the last revolution

◄	THE LAST REVOLUTION: FREEDOM and POWER

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Locke:

Social Order

In a series of Letters on Toleration, John Locke argued against the exercise of any governmental effort to promote or to restrict particular religious beliefs and practices. His epistemology is directly relevant to this issue: since we cannot know perfectly the truth about all differences of religious opinion, Locke held, there can be no justification for imposing our own beliefs on others. Thus, although he shared his generation's prejudice against "enthusiastic" expressions of religious fervor, Locke officially defended a broad toleration of divergent views.

Locke's political philosophy found its greatest expression in the Two Treatises of Civil Government. The Second Treatise on Government develops Locke's own detailed account of the origin, aims, and structure of any civil government. Adopting a general method similar to that of Hobbes, Locke imagined an original state of nature in which individuals rely upon their own strength, then described our escape from this primitive state by entering into a social contract under which the state provides protective services to its citizens. Unlike Hobbes, Locke regarded this contract as revokable. Any civil government depends on the consent of those who are governed, which may be withdrawn at any time.

Since standing laws continue in force long after they have been established, Locke pointed out that the legislative body responsible for deciding what the laws should be need only meet occasionally, but the executive branch of government, responsible for ensuring that the laws are actually obeyed, must be continuous in its operation within the society. In similar fashion, he supposed that the federative power responsible for representing this particular commonwealth in the world at large, needs a lengthy tenure. Locke's presumption is that the legislative function of government will be vested in a representative assembly, which naturally retains the supreme power over the commonwealth as a whole: whenever it assembles, the majority of its members speak jointly for everyone in the society. The executive and federative functions, then, are performed by other persons (magistrates and ministers) whose power to enforce and negotiate is wholly derived from the legislative. But since the legislature is not perpetually in session, occasions will sometimes arise for which the standing laws have made no direct provision, and then the executive will have to exercize its prerogative to deal with the situation immediately, relying upon its own counsel in the absence of legislative direction. It is the potential abuse of this prerogative, Locke supposed, that most often threatens the stability and order of a commonwealth.

Revolution

Whether any specific use of executive prerogative amounts to an abuse of power, is a question that transcends the social contract itself, and can only be judged by a higher appeal, to the divinely ordained law of nature. Remember that according to Locke all legitimate political power derives solely from the consent of the governed to entrust their "lives, liberties, and possessions" to the oversight of the community as a whole, as expressed in the majority of its legislative body. The commonwealth as a whole, then, is dissolved (and a new one formed) whenever there is a fundamental change in the membership of the legislature.

The most likely cause of such a revolution, Locke supposed, would be abuse of power by the government itself: when the society unduly interferes with the property interests of the citizens, they are bound to protect themselves by withdrawing their consent. When great mistakes are made in the governance of a commonwealth, only rebellion holds any promise of the restoration of fundamental rights. Who is to be the judge of whether or not this has actually occurred? Only the people can decide, Locke maintained, since the very existence of the civil order depends upon their consent. On Locke's view, then, the possibility of revolution is a permanent feature of any properly-formed civil society. This provided a post facto defense of the Glorious Revolution in England and was a significant element in attempts to justify later popular revolts in America and France.

		Velvet Revolution ----->

	The Jasmine Revolution, the Egyptian Revolution, Euromaidan: it is hard to imagine now, exactly one hundred years after the fact, that the Russian Revolution promised to be the last revolution. Despite the Bolshevik’s optimism and dreams of equality, the Russian Revolution, like other revolts, brought about a terrifying destruction of liberty, values and truth.

Revolutions continued to occur, and questions about the destiny of humankind and society remain unanswered. Why do revolutions happen? What are the powers that liberate, and what are the powers that oppress? What can we learn from the fact that the French Revolution ended in terror and the Russian Revolution degenerated into totalitarianism, while the American Revolution was successful?

Will the last revolution be for
freedom and human dignity?

On Saturday 18 November, the Nexus Institute brought together writers, thinkers, diplomats, politicians and activists from around the world who addressed these questions and looked for answers, ideas and arguments. Which movements will bring freedom in the twenty-first century? Who will oppose power and rise against it? Where will they find strength and inspiration? And what will be the true last revolution?

Nexus Conference 2017 The Last Revolution

Paris, 1850
In his hotel room, a Russian exile is writing down his thoughts on the failed revolutions of 1848 and 1949, to which he was a witness. He left his homeland in 1847, never to return, revolted by the despotism of the Tsar and the tyranny of intellectual and moral backwardness. He is even more disappointed by the fact that the European revolutions failed to deliver the freedom they promised. But he realizes that they could not have delivered on their promise, because the revolutionaries were possessed by an ideological utopia rather than having their minds set on actual freedom, and because the masses did not really desire freedom at all. To his disappointment, his friends like Garibaldi, Mazzini and Jules Michelet failed to understand this. Despite all this, he publishes an issue of his journal The Bell every week, like a Russian Voltaire, driven by his personal passion for the freedom of each human individual and his conviction that without this freedom and the moral values it requires, no civilized society can exist. His intellectual independence, his qualities as a writer and his struggle against all forms of tyranny won him the posthumous admiration of such diverse figures as Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Isaiah Berlin. These three intellectuals, facing the same question — how to defend freedom from the powers of illiberalism — were inspired by the words Alexander Herzen, a socialist, liberal and European humanist avant la lettre, wrote in his Paris hotel room in 1850 while working on his book From the Other Shore.

Yasnaya Polyana, 1869
At home, 200 kilometres south-west of Moscow, Leo Tolstoy is writing a second epilogue to conclude his epic work War and Peace. He has been working on the book for seven years — years in which he, as a novelist, used the power of his imagination to address the fundamental questions historians had failed to answer. What is the power that moves peoples? Why do people do what they do? In antiquity, it was thought there was a divine power to which people were subjected. The modern science of history knows better. But, Tolstoy noted, it only seeks to describe the expressions of power, rather than studying and explaining its causes. It does not answer the important questions: What is power? Where does power reside, and why? Why do people obey great men? And what makes them great? When and why do people rise up to resist power? Why is slaughtering a whole nation at the command of an emperor justified, while killing a single human being is murder? How free are people? Does man have a free will? What is freedom? What is the relationship between freedom and inevitability? What makes people free? What causes historical events? Is it God, or Reason? Is history guided by laws, or are human beings responsible for their own fates?

Prinkipo, 1930
On this island off the coast of Istanbul, another Russian exile has been residing for the past year. Unlike Alexander Herzen, he did not leave Russia willingly. Like the princes in ancient Byzantium, banned to this ‘Princes’ Island’ by the ruler who feared their power, Leon Trotsky was imprisoned here by Stalin. Trotsky is writing his History of the Russian Revolution, a history that is also, in large part, the story of his life. Together with Lenin, he led the October Revolution of 1917 which ended the centuries-old rule of the tsars. He was the chief strategist and commander of the Red Army which, against all odds and expectations, with few resources and in the middle of the chaos of the First World War, managed to emerge victorious. Together with Lenin, he was also the main ideologue of Bolshevism. The questions Tolstoy pondered are not Trotsky’s questions, because the latter already knows the answers. There is no God, but history is subject to laws, and, as he writes in his preface, ‘the discovery of these laws is the author’s task.’

i. the world of power
If Thomas Hobbes, one of the most brilliant thinkers on the phenomenon of power, writes: ‘In the first place I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual restless desire of Power, after Power, that ceaseth only in Death’; and if a no less brilliant thinker like Friedrich Nietzsche concludes that human existence is determined by the ‘will to power’; and if even Simone Weil, who hated the hunger for power more than anyone, is forced to infer that ‘there is no other force on this earth except force’; then all these voices are but an echo of the account of the origin of mankind in the Book of Genesis, which declares that man is created to rule over nature. The desire for power, the possession of power, the exercise of power is an indelible part of human nature. Yet because there are humans, and not a single human being, peoples, and not a single person, and because every human individual is shaped by instincts, by contradictory emotions, but also by a sense of values; we are also creatures that need order: social order, a world order, a way of life — the ideal of civilization described by Simone Weil.

ii. the world of freedom
The brilliant Italian humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is only 24 when, in 1487, he publishes his ode to freedom, De hominis dignitate (‘Oration on the Dignity of Man’), in which he puts these immortal words into the mouth of the Deity: We have given you, Oh Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor any endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgment and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very centre of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine. No matter how elegantly freedom as the essence of mankind has been worded here, the Deity forgets one crucial fact, a fact recorded in His own story of the Creation: the freedom of man begins with rebellion! Only by refusing to obey and by eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil does humanity attain the freedom with which its history begins. Our freedom is always the result of a choice to be free; to orient your thinking against the established order and to be aware that you are responsible for the choice between good and evil. And so the predicament of human existence began.

To his great disappointment, Alexander Herzen realized that the revolutions of 1848 and 1849 failed because the masses did not really want to be free. But what is needed to transform the masses into individuals of a united humanity, which cherishes freedom and human dignity? Would that not truly be the last revolution?

Rob Riemen Founder and president of the Nexus Institute

what is needed to transform the masses into individuals of a united humanity, which cherishes freedom and human dignity? Would that not truly be the last revolution?

‘The Last Revolution’ is a reference to Trotsky’s belief that the Russian Revolution, a hundred years ago by this point, would be the last. For the afternoon debate on the subject ‘the world of freedom’, Aleksandr Dugin and Antony Blinken sat together at a round table, along with other speakers. Dugin, famous as Putin’s philosopher and whisperer, said the following:

Russia has a civilization of its own, which you could call Eurasian. Among us the people, the collective identity with its own history, traditional values and religion, is paramount. God, church and soul determine our human dignity and we detest Western individualism and materialism, the spiritual emptiness that is filled with technology and science. We practise the conservative revolution to guard our own identity, and our greatest enemies are liberalism and globalism. To defend our civilization, Greater Russia must be restored and as a first step towards that we will incorporate the Ukraine once more. The Ukraine is not a country in its own right, it has no culture of its own, Kiev has always been part of Russia. With China and Islam we resist the unipolar world with the global West as its centre and with the United States as its core. This kind of unipolarity has geopolitical and ideological characteristics. Geopolitically, it is the strategic dominance of the Earth by the North American hyperpower and the effort of Washington to organize the balance of forces on the planet in such a manner as to be able to rule the whole world in accordance with its own national, imperialistic interests. It is bad because it deprives other states and nations of their real sovereignty. When there is only one power which decides who is right and who is wrong, and who should be punished and who not, we have a form of global dictatorship. This is not acceptable. The American Empire should be destroyed. There will be war, but our war will be a civilizing mission, just as the European crusades in the Middle Ages.

Antony Blinken responded as follows.

President Roosevelt provided the American people with a rationale for abandoning isolationism. He argued that our own democracy and the freedoms it guaranteed were at risk: ‘The future and safety of our country and of our democracy are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our borders.’ And he looked to a world founded on four essential human freedoms – of speech and religion, and from want and fear – that could only be guaranteed by an engaged America. President Roosevelt laid the foundation for an open, connected America in an open, connected world. Now, the failure to convince of its benefits and address its downsides – and the fears and frustrations of those left out or left behind – risks a fatal crisis of legitimacy for the world that America built.

As we build new economic ties – through trade, automation, digitization – how do we ensure that creative disruption does not become destruction of people’s livelihoods and sense of self? As we form new cultural connections – through migration and the adoption of universal norms – how do we preserve traditional values and identities? As we bridge physical borders – accelerating even more the free movement of people, products, ideas and information – how do we simultaneously secure them and our sense of personal safety? As we increase cooperation and coordination among nations – through alliances and international institutions and shared rules – how do we hold onto a sense of national sovereignty? At the heart of these challenges is one of the most powerful human yearnings: for dignity. It informs who we are as individuals, what we are as a nation and where we go as a community of nations. It is an article of faith among democrats that free societies best promote and defend human dignity.

Speakers:

Sjeik Rached Ghannouchi, one of the main opponents of the autocratic Tunisian president Kais Saied, has been arrested april 2023 at his home in Tunis. Ghannouchi's party was the largest when Saied dissolved parliament in July 2021. The former parliament speaker is said to have said that a civil war is imminent if political Islam is eradicated. He has already appeared in court in several cases.