Revolutionaries and Reactionaries…

Each committed liberal and each committed socialist should be at least something of a revolutionary. Mannered as such good people might be in their reformism, so extensive are the coercive restraints and traditional norms or hierarchical systems of power and wealth that they hope to replace that they must be imbued with something of the transformative spirit. Each committed conservative should be at least something of a reactionary. As averse as such cautious people might be to avoid appearing militant, so radical are the progressive forces at work in our times that in some senses they must wish to stop and turn back history and not merely slow it down. That people ignore this, and attempt to subdue its implications, says something about our tendency to think that our beliefs are natural and uncontroversial.