{"id":81644,"date":"1990-03-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"1990-03-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/refurbishing-the-rhetoric-of-revolution\/"},"modified":"2024-03-22T08:45:53","modified_gmt":"2024-03-22T12:45:53","slug":"refurbishing-the-rhetoric-of-revolution","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/refurbishing-the-rhetoric-of-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Refurbishing the rhetoric of revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"

N<\/span>o sooner had Francis Fukuyama announced to the world that, owing to the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, the end of history was now upon us than Professor Pierre Bourdieu of the College de France hastened to report that, on the contrary, what the collapse of Communism really means is that history has just begun\u2014again. In a remarkable essay entitled \u201cHistory Dawns in the East,\u201d published in Liber<\/em>, the monthly European supplement to the London Times Literary Supplement<\/em>, Bourdieu hailed events in Eastern Europe for providing us with, of all things, a model of revolution\u2014a model, moreover, that the rest of Europe (meaning, of course, Western capitalist Europe) would do well to follow.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is time,\u201d he writes, \u201cto take up the revolutionary \u00e9lan<\/em> that the peoples of the East have injected into the listless history of Europe.\u201d Which can only mean that it is not for Prague and Warsaw to emulate London and Paris and Rome, but for London and Paris and Rome to follow the lead of Prague and Warsaw. This, to say the least, is a very novel reading of events in Eastern Europe.<\/p>\n

F<\/span>or Pierre Bourdieu, clearly, you cannot have history without revolution, and without revolution history is hardly worth having, anyway. In this interpretation of events and their meaning, it was Stalin who closed the door on history by betraying the revolution, and the downfall of Stalinism in Eastern Europe means that \u201chistory did not really stop in Moscow in the 1930s.\u201d But who except Pierre Bourdieu, we can only wonder, ever believed that it did? Certainly not the people who suffered under Moscow’s tyranny for so many decades. History remained all too real and all too bloody for them, and what they dreamed of was hardly yet another re-enactment of the revolution that brought them so much misery and death.<\/p>\n

The real meaning of \u201cHistory Dawns in the East\u201d\u2014a title so reminiscent of all those earlier announcements of Red dawns promising the joys of revolution\u2014has nothing to do with either the end of history or its beginning. It is to be found, rather, in what on this side of the Atlantic is called political damage control.<\/p>\n

T<\/span>he overthrow of Communism in Eastern Europe has dealt a harsh blow to the political myths fostered by the intellectual Left in Western Europe\u2014and, for that matter, in this country, too\u2014and to a way of thinking that glorifies revolution as a political and cultural ideal. It is entirely understandable, therefore, that intellectuals like Pierre Bourdieu, still dreaming the dream of lost Utopias, should now want to claim that this spectacular repudiation of revolution and its consequences is somehow a reaffirmation of the very thing that has been so resoundingly rejected. \u201cWhat a magnificent celebration of the Revolution of 1789!\u201d writes Pierre Bourdieu of events in Eastern Europe, apparently oblivious to the fact it is only in the comfortable milieu of the College de France in Paris, and not in the more difficult world of Warsaw and Prague and East Berlin, that anyone is invoking 1789, not to mention 1917.<\/p>\n

Trotting out all the blood-chilling rhetoric of past revolutions\u2014\u201cWe must make every effort to ensure that the rigorous use of reason, and hence of language, becomes a political virtue, and the first among political virtues,\u201d etc.\u2014Pierre Bourdieu warned against \u201clapsing into the old rhetoric.\u201d But what was this but the refurbished rhetoric of Robespierre adapted to yet another attempt to uphold the ideal of revolution as an alternative to what is contemptuously dismissed as \u201cthe soft pillow of economic success\u201d? Our own guess is that events in Eastern Europe have a lot more to do with a yearning for such a \u201csoft pillow\u201d than with revolutionary theories of history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Pierre Bourdieu\u2019s essay <\/i>History Dawns in the East in the TLS.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2188,"featured_media":0,"template":"","tags":[635],"department_id":[553],"issue":[3208],"section":[],"acf":{"participants":{"simple_value_formatted":"","value_formatted":null,"value":null,"field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_65fd9fbaa0408","label":"Authors","name":"participants","aria-label":"","prefix":"acf","type":"user","value":null,"menu_order":0,"instructions":"","required":0,"id":"","class":"","conditional_logic":0,"parent":"group_647e2b3c6941d","wrapper":{"width":"","class":"","id":""},"role":"","return_format":"array","multiple":1,"allow_null":0,"bidirectional":0,"bidirectional_target":[],"_name":"participants","_valid":1}},"page_number":{"simple_value_formatted":1,"value_formatted":1,"value":"1","field":{"ID":0,"key":"field_647e2bc0c860c","label":"Page 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