Revisiting The Longing for Total Revolution

ABSTRACT

This paper reconsiders the arguments of my book, The Longing for Total Revolution, in response to the thoughtful analyses collected in this symposium. It restates the book’s main genealogical and critical arguments about the philosophical sources of uniquely modern forms of social discontent, while distinguishing those arguments from recent attempts to uncover the deeper, theological sources of discontent. It focuses, in particular, on the role played in modern social discontent by the group of thinkers I describe as the “Kantian left”: a long line of social critics who sought to “realize” Kant’s understanding of human autonomy in society, thereby gaining what Marx called “control and conscious mastery” over our social world, not just over our wills.

Keywords:

• freedom
• Hegel
• Kant
• Marx
• Rousseau
• revolution
• Schiller

Notes

1 The Longing for Total Revolution began as a Ph.D. thesis in the Harvard Government department, completed in 1981. The thesis lacked the book’s chapters on the Kantian left and the Hegelian left, and much else besides. The book was published in 1986 with Princeton University Press. A paperback version, with a new Preface, was published in 1992 by University of California Press, and it is being brought back into print in 2022 by that press.

2 Nor, for that matter, was I aiming to defend “ancient” as opposed to the “modern” approaches to our humanity that were exemplified by Kant. Kant’s “de-naturing” of our conception of humanity runs counter to most modern thinking that preceded him and a great deal of what followed in his wake. When I noted that the ancient sources who inspired Rousseau would have rejected his identification of moral virtue with a “denaturing” process of education, I was pointing to their rejection of the separation of our conception of our humanity from our nature, rather than a supposedly superior view that identifies our humanity solely with our nature. I suppose that there are some ancient thinkers who take that view, but Professor Thiele is certainly right to emphasize that Aristotle is not one of them.

3 For discussion of Engels’s reversal of Hegel’s formula, see Rosenzweig 1980, vol. 2, 79-82, and Fackenheim 1970, 690-98.

4 I ended Chapter Three of The Longing for Total Revolution by wondering if Habermas’s ideas might be preparing a new wave of left Kantianism (Yack 1986, 132). The answer to that question is clearly no.