.

Social and Economic: Studies 44:2 & 3 (1995J

ISSN: 0037-7651

REVO LUTI ONITH EORY/M DOE RN ITY

NOTES

ON

THE

COGNITIVE-POLITICAL
OF"

CRISIS

OUR TIME

DAVID SCOTT

r
""

Men fight and lose the battle, and the thing they fought for comes
about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out nor to
be what they meallt, and other men have to fight for what they
meant under another name.
- William Morris

III the following chapter Karl Marx will be criticized. This is untot-

..
~

runare at ,I time when so many writers who once made their living
by explicit or tacit borrowing from the great wealth of Marxian
ideas and insights have decided to become professional anci-Msrxists, in tb process of which one of them even discovered that Karl
Marx hillJselfwas unable to make a living, forgetting for the 1II0-

ment the generations of authors whom he has 'supported'.

- Hannah Arendt

In Marxism's Wake
l.

Visiting Marx in 1881, Karl Kautskv asked him whether he did not concernplate bringing out an edition of his complete works, whereupon the aging
Marx replied: "These works must first be wr it ten." Hannah Arendt, who
recalls this telling anecdote in a footnote in her important chapter on "Labour"
in The Human Condit i.), recalls it to mark a cautionary cent rust between
those readings of Marx (gaining popularity in the Cold War of the late 1940s
and 1950s) which seem always-already to have summarized and positioned

him, <1'hd Marx's more tentative, more ironic attitude to his own - unfinished
- work.' It is sobering, 1 think, to bear this anecdote in mind as we (lee these
days from a fiercely renounced and seemingly indefensible Marxism into the

',I.

'f
,

gentle embrace of an updated and visibly welcoming liberalism.

Hannah Arendt, Till' HllIJ1illl Coudiucn:

10411.

~I

Pp 1-2)

(CI\i(;j~o:

Lnivcr su y of Chicago Press, 1958), p.

2 S<XlAI. ANDECONOMICSTUDIES

It is a singular feature of the cognitive-political crisis of our time, per-

i'
~1
~I
~.

I,r:;

RevolutlonfTheory/Modernlty

haps, that giving up Marxism seems to many to entai/embracing liberalism or

at any rate criticizing or correcting Marxism ill the name oniberalism's famil-

The hinge of this connection between Marxism and liberalism, of course,

is to be sought in the project of the Enlightenment, the cognltive-poiitlcal and
epistemological-institutional establishment of the forms of the modern. Now,

iar principles - the sacredness of "individual right," for instance, or the pri-

what do I mean by the modern or Enlightenment project? In what sense

macy of "the market," or the privilege of "secular rationality," or the transparency of "personal freedom." With an almost tedious regularit y these days,
and with a surprising absence of any embarrassment, we hear about Marxism's
lack of appreciation for rights and procedures, for complexity and pluralism,
for indeterminacy and contingency. What Marxism lacks, so we are told
unabashedly, is a real sense of the principles - political and epistemological of democracy. And much of this, of course, is offered in the name of a recently acquired taste for postmodern uncertainty and autonomy.' One need
not be an apologist for the dogmas of historical materialism to recognize that
what such writers - in their unseemly haste to forget the past - fail to
sufficiently appreciate is the more fundamental conceptual ground already
shared by both and Marxism and liberalism. They therefore miss the significance of what is most salient in the current global politico-historical conjuncture - a conjuncture in which Marxism and the communist project it inspired appears to have driven itself into an impasse, when Third World
socialisms have been replaced by liberalization and structural adjustment
programmes, and when varieties of neo-liberalisrn are everywhere seeking to

ought one to speak of the project of the Enlightenment since, surely, the
various "national" Enlightenments of European historiography (Scottish,
French, German, etc.) did not constitute a coherent, homogeneous singularity? And why are we now to give up the Truths (about Reason, about History, about Progress) of which this project has sought to persuade us since at
least the end of the eighteenth century? These are crucial questions. Much of
what is salient in contemporary cultural-political debate turns on how we
come out on them. In his recent polemic against the "new liberalism," John
Gray has put the matter usefully:

make themselves the norm. Surely, what is most crucial in this conjuncture is
not another rehearsal of the well-known enterprise of humanising Marxism
(liberalizing it, for instance, with a supplement of "agency"), nor yet another
return to a more authentic reading of Marx's founding texts (to determine
what he might really have meant), but a careful and critical inquiry into
precisely this profound connection itself between Marxism and liberalism. J

The core project of the Enlightenment was th~ displacement of

local, customary or traditional moralities, and of all forms of transcendental faith, by a critical or rational morality, which was projected as the basis of a universal civilization. Whether it was conceived in utilitarian or contractarian, rights-based or dut v-based
terms, this morality would be secular and humanist, and it wuuld
set universal standards for the assessment of human institutions.
'\fhe core project of the Enlightenment was the construction of such
a critical morality, rationally binding on all human beings, and as a
corollary, the creation of a universal civilization. This is the project
that animated Marxism and liberalism in all their varieties, which
underpins l-oth the new liberalism and neo-conservatism, and to
which every significant body of opinion in the United States continues to subscribe.'
Notice what is at stake in the Enlightenment project so understood, The

;/
1

rJ
:1

For one such argumentee Falke Lindahl, "Caribbean Diversit y and Ideological Conform,
ism: The Crisis of Marxism in the English.Speaking Caribbean" Social sud Economic Studies 43(3) (1994): 57.74.

salient feature of the project of the modern is not (as liberalism's autobiography would have us believe) the bestowal of freedom of choice upon the indio
vidual, nor (as Marxism's autobiography urges us to believe) the hegemony of
bourgeois interests. Rather, the salient feature of the modern is the inaugura-

Note that this is categorically 1I0C to .ay that an understanding of Marx is irrelevant to our
present, that we should all stop reading Marx. If we abandon "Marxist Philosophy" this is
not to .ay that we should abandon a place for Marx - or even "Marx's philosophy" - in our
attempts to grapple with our present. The later work of Stuart Hall comes immediately to
mind in this regard. See, for instance, his "The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without
Guarantees" journal of CommulI;cacioll Inquiry 10(2) (1986): 2945.

social life as such: its task is the creation of conditions in which old choices
are increasingly disabled and new ones enabled. It is a form of power, there-

See also Etienne Balibar's recent attempt to think a relation to Marx, The Philmnrhy of
Marx (New York: Verso, 1995).

See "After the New Liberalism", in his Enliglueutnent' Wake: Politics sod Culture Br the
Close of the Modem Age (New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 12l124.

tion of a form of power that has as its fundamental target the conditions of

ill

I"
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1:1

Revolutlon/Theory/Modernlty

4 SOCIAL ANDECONOMIC S1UDIES

fore, that is radically destructive (of "irrational" social forms) and reconstruc-

",I

'iI,

current ethical-political conjuncture: an interrogation of the senses in which

tive (of rational-secular-progressive ones). This is particularly crucial to un-

(or levels at which) Marxism and liberalism are anchored in the restructur-

derstand for those social spaces that were transformed by modern colonial

ing project of the Enlightenment. It seems to me that only this kind of

power, whose subjects have been, in effect, "conscripts of Western civiliza-

historicization of our political present can begin to produce the conceptual

tion." As Talal Asad has argued in his essay of that title: "Essentially, the

space in which alternative non.modernizing/non-modernist futures might

West has become a vast moral project, an intimidating claim to write and

effectively be imagined.

speak for the world, and an unending politicization of power. Becoming West-

It is in the context of this historical predicament - the seeming exhaus-

ern has meant becoming transformed according to these things, albeit in a

tion of the vocabulary of modern left politics, the remarkable surrender of

variety of historical circumstances and with varying degrees of thorough-

left-wing intellectuals to the most uncunning and banal liberalism, the appar-

ness. For conscripts of Western civilizations this transformation implies that

ent intransigence of the present to conceptual refiguration or redescription,

some desires have been forcibly eliminated - even violently - and others put

the seeming absence in it of political alternatives - that I want to turn to the

in their place. The modern state, invented in Europe, is the universal condi-

political-theoretical problem of revolution," After all, whether as something

tion of that transfurmatiun. And of its 'higher t ruth'."? What is at stake, it

to fear or as something to desire, revolution has been one of the central

seems to me, is not gelling out of this moder nit y, as refusing to accept the

categories of the philosophical as well as of the political discourse of our

terms of its normalization, that is to say, the normalization of this "higher

modernity.

truth."
Readers of Alasdair Madnt yre's ruucl) argued about After Virtue will

Concepts Have Histories

remember that this question of the relation between Marxism and liberalism

I want to stand on this basic epistemological point: concepts have histories. 51

is one of the questions that sets the stage for the moves he makes in that text

shall stand on it because I think that the implications of it are fundamental in

(among them the introduction of a revised version of the concept of a "tradition" to which I shall return because it enables, I believe a repositioning of

this sense t~lat if you accept its epistemological premise there is no coherent
way back to the prevailing normalizing sociological functionalism that reads

the idea and the task uf sucial and political criticism). Madnt yre argues that

concepts as so many transhistorical reiterations of some self-standing reality.

"Marxism's moral defects and failures" are not to be understood as somehow

The point I want to make, I will argue, is not a nominalist one about the

internally sui generis (as varieties of anti-Marxism would have it), but rather

power of words. Rather it is a point about the relation between languages of

"arise from the extent to which it, like liberal individualism, embodies the

representation and the conceptual assumptions mapped unto them. If we are

ethos of a distinctively modern and mudernizing world." From which it fol-

to give up (as I think we ought to do) the realist or correspondential under-

lows that "nothing less than a rejection of a large par t of that ethos will

standing of the relation between language and the Real - that understanding

provide us with a rationally and morally defensible standpoint from which to

that authorizes a search for the proximity of representation to the Real -

judge and to act - and in terms of which to evaluate various rival and hetero-

then we have to admit that these representations have densities that require

geneous moral schemes which compete for our allegiance."" This, it seems to

our attention and that the question of history has also to be a history of our

me, is what is at stake - or what, anyhow, ougli: to be at stake - in the

I
\

See Talal Asad, "Conscripts of Wcster n Civilisat ion" in Christine Ward (,ailey (ed) Civil;"'"
liOJ) ill Lri.i. vol, I of Dislcctic! AIIlhropo/o/iY: E..,a)'.1 ill HOJ",,,r or Stallle)' Diamolld
(Gaiusville: University Press of Florida, 1992), p. 145. Sec also my own "Colonial
Governmentalily" Social Texl41 (Summer 1995): 191-220.

Alasdair Macintyre, Arter V;rI"e, Zud Edition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1984), p. x. For discussions of Maclnl vre's work see John l lor rou and Susan Mendus
(eds) Aher Meclnt vrc: Crilical Perspectives 011 the work or A/a .dair Mac/III yre (NOire
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994).

1 take up other aspects of this matter in "The Aftermath. of Sovereignty: Postcolonial Criticism and the Cia; ms of Polit ical Modernity" forthcoming in Social Texc 46 (Summer 1996).

1 have worked with this - to my mind - fundamental argument in my book, Formstions of

Ritusl: Colonial and Amhropologicsl Discourses on the Sinhala Ysktovi! (Minneapolis: Uni
versity of Minnesota Press, 1994), and more recently, "Religion in Colonial Civil Society:
Buddhism and Modernit y in 19th Century Sri Lanka" Cultursl Dynsmics 8 (1) (1996): 7-23.

I!

Revolution/Theory/Modernity

6 SOCIAl. ANDECONOMIC STUDIES

categories. Only then can we ask whether our concepts are adequate to our
.present, whether they can be reappropriated through a refigured semantic
content, or whether they ought to be abandoned altogether. On my reading
of it, Michel Foucault's entire oeuvre - from the early work on madness to
the later work on politics and ethics - constitutes an exercise in the elaboration of this point.
Let me begin by reflecting briefly on a recent book that aims to address
what appears at first glance to be some pertinent questions about revolution
for the common life we inhabit. It ought to be understood, however, that I am
concerned less with the specific details of the thesis advanced in this book
than with the kinds of assumption that animate its argument. This is because
my overall aim is to argue that the general project reflected in books such as
this is a faulty one and to urge that a very different set of preoccupations
ought to define the field of our historico-political investigations and the claims
of our moral-critical positions.
Brian Meeks's book, Caribbean Revolutiuns and Revolut iunary Theury,9
is written within a very particular tradition of scholarship on modern political thought, one that has exercised a significant-enough influence on both
left and liberal accounts of political modernitv.'? His book may serve therefore not only as a useful textual point of entry into a discussion about the
specific question of Caribbean revolutions (an important and complex question in its own right, as the book makes abundantly clear) but also into a
discussion about the more general question of revolutionary theory as such.
This is of course precisely how, by its very title, we are invited or indeed

challenged to read it. I want to accept this challenge or invitation. And in

view of this, my concern in what follows will not be so much to ponder the
specific details of the revolutions in Grenada or Cuba or Nicaragua, but to
inquire into some of the conceptual assumptions through which that detailed
account itself is offered, through which an illumination of the idea or the
problem of revolution and revolutionary theory as such is produced. 1 shall
do so in part by trying to connect the relation bet ween the categories suggested in my own title - revolution, theory, moder nit y.

I can say at the outset what I am interested in, what in a certain sense
my own conceptual and ethical-political dispositions are, and give a sense
thereby of why I think the issue is an important one to begin with, and why,
in the end, I find books like Meeks's unsatisfactory. I do not know whether
"revolutions" are possible any longer. In fact, I have strong doubts. 1 wish it to
be clear, however, that this is not to say that I doubt the existence or the
possibility of social upheavals of greater or lesser intensity, that I doubt as an
historical possibility, say, the violent overthrow of a government by some
organization of oppositional power. No. What I doubt is the nornuuive lise-

fulness of continuing to understand these upheavals in terms of the concept

of revolution. It is obvious that it was once possible to do so. Indeed, in a
certain sense, revolution once defined the horizon of radical politics and
haunted the imagination of liberals and conservatives alike. But at the same
time, as we will see, it has not always been the case that such forms of social
action have been understood as revolution. The point again is that concepts
have histories and these histories have implications for the yield they can
generate in any given conjuncture. I think that the disappearance (to call it
that) of "revolution" as a salient category in our oppositional political

VlJ-

cabulary and oppositional political calculations has to have profound implications for how we think about the possibilities and limits that lie within our
political present] how we think and think againslthe historicit y of our present.
The argument I wish to advance here is that the narrative of revolution is
inseparable from the larger narrative of modernity, and inseparable, therefore, from those other cognitive and ethical-political categories that constitute and give point to that narrative - categories such as "nation," "sovereignty", "progress," "reason," etc. It is undeniable that in the last decade or so
there has been a profound challenge - both philosophical and political - to
them. My question is what happens when both the cognitive and the political
space for that narrative alters in such a way that these categories are no
longer available for - perhaps are no longer even intelligible within - the
labour that once defined them.
This, notably, is not the question that animates Meeks in this book. He
is interested, rather, in a different sort of problem, namely, the problem of
what causes revolution, and in deciphering the general meaning of revolu-

Meek" Caribhea/l Revolutions alld Revolutionsrv Theory: All A.H'.<.<fllelll /If Cui,., Nicaragua snd GrellDda (London: MacMillan Caribbean, 1993).
10

This is the tradition represented in book, like John Dunn's We.leru Political Theory ill the
Face of the Pucure (Cambridge: Cambridge Univcr suv Press 1979). For a critique of this
kind of work see William E. Connolly, Political Theory snd Moderuir y (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press 199) 11988)).

tion; he is interested in such matters as the conditions of the success and

failure of revolutions, in determining why they take the course they take, and
how we might encourage them to take one path rather than another. In this
it will be obvious that he takes his cue from John Dunn who has reflected at

Revolution/Theory/Modernity

B SOCLAJ.. N'lD ECQN()fv1IC STUDIES

length on the problem of revolution." When, for example, Meeks writes that

- though perhaps not sufficiently or adequately criticized - progressivism

he is concerned to "examine whether the concept of revolution remains a

useful category to explain political change and whether revolution as myth

within theoretical practice, but that insofar as revolution is understood as a

category with a natural and continuous history it will be impossible to ad-

retains its potential as a liberating vision for intellectuals and countless scores

equately think the limits and the possibilities of our own political present.

of deprived people in the Third World,"tl one can hear an echo of Dunn's

In the "theoretical developments of the twentieth century," Meeks tells

us, there have been "three waves" of thinking about revolution. His strategy
is to outline the strengths and weaknesses of each of these waves. The main
feature of the first wave is the absence "of any serious theoretical corpus."!"
The second wave, a post-Second World War development, was in large part

sceptical remark regarding the "hope that the concept of revolution itself can
ever serve as a quasi-magical device for compressing into either theoretical or
practical intelligibilit y the political experience of any real society at any point
.In time.
. "IJ Mee ks'auns, .I n fact, to "
' at an aI
' approac I1 to tI ie
arrive
ter nauve
concept of revolution ... "14 He thinks, in other words, that the political

a response to the national liberation movements emerging in the 1950s. Three

climate is now hostile, that the old paths may now be closed off, and that

schools define this wave: the "psychological school," with its discourse of

therefore this is a useful moment to seek new ways of conceptualizing those

relative deprivation and its frustration-aggression thesis (Ted Gurr's famous

tumultuous moments in (Third World) history. What I hope to make clear

in the course of my remarks in this note, however, is that the level of his

book, Why Men Rebel, is one of the centre-pieces of this approach); the

analysis is such as to preserve the seeming conceptual transparency of "revo-

lutionary Change), was Parsonian-functionalist in or ientat ion emphasising

lution." That is to say, what does not occur to Meeks, indeed what cannot
occur in the kind of problematic in which his thesis is formulated and elabo-

that themselves produced the space in which such things as "theories" of

the problem of value-consensus; and the "political conflict school," one of

whose main protagonists is Charles Tilly (see his FWIII Mobilizut icm 10 Revolution, in particular), who sees political outcomes as a result of intersecting
or competing interests. Meeks, however, is not much concerned with either
of these first two waves.

revolution can come to inhabit.

This transparency of concepts is of course why Meeks can begin his
story of revolutionary theories with only the briefest most perfunctory nod

advances" begins. This wave consists centrally of the theories of Barrington

Moore and his student Theda Skocpol. Moore's Social Origins of Dictetor-

rated, is the intelligibility of revolution as a cognitive-political concept made

available by certain historical-epistemic condit ions of possibilit y, conditions

!
~~

"sociological school" (represented for example by Chalmers Johnson's Revo-

It is really with the third wave that the important story of "theoretical

in the direction of the concept's genealogy, and indeed in such a way as to

ship and Democracy is said to mark a "qualitative advance" over the second

suggest a straight and continuous conceptual line between Aristotle and the

wave theories. This is because, and to the extent that, Moore challenges and

ideologues of the French Revolution. It were as though the episternic terrain

into which Aristotelian and Enlightenment political rationalities were folded

revises the classical Marxist approach to revolution. Moore not only explains

were identical, as though an unbroken conceptual thread connected them.'?

My argument shall simply be that this assumption not only repeats a familiar

to show how the peculiar juxtaposition of social classes in particular historical circumstances led either to liberal democratic outcomes, to fascism or to
communism."? Theda Skocpol's "pathbreaking approach," however (in Stetes

the causes of revolution, but he "moved decisively beyond this in attempting

end Social Revolutions, most especially), marked a "clear advance" over Moore's
II

See, most comprehensively, Modern Revolutions: An Introduction lO (he ArJa/)~i.

IblicK./ Phenomenon 2nd ed (Cambridge: Cambridge Universit y Press, 1989).

II

Meeks, Coribbe.n Revolutions, pp. 45.

Dunn, Modern Revo/uliollS, p. xxiv,

or a

" Meeks, uribbe.n Revo1u/ions, P: 5.

I<

For an incisive critique of this view see Macintyre, Arter Vir we. See also Hannah Arendt,
On Revo/urion (New York: Penguin, 1963), especially chapter I, "The Meaning of R"I"llu

rion,"

approach. Her strengths lie in her emphasis on the state and in general the
structuralist approach she adopts. However, in this structuralism she "loses

" Meeks, uribbeall Revolutiot,, p. 12.

" Ibid., p, 16.

10 SOCIAl. ANDECONOMICSTUDIES

Revolution/Theory/Modernity

focus on the human, the role of personality and of the accidental as elements,
if not always determinants in history.''iS In short, she loses sight of agency.
Finally, after a look at theorists he sees as sketching a "fourth wave" (worldsystem theorists, for example), Meeks visits some of the work of S.N. Eisenstadt,
Roberto Unger and Dunn. These he sees as offering elements of a direction
beyond a determinist or necessitarian conception of history.

'I

This is the main line of the argument. Altogether, it may be said that the
discussion of each of the texts is less engaging than one would think neces-

;1 I

i,

a rapid rehearsal of positions at least some of which, it seems to me, are

JI

internally rich enough to warrant a closer more discerning reading. Roberto

Unger's work, for instance, and its relation to the line of thinkers among

:'j1

"'

sary for exploring the problem Meeks sets himself. There is little more than

whom Meeks places him, would be a case in point. Surety, on any reading,

whether in the end you buy it or not, an assessment of the project of Unger's

'I

Politics deserves a more considered, nuanced and detailed explor at ion.l"

But this sort of critical engagement - the mode of the review - is not my

or story

'I

principal concern here. I am much more concerned with the kind

Meeks tells about "revolution as theory" and its implications for a theoretical

understanding of the possibilities that lie within our present. And what I
particularly want to notice about the story that he tells about revolution as
theory is its uncomplicated progressivism. The "three waves," and the positions that are understood to characterize them, are lined up in a progression,
as so many steps, such that each successive one is counted as an advance on

the one before - Moore is an advance over determinist Marxists and Parsonian
functionalists; Skocpol is an advance over Moore; and there are encouraging
signs that Unger and company will produce an advance over Skocpol. But

11

For him the problem of theories of revolution is no more than the problem of
building in more - and more varied - determinations. To put it slightly
differently, on this view, each advance is to be measured in relation to a more
finely tuned balance between structure and agency.lO

It is not hard to see that what is at work in such arguments as Meeks's,

is a set of assumptions about theory's relation to its objects, most prominently
the rationalist assumption that this relation is a transparent one. On the view
supported by this assumption theory is understood as the progressive mastery of its object. Theory is that optic that offers us the reassurance that with
each "advance," with each hurdle surmounted, we are

Oil

the way to finding

a cumulatively better understanding of revolution. (Again there is an echo of

Dunn who endorses the view that "a cumulative causal understanding of
past revolutions" will "deepen our understanding of revolutionary pheuorn-

ena.")!' If it is the case - as Meeks seems to think it is - that theoretical

understanding consists of a steadily rising curve (from less to more, from
simple to complex) then it must be the case that the objects of theoretical
understanding are stable, transparent, a priori, given in advance of the discursive field they inhabit. To put it another way, it must be the case that
theoretical objects are discovered rather than produced in the field of theory.
On the view Meeks (and many others too of course) offers, a conceptual

"

object like "revolution" is somehow produced outside the ensemble of questions that make up a theoretical apparatus. So that the crucial questions can
only be framed in terms of the proximit y of theory to the Real. I would argue
that this objectivist view is a mistaken one. I would agree with those - like
Michel Foucault in his concept of "systems of thought," for instance, or Ian
Hacking in his concept of "st vles of reasoning" - whose inquiries are framed

what is the teleology at work in this story of successive theoretical thresholds?

That is to say, an advance in relation to what supposed end? How, we might
ask, are such advances to be identified and measured? For Meeks the history

For some dilfereru assessments of Unger's work, see Perry Anderson. "Roberto Unger and

In a more recent essay. "Re-readiug The Black Jalllhins: james. the Oialeclic and the Rcvolurionarv Conjuncture" Social a/l(l EC()Iwmi(' Swdic.' 410) (1994): 74101, Meeks engages
this problem directly in hi, allempl to rescue James from the clutches of classical Marxism.
For Meeks, james's audacil y (my word) lies in the fact that "in the last instance" he opens
"the Pandora', box of temporurv primacy of agents" p. 101. Similarly in another related
essay. "Caribbe.. , Insurr ections", Caril,f,eall Quarterly 41 (2) Uune 1995): 1021. john
Dunn is again mobilised to demonstrate the conceptual virtues of "human agency", In my

the Politics of Empowerment" in A Zone of Ellgagemelll (New York: Verso, 1992); Richard
Rorty, "Unger, Castoriadis, and the Romance of a National Future" in Essovs Oil Heidc!:ger
alld Ochers, Philosophical Papers volume 2 (New York: Cambridge Univcrsit y Press, 1991);
and William Connolly, "Making the friendly World Behave" New Yt"k Times SOliday LJook

view. however, besides the unproblemariscd humanism of the self-t ransparcnt subjec\ deployed here. it is a question whether this worrv regarding the exact weiglll of st rucrure as
agoinst agency continues CO be one worth trying 10 resolve in tl,,-ory. I ""uld argue that this
perhaps ought to be thought of a~ a strategic as opposed to all OJ priori qucst iou,

of theory is (to adapt a metaphor from Fanon) a continuously rising curve.

,. lbid., 1'. 21
19

r"1

10

Review. Februa ry 19, 19BB.

11

Dunn, Moderll Rc\{,lut;olL". p. xxiv,

Revolution/Theory/Modernity

12 SOCIAl AND ECONOIIAIC STUDIES

in terms of the modes of problemization of questions, and who therefore

13

mobilized and advanced. If this is so, moreover, the question before us is

maintain that theory produces its objects along with the conceptual space for

whether we want to continue to think social criticism and the whole problem

the questions it poses to them." If we accept this then it follows that social

of change in terms of the basic assumptions uf the moder n concept of revolu-

historical understanding has simultaneously to be an understanding of the

tion. Two kinds of (related) historicizing investigation immediately corne to

history of concepts and of their conditioning discursive fields.

Meeks, in short, does not historicise his conceptual objects. In my view,

mind as instructive for exploring these questions: one can be illustrated through
the wurk uf Reinhart Koselleck; the other through the work of Bernard Yacko

therefore, this entire approach to the problem of revolution as concept and as

Koselleck reminds us of the moder nit y of the concept of revolution. The

theory is unsatisfactory. Quite apart from the seeming coherence or other-

concept, he says, "is itself a linguistic product of our modernit y." This is not

wise of the answers Meeks offers for the questions he poses, my argument is

a trivial incidental. It is unly since the French Revolution, he suggests, that

that it is the questions themselves that we ought to query, and in my view

the term revolution has gained the kind of ambivalent and ubiquitous seman-

they are not the questions that need posing. They are not the questions

tic quality that it currently has." Prior to the 18th century "revolution" had

demanded by our present. I should like to suggest that what is crucial is not

a very different significatiun to what it came to have after. On Koselleck's

such questions as what really causes revolutions (or how much economic

account of it, ancient doctrine conceived political constitutions as a limited

crisis and how much state and how much intellectual will and how much

succession of forms which dissolved and replaced each other at intervals in a

ideology gu into the making uf them) or what causes them tu gu bad and

perpetual cycle: so that monarchy would come to be replaced by aristocracy,

what might induce them not to do so and so on. These questions play them-

which would in the fullness of time be replaced by oligarchy, and this in turn

selves out in a game uf political discourse and theoretical discourse about

would eventually be displaced by democracv, which, soon enough degeuer-

politics that unref lexivelv presupposes that revolutiun is a concept that can

ated into ochlocracy or mass rule. And this eventually paved the way for the

continue to make a claim on our polit ical calculations and our political hopes.

rule of the individual to emerge once more. The cycle itself, however, was

Whereas it is precisely this assumption that has to be brought into question.

closed, it could not be transgressed. As Hannah Arendt put it in her own

'"

In other wor ds, what is crucial, it seems to me, is whether the cognitive-

meditation uf the subject, these changes did not appear to introduce some-

political world in which we live cont inues to make revolution plausible to

thing entirely new, tht'y "did not interrupt the course of what the rnodern age

think and think witl, - as criticism.

has called history, which, far from starting with a new beginning, was seen as
falling back into a different stage of its cycle, prescribing a course which was

Historieising Revolut ion

Here is where the question of the relation of revolutiun - as a problem in
(/,tory - to muder uit y lias tu posed. It has tu be posed liere because the

demand we face in the present we inhabit is for an historicizatiun uf the

categuries t hat have cunstilllted the idiom uf our political criticism. What we
need to properly understand is whether revolutiun isn't a distinctively mod-

preordained by the very nature of human affairs and which therefore itself
was unchungeable.v" In the course of the 17th century, the astronomical
metaphor, "revolution," was deployed to characterize this quasi-natural experience - a natural revolution of state constitutions, which continually trans'
forms the condition of political conununit y and finally ret ur ns to its point of
departure.

em mudalit y uf conceiving political change, and whether, in this uuderst auding there aren't distinctive assumptions about change and history that are
n See "Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Rcvoluuou" ill his futures l'l;,.'il~ On the

Semeutics of Hist oricni Time. tons. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, Moss: MIT I)ress, 19R';), PI'.
40,41. See also his "The Philosophy of Progress and its Progllosis of Revolution" in Critique
JJ

or

and Crisi: Enli/ihtcnlllcllI and the Pst uogcucsis

Modem Soviet y (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 198R). For a must useful discussion of Kosdleck sec Peler Osbor nc, The Politics
Tillie: Modernity and A"anl-(;ar<!" (New York: Verso, 199';).

Sec Michel Foucault, LSlJgU.1gC, CounterMelJJory, Precticc. Sclca cd Disay,'i and Interviews,
Irons. Donald r. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell Uni\'ersil y Press, 1977); and Ion Hacking, "Languagc, Truth and Reason" in Marlin Hollis and Steven Lukes (cds) Rationality and Relat iv-

isn (Oxford: Basll llIackwdl, 1982).

or
II

Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, p. 21.

Revolutlon/Theory/Modernlty

15

14 SOCLl\lANDECONOMICSTUDIES

Even in the Early Modern period, revolution indicated a "return," a

circular movement to a point of departure. It is in this sense, Koselleck suggests, 'that Hobbes for instance uses the term to describe the twenty year
period of turmoil in England between 1640 and 1660: "I have seen in this
revolution a circular motion." What is important to grasp is that the naturalistic metaphor of political revolution depended on the assumption that historical time was itself of a uniform quality, contained within itself, and reo
peatable. History produced - and could produce - no radical novelt y.lS Nor
was revolution interchangeable with the varied expressions used to designate
the violent struggles of the 16th and 17th centuries: uprising, revolt, riot,
insurrection, rebellion, civil war. All these expressions, Koselleck explains,
shared a view of social organization based on a society of orders. While the
mode of government might alter (i.e, in virtue of political revolution), the
social order itself was seldom directly displaced by civil war. In short, up to
around 1700 "civil war" and "revolution" were not interchangeable terms.
Thus, the idea of social emancipation as likened to political revolution still
lay outside of historical experience.
This whole conceptual framework would alter, however, with the EnIightenment. For the thinkers of the Enlightenment, everything was seen and
described in terms of change and upheaval. Every facet of life -law, morals,
religion, economy, state - could now, indeed had now, to be comprehended
through it. Revolution understood as a repetition of political orders already
known in advance was displaced by a concept of revolution as a form of
change that looked forward into an unknown and novel future. It is, of
course, in this sense that Arendt speaks so memorably of revolutions as "the
only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning."z6 Revolution now depended - among other things - upon
an idea of historical time that was progressive, moving upwards and onwards
in successive stages. Revolution marked that "acceleration" in the tempo of
historical time, that moved history from one stage to the next. In this way,
revolution "congealed into a collective singular," as Koselleck says. It became
a metahistorical concept, completely separated from its naturalistic origin
and henceforth charged with ordering historically recurrent convulsive expe-

l\

II i. also useful to recall here Michel Fouc."ll" description of 1I.., epistcme of Early Modern
Europe in The Order of TlIing5 (New York: Vintage, 1973).

,. Hannah Arendt,

-Gil. Re",)luri(.~

p. 2 \.

riences. In other words, Revolution assumed a transcendental significance; it

became a regulative principle of knowledge and therefore it now became
possible to formulate its place within a Philosophy of History. This
metahistoricity would now form the cognitive background against which all
other features of the modern concept - and the concept of modernity itself would have to be situated.
Moreover, a direct relation was now conceived between political and
social revolution. Revolution, as we know it, depended upon the rise of the
'social" in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Revolution now did not
merely involve social elements, but involved above all a transformation of the
social structure itself, a dissolution of the old "society" as well as of the old
power and their replacement by a new kind of society and a new kind of
power. This, of course, is Marx's well-known preoccupation when, in his
early ~ars, he was seeking to challenge Hegel's understanding of the French
Revolution. Marx, it will be recalled, makes a distinction between political
revolution (a revolution involving the emancipation of the subject as citizen),
and a social revolution (a revolution involving the emancipation of the subject as a human being). The latter would be the fundamental achievement of
the proletarian revolution."
This kind of investigation into the conceptual terrain occupied by "revolution" is givenva different contour in Bernard Yack's excellent book, The
Longing {or Tote! Revolution. Yack's work, as I understand it is animated by
a certain doubt about the shape of modern political desire and the hopes that
spring from it. He thinks that these hopes are philosophically incoherent and
that only a comprehensive revision of our understanding of the sources of
our social discontent can begin to open up new political paths. Now, I may
not share the hopes that inspire Yack's political position (they are largely
liberal hopes), but I think that the framing conceptual move he urges is an
instructive and enabling one. What Yack seeks to provide in this book is an
account of what he calls "a new form of social discontent shared by many
European philosophers and intellectuals since the beginning of the nineteenth
century," a form of discontent which he calls "the longing for total revolu-

17

For a useful discussion of Mar"', preoccupation with the French Revolution and the UlCi he
made of it, ICe Francoi. Furet, M.rx end the French Remlurion, trans. Deborah Kan Furet
(Chic. go: University of Chic. go Pre .., 1988).

'III
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Revolution/Theory/Modernity

16 SOCIAl. N-lO ECOOOMIC STUDIES

tion."18 As he suggests, many studies of revolutionary discontent have failed

not a species characteristic. Second, one must believe that there is a general

tu adequately understand the role of new concepts in generating social dis-

spirit of interaction that intor rns all social phenumena in a given epoch. New

content. This is because they have mistakenly focused on the way these con-

ways of thinking about freedom and history, Yack argues, spread these two

cepts define alternatives to present social limitations rather than un the way

beliefs especially among German intellectuals at the end uf the 18th century.

they shape our understanding of these limitations themselves." What Yack

In the first place, the use of "human" as a term uf distinctiun among men

wants tu shuw, then, is how the development of a set uf new concepts in the

develops out of the new understanding of freedom intruduced by Rousseau

last half of the 18th century makes possible the furm of social discuntent

and Kant. Fur them, freedom gives us our human character in that it allows

which he calls the longing fur total revolution.

us to oppose our own ends to those imposed un us by nature and societ y. In

The discovery of new obstacles to the sat isfactiun uf uur desires, he

the second place, that strand of histuricism associated with Muntesquieu

suggests, tends tu generate a new object uf desire: a world withuut that ob-

begins to use the historical comparison uf epochs to identify the specific

stacle. And if we find ourselves incapable uf removing this obstacle, our

character or spirit of sucial interaction that informs individual phenomena.

desire becomes a longing which, in turn, generates the definitiun uf new

Employing in particular ancient/ mudern comparisons, the peculiar charac-

objects of desire. And the way the obstacle tu such a world is defined shapes

ter of contemporary societ y - and specifically the failings of modern societ y

the character of new desires and longings. The lunging fur total revolution

_ is identified and represented. These new attitudes towards human free-

develops out of the redefinition uf that obstacle first suggested in the second

dom and historical context make possible the new interpretation uf the ob-

half of the 18th century: the "dehumanizing" spirit uf modern societ y. Since

stacles to a world without sources of dissatisfaction. The Rosseauian-Kantian

the 18th century the greatest source of indignatiun amung European intellec-

understanding of human freedum introduces a new way of viewing the fail-

tuals educated in the German philosophic tradition has been the "spirit" of

ings uf social institutions; and the new understanding uf histury tells us that

mudern social relations, The conditiuns of modern social Ii fe/ relations de-

the sources of fundamental problems are histurical, and therefore changeable.

for m and dehumanize individuals. This complaint is one uf the most fre-

What is important about these kinds uf investigation, it seems to me, is

quently repeated refrains in the discourse uf modern intellectuals. Yack's

1I'I!~

r,

1.,
II

that they pru~lematizc the concept of revulutiun in an important way. They

project is to identify and account for the concepts that make possible the

do not presume the transparency, or the transhistorical reiterabilit y of the

designation uf the dehumanizing spirit of modern societ y as the obstacle tu a

concept. They indicate the danger in the assumption that we already know

world without social sources uf dissatisfactiun; and to show how this redefini-

what is built into the concept uf revolutiun, and show the ways in which the

tion uf the obstacle to our satisfaction generates a new and more intense form

concept depends upon the larger conceptual apparatus of our mudernit y. I

uf social discontent, i.e., the longing fur total revulution.

should like to suggest that it is only by spelling uut the problem in this way

To see the dehumanizing spirit of modern societ y as the obstacle to our

~I i
"1

17

satisfaction, Yack contends, one must believe at least two things about human

that we can grasp the conceptual plane frum which uur own coutempor arv
questiuns about revulution can be articulated.
,1:.

'I

""

\)

";
."

life. First, une must think uf the "human" as a term uf distinction amung
uther words, one must understand the humanit y uf man as an achievement,

Now the point is this that if the problematic uf revulution is to be located as

Koselleck and Yack urge that it ought (located in the specific sense uf its

existence as an historical-cunceptual, and thus finite, possibilit y) then the

relevant questions have little tu do with finding a better theory of revolution
I.

I,

"

See The Longing {or Total Revolution. Philo",phical Sources o{ Social Discontent {rom

but mure fundamentally with whether in a present in which the conceptual

ROIIeau to Mar x and Nietzsche (Berkeley: Univer sit y of California Press, 1992 119R61,) p.

underpinnings of the Enlightenment project have been su profoundly eroded,

xix.

" Ibid., pp. xix-xx.

Iii

individual human beings, nut just as what distinguishes man frum animal. In

Criticism from Within

it is still useful ur feasible or desirable to think oppositional criticism in terms

of such a concept. Tliis is the region uf my doubt. What 1 would like tu

,I
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Revolutlon/Theory/Modernlty

18 SOCw. A/'lDECONOOICSTUDIES

19

explore in a provisional way in the remainder of this note are what I take to
be some of the implications for social criticism of giving up the concept of
revolution.

nativist. The problem therefore is to formulate the idea of social criticism in

such a way as to cut across the nativist/universalist opposition. Michael
Walzer is helpful in this regard because he has been acutely concerned pre-

It seems to me that we inhabit a moment in which we are obliged to

rethink a whole family of cognate conceptual oppositions that have characterized our political modernity - left/right, for instance, or reactionary/progressive, or revolutionary / conservative, and so on. A range of modern political imaginings and political hopes have hung on the "style of reasoning" in
which these oppositions participated. But it is certainly no longer clear how
one might coherently and consistently defend anyone of them. This is because they depended for the force of their persuasion (we can now say, following a number of insightful "decenterings" of Enlightenment assumptionsj f
on a false story of modernit y, which is only to say, on modernity's normalized
account of itself. To reject this autobiography entails rejecting that practice of
social criticism sustained by it - that practice in which a General Hermeneutic
seeks to grasp (or discover) an Objective Moralit y from the external panoptic
of God or Reason or History or Reality or Nature. As Koselleck has sug
gested, the "self-assurance" of this attitude of criticism "lay in the connection
of the critic to the yet-to-be-discovered truth."!' Whether fashioned as the
liberal desire for the universalit y of a rational choice individualism or as the
revolutionary dream of a rational-collectivist alternative to bourgeois morality, what was assumed was the possibility that some privileged version of a
transcendental reason would be able to offer the path to a secure future. If
these are no longer plausible or coherent or defensible options - as I think
they are not - then surely what is needed are the concepts that will enable us
to think a practice of particularist or internal criticism, a practice, in short, of
criticism from within."
Now, of course, the classic criticism of criticism from within is that it is
necessarily complicitous with the status quo, at best reformist and at worst

cisely with this problem of formulating an adequate conception of "irnmanent" or internal - as opposed to "transcendent" or external - criticism.'! He
is concerned to pursue the possibility that social criticism has no need for a
Critical Theory. He doubts that it does. Distinguishing between three paths
of moral inquiry - that of discovery (the path of Moses and of Marx), that of
invention (the path of Descartes), and that of interpretation (the path of
everyday judgement) - Walzer himself urges the interpretive path. The path
of interpretation, he argues, lacks both the simplicity and the precision of
either the paths of discovery or invention, but is the one that accords with the
ordinary practice of complaint and everyday dispute. Not only are the paths
of discovery and invention not desirable as options in moral inquiry, he
suggests, they are actually unnecessary. "The claim of interpretation is simply

'I,
I,
j;11

l:~
111

,:1

1,;1'

IlIi
I

this: that neither discovery nor invention is necessary because we already

I'

possess what they pretend to provide." The moral world is where we have
always lived, as he says, and therefore what we need are not decision-procedures but a practice of producing thicker and thicker descriptions of where
we are, how we have gotten there, and where we want to go: "The project of
modeling or idealizing an existing morality does depend ... upon some prior

iI:

acknowledgement of the value of that morality. Perhaps its value is simply

this: that there is no other starting point for moral speculation. We have to
start from where we are. Where we are, however, is always someplace of
value, else we would never have settled there."!' Interpretation requires a
work of judgement. And judgement presupposes a context of precedent, a
known set of references and an idiom in which they are articulated. "Deprived of a yardstick, we rely on exegesis, commentary, and historical precedent, a tradition of argument and interpretation. Any given interpretation

I'

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1

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t;

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::

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"

10

Therr are many now, of course. bUI Richard Rore v's Phi/o.<ophy and the Mirror of Nsture
(Pr inceton: Princeton Universii y Press, 1979), is to my mind st il] one of the most compelling and one of the most useful.

" See Reinhart Koselleck, "The Process of Cr lucism (Schiller, Simon, l3ayle, Voltaire, Dlderot
and the Encvclopedi, Kant)" in Cricique and Crisis, p. 109.
11

I have tried elsewhere 10 sketch preliminarily something of t he area of this problem. See
David Scott, "A Note on the Demand of Cr iricism." Public Culture, 8( I) (Fall 1995): 4150.

II

Michael Waller, Interpretacion and Soci.1 Criticim (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Pre .., 1987). See also his The Company of Critks: Social Criticism and lb/itical Commitment in the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 1988), especially
lntroduction, 'The Practice of Social Criticism" and the conclusiou. "Criticisru Today," and more
recently Thick and Thin: Moul Argument at Home and Abrosd (Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Pre .., 1994).

I""

,. Walter, Inrerputatiorl, p. 17.

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20 SOCIAl. ANDECONOMICSTUDIES

Revolution/Theory/Modernity

21

will be contentious, of course, but there is little disagreement about what it is

we are interpreting or about the need for the interpretive effort."ls Or again:

Enlightenment promise of a context-independent conception of rationality

and the moral self; indeed his concept of a tradition is itself embedded in a

"Morality, in other words, is something we have to argue about. The argu

skein of other reworked concepts: for instance, the idea of a narrative COIKep-

ment implies common possession, but common possession does not imply

tion of the self, or the idea of the virtues as those dispositions that sustain

agreement. There is a tradition, a body of moral knowledge; and there is this

the relationships requi red for pract ices and that enable us to pursue and

group of sages, arguing. There isn't anything else."J6

achieve the goods internal to practices. His argument is that those who de-

It is this concept of a "tradition" that interests me. For it seems to me

ploy the modernity/tradition distinction have by and large followed in the

that through it there opens up the possibilit y of finding a useful path to the

footsteps of Edmund Burke in "contrasting tradition with reason and the

formulation of a practice of criticism that is neither Kant ian-univer salist nor

stability of a tradition with conflict."lR On MacInt yre's account this is mis-

exclusivist-nativist. Note first of all that in Walzer's formulation the concept

leading, for as he says, "all reasoning takes place in the context of some

of a "tradition" is essentially a discursive (as opposed, say, to a sociological)

traditional mode of thought, transcending through criticism and invention

concept. A tradition, that is to say, is not mapped by race or territory or

the limitations of what had hitherto been reasoned in that tradit ion."!? For

language, though "race" or "territory" or "language" can come to be crucial to

MacInt yre, "a tradition is an historically extended, socially embodied argu-

the idiom of a particular tradition's style of reasoning. A tradition is consti-

ment"; it is constituted at least in significant part by cross-gcnerat ional "con-

tuted in and through argument and interpretation, in and through the stakes

tinuities of conflict" - conflict and argument, which, he says, are "about the

it constructs - what counts and what does not, what the goods are and what
practices enable (or disable) their achievement. To enter this communit y, one
has to enter into the body of moral knowledge and moral argument that
constitutes that tradition. This entails entering the idiom and the st yle of
reasoning through which that tradition formulates its preoccupations. Note
moreover that in Walzer's conception if tradition presupposes "common pos-

goods the pursuit of which gives to that tradition its particular point and
purpose."?
Here perhaps is an evocative sketch of what Walzer and MacInt vre are
trying to get at. I borrow the image from Kenneth Burke whom Walzer and
Macintyre may well recognize as a fellow traveller on the paths of internal
criticism:

'\0

session" it does not presuppose uniformit y or plain consensus. Rather it

Imagine that yOll enter a parlour. You come late. When you arrive,

depends upon a play of conflict and contention. This, therefore, is not the
familiar Habermasian space of unencumbered communications. It is a space

others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated

of dispute as much as consensus, of discord as much as accord. What is

exactly what it is about In fact, the discussion had already begun

discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell yOll

shared is what is argued about. There may be dispute over how to under-

long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified

stand a particular event or practice, or how to take up a position in relation

to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a

to some rnoral-political claim, but what is not in doubt is that finding an

while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argu

understanding about that event or practice, or taking up a position in regard

to that claim is a matter of significance.

another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you,

As 1 suggested earlier, Alasdair Macintyre has sought to reclaim this

to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, de-

concept of a tradition from dominant modern understandings of itY Doing

pending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the

ment; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him;

so is crucial to the overall structure of his concern to situate and criticize the

" Ibid., p, Ll.

.. Ibid., p. 32.
J7

See M.c1ntyr." After Virtue.

III

Madill yre, Altrr Virtue, p. 221-

lY

Ibid; p. 222.

"' Ibid.

II
:1

1,
I

22 SOCIAl. ANDECOOOMIC STUDIES

Revolutlon/Theory/Modernlty

discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart.

And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress."
There is much in this image that we may want to redraw (the parlour setting,

the normal history of these normal (that is to say, normalized) categories

(what in my view books like Meek's o.rilXJesn ReKJlutions - following books
like John Dunn's Modern Revolutions - do), but to investigate the epistemic

for example, that perhaps conveys too much the privileged site of the intellectual salon rather than the dissonance of the dance hall). But what it foregrounds is the pragmatic, ongoing, commonplace, and strategic context of
argument. What it foregrounds is the arena of dissent and conflict and negotiation, the arena that is to say of the political.
To give up the concept of revolution therefore does not commit us (as
some might think) to giving up the practice of social criticism as such. It
commits us only to giving up one version of that practice, that version in
which the figure of the theory-wise radical intellectual is the sovereign adjudicator of the best path for a common life; the sovereign judge of what futures

23

..

terrain of the concepts themselves so as to be able to problematize that normalization itself and to open the cognitive space for questions regarding the
historicity of our political present. What the concepts are that will have to be
produced - that will have to be re-appropriated or worked over - in order to
give us a critical purchase on alternative futures are perhaps not self-evident.
But these concepts, whatever they are to be, can only emerge out of an

interrogation, from within, of our common and unCommon present."

we ought to choose. But it should be clear by this point, I hope, why this
heroic figure, so dear to our modern and modernist for ms of oppositional
self-fashioning (revolutionary self-fashioning, in particular) ought not - or
no longer - to exert the claim on our understanding that it has for so long
exerted. Giving up the concept of revolution urges us only to take a different
view of the practice of social criticism and the position of the social critic.
Rather than a practice of social criticism that relies for its legitimacy upon the

,.

Truth claims of a Critical Theory, social criticism has to be understood as

working from within a tradition, in its vernacular idiom, with reference principally (though not necessarily exclusively) to the images and events that
texture its historical memory, the rhythms that contour its styles of knowing,
and the concepts that organize and give point to the fields of its intellectual
practice.
To sum up: This exercise has been wholly provisional and exploratory.
My aim has been to inquire into the conceptual limits of some aspects of the
political vocabulary of our modernity. The concept of revolution has clearly
been one of those modern concepts that, since the "left" Kantians of the
German Enlightenment, has provided some of the resources for removing
the causes of our social discontent and enabling the realization of a Humanit y in transcendence of heteronomy, in achievement of a reason-governed
autonomy. Marxism - with its concept of "social" revolution - belongs very
much to this genealogy of political modernity. It is not an exception to it.
And therefore those of us whose intellectual and political formations owe
much to Marx, and who now find ourselves with categories that are no longer
adequate to the historical presents we inhabit, have not merely to (rerwr ite

II

Kenreth Burke, T~ pfJilowphy of Lireruy Form. Frank Leruricchia discusses this p....lIe
in his CririciJm and Social Chall/le (ChicaJO: University of Chic.JO Prell, 1983), p. 160.

o Aclmow/edgements. I.m IIratefulto Clement Branche, Rupert Lewis,Annie Psul and Mich.eI
Witter for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Malathi de Alwio provided the
initial questioN, .nd Brian Meeks has offered. number of doubts which I hope he will
elaborate in relponae to me.