Abstract
The revolutionary impetus emerges typically in situations of radical injustice where the political order advantages one group at the cost of another and where those in power are largely deaf to legitimate demands for justice from the underclass. We must assess the cost of this impetus and understand its implications. The impetus would probably not emerge if revolutions were a purely negative matter, if all that was at stake was the overthrow of a crooked order. It emerges where there are great hopes for a better tomorrow. It is only with this prize in mind that the sacrifices that revolutions demand can be seen to be worthwhile by those choosing to make them. But this prize is Janus-faced. It promises an abstraction in the place of the concreteness of the present. And this, according to Albert Camus, sets the scene for the rivers of blood characteristic of human history to continue to flow. Camus’ views contrasts markedly with Frantz Fanon and Ernesto Che Guevara’s. For them a ‘New Man’ will emerge after the storm (if the revolution is well conducted). Violence, for them ‘is the midwife of new societies’.
We should not fear violence, the midwife of new societies….
(Che Guevara 1997 [1963], p. 152)
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At the individual level, violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude. It emboldens them, and restores their selfconfidence.
(Fanon 2004 [1961], p. 51)
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Notes
- 1.
I engage with these issues in more depth than I have space to do here in “Rebellion and Revolution” (2019).
- 2.
For a book length study of this clash see Ronald Aronson’s Camus & Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 2005.
- 3.
Here is a sample passage for which Arendt has rightly been criticized: ‘Negro students, the majority of them admitted without academic qualification, regarded and organized themselves as an interest group, the representatives of the black community. Their interest was to lower academic standards…. [It] seems that the academic establishment, in its curious tendency to yield more to Negro demands, even if they are clearly silly and outrageous, than to the disinterested and usually highly moral claims of the white rebels, also thinks in these terms and feels more comfortable when confronted with interests plus violence than when it is a matter of nonviolent “participatory democracy”’ (Arendt 1969, p. 18).
- 4.
The mummification of the revolutionary pharaohs of the twentieth century should not pass unnoticed, for it points in the direction of the cult mentality.
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Tabensky, P. (2022). The Revolutionary Impetus. In: Graneß, A., Etieyibo, E., Gmainer-Pranzl, F. (eds) African Philosophy in an Intercultural Perspective. Reihe Interkulturelle Philosophie. J.B. Metzler, Stuttgart. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05832-4_6
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