl enemy.)
Quite apart from the misleading transposition of phy-
sical terms such as "energy" and "force" to biological and
zoological data, lvhere they do not make sense because they
cannot be measured,sl I fear there lurks behind these
80To counter the absurdityof this conclusiona distinctionis made
betweenendogenous, spontaneous instincts,for instance,aggression,
and reactivedrivessuchas hunger.But a distinctionbetweenspon-
taneity and reactivitymakesno sensein a discussion of innate im-
pulses.In the world of nature there is no spontaneity,properly
speaking,and instinctsor clrivesonly manifestthe highly complex
way in.which all living organisms,including man, are adapte(lro
its processes.
81Thc Irypotheticalcharacterof Iionrad Lorenz's On Aseression
(New York, 1966)is clarifiedin the interestingcollectionof essays
on ag1;ression and aclaptationeclited by Alexander N{itscherlich
under tlre title Bis hierher uncl nicht ueiter. Ist clie menschliche
Aggressiortunl.tefriedbar?,
Nltnchen, r968.
newes[ "discoveries" the oldest definition of the nature of
man-the definition of man as the animal raliotrule, accord-
ing to which r\re are distinct from other animal species
in nothing but the additional attribute of reason. Nlodern
science, starting uncritically frorn this old assunption, has
gone far in "proving" that men share all other properties
rvith some speciesof the animal kingdom-except that the
additional gift of "reason" makes man a more dangerous
beast. It is the use of reason that makes us dangerously
"irrational," because this reason is the property of an
"aboriginally instinctual being." ez The scientists know, of
course. that it is man tbe toolmaker rvho has invented
those long-range weapons that free him from the "natural"
restraints we frnd in the animal kingdom, and that tool-
making is a highly complex mental activity.ss Hence sci-
ence is called upon to cure us of the side effects of reason
by manipulating and controlling our instincts, trsually by
finding harmless outlets for them after their "life-promot-
ing function" has disappeared. The standard of behavior is
again derived from other animal species, in which the
function of the life instincts has not been destroyed
through the intervention of htrman reason. Ancl the spe-
r:ific distinction betrveen man and beast is norv, strictly
speaking, no longer reason (the lumen natttrale of the
human animal) but science, the knowledge of these stand-
82von Holst, op. cit., p. z8g: "Nicht, weil uir Verstandesuesen,
sondernweil wir ausserdem gnnz urtiimliche Triebwesensind, ist
unser Dasein im Zeitalter d,er Technik gefiihrd.et."
83Long-rangeweapons,seen by the polemologistsas having freed
man's aggressive instinctsto the point where the controls safeguard-
ing the speciesdo not work any longer (seeTinbergen, op. cit.),
are taken by Otto Klineberg ("Fearsof a Psychologist,"in Calder,
op. cit., p. zo8)rather as an indication "that personalaggressiveness
played [no] important role as a motive for war." Soldiers,one would
like to continue the argument, are not killers, and killers-those
with "personalaggressiveness"-are probably not even good soldiers.
ards and the techniques applying them. According to this
vierv, man acts irrationally and like a beast if he refuses
to listen to tl"rescientists or is ignorant of their latest find-
ings. As against these theories and their implications, I
shall argue in rvhat follorvs that yiolence.is neither beastly
nor irrational-rvhether we understand these terms in the
ordinary language of the humanists or in accordance r'vith
scientific
'-înat theories. ' y ' t 6 l . t ;- l
viàlenéè often springs from rage is a common-
rl
place, and rage can indeed be irrational and pathological,
t f.,rt{
but so can every other human aftect. It is no doubt pos-
sible to create conditions under r,vhich men are dehurnan-
ized-strch as concentration carnps, torture, famine-but
this cioes not mean that they become animal-like; and
under such conditions, not rage and violence, but their
conspicuous absen(:eis the clearest sign of dehumanization.
Rage is by no mear)s an automatic reaction to misery and
suffering as such; no one reacts rvith rage to an incurable
disease or to an earthquake or, for that matter, to social
conditions that seem to be unchangeable. Only where
there is reason to srrspectthat conditions could be changed
and are not does rage arise. Only when our senseof justice
is offended do we react. with rage, and this reaction by no
tneans necessarily reflects personal injury, as is demon-
strated by the r,r'hole history of revolution, where invari-
ably members of the Llpper classestouched off and then led
the rebellions of the oppressed and downtrodden. To re-
sort to violence when confronted rvith outrageous events or
conclitions is enormously tempting because of its inherent
irrrmediacy and srviftness.To act rvith deliberate speed pçoes
against the grain of rage and violence, but this does not
make them irrational. On the contrary, in private as'çvell
as public life there are situations in r.vhich the very swift-
ness of a violent act may be the only appropriate remedy.
The point is not that this permits us to let off steam-
which indeed can be equally well done by pounding the
table or slamming the door. The point is thar under cer-
tain circurnstances violence-acting without algument or
speech and without counting the consequences-is the only
way to set the scales of justice right again. (Billy Budd,
striking dead the man who bore false witness against him,
is the classical example.) In this sense, rage and the vio-
lence that sometimes-not always-goes rvith it belong
among the "natural" human emotions, and to cllre man
of them would mean nothing less than to dehumanize or
emasculate him. That such acts, in which men take the
law into their own hands for justice's sake, are in conflict
rvith the constitutions of civilized communities is un-
deniable; but their antipolitical character, so manifest in
Melville's great story, does not mean that they are in-
human or "merely" emotional.
Absence of emotions neither causesnor promotes ration-
ality. "Detachment and equanimity" in view of "unbear-
able tragedy" can indeed be "terrifyirg," ar namely, when
they are not the result of control but an evident manifes-
tation of incomprehension. In order to respond reasonably
one must frrst of all be "moved," and the opposite of
emotional is not "rational," whatever that may mean, but
either the inability to be moved, usually a pathological
phenomenon, or sentimentality, which is a perversion of
feeling. Rage and violence turn irrational only rvhen they
are directed against substitutes, and this, I am afraid, is
precisely what the psychiatrists and polemologists con-
cerned with human aggressivenessrecommend, and what
corresponds, alas, to certain moods and unreflecting atti.
tudes in society at large. We all know, for example, that
8aI am paraphrasing
a sentenceof Noam Chomsky(op. cit., p. 37r),
who is very good in exposing the "façade of toughmindedness and
pseudoscience"and the intellectual "vacuity" behind it, especially
in the debatesabout the war in Vietnam.
it has become rather fashionableamong white liberals to
lc.lct to Negro grievanceswith the cry, "We are all guilty,"
ancl Black Porver has proved only too huppy to take ad-
vantage of this "confession" to instigate an irrational
"black rage." lVhere all are guilty, no one is; confessions
of collective guilt are the best possible safeguardagainst
the discoveryof culprits, and the very magnitude of tl-re
t:rime the best excusefor doing nothing' In this Particular
instance, it is, in addition, a dangerous and obfuscating
cscalationof racism into somehigher, lesstangible regions.
The real rift between black and white is not healed by
lleing translated into an even less reconcilable conflict
between collective innocence and collective guilt. "All
rvhite men are guilty" is not only dangerousnonsensebut
also racism in reverse,and it servesquite effectively t<l give
the very real grievances and rational emotions of the
Negro population an outlet into irrationality, an escape
from reality.
Moreover, if we inquire historically into the causes
likely to transform engagésinto enragés,it is not injustice
that ranks first, but hypocrisy. Its momentous role in the
lateï stagesof the French Revolution, when Robespierre's
war on hypocrisy transformed the "despotism of liberty"
into the Reign of Terror, is too well known to be dis-
cussedhere; but it is important to remember that this war
hacl been declared long before by the French moralists
rvho saw in hypocrisy the vice of all vices and found it
ruling supreme in "goocl society," which somewhat later
was called bourgeois society. Not many authors of rank
glorified violence for violence'ssake;but thesefew-Sorel,
Pareto, Fanon-were motivated by a much deeper hatred
of bourgeois society ancl were led to a much more radical
break with its moral standardsthan the conventional Left,
rvhich was chiefly inspired by compassionand a burning
desire for justice. To tear the mask of hypocrisy from the
faceof the enemy, to unmask him and the deviousmachin-
ations and manipulations that permit him to rule without
using violent means,that is, to provoke action even at the
risk of annihilation so that the truth may come out-these
are still among the strongestmotives in today'sviolenceon
the campusesand in the streets.ss And this violence again
is not irrational. Since men live in a world of appearances
and, in their dealing with it, depend on manifesration,
hypocrisy'sconceits-asdistinguishedfrom expedientruses,
followed by disclosurein due time-cannor be met by so-
called reasonablebehavior. Words can be relied on only
if one is sure that their function is to reveal and not to
conceal.It is the semblanceof rationality, much more than
the interests behind it, that provokes rage. To use reason
rvhen reasonis used as a trap is not "rational"; just as to
use a gun in self-defenseis not "irrational." This violent
reaction against hypocrisy, however justifiable in its own
terms, loses its raison d'être when it tries to develop a
strategy of its own with specific goals; it becomes "irra-
tional" the moment it is "rationalized," that is, the
moment the re-action in the course of a contest turns into
an action, and the hunt for suspects,accompaniedby the
psychologicalhunt for ulterior motives, begins.Bo
Although the eftectivenessof violence, as I remarked
before, does not depend on numbers-one machine gunner
85"If one reads the SDS publications
one sees that they have fre-
quently recommended provocations of the police as a strategy for
'unmasking'
the violence of the authorities." Spender (op. cit., p. gz)
comments that this kind of violence "leads ro doubletalk in which
the provocateur is playing at one and the same time the role of
assailant arrd victim." The war on hypocrisy harbors a number of
great dangers, some of which I examined briefly in On Reaolutton.
N e w Y o r k , 1 9 6 g ,p p . g r - r o r .
86See appendix XV, p,
99.
can hold hundreds of well-organizedpeople at bay-none-
thelessin collective violence its most dangerously attrac-
tive features come to the fore, and this by no means be-
causethere is safety in numbers. It is perfectly true that
in military as well as revolutionary action "individualism
is the first [value] to disappear"'87in its stead,we find a
kind of gïoup coherencewhich is more intensely felt and
proves to be a mtrch stronger, though less lasting, bond
than all the varieties of friendship, civil or private.8sTo
be sure, in all illegal enterprises,criminal or political, the
group, for the sake of its own safety, will require "that
each individual perform an irrevocableaction" in order to
burn his bridges to respectablesociety before he is ad-
mitted into the community of violence. But once a man
is admitted, he will fall under the intoxicating spell of
"the practice of violence [which] binds men together as a
whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the
great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which
has surgedupward." 8e
Fanon's'lvordspoint to the well-knorvn phenomenon of
brotherhood on the battlefield, where the noblest, most
selflessdeedsare often daily occurrences.Of all equalizers,
death seemsto be the most potent, at least in the few
extraordinary situations rvhere it is permitted to play a
political role. Death, rvhether faceclin actual dying or in
the inner awarenessof one's own mortality, is perhapsthe
most antipolitical experiencethere is. It signifiesthat rve
shall disappear from the world of appearancesand shall
leave the company of our fellow-men,rvhich are the condi-
8?Fanon, op. cit. p. 47.
83.|. Glerrn Gray, The lVarrior.r (New York, rg5g; now available in
paperback), is most perceptive and instructive on this point. It
should be read by everyone interested in the practice of violence.
8sFanon, op. cit., pp. 85 and q3, respectively.
67
 tions of all politics. As far as human exper.ienceis con_ krrorv of was ever founded on equality before death and
cerned, death indicates all extreme of lonelinessand im_ its actualization in violence; the suicide squadsin history,
potence.But facedcollectivelyand in action, death changes rvlrich were indeed organizedon this principle and there-
its countenance;now nothing'seemsmore likely to intensify
lore often called themselves"brotherhoods," can hardly
our vitality than its proximity. Something we are usually lre counted among political organizations.But it is true
hardly aware of, namely, that our own death is accom_ that the strong fraternal sentiments collective violence
panied by the porenrial immortality of the group we be-
t'ugendershave misled many good people into the hope
long to and, in the final analysis,of the species,màves into
rhat a new comrnunity together with a "new man" will
the center of our experience.It is as though life itself, the
arise out of it. The hope is an illusion for the simple
immortal life of the species,nourished, as it rvere,by the
reasonthat no human relationship is more transitory than
sempiternal dying of its individual members, is ,,surging
this kind of brotherhood, which can be actualized only
upward," is actualizedin the pracriceof violence
trnder conditions of immediate danger to life and limb.
It would be wrong, I think, to speakhere of mere senti_ That, however, is but one side of the matter. Fanon
ments. After all, one of the outstanding properties o[ the
<:oncludeshis praise of the practice of violence by remark-
human condition is here finding an adequate experience.
ing that in this kind of struggle the people realize "that
In our context, however, the point of the -utt", is that
life is an unending contest," that violence is an element
these experiences, whose elementary force is bevond
of life. And does that not sound plausible?Have not men
doubt, have never found an instituiional, politi.ai ex_
alrvaysequated death with "eternal rest," and does it not
pression,and that death as an equalizer plays hardly any
follow that where lve have life we have struggle and un-
role-in political philosophy, although human morrality_
rest? Is not quiet a clear manifestation of lifelessnessor
the fact that men are "mortals," as the Greeks used to iay
decay?Is not violent action a prerogative of the young-
-was understoodas the strongestrnotive for
political action those rvho presumably are fully alive? Therefore are not
in prephilosophic political thought. It was the certainty
praiseof life and praiseof violence the same?Sorel,at any
of death that made men seek immortal fame in deed anà
rate, thought along these lines sixty years ago. Before
word and that prompred them to establisha body politic
Spengler, he predicted the "Decline of the Occident,"
which was potenrially immortal. Hence, politics rui, p."-
having observedclear signsof abatement in the European
ciselya meansby which ro escapefrom the equality beiore
class struggle. The bourgeoisie, he argued, had lost the
death into a distinction assuring some measnreof death_ "energy" to play its role in the classstruggle; only if the
lessness. (Hobbes is the only political philosopher in whose proletariat could be persuadedto use violence in order
work death, in the form of fear of violent death, plays a
to reaffirm classdistinctions and awaken the frghting spirit
crucial role. But it is not equality before death that is
of the bourgeoisiecould Europe be saved.eo
decisive for Hobbes; it is the equality of fear resulting
Hence, long before Konrad Lorenz discoveredthe life-
from the equal ability to kitl possessed by everyone that
persuadesmen in the state of nature to bind themselves troSorel, op. cit., chapter z, "On Violence and the f)ecadence of the
into a commonwealth.) At any event, no body politic I l\Iiddle Classes."
 promoting function of aggressionin the animal kingdom, this rvere the only reason this reason
lrorverless. If
violence rvas praised as a manifestation of the life force alone would, it seems to me, be decisive in favor of the
ancl specificallyof its creativiry. Sorel, inspired by Berg- :rpologists for violence." 05
son's ëlan uital, aimed at a philosophy of creativity de- I\Iuch can be learned from Sorel about the motives that
signed for "producers" and polemically directed against prompt men to glorify violence in the abstract, and even
the consumersocietyand its intelleituals; both groups, he rnore from his more gifted Italian contemporary, also of
felt, were parasites.The image of the bourgeois-peaceful, l-rench formation, Vilfredo Pareto. Fanon, who had an
complacent, hypocritical, bent on pleasure,rvithout rvill infinitely greater intimacy with the practice of violence
to power, a late product of capitalismrather than its repre- than either, was greatly influenced by Sorel and used his
sentative-and the image of the intellectual,lvhosetheories categories even when his own experiences spoke clearly
are "constructions" instead of "expressionsof the will,', sr against them.s6 The decisive experience that perstraded
are hopefully counterbalancedin his work by the image Sorel as well as Pareto to stress the factor of violence in
of the worker. Sorel seesthe rvorker as the "producer," revolutions rvas the Dreyfus Affair in France, when, in the
who lvill create the nerv "moral qualities, which are rvords of Pareto, they were "amazed to see lthe Drey-
necessaryto improve production," destroy "the parlia- fusarils] employing against their opponents the same vil-
ments [lvhich] are as packed as shareholders'meetings,"e2
and oppose to "rhe image of Progress the image of s5'Ibitlem,Appendix z, "Apology for Violence."
total catastrophe,"when "a kind of irresistible wave will
passover the olcl civilization." e3The new values turn out gGThis has recently been stressedby Barbara Deming in her plea
to be not very new. They are a senseof honor, desire for for nonviolent action-"On Revolution and Equilibrium," in ,lleuo-
fame and glory, the spirit of fighting lvithout hatrecl and lution: Violent and Nonuiolent, reprinted from Liberation, Febru-
"without the spirit of revenge," and indifference to ma- ary, 1968. She says about Fanon, on P. 3: "It is my conviction that
he can be <luoted as well to plead for nonviolence. Every time
terial advantages.Still, they are indeed the very virtues you find the word
'violence' in his pages, substitute for it the
that were conspicuouslyabsent from bourgeois society.ga phrase
'radical and uncompromising action.' I contend that with the
"Social war, by making an appeal to the honor which de- exception of a very fcw passagesthis substittrtion can be made, and
velops so naturally in all organized armies, can eliminate that the action he calls for could just as well be nonviolent action."
those evil feelings against which morality would remain Even more important for my PurPoses: Miss Deming also tries to
distinguish clearly between power and violence, and she recognizes
that "nonviolent disruption" means "to exert force. It resorts
sr Ibidem, "Introduction, Letter to Daniel even to what can only be called physical force" (p. 6). However,
Halevy," iv.
szlbidem, chapter she curiously underestimates the eflect of this force of disruption,
7, "The Ethics of the producers,',I. which stops short only of physical injury, when she says, "the hu-
ssIbidem, chapter rnan rights of the adversary are respected" 1p. 7). Only the oppo-
4, "The proletarian Strike,', II.
nent's right to life, but none of the other human rights, is acttrally
et lbidem; see especially chaprer ,,prejudices
5, III, and chapter 3, rcspected. The same is of course true for those who advocate
against Violence," III. "violence against things" as opposed to "violence against Persons."

70 7r
lainous methods that they had themselves denotrnr:ecl."e?
A t t h a t j u n c t u r e t h e y d i s c c t v e r e dr v h a t r v e c a l l t o d a y t h e
E.stablishment and rvhat earlier rvas called the System, and
it rvas this discovery that made them turn to the praise of
violent action and made Pareto, for his part, despair of tl.re
rvorking class. (Pareto understood tl-rat the rapid integra-
tion of the rvorkers into the social and political body of
the nation acttrallyamounted to "an alliance of ltotrreeoisie
and rvorking people," to the "embourgeoisemenr" of the
rvorkers, rvhich then, accclrcling to him, gave rise to a new
sy.stem,'n'hich lre called "Pltrto-democra(:y"-a mixed form
of government, pltrtocracy being the bourgeois regime and
demo<:racy the regime of the lvorkers.) The reason Sorel
held on to his Marxist faith in the rvorking class .lvas
that the rvorkers \vere the "producers," the only creative
element in society, tl.rose rvho, according to Nfarx, rvere
bound to liberate the productive forces of rnankind; the
trouble lvas only that as soon as the rvorkers had reached
a satisfactory level of rvorking and living conditions, they
stubbornly refused to remain proletarians and play their
revolutionary role.
Something else, horvever, rvhich became frrlly manifest
only in the decades after Sorel's and Pareto's death, rvas
inr:ornparably more clisastrous to this vier,v.The enormous
growth of productivity in the modern rvorlcl lvas by no
means due to an increase in the rvorkers' procluctivity, but
exclrrsively the developmenr of technology, and this de-
pended neither on the lvorking class nor on the ltourseoi-
sie, btrt on the scientists. The "intellecttrals," much cle-
spisecl by .Sorel and Pareto, strcldenly ceased to be a
marginal social group and emerged as a nerv elite, rvhose
37
Quoted from S. E. Finer's instructive essay "Parero anrl pluto-
Democracy: The Retreat to Galapagos," in The American political
Science Reuietu, .fune, r 968.
72
lork, having chauged the conclitions of human Iife almost
lrt')'oucl rec<-rgnition in a ferv decades, has remained es-
-I-here
rcrrtial for the ftrnctioning of sot:iety. are rnany
r ('irs()ns rvl'ry this new gr()up has not, or- not yet, developed
nr[o a p()rver elite, l-)trt there is incleed every reason to be-
lit've rvith Daniel Bell that "not only the best talents, ltut
<'rentually the entire complex of social prestige and social
\tiltus, rvill be rooted in the intellecttral and scientific
, onrrnut-tities." e8 Its mernbers are more dispersed and less
lrorrnd by clear interests than groups in the old class
s y s t e r n ;h e n t e , t l r e y l t a v e n o d r i v e t o o r g a n i z e t h e m s e l v e s
;rn<l lar:k experience in all nlatters pertaining to po\ver.
.\lso, l-reing rnuch tnclre <:losely bound to cultttral tracli-
tions, of lvhir:h the revolutionary tradition is one, they
r ling lr,ith greater tena(:ity to categories of the past that
l)levent them frorn understanding the present and their
rxvn role in it. It is often touching to watch with rvhat
nostalgir; sentiments the most rebellious <tf oltr students
cxpect the "true" revoltttionary impetus to come fi:om
tlrose erotrps in sot:iety that denounce them the more ve-
lrenrently the rnore they have to lose by anything that
r orrld disturb the smooth functioning of the constlmer
sot'iety. For better or w()rse-ancl I think there is every
r cason to be fearful as lvell as hopeftrl-the really nerv and
potentially revolutionary class in society rvill consist of
intellectuals, and their potential power, as yet unrealized,
is very greât, perlraps too great for the goocl of mankincl.ee
llut these are sper:ulations.
Horvever that may be, in this context we are chiefly
interested in the strange revival of the life philosophies of
llcrsson and Nietzsche in their Sorelian version. We all
l's"Noteson the Post-Industrial
Society,"The Pttblic Interest,No. 6,
rr 1 ( i 7 .
" Sce appendix XVI, p. roo.
t3
 know to rvhat extent this old combination of violence,
life, and creativity figures in the rebellious state of rnind
of the present generation. No doubt the emphasison the
sheer factuality of living, and hence on love-making as
life's most glorious manifestation,is a responseto the real
possibility of constructing a doomsday machine and de-
stroying all life on earth. But the categoriesin rvhich the
new glorifiers of life understand themselvesare not new.
To see the productivity of society in the image of life's
"creativity" is at least as old as N{arx, to believe in vio-
lence as a life-promoting force is at least as old as Nietz-
sche,and to think of creativity as man's highest good is at
least as old as Bergson.
And this seemingly so novel biological justification of
violence is again closely connected with the most perni-
cious elementsin our oldest traditions oI political thought.
According to the traditional concept of power, equated,as
we saw,with violence, power is expansionistby nature. It
. "has an inner urge to grow," it is creative because"the
instinct of growth is proper to it." 100Just as in the realm
of organic life everything either grorvs or declines and
dies, so in the realm of human affairs power supposedly
can sustain itself only through expansion; otherwise it
shrinks and dies. "That which stops growing begins to
rot," goes a Russian saying from the entourage of Cath-
erine the Great. Kings, we are told, were killed "not be-
causeof their tyranny but becauseof their weakness.The
people erect scaffolds, not as the moral ptrnishment of
despotism,but as the biological penalty for weakness"(my
italics). Revolutions, therefore, were directed against the
establishedpowers "only to the outward view." Their true
"effect was to give Power a new vigour and poise, and to
pull down the obstacleswhich had long obsrructedits de-
l00Jouvenel,op. cit., pp. rr4 and ra3, respectively.
74
velopnrent." 101When Fanon speaks clf the "creative mad-
ness" present in violent action, he is still thinking in this
tradition.l02
Nothing, in my opinion, could be theoretically more
dangerous than the tradition of r>rganic thought in political
matters by rvhich power and violence are interpreted in
biological terms. As these terms are understood today, life
and life's alleged creativity are their common denomina-
tor, so that violence is jtrstified on the ground of creativity.
The organic metaphors with which our entire present dis-
<;ussionof these matters, especially <lf the riots, is permeated
-the notion of a "sick society," of which riots are symp-
toms, as fever is a symptom of disease-can only promote
violence in the end. Thus the debate betrt'een those who
propose violent means to restore "law and orcler" and
those who propose nonviolent reforms begins to sound
ominously like a discussion betu,'een two physicians who
debate the relative advantages of surgical as opposed to
medical treatment of their patient. The sicker the patient
is supposed to l-re, the more likely that the surgeon will
have the last word. N{oreover, so long as we talk in non-
political, biological terms, the glorifiers of violence can
appeal to the undeniable fact that in the household of
nature destruction and creation are but two sides of the
natural process, so that collective violent action, quite
apart from its inherent attraction, may appear as natural
a prerequisite for the collective life of mankind as the
struggle for survival and violent death for continuing life
in the anirnal kingdom.
The danger of being carried away by the deceptive
plausibility of organic metaphors is particularly great
rvhere the racial isstre is involved. Racism, r,vhite or black,
totlbidem, pp. r8? and r88.
102
Fanon, op. cit., p. gg,
t5
is fraught lvith violence by definition because it ol)jects to
natural organic facts-a rvhite <lr blat'k skin-lvhich no per-
slrasion or power could change; all one can clo, when the
chips are dorvn, is to exterminate their bearers. Racism, as
distinguished from race, is not a fact of life, but an ideol-
ogy, and the cleedsit leacls to are not reflex actions, btrt cle-
liberate acts based on pseudo-scientifrc theories. Violence
in interracial struggle is alrvays murderous, brrt it is not
"irrational"; it is the logical and rational consequence of
racisrn, by r,vhich I do not mean some rather vague preju-
dices on either side, but an explicit ideological system.
Under the presstrre of power, prejudices, as distinguished
fror-n both interests and ideologies, may yield-as \ve saw
happen 'lvith the highly successful civil-rights movernent,
which r,vasentirely nonviolent. ("By l964 . . . most Ameri-
cans were convinced that subordination and, to a lesser
degree, segregation were rvrong.") 103But u,hile boycotts,
sit-ins, and demonstrations were successful in elimir-rating
discrirninatory lalvs ancl ordinances in the South, they
proved utter failures and ltecarne counterproductive rvhen
they encountered the social conditions in the large urban
centels-the stark needs of the black ghettos on one side,
the overriding interests of rvhite lower-income eroups in
respect to housing ancl education on the other. All this
mode of action could do, and indeed dicl, rvas to bring
these conditions into the open, into the street, lvhere the
basic irreconcilability of interests was dangerously ex-
posed.
Rut even today's violence, black riots, ancl the potential
violence of the n'hite backlash are not yet manifestations
of racist ideologies and their mtrrderous logic. (The riots,
r03Robert N{. Fogelson,"Violence as Protest." in Urban Iliots:
Violence and Social Change, Procceclings of the Acaclemy of I'olitical
Science, Columbia University, r968.
76
,rs lras recently been stated, are "articulate protests against
,lt'rrrrine grievances"' tor indsgd restraint and selectivity-
()r . . rationality are certainly among [their] rnost crucial
l(':rtrlres." 105And much the same is true for the backlash
phenomena, rvhich, crontrary to all predictions' have not
lr<'cn r:haracterizecl by violence up to norv. It is the per-
It'<tly rational reaction of certain interest groups rvhicl'r
lrrriously protest against being singled out to pay the full
whose conse-
;rrice for ill-clesigned integration policies
(luences their auth<)rs can easily escape.)106Tl-re greatest
<l:rnger cornes from the other direction; since violence
:rlrvays needs jtrstification, an escalation of the violence
iu the streets may lrring all<lttt a trtrly racist ideology to
lrrstify it. Black racism, so blatantly evident in James
For-
nran's "l\'{anifesto" is proltallly more a reaction to the cha-
otit'riotin.g of the last years tlran its cause. I t could, of
( ( ) r l r s e ,p r o v o k e a r e a l l y v i o l e n t r v h i t e l l a c k l a s h ,t v h o s eg l e a t -
('st clanger rv<luld be the transformatiou of rvhite prejudices
ir)to a full-fledgecl racist icleology for lvhich "larv and
orcler" rvotrlcl incleed ltecome a mere façade. In this still
r r n l i k e l y c a s e ,t h e c l i m a t e o f o p i n i o n i n t h e c o t r l r t r y m i g h t
(lcteriorate to the point where a majority of its citizens
rvould be lvilling to pay the price of the invisible terror
o[' a police state f<lr law and order in the streets. What rve
lrave norv, a kind of police backlash, quite brutal and
hiuhly visible, is nothing of the sort.
Beh4vior and arguments in interest conflicts ale not
lrotorious for their "rationality." Nothing, unfortunately,
lras so constantly been reftlted by reality as tlre credo of
"cnlichtenecl self-interest," in its literal version as lvell as
trt Ibidem.
1"i lbitlem. see also the excellent article "official Interpretation of
l{:rcial Riots" by Allan A. Silver in the sanre collection'
1 1S
" ;e ea p p e n d i x X V I I , P . l o l .
tl
 in its more sophisticated I\{arxian variant. Some experi-
ence plus a little reflection teach, on the contrary, that it
goes against the very nature of self-interest to be en-
lightened. To take as an example from everyday life the
current interest conflict between tenant and landlord:
enlightened interest worrld focus on a br"rilding fit for
hurnan halritation, but this interest is quite different
from, and in most cases opposed to, the landlord's self-
interest in high profit and the tenant's in low rent. The
common answer of an arbiter, supposedly the spokesman
of "enlightenment," namely, that in the long run the
interest of the building is the true interest of both land-
lord and tenant, leaves out of account the time [ac:tor,
which is of paramount importance for all concerned. Self-
interest is interested in the self, and the self dies or moves
out or sells the house; because of its changing condition,
that is, ultimately because of the human condition of
mortality, the self qua self cannot reckon in terms of long-
range interest, i.e. the interest of a world that survives its
inhabitants. Deterioration of the building is a matter of
years; a rent increase or a temporarily lower profit rate are
for today or for tomorrow. And something similar, n1,1t-
tatis mutandis, is of course true for labor-management
conflicts and the like. Self-interest, when asked to yield
to "true" interest-that is, the interest of the world as
distinguished from that of the self-will alrvays reply, Near
is my shirt, but nearer is my skin. That may not be par-
ticularly reasonable, but it is quite realistic; it is the not
very noble but adequate response to the time discrepancy
between men's private lives and the altogether different
life expectancy of the public world. To expect people,
; who have not the slightest notion of what the res publica,
. the public thing, is, to behave nonviolently and argue
I rationally in matters of interest is neither realistic nor
i reasonable.
78
Violgngg, being instrumental by nature, is rational to
tl're extent that it is effective in reaching the end that must
justify it. And since rvhen we a('t we never knolv 'lvith any
certainty the eventual consequences o[ rvhat we are -doi3g,
violence can remain rational only if it pursues sl'rort-term
g1gls. Violence does not promote causes,neither history!
nor revolution, neilher progressnor reaction; but it can
and bring them to public
ierve to diâiiiatizè-,$rievances
attention. As Conor Cruise O'Brien (in a debate on the ,
legitirnacy of violence in the Theatre of Ideas) once re-
marked, quoting William O'Brien, the nineteenth-century
Irish agrarian and nationalist agitator: Sometimes "vio-
lence is the only way of ensuring a hearing for modera-
tion." To ask the impossible in order to obtain the pos-
qlble- p not alrvays counterproductive. And-- -i.nd"cçd,;.
'
violence, contrary to what its prophets try to tell us, is
more the weap.gn of rç.f."91p than of revoluti.on. France .
rvould not have received the most radical bill since Na-
poleon to change its antiquated education system if the
French students had not rioted; if it had not been for the
riots of the spring term, no one at Columbia tlniversity
rvould have dreamed of accepting reforms; 107and it is
probably quite true that in West Germany the existence
of "dissenting minorities is not even noticecl unless they
engage in provor;ation." 108jlo doubt, "violence pays," but
r0?"At Columbia,before last year'suprising,for example,a report
on studentlife and anotheron faculty housingha<lbeen gathering
rlrrstin the president'soffice,"as Fred Hechingerre1>orted
in the
New York Tirnes."The Week in Review"of N{ay4, r969.
108Rudi Dutschke,as quoted in Der Spiegel,February ro, rq6q, p.
27. Gùnter Grass,speakingin much the samevein after the attack
on Dutschkein spring rq68, also stresses the relation betweenre-
forms and violence: "The youth protest rnovementhas brougl"rtthe
fragility of our insulhcientlyestablisheddemocracyinto eviclence.
q!,q_!r_o-ylr_le_
!p - .qhat it pays indiscrinrinately, for "sorrl
and instruction in Swahili as rvell as for real_-re-
_g1lgl.qes"
forms. And since the tactics of violence and disruption
tnakc senseonly for short-term goals, it is even more likely,
as was recently the case in the Llnited States, that the
established power will yield to nonsensical and obviously
darnaging demands-such as admitting students rvitl.rotrt
the necessaryqualifications and instructing them in non-
existent strbjects-if only such "refomrs" can be made with
comparative ease, than that violence will be effective lvith
respect to the relatively long-term objective of structural
change.l0e Nloreover, the daneer of violence, even if it
moves conùiousiy within a nonextremist framervork of
short-terrn goals, will alrvays be that the means overwhelm
the end. If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result rvill
be not merely defeat but the introcluction of the practice
of violence into the whole body politic. Action is irreversi-
ble, and a retrrrn to the status quo in case o[ defeat is
always unlikely. The practice of violence, like all action,
changes the u'orld, but the most probable change is to a
more violent world.
In this it has been successftrl, but it is far from certain where this
successwill lead; either it will bring about long-overdue reforms
. . or . . . the uncertainty that has now been laicl bare will provide
false prophets with promising markets ancl free advertising." See
"Violencc Rehabilitated," in ,\pcak Orrll, New York, rq6q.
10eAnother question, which we cannot cliscusshere, is to what an
extent tl-re whole university system is still capable of reforming it-
self. I think there is no general answer. Even though the student
rebellion is a global phenomenon, the university systemsthemselves
are by no means uniform and vary not only from corrntry to coun-
try but often from institution to institution; all soltrtions of the
problem must spring from, ancl correspond to, strictly local concli-
tions. Thus, in some countries the university crisis may even broaclen
into a government crisis-as Der Spiegel (.fune 23, rq69) thought
possiblein discussingthe German situation.
80
Finally-to <;ome back to Sorel's and Pareto's earlier
denunciation of the system as such-thg g-I.-_u!çtthe btr;
reaucratization of publir: life, the greater will be the at-
traction of violence Il a fully develgped bureaucracy
there is nollody left rvith rvhom one can argue, to whom
one can present grievances, on whom the pressures of ,
po,-rvert:an be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of govern-
ment in rvhich everybody is deprived of political freedom,
of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, i
and rvhere all are equally porverless we have a tyranny ,
without a tyrant. The crtrcial feature in the student re-
bellions around the rvorld is that they are directed every-
rvhere aeainst the ruling bureaucracy. This explains what
at first glan<:e seenls so disturbing-that the rebellions in
the East demand precisely those freedoms of speech and
thought that the young rebels in the West say they
clespiseas irrelevant. On the level of ideologies, the whole
thing is <:onfusing; it is mtrch less so if u'e start from the
obvious fact that the huge party machines have sttcceecled
everywhere in overruling the voice of the citizens, cven in
countries where freedom of speech and association is still
intact. The dissenters and resisters in the East demand
free speech and thought as the preliminary conditions for
political action; the rebels in the West live under condi-
tions where these preliminaries no longer open the chan-
nels for action, for the meaningful exercise of freedom.
What matters to them is, indeed, "Praxisentz?1g," the sus-
pension of action, as Jens Litten, a German student, has
aptly called it.110The transformation of government into
administration, or of republics into bureaur:racies, and
the disastrous shrinkage of the public realm that went
with it have a long and complicated history throughout
the modern age; ancl this process has been considerably
rroSeeappendixXVIII. p. r02.
8l
 acceleratecl during the last hundred yearsthrollgh the rise
of party bureaucracies. (Seventy years ago Pareto recog-
nized that "freedom . . . by which I mean the porver to
act shrinks every day, save for criminals, in the so-called
free and democratic countries.)111What makes man a
political being is his faculty of action; it enableshim to I
'r ,) tf get together with his peers,to act in concert, and to reach iI
out for goals and enterprisesthat would never enter his
mind, let alone the desiresof his heart, had he not been
given this gift-to embark on something new. Philosophi-
cally speaking,to act is the human answerto the condition
of natality. Since we all come into the world by virtue of
birth, as newcomersand beginnings, we are able to start
something new; without the fact of birth rve r.vouldnot
even know what novelty is, all "action" would be either
mere behavior or preseryation. No other faculty except
language,neither reason nor consciousness, distinguishes
us so radically from all animal species.To act and to be-
gin are not the same,but they are closely interconnected.
None of the properties of creativity is adequately ex-
pressed in metaphors drawn kom the life process. To
beget and to give birth are no more crearive than to die
is annihilating; they are but different phasesof the same,
ever-recurringcycle in which all living things are held as
though they rverespellbound. N_qi,tlerviolence nor porver
is a natural phenomenon, that is, a manifestation of the
life process;they belong to the political realm of human
affairs whose essentiallyhuman quality is guaranteed by
man's faculty of action, the ability to begin something
new. And I think it can be shown that no other human
ability has suffered to such an extent from the progressof
the modern age, for progress,as we have come to under-
stand it, means growth, the relentless processof more and
1rr Pareto, quoted from Finer, op. cit.
nlore, of bigger and bigger. The bigger a colrntry becomes
in terms of population, of objects, and of possessions, the
greater will be the need for administration and lvith it
the anonymousporverof the administrators.Pavel Kohout,
a Czechauthor, writing in the heydayof the Czechoslovak-
ian experiment rvith freedom, defined a "free citizen" as
a "Citizen-Co-ruler." He meant nothing more or lessthan
the "participatory democracy" of r.r'hichwe have heard so ti
much in recent years in the West. Kohout added that
rvhat the rvorld today standsin greatestneed of may rvell
be "a new example" if "the next thousand years are not
to become an era of supercivilizeclmonkeys"-or, even
worse,of "man turned into a chicken or a rat," ruled over
by an "elite" that derives its power "from the rvisecoun-
sels of . intellectual aides" who actually believe that
men in think tanks are thinkers and that computers can
think; "the counselsmay turn otrt to be incredibly in-
sidious and, instead of pursuing human objectives, may
pursue cornpletelyabstract problems that had been trans-
112
formed in an unforeseenmanner in the artificial brain."
This nerv example rvill hardly be set by the practice of
violence, although I am inclined to think that mr'rch of
the present glorification of violence is caused by severe
frustration of the faculty of action in the modern world'
It is simply true that riots in the ghettos and rebellions
on the calnpusesmake "people feel they are acting to-
gether in a way that they rarely can." 11:J
We do not know if
these occurrencesare the beginnings of something new-
the "nerv example"-or the death pangs of a faculty that
112SeeGùnter Grass and Pavel Kohout, Briefe iiber die Grenze'
Hamburg, r968, pp.88 and go, respectivell';ancl Andrei D. Sakharov,
op. cit.
113Herbert .J. Gans, "The Ghetto Rebellions and Urban Class Con-
fiict," in Urban Riots, oP. cit.
83

mankind is about to lose. As things stand today, when rve
see horv the superpowers are bogged dou,n uncler the
monstrous rveight of their orvn bigness,it looks as though
the setting of a "new example" will have a chance, if at
all, in a small country, or in small, 'rvell-definedsectorsin
the masssocietiesof the large powers.
The disintegration processeswhich have become so
manifest in recent years-the decay of public services:
schools,police, mail delivery, garbage collection, trans-
portation, et cetera; the death rate on the highways and
the traffic problems in the cities; the pollution of air and
rvater-are the automatic results of the neecls of mass
societiesthat have become unmanageable.They are ac-
companied ancl often acceleratedby the simultaneousde-
cline of the various party systems,all of more or lessrecent
origin and designed to serve the political needs of mass
populations-in the \,{/est to make representative govern-
ment possiblewhen direct democracy would not do any
longer because"the room rvill not hold all" (John Selden),
and in the East to make absolute rule over vast territories
more effective. Bigness is affiicted rvith vulnerability;
cracksin the power structure of all but the small countries
are opening and rvidening. And while no one can say rvith
assurancervhere and when the breaking point has been
reached, we cân observe, almost measure, how strength
and resiliencyare insidiouslydestroyed,leaking, as it rvere,
drop by drop from our institutions.
Moreover,there is the recent rise of a curious new brand
of nationalism,usuallyunderstoodas a srvingto the Right,
but more probably an indication of a grorving, world-r,vide
resentmentagainst "bigness" as such. While national feel-
ings formerly tended to unite various ethnic grotrps by
focusing their political sentiments on the nation as a
rt'hole,we now r,vatchhow an ethnic "nationalism" begins
to threatenwith dissolution the oldest and best-established
-fhe
llation-states. St'ots and tlre Welsh, the Bretons and
the Provençals, ethlic gTouPs rvhose successfrrlassirnilatiotr
had been the prereqtrisite for the rise of the nation-state
and had seenred utrnpletely assttred, are tttrning to separat-
isrn in rebellion against the centralized governments in
[,ond<tn and Paris. And jtrst lvhen centralization, under
tlre impact <lf ltigness, tr.rrned out to be <rltnterproductive
in its orvu terms, tl'ris country, fotrnded, according to the
federal principle, on the division of porvers and polverful
so l<lng as this division was respecte(I, threrv itself head-
long, 1,, the unanimous applause of all "progressive"
forces, into the nell', for America, experiment of central-
izecl administration-the federal government overpowering
state powers and exe(:utive power eroding congressional
porvers.ll{ It is as though this most successful Etrropean
colony wished to share the fate of the mother countries in
their decline, repeating in great haste the very errors the
framers of the Constitution had set out to correct and to
eliminate.
Whatever the administrative aclvantages and disacl-
vantages of centralizatiorr may be, its political result is
always the same: monopolization of power causes the dry-
ing trp or o<tzing arvay of all authentic power sources in
the r:ountry. In the flnited States, based on a great plural-
ity of powers and their mutttal checks and balances, we
o.. .'orrfr,,trtecl not merely rvith tl're disintegrati<ln of
'rvith power, seemingly still intact
power structures, but
àncl free to manifest itself, losing its grip and becoming
ineffective. To speak of the impotence of power is no
longer a rvitty paradox. Senator Eugene lVlcCarthy's cru-
sacle in rq6B "to test the system" brought popular resent-
ment against imperialist adventures into the open, pro-
vicled the link benveen the opposition in tlre Senate and
see the importantarticleof Henry Steelecommager,footnote74.
1r.r
that in the streets,enforced an at least temporary spec- ( l t t ( ' n o t t s s o n r m r : s " ?( " O n e c a n s a y t h a t a l l r v e k n < l w ' t h a t
against
tacular change in policy, and demonstrated horv quickly is, all we have the power to do, has Ênally turned
the majority of the young rebels could become dealien- rçltat rve are.")
rvill
ated, jumping at this first opportunity not to abolish the Again, tu. à., not know lvhere these developmerrts
systembut to make it work again. And still, all this porver l<.ud"trs, l)tlt we kntlrv, or shotrlcl knorv, that 'every*dç-
<rnly
could be crushed by the party bureaucracy,r'vhich,con- ( r'case.in porver is an open invitation !o yiq-!çn.ce-if
from
trary to all traditions, preferred to lose tl're presidential lrct:ause those rvho hofd pq\aç-I.?nd feel it slipping.
electionrvith an unpopular candidatewho happenedto be ()r lle they'the gov-
tlrcir hands, be they the goverulnent
the tempta-
an apparatclziÀ. (Somethingsimilar happenedwhen Rocke- t:r'ned, have alrvays found it difficult to resist
feller lost the nomination to Nixon during the Republir:an tion to substitute violence for it'
convention.)
There are other examples to demonstrate the curious
contradictions inherent in impotence of power. Because
of the enormouseffectiveness of teamwork in the sr:iences.
which is perhaps the outstanding American contribution
to modern science,we can control the most complicated
processes with a precisionthat makestrips to the moon less
dangerous than ordinary rveekend excursions; but the
allegedly "greatest power on earth" is helplessto end a
war, clearly disastrousfor all concerned, in one of the
earth's smallestcountries. It is as though rve have fallen
under a fairylând spell rvhich permits us to do the "im-
possible" on the condition that we lose the capacity of
doing the possible,to achieve fanrasricallyextraordinary
feats on the condition of no longer being able to attend
properly to our everydayneeds.If power has anything to
do with the we-will-and-we-can, as distinguished from rhe
mere we-can,then rve have to admit that our power has
become impotent. The progressesmade by sciencehave
nothing to do with the l-will; they follorv their orvn in-
exorable laws, compelling us to do whatever we can,
regardlesso[ consequences. Have the l-will and the I-can
parted company?Was Valéry right .w,henhe saiclfifty years
ago: "On peut dire que tout ce que nous sal)ons,c'est-à-
dire tout ce que nous pouuons, a fini par s'opposerà ce

87
 Appendices

l, 'lo PAGEr3, NOrn 16

ProfessorB. C. Parekh, of Hull Llniversity, Englantl, kindly drew
nry attentiolr to the following passagein the section on F'euerbach
lronr NIarx's anrl lingels' ()erman Ideology (r8a6), of which l-ngels
later wrote: "The portion tnisherl . . . only Proves how inconrplete
at tlr:rt time r.r'asotrr knowletlge of econornic history." "Roth for the
procluction on a rnass scale of tlris communist consciotrsness, ancl
for the successof the cause itself, the alteration of man Ides
Nlenschen] on a rnassscale is necessary,an alteration which can only
take place in a practical movement, a reuolut.ion; this revolution is
necessary,therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be
overtlrrown in any other way, btrt also becarrsethe classouerthrowing
it can only in a revolution succeedin ridcling itself of all the muck
of agesand become frtted to found society anew." (Quoterl from the
edition by R. Pascal,New York, r96o, pp. xv ancl 6q.) L,ven in these,
as it rvere, pre-Nlarxist utterances, the distinction between NIarx's
and Sartre's positions is evident. Nlarx speaks of "the alteration of
man on a mass scale," and of a "mass production of colrsciousness,"
not of the liberation of an indiviclual through an isolated act of
violence. (For the German text, see l\Iarx/Engels Cesarntausgabe,
rg3z, I. Abteilung, vol. 5, pp. 59 f.)

rr, To PAGE13, NOTEr7

The New Left's unconsciousclrifting away from Nfarxism has been
rluly noticecl. See especially recer)t comments on the stu<lent move-
rnent by Leonarcl Schapiro in the Neu York lleuieu ol Books
(Decenrlrer 5, rq{i8) and by Ravnron<l ,\ron in La Rëz,olution In-
trouuable,I'aris, rq68. Both consi<lerthe new emphasis on violence
t o b e a k i n d o f b a c k s l i t l i n gc i t h e r t o p r e , N { a r x i a nu t o p i a n s o c i a l i s m
(Aron) or to the lLussian anarchism of Nechacv and Bakunin
(Schapiro),who "had nruch to sav about thc importance of violence
as a factor of unity, as the bincling force in a society or groLrp, a

89
century before the same ideas enrergerl in rlrr: rvorks o[.fean-P:url
Sartre and Frantz Fanon." Aron writcs in ll)c s:rnrc vein: "lr:.ç
c h a n t r e sd e l a r e u o l u t i o n d e m a i t r o i u t t d / l t t t . s s t rb n u r x i s m e . .
i l s o u b l i e n t u n . s i à t l e d ' h i . s t o i r e "( p . , . t ) . ' l o u n o n - I l r t r x i s t s u c h a
reversion woukl of course hartlly be arr argrrnrcllt; l)ut Ior Sartre,
wlto, for instance,writes "Un prétendu 'tlëpussernent'rlu ntarxisrne
ne sera au pis qu'un retour au prëmarxisnlc, Att ntieux que Ia
redécouuerted'une pensëe dëjà contenue (lans la philosophie qu,on
a cru dëpasser" ("Question de l\{éthode" in Critique dc Ia raison
dialectique, Paris, r96o, p. t7), ir musr consrirute a formidable objec-
tion. (That Sartre and Aron, though political opponcnrs, are in full
agreement on this point is noteworthy. It shows to what an extent
Hegel's concept of history dominates the thought of Marxists ancl
non-l\Iarxists alike.)
Sarrre lrimself, in his Critirlue ol Dialccticrù Reason, gives a kintl
of Hegelian explanation for his espousalof violence. His point of
departure is that "need and scarcity determinecl the N,lanicheistic
basis of action ancl morals" in present history, "whose trtrth is basecl
on scarcity [and] must manifest itself in an antagonistic reciprocity
between classes."Aggressior-ris the consequence of r-reedin a world
where "there is not enough for all." [Jnder such circumstances, vio-
lence is no longer a marginal phenomenon. "Violence and counter-
violence are perhaps contingencies,but they are contingent necessi-
ties, and the imperative consequenceof any ârtempr to destroy this
inhumanity is that in destroying in the adversary rhe inhumanity of
the contraman, I can only destroy in him the humanity o[ man, ancl
realize in me his inhumanity. Whether I kill, torture, enslave. . . my
aim is to suppress his freedom-it is an alien force, de t.rop." His
model for a condition in which "each one is one too many . . . Each
is redundant for the orher" is a bus queue, the mernbers of which
obviously "take no norice of each other except as a number in a
quantitative series."He concludes,"They reciprocally deny any link
between each of their inner worlds." From this, it follows that praxis
"is the negation of alterity, which is itself a negarion"-a highly wel-
come conclusion, since the negation o[ a negation is an affirmation.
The flaw in the argument seems to me obvious. There is all the
difference in the world between "not taking norice" and ,,denying,"
between "denying any link" with somebody and ..negating" his
otherness;and for a sane person tllere is still a considerabledistance
to travel from this theoretical "negation" to killing, tortrrring, ancl
enslaving.
90
IVIostof the above quotations are drawn from R. I). Laing and D.
G. Cooper, Il.eusonand Violence. A Decade of Sartrt:'s Philosoplty,
-l-his
r95o-r96o,Lon<lon, rqô4, I'alt Three. seemslegitimate because
Sartre irr his foreworcl says: "/'ai Iu atlentitternent I'ouurage rlue
uolts auez bien troulu tnc tortlier et j'ui eu le grund plaisir d'y
trouaer urt exposé lrès clair et tràs firlèlc tle ma pensëe."
rn, To PAGEt5, NOTE20
l hey are indeecl a mixed lot. Raclical students congrcgate easily
'fhe
with dropouts, hippies, drug atlclicts,and 1;sychopaths. situ:rtion
is further coml>licatedby thc insensitivity of the establishedpowers
to the often sr"rbtledistinctions between crime and irrcgularity, clis-
tinctions that are of great irnport:rnce. Sit-ins ancl occupations of
lrrriklings are rrot the same us arson or armetl revolt, antl the cliflcr-
ence is not just one ol clegree.(Contrary to the opinion of one mern-
'frustees,
, ber of Harvar-tl'sBoard o[ the occupation ol a university
builcling by students is not the same tlling as the invasion of a
br:rnch of the First National City Bank by a street nrob, for tlre
simple reason that the students trespassupon a property whose risc,
to be sure, is subject to rules, but to which they belong and which
belongs to them as much as to faculty ancl aclministration.) Even
more alarmir-rgis the inclination of faculty as well as administration
to treat drug attclictsand criminal elements (in City College in New
York ancl in Clornell tlniversity) with considerably nrore leniency
than the ar.rthenticrebels.
Helmut Schelsky,the German social scientist, <lescribedas early
as r96r (in Der ùIensch in der uissenschaltlichenZiuilisation, Kiiln
rrnd Oplatlen, rq6r) the possibility of a "metaphysical nihilism,"
by which he mezrnt the raclical social anct spirittral <leni;rl of "the
whole process of man's scientific-technicalreproduction," that is,
-I-o
the no saicl to "the rising world of a scientific civilization." call
this attittrrle "nihilistic" presupposesan acceptance of the modern
world'as the only possible world. f'he challenge of the young rebels
concernsprecisely this point. There is incleed much sensein turning
the tables ancl stating, as Sheldon Wolin antl .|ohn Schaar have done
in op. cit.: "The great danger at present is that the establishedand
the respectable seem prepared to follow the most profoundly
nihilistic denial possible,which is the denial of the future through
clenial of their own children, the bearerso[ tl'refuture."
Nathan Glazer, in an article, "Sttrclent Power at Berkeley," in
The Public Interest's special issuc ?he Llniuersities, Fall, r 968,
9l
writes: "The stuclent radicals renrintl me rnore of the Ludclite
machine smashersthan the Socialist tracle unionists who achieved
citizenship antl power for workers," irnrl he concluclesfrom this im-
pression that Zbigniew Brzezinski (in an article about Columbia in
T h e N e z uR e p u b l i c , . f u n e r , r q 6 8 ) m a y h a v e b e e n r i g h t i n h i s d i a g -
nosis: "Very lrequently revolutions are rhe last spasmsof the past,
and thus are not really revoltrtions llut counter-revolutions,operat-
ing in the name of revolutions." Is not this bias in favor of march-
ing forward at any price rather ocltl in two authors who are
generally consicleredto be conservarives?And is it not even oclder
that Glazer should remain unaware of the decisive differences be-
tween manufacturing machinery in early nineteenth-century Eng-
lanrl and the harclware developed in the middle of the twenrierh
century which has turned out to be destructive even when it ap-
peared to be most beneficial-the cliscoveryof nuclear euergy, auto-
mation, medicine whose healin۔ powers have led to overpopulation.
wliich in its turn will almost certainly lead to mass starvation, air
pollution, er cerera?
lv, To pAcE 16, torr z3
To look for prececlents and analogies where there are none, to
avoid reporting and reflecting on whnt is being done and what is
being said in terms of the events themselves,under the pretext that
we ought to learn the lessons of the past, parricularly of the era
between the two world wars, has become characteristic of a great
many currcnt discussions.Enrirely free of this form of escapism is
Stephen Spender's splendid and wise report oll rhe sruclenr move-
ment, quoted above. He is among the few of his generation to be
fully alive to the present an.d to remember his own yourh well
enough to be aware of the differences in mood, style, thought, and
action. ("Today's studenrs are enrirely different from the Oxbridge,
Harvarcl, Princeton or Heidelberg studenrsforty years back," p. r66,.)
But Spender's arritude is shared by all those, in no matter which
generation, who are truly concerned with the world's and man's
future as distinguished from those who play games with it. (Wolin
and Schaar,op. cit., speak of "the revival of a senseof shareddestiny"
as a bridge between the generations, of "our common fears that
scientific weapons may destroy all life, that technology will increas-
ingly disfigure men who live in the city, just as it has already debased
the earth and obscured the sky"; that "the 'progress' of industry will
destroy the possibility of interesting work; ancl that 'communica-
92
tions' will obliterate the last tracesof the varied cultures which have
been the inheritance of all but the most benighte<I societies"') It
seems only natural that this should be true more frequently of
physicists and biologists than of rnembers of the social sciences,even
lhorgh the students o[ the former faculties were much slower to rise
in rebellion than their fellow classmatesin the humanities. Thus
A<lolf Portmânn, the famous Swiss biologist, sees the gap between
the generations as having little if anything to do with a conflict
berween Young and old; it coincideswith the rise of nuclear science;
"the resulting worlcl sitrration is entirely new' [It] cannot be
comparecl to even the most powerful revolution of the past'" (In a
pamplrlet
'Bedrohung, entitled Llanipulation rles Menschen als Schicksal und
Ziirich, rq6q.) And Nobel Prize winner George Wald, of
Harvarcl, in his lamous speech at M.I.T. on March 4, r969,rightly
stressed that such teachers understand "the reasons of [their stu-
dents'] une:rsinesseven better than they do," and' what is more, that
thev "share it," oP. (il.
Thepresent is
p.ri,i.i,l,lI iiiJ''i?;"',11i.,, .ign,rvdeplored,
usually blamecl on the rebellious students, who are accused of attack-
ing the universities becirusethey constitute the weakest link in the
chain of establishedpowel-. It is perfectly true thât the universities
will not be able to survive if "intellectual detachment and the dis-
interested search for trtlth" should come to an encl; and, what is
worse, it is unlikely that civilized society of any kind will be able to
survive the clisappearanceo[ these curious institutions whose main
social ancl political function lies precisely in their impartiality and
indepenclence frotl social Pressure and political Power. Power and
truth, both perfectly legitimate in their own rights, arc essentially
distinct phenomena and their pursuit results in existentially clifferent
ways of life. Zbigniew Brzezinski, in "America in the Technotronic
A g e " ( Ë n c o z r l l e r , . f a n t r a r y ,r 9 6 8 ) , s e e st h i s d a n g e r b u t i s e i t h e r r e -
signed oi at leâst not unduly alarmed by the prospect. Technotron-
'supercultttre'" under the
ics, he believes, will usher in a new "
guidance of the rrew "organization-orientetl,application-mincled in-
tellectuals." (see especially Noam chomsky's recent critical analysis
"Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship" in op. cit.) Well, it is much
more likely that this new breed of intellectuals, formerly known
as technocrats,will usher in an age of tyranny and uttel sterility'
However that may be, the point is that the politicization of the
93
 Yotlt' Ileuieu of
Êt to prirrt," remainecl unpublished until the Neu
universities by the students' movement was precedeclby the politi- the Introtluction' Its con-
BooÀs (July ro, rqtiq) printetl it without
cization of the universities by the establisheclpowers. The facts are fantasy' and may not be meant
tent, to" be s.,re, is half-illiterate
too well known to need emphasizing,but it is good to keep in mind more than a joke, and that the Negro commutrity
seriously.But it is
that this is not merely a matter of military research. Henry Steele secret' That the au-
moo<lily inclulges totlay in such fantasies is no
Commager recently clenouncecl "the University as Employment What can neither
thorities shoulil be frightenecl is understanclable'
Agency" (The New Republic, F'ebruary 24, rq68). Incleed, "by no is their lack of imagination' Is it not
be unclerstoodnor condoned
stretch of the imagination can it be alleged that Dow Chemical ancl his followers, if they find no opposi-
obvious that NIr. I;orman
Company, the Marines or the CIA are educational enterprises," or a little aPPease-
tion in the commttnity at large and even are given
institutions whose goal is a search for truth. And lVlayor John which they
ment money, will be forced to try to execute a Progrâm
Lindsay raised the question of the university's right to call "itself in?
themselvesperhaps never believed
a special institution, divorced from worldly pursuits, while it en-
gagesin real-estatespeculation and helps plan and evaluate projects
vll, To PAGE 19, NOTE 3r
for the military in Vietnam" (New York Times, "The Week in rq6q)' Lynd
In a letter to tl.re New York Tintes (lated April 9'
Review," NIay 4, rq6g). To pretencl that the university is "the brain actions such as strikes ancl
mentions only "nonviolent disruptive
of society" or of the power structure is clangerous,arrogant nonsense the tumultuous violent riots of
sit-ins," igno.ing for his PurPose;
-if only becausesociety is not a "body," let alone a brainless one. why these
the working ctus itt the twenties, ancl raises the question
In order to avoid misunderstanclings:I quite agree with Stephen in labor'management relations ' ' '
tactics "accËpteclfor a generation
Spender that it would be folly for the students to wreck the uni- a camPus? ' ' ' when a union organ-
are rejected when practicecl on
versities (although they are the only ones who could do so effectively off the job
izer is firecl from à factory bench, his associateswalk
for the simple reason that they have numbers, anrl therefore real though Lynd has accePted
until the grievance is settlecl."It looks as
power, on their side), since the campusesconstitute not only their not unfreqlrent among trustees
a university image, unforttlnately
real, but also their only possible basis. "Without rhe university, which the camPus is owned by the
and aclministrators, accor(ling to
there would be no stuclents"(p. zz). But the universities will remain the aclministration to manage their
board of rrustees, which hires
a basis for the students only so long as they provicle the only place to,serve
propert)r, which in turn hires the faculty as employees .its
in society where power cloes not have the last word-all perversions no reality that correspontls to this
arrà-".r, the stuclents. There is
and hypocrisies to the contrary notwithstanding. In the present the
"image." No matter how sharp the conflicts may become in
situation, there is a danger that either students or, as in the case of interests and class
acadàic world, they are not matters of clashing
Berkeley, the powers-that-be will run amuck; if this shoulcl happen,
warfare.
the young rebels woulcl have simply spun one more thread into what
has been aptly called "the pattern of disaster." (Professor Richard vrrl, To PAGEr9' NOTE3?
all that
A. Falk, of Princeton.) Bavarcl Rustin, the Negro civil-rights leader' has said
saicl on the matter: College officials sl-rould "stop capit-
,r".dld to be
it is wrong if
vr, To PAGElg, NoTE 30 ulating to the stuPid demands of Negro stuclents";
masochism permits another segment
Fred M. Hechinger, in an article, "Campus Crisis," in the New o.r" gÀ,,p', "scnse of guilt and
York Times, "The Week in Review" (M"y +, rq6g), writes: "Since ot,o".i"tytoholdgunsinthenameo[justice',;blackstudentswere
"an easy
the demands of the black studenrs especially are usually justified in "sufferin! from the shock of integration" and looking for
students need is "remedial
substance . . . the reaction is generally sympathetic." It seemschar- way outîf thei. problems"; what Negro
correct sen-
acteristic of present attitudes in these matters that fames Forman's tral.ning" so that they "can do mathematics and write a
"soul courses." (Quoted from the Daily News' April z8'
"Manifesto to the White Christian Churches and the .fewish Syna- tence," not
of so-
gogues in the United States and all other Racist Institutions," 1969.)What a reflection on the moral and intellectual state
though publicly read and distributed, hence certainly "news that's
95
94
 ciety that much courage was requirctl t. t:rlk (onl'lo.
se'se in these son with the essayol Andrei D. Sakharov rluotecl abovc shows how
marters! Even more frightening is the al.l
too likcly prospect that, much easier it is for those rvho look on "capitalism" from t h e
in about five or ten years,this ,,edrrcation,,
in Swahili (a nineteenth_ perspective of the disastrotrs Eastern experiments to discard o u t -
century kind of no-la-nguagespoken by thc
,\rab ivory ancl slave wolr) theories and slogans.
caravans, a hybrid mixture of a Bantu clialcct
with an enorrnous
vocabulary of Arab borrowings; see rhe
EncyclopaecliaBritannica,
r96r), African literat.re, a.cl orher nonexisrcnr xI, TO PAGE4r, NOrn 6e
s'bjects wilr be in-
terpreted as another trap of the white man The sanctions o[ the laws, which, however, are not their essence,
to prevenr Negroes from
acquiring arr adequate education. are clirected against those citizens who-withotrt withholtling their
support-wish to make zrn exception for themselves; the thief still
expects the government to protect his newly acquirecl property. It
Forma",,,, 3,1," has been noted that in the earliest legal systemsthere were no sanc-
James N Brack Eco.
"ii,l,i":lË,,:;,i;i,
nontic l)evelopmenr",Conference), *tri.t, ",ion"rbefore tions whatsoever. (See Jotrvenel, op. cit., p. 276.) The lawbreaker's
t mentione<l and punishment was banishrrrentor outlawry; by breaking the law, the
which he presented to the Churches and
Synagoguesus ,,only a be_ criminal hacl put himself outsicle the community constitute(l by it.
Sinyin-S of the reparations due us u, peolrle who have been
ploited and degraclecl,brutalizecl,killect
ex_ Passerind'l-ntrèves (op. cit., pp. rz8 ff.), taking into account "the
anri persecure(',,,reaclslike complexity of law, even of State law," lras pointe(l out t.hat "there
a classicalexanrple of such futile clreams.
.,\ccording to him, ,.it fol_ are indeecl laws which are
'clirectives'
rather than
'irnperatives',
lows {rom the laws of revolution that the
mosr oppressetl will make wl-rich are 'accepted' rather than 'inrposed', anrl whose 'sanctions' do
the revolution," whose ultimate goal is that ,,we
must assumelcader_ not necessarilyconsist in the possible use of force on the part of a
ship, total control . . . insicle of ihe Urlited 'sovereign'."
Statesof everything that Such laws, he has likenecl to "the rules of a game, or
e-rists..The. time has passed when we are
seconci i.r commancl ancl those of my club, or to those of the Church." I confonn "because
the white boy stanclson top." In order
to acrrieve this reversal, it for me, unlike others of my fellow citizens, these rules are 'valid'
will be necessary,.to use whatever means
necessary,inclucling the rules."
j31ce and power of the gun to bring down the
1se.of colonizer.,, I think Passerind'Entrèves'scomparison of the law with the "valid
And while he, in the name of tlre commuiity
(whicl.r, of course, rules of the game" c:rn be rlriven further. For the yroint o[ these
stands by no means behind him), ,.declares
war,,, refuses ro ,,share rules is not that I submit to them voluntarily or recognize theoreti-
power with whites," and demanrls that .,white
people in this counrry cally their validity, but that in practice I cannot enter the game
. b" ro accepr black learlership,,,he calls at the
;.. îil!"g
"upon all Christians and same time unless I conform; my motive for acceptanceis rny wish to play, and
Jews to practiie patience, rolerancc,trnder_ since men exist only in the plural, my wish to play is identical with
standing and nonviolence" cluriÀg the
period it nray still take_ my wish to live. Every man is born into a community with pre-
"whether it happens in a thousanJ
years'is of no consequence,,_ro existing Iaws which he "obeys" frrst o[ all becausethere is no other
seize power.
way for him to enter the great galne of tl-re world. I may wish to
change the rules of the garne, as the revolutionary does, or to make
x, To PAGE24, NOTE an exception for myself, as the criminal does; but to deny them on
40
Jrirgen Habermas, one of the most thorjhtf.rl ancl intelligent principle means no mere "disobedience," but the refusal to enter
so_
cial scientists in Germany, is a goocl
of the cliffic.lties these the human community. The common dilemma-either the law is
trIarxists or former À{arxists find in "*u_pï"
pr.ring with any piece of the absolutely valid and therefore needs for its legitimacy an immortal,
work of rlre master. ln his recent irrn,it,
'Ideologie' und lVissen.scha.ft als divine legislator, or the law is simply a conrntand with nothing be-
(Frankfurt, r96g), he rnenrions several hind it but the state'smonopoly of violence-is a delusion. All laws
times that certain
"key categories of N{arx,s theory,
namely, clars_str.,ggleand ideology, are " 'directives' rather than 'im1>eratives.' " They clirect human
can no longer be applied without
ado (umstandslor).,,A compari_ intercourse as the rules tlirect the garne. And the ultimate guarantee

96 97
of their valiclity is contained in the okl Roman maxim Pacta sunt
seruandd.
Thereis ro^".o,,,,o,,]l.i#Tï.ti;",o,"11 deGauue,s
visit.The
eviclence of the events themselves seemsto suggest that the price he
had to pay for the army's supporr. was public rehabilitation of his
enemies-amnesty for General Salan, return of Biclault, return also
of Colonel Lacheroy, sometimes called the "torturer in Algeria." Not
much seemsto be known about the negotiations. One is tempred to
think that the recenr rehabilitation of pétain, again glorifiecl as the
"victor of Verdun," ancl, more importantly, cle Gaulle's increclible,
blatantly lying statement immediately after his rerurn, blaming the
Communist party for what the French now call les ëuënements,
were part of the bargain. God knows, the only reproach the govern-
ment could have addressed to the Communist party an(l the trade
unions was tlrat they lacked the power to prevent les ëuënements.
xlrr, To PAGE54, NoTE 75
It would be interesring to know if, and to what an extent, the
alarming rate of unsolveclcrimes is matchecl nor only by the well-
known spectacularrise in criminal offensesbur also by a definite
increase in police brutality. The recently published Lrnfform Critne
Report lor the United States,by J. Edgar Hoover (FecleralBureau
of Investigation, United States Department of
Justice, rq67), gives
no indication how many crimes are acttrally solved-as distinguished
from "cleared by arrest"-but does menrion in the Summary rhar
police solutions of seriouscrimes declined in 1967 by 8fl. Only zr.7
(or zt.g)fo of all crimes are "cleared by arrest," and of these only
7g/o could be turned over to the courrs, where only about 6olo of
the indicted were found guiltyl Hence, the odds in favor of the
criminal are so high that rhe consrant rise in criminal offensesseems
only natural. Whatever the causes for the spectacular decline of
police efficiency,the decline of police powe. i, eviclenr, and with it
the likelihood of brutality increases.Students and other demonstra_
tors are like sitting ducks for police who have become used to
hardly ever catching a criminal.
A comparison of the situarion with that of other countries is
difficult becauseof the differenr statistical merhods employed. Still,
it appears that, thougl'r the rise of undetected crime seems to be a
fairly general problem, it has nowhere reached such alarming pro_
98
portions as in America. In I'aris, for inst:rnce, the rate of solvetl
crimes cleclinedfrotn 6zfo in rq67 to 5ô]i, in r968, in Gerlnany from
in Sweden 4rlo of crimes
7g.4To in rq54 to 5z.zo,/oin rq67, and
were solveclin 1967. (See "Deutsche l'olizei," in l)er Spiegel' April
7, r967.)
xtv. To PAGE55' NOTE76
Solzhenitsvnshows in concrete cletail how attemPts at a rational
economic tlevelopment were wrecked by Stalin's metho(ls, an<l one
hopes this book will put to rest the myth that terror and the enor-
mous lossesin human lives were the price that hacl to be paicl for
rapid inclustrialization of the country. Rapicl progrcss was macle
afier Stali''s tleath, and w6at is striking in Russia totlay is that the
country is still backwarclin comparison not only with the West but
also with most of the satellite countries. In Russia there seemsnot
much illusion left on this point, if there ever was any. The yottnger
generation, especiallythe veterans o[ the Second \Vorlcl War, knows
very wetl that only a miracle save<lRussia frorn defeat in rq4r, antl
that this miracle was the brutal fact that the en€my turned out to
be even worse tharr the native ruler. What then turned the scales
wâs that police terror abatecl trnder the pressure of the national
emergency; the people, left to themselves, coulcl again 8âther to-
gether aD(l generate enough Power to tlefeat the foreign invatler'
When tltel' retttrnecl from prisoner-o[-war camPs or from occttpatiotr
cluty they were PromPtly sent for long years to labor and concentra-
tion camps in orcler to break them of tlre hallits of freetlorn' It is
precisely this generation, which tasted freeclom during the war and
terror afterward, that is challenging the tyranny of the Present
regime.
xv, To PAGE66, NOrn 86
No one in his right sensescan believe-as certain German student
groups recently theorized-that only when the governÛrent has been
forcecl "to practice violence openly" will the rebels be able "to fight
with adequate means and
against tlris shit society (Scheissgesellschaft)
destroy it." (Quoted in Der Spiegel, February ro, 1969, p.3o') This
Iinguistically (though hardly intellectually) vulgarizecl new version
of the olcl Communist nonsenseof the thirties' that the victory of
fascism was all to the gootl for those who were against it' is either
sheer play-acting, the "revolutionary" r'ariant of hypocrisy, or testi-
fies to the political icliocy of "believers." Except that lorty years ago
99
it was Stalin's cleliberate pro-Hitler policy and not jusr stupid
theorizing that stood behin<l it.
To be sure, there is no reason for being particularly surprised that
German students are more given to theorizing and less gifted in
political action ancl judgment than their colleaguesin other, politi-
cally more fortunate, countries; nor that "the isolation of intelligent
and vital minds . . . in Germany" is more pronounced, the polariza-
tion more (lesperate,than elsewhere, and their impact ul)on the
political climate of their own counrry, except for backlash phe-
nomena, almost nil. I also would agree with Spender (see "The
Berlin Youth N,Iodel,"ln op. cit.) about the role playecl in this situa-
tion by the still-recent past, so that the studcnts "are resentecl,not
just on account of their violence, but because they are reminclers
. they also have tl're look of ghosts risen front hastily covered
graves." Anrl yet, when all this has been said ancl duly taken into
account, there remains the strange ancl disquieting fact that none
of the new leftist groups in Germany, whose vociferous opposition
to nationalist or imperialist policies of other counrries has been
notoriously extremist, has concerned itself seriously with tl-rerecogni-
tion of the Oder-NeisseLine, which, after all, is the crucial issue
of German foreign policy and the touchstoneof German narionalism
since the defeat of the Hitler regime.
xvr, To PAGE73, NoTE gg
Daniel Bell is cautiously hopeful becausehe is aware that scien-
tilic and technical work depend on "rheorerical knowletlge [that]
is souglrt, tested, anrl codifiecl in a disinterested way" (op. cit).
Perhaps this optimism can be justifred so long as rhe scientistsand
technologistsremain uninterested in power and are concernetl with
no more than social prestige, that is, so long as rhey neither rule
nor govern. Noam Chomsky's pessimism, "neither history nor psy-
chology nor sociology gives us any parricular reason to look forward
with hope to the rule of the new mandarins," may be excessive;
there are as yet no historical precedents, and the scientists ancl
intellectuals who, with such cleplorable regularity, have been found
willing to serve every governmenr thar happenecl to be in power,
have been no "meritocrats" but, rather. social climbers. But Chom-
sky is entirely right in raising the question: "Quite generally, what
grounds are there for supposing thar those whose claim to power
is based on knowledge and technique will be more benign in their
100
exercise of power than those whose claim is based on wealth or
aristocratic origin?" (Op. cit., P. 27.) And there is every reâson to
raise the complementary question: What grounds are there for sup-
posing that the resentment against a meritocracy, whose rule is ex-
clusively based on "natttral" gifts, that is, on brain Power, will be
no more clangerous, no more violent than the resentment of earlier
oppressedgroups who at least hacl the consolation that their condi-
tion was causeclby no "fatrlt" of their own? Is it not plausible to
assume that this resentment will harbor all the murclerous traits of
a racial antagonism, as distinguished from mere class conflicts,
inasmuch as it too will concern natural data which cannot be
changecl, hence a conclition from which one coulcl liberate oneself
only by extermination of those who happen to have a higher I.Q.?
Ancl since in such a constellation the ntlmerical power of the dis-
aclvantageclwill be overwhelming and social mobility irlmost nil, is
it not likely that the danger of demagogues,of popular leaders,will
be so great that the meritocracy will be forced into tyrannies and
despotism?
xvII, TO PAGI.77, NOrr ro6
Stewart Alsop, in a percePtive column, "The Wallace NIan," in
Neuszueek,()ctober zr, r968, makes the point: "It may be illiberal
of the wallace man not to want to senclhis children to bacl schools
in the name of integration, but it is not :rt all unnatural. And it is
'molestation' of
not unnatural either for him to worry about the
his wife, or about losing his equity in his ltouse,which is all he has!"
He also quotes the most effective statement of George Wallace's
demagoguery: "There are 535 members of Congrcss and a lot of
these liberals have children, too. You know how many send their
kids to the public schools in Washington? Six."
Another prime example of ill-designed integration policies was
recently published by NeiI Nlaxwell in The J|y'aIIStreet Journal
(August 8, rq68). The fecleral government Promotes school integra-
tion in the South by cutting off fetleral {unds in casesof flagrant
noncotnpliance. In one such instance, $zoo,ooo of annual aicl was
withhekl. "Of the total, $r75,ooo went directly to Negro schools. ..
Whites promptly raised taxes to replace the other $e5,ooo."In short,
what is supposed to help Negro eclucation actually has a "crushing
impact" on their existing school system and no impact at all on
white schools.
l0l
 rn thernurky
.,,*iT':Jlo"*,ill i:ff;ï croubretark
of lvest.
ern student debate, these issues seldom have a chance of being
clarified; indeed, "this community, verbally so raclical, has always
sought and found an escape," in the words of Gùnter Grass. It is
also true that this is especially noticeable and infuriating in Ger-
man students and other members of the New Left. ,,They don't Index
know anything, but they know it all," as a young historian in
Prague, according to Grass, sumrned it up. Hans IVlagnus E,nzens-
berger gives voice to the general German attitude; the Czechs suffer Algeria, 14, 53, 98 C o m m o n u , e a l ,z z
from "an extremely limited l"rorizon.Their political substance is Alsop. Stewart, ror Commentary, z9n
meager." (SeeGùnter Grass,op. cit., pp. r38-r42.) In conrrast to rhis American Political Science Re' Cooper, D. G., gt
mixture of stupidity and impertinence, the atmosphere among"the uieu, The, 7zn Cornell University, r8, 9r
eastern rebels is refreshing, although one shudclers to think of tl-re Aron, Raymond, 4gn, 89-9o Cromer, Lord, 54
exorbitant price that has been paid for it. Cuba, ztn
Jan Kavan, a Czech stu-
dent leader, writes: "I have often been told by my friends in west- Bakunin, N{ikhail, 89 Czeclroslovakia,zq, 53, 83, roz
ern Europe that we are only fighting for bourgeois-democratic Barion, Jacob, rzn
freedoms. But somehow I cannot seem ro distinguish between capi Barnes, Peter, zgn Declijer, Vladimir, ron
talist freedoms and socialist freedoms. What I recognize are baiic Beaufre, André, 5n de Gaulle, Charles, 5o, 98
lruman freedonrs." (Ramparts, September 1968.) It is safe to assume Bell, Daniel, 73, roo Deming, Barbara, 7rn
that he would have a similar difficulty with the distinction between Bergson, Henri, rz, 70, 73, 71 DesJardins, Gregory, 4on
"progressive and repressive violence." However, it would be wrong Berlin, Isaiah, z7n Dreyfus, Alfred, 7r
to conclude, as is so frequently done, that people in the western Bidault, Georges,98 Dutschke, Rudi, 79n
countries have no legirimate complaints precisely in tl.re matter of Bodin, Jean, 38
freedom. To be sure, ir is only narural .,that the artitude of the Bôll, Heinrich, 46n Ehmann, Christoph, z5n
Czech to the western srudenrs is largely coloured by envy" (quoted Borkenau, Franz, 47n-48n Encounter, qg
from a student paper by Spender, op. cit., p. Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 92, 93 EncyclopaediaBritannica, 96
7e), but it is alsà true
that they lack certain, less brutal and yet very decisive experiences Encyclopedia of the Social
in political frustration. Calder, Nigel, 3n, 5n, ron, 6:n Sciences, 8
Casro, Fidel, zrn Engels, Frieclrich, 4, g, r2Yr, 20,
Catherine the Great, 74 zzn, 89
China, z tn England, 38, 53, 54, 92
Chomsky, Noam, 7,7n' r4rr' 23n, d'Entrèves, Alexander Passerin,
48n, 64n, 93, roo-tor 3i'38' $' 97
Cicero, 43n Enzensberger, Hans l\'Iagnus,
City College of New York, r8, 9r r02
Clausewitz,Karl von, 8-9, ro, 36, Europe, 6, t5, 53, 6q, tos
37rr
Columbia UniversitY, 79, 9z Falk, Richard A, g+
Commager, HenrY Steele' ry' 54, Fanon, Frantz, r2, 14, 20, 2rn,
8bn' 94 6 5 , 6 7 , 6 9 ,7 t , 7 5 , 9 o

103
102
 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 89
Finer, S. E., 7zn, 8rn
Fogelson, Robert M., 76n
Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de,
25
l-orman, James, 77, 94
95, 96
France. 15, 88, Eg, 29,
99, gg
Fulbright, William, r6-r7
Gandhi, Mahatma, 53
Gans, Herberr J., 83n
Germany, r5, r8, zgn, z4-2b, 42,
So, gg, 79, 96, 99, roo, ro2
Glazer, Nathan, gr-gz
Goodwin, Richard N., 7
Grass, Gûnter, 79n-8on,83n, roz
Gray; J. Glenn, 67n
Greece, 5on
Guevara, Che, zrn
Habermas, Jûrgen, 96
Halevy, Daniel, 7on
Harbold, William H., z6n
Harvard University, gr, gz,
93
Hechinger, Fred M., 7gn, 94
Hegel, Georg Friedrich, r2-tg,
26, 27, a8, 56, 9o
Heidelberg University, 9z
Herzen, Alexander, z7
Hitler, Adolf, 4r, 59, roo
Hobbes, Thomas, 5, 38, 68
Ho Chi Nfinh, zr
Hoover, J. Edgar, 98
Hull University, 89
India, 53
Japan, r5, 59
Jouvenel, Bertrand de, g6, 37,
98, 4r, 74n, 97
104
Kant, Immanuel, z7 Nechaer,, Sergey Kravinsky, 89 Sakharov, Andrei D., g-ro, 46n,
Kavan, Jan, roz New Left, rr, r3-r4, 13, 89, roe 83n, 97
Klineberg, Otto, 6gn New Republic, The, b4n, 92, 94 Salan, Raoul, q8
Kohout, Pavel, 83 New York Daily News, gg S a r t r e ,J e a n - P a u l , r s , l B , 2 0 , 2 1 ,
New Yorh Reuieu of Books, r6n, 36, 89, go-qr
Lacheroy, Colonel, 98
89, 95 Schaar, John, r6n, 2gn, 45n, gr,
Laing, R. D., qr New York Times, r9n, 46n, 7gn,
92-93
Lenin, Nikolai, g, rz, zz, z4
94' 95 Schapiro, Leonard, 89
Lessing, Gorthold Ephraim, 15 New York Times Llagazine, r6n
Schelling, Thomas C., 7n
Lett.sin, Jerome, r6n, 17 Neu Yorher, The, 7n, r9n
Schelsky, Helmut, gr
Liberation, 7tn
Newsweek, 2qn, lor Science,6on
Lindsay, .fohn V., 94
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 44, 73, 74 Selden, John, 84
Litten, Jens, 8r
Nisbet, Robert A., z8n Silver, Allan A., 7jn
Lorenz, Konrad, 6rn, 69
Nixon, Richard, 86 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I., bS,
Lùbke, Karl-tleinz, 45n
99
Lynd, Staughron, rg, 95 O'Brien, Conor Cruise, 79
Sorel, Georges,r2, 20, A5, 65, 69,
O'Brien, William, 79 7o,7t,72,8t
Madison, James, 4r
Spain, 5 r
Mao Tse-tung, rr, 2ln, Parekh, B. C., 8q
38 S p e n d e r ,S t e p h e n , r 7 n , r 8 , z r n ,
Nfassu,.facques, 5o Pareto, Vilfredo, 6b, 7t, j2, 8r, s3n, 2gn, 42, 4grt-bon,66n, ge,
N , I a r x ,K a r l , l r , 1 2 , r 3 , r 5 n , z o ,
8r 94, loo, l02
2r, 22, 24, 2b, 26, 27, Pascal, Blaise, zg
86, 56, Spengler, Oswald, 69
72, 74, 89, 96 Péguy, Charles. zg Spiegel, Der, r4n-t5n, 2gn, zbn,
MassachusettsInstitute of Tech-
Pétain, Henri Philippe, 98 79n, 8on, gg
nology, 16, r7, 93 Plato, 44 Stalin, .|oseph, fi, Sb, 99, roo
Maxwell, Neil, ror
Portmann, Adolf, 6o, 93 Steinfels, Peter, z3
McCarthy, Eugene, 85-86
Princeton University, gz, 94 Strausz-Hupé,Robert, 96-97
Mclver, R. I\1., g7n
Proudhon, P.-J., 7, z6 Students for a Democratic
tr{elville, Herman, 64
Public Interest, The, 7gn, gr Society (SDS), 66n
Mill, John Stuart, 3q,
4o Sweden, gg
Nfills, C. Wright,
35 Ramparts, toz
Mitscherlich, Alexander, 6rn
Rand Corporation, 5n Theatre of ldeas, 79
Montesquieu, Charles L. de,
4r Renan, Joseph Ernest, 8 Thring, M. W., ron
Rèuieu ol Politics, z6n Tinbergen, Nikolas, 6on, 6zn
Napoleon Bonaparte, 5r,
79 Robespierre, Maximilien, 65 Tito, Josip Broz, zrn
National Black Economic De-
Rockefeller, Nelson A., 86 Trotsky, Leon, 35n
velopment Conference, q6
Rousseau,Jean Jacques, 37n
National Guard, zq, 54 Russia, 5e-S3,55-56, 99 U n i t e d S t a t e s ,5 - 6 , r 5 , r 8 , r g , 2 4 ,
National Liberation Front,
4g Rustin, Bavard, 95 rqn, 48, 8o, 85-86, 98-99
105
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University of California (Berke- Wallace, John IvI., 4on

ley), r6n, e8'29'45n' 54,9r'
92' 94
Valéry, Paul Ambroise, 86-87
Venturi, Franco, :7n
Verdun, 98
Vietnam, 14, 48, 5r, 54' 64n' 94
Voltaire, François, 36
von Holst, Erich, 6on, 6zn
Wald, George, r8, 93
Wallace, Gcorge, tot
Vl/all Street Journal, The, ror
Weber, Max, 35, 36' 37n
Wheeler, HarveY, 3n, 9n, ron
Wilson, Edmund, 3on
Wilson, James, 6
Wolin, Sheldon, r6n, zgn, 45n
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