Suchergebnisse

The question about the relationship between revolution and progress is the centerpiece of this essay. A specific solution to this question is expressed by a well-known metaphor invented by Marx -"revolutions are the locomotives of history". The rendering of this metaphor in the language of theory uncovers certain ambiguities and tensions inherent in it, some of which are caused by a collision of positivist-evolutionist and dialectical-revolutionist strands of Marx's thought. The actual revolutions of the twentieth century turned these tensions into political reality. Progress is a form of social development which converts history into evolution removing the former's open-endedness and the variability of the trajectories of societal movement, which is precisely what distinguishes history from evolution. However tragic the concrete manifestation of a revolution can be, it interrupts the progress-as-evolution and restores, at least for the time being, history as history. Thus, Walter Benjamin's metaphor of revolution as an attempt undertaken by the passengers on the train of progress to "activate the emergency brake", all its own ambiguities notwithstanding, offers a much more adequate image of the relationship between revolution and progress.

The book aspires to show the inherent paradoxes of the "pure idea" of freedom and its foreignness, and possible contrariety, revealed in and by some specific historical-political contexts, to freedom as practice of human liberation. This theme is looked at mainly through the prism of Kant's moral and political philosophy, which—by way of critical engagement with it—offers a particularly propitious vantage point for its exploration and elaboration. Kant's Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, with its dramatic juxtaposition and conjoining of freedom with evil, along with its emphasis on "radical evil" and, at the same time, its dismissal of "diabolic evil" (as something applicable to and practicable by humans) is particularly seminal in this respect. The book furnishes a political-philosophical reading of the paradoxes of Kant's account of freedom and culminates in showing what they reveal and allow us to come to grips with politics in "real life", in particular the politics of great revolutions.

1. Introduction (Russia as a part of Europe).