Revolutionary Violence

Abstract

Alongside utopianism and scientism, totalitarianism has a third and final current: revolutionary violence. We have seen so far that, in totalitarian ideology, it is utopianism that defines the terms of community, and scientism that defines the terms of historical justification. Revolutionary violence is the current that defines the terms for political action. Once more, there is a particular intellectual milieu in which one theme in totalitarian thought has found dominant expression: revolutionary violence is the theme accentuated in anti-totalitarian thought in France. Explicit debate about totalitarianism came relatively late to France, only arriving in the late 1970s, in the course of the impact of the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Needless to say, therefore, debate about totalitarianism in France was really a debate about the nature of communism. But there was more to it than that. It was also, at the same time, a debate about the continuing reception of the French Revolution: the vital figures in French anti-totalitarian thought are, in many ways, the French Revolution’s revisionist historians.