The Revolution You Planned Is Not the Revolution You'll Get

By -
In 462 BCE, Ephialtes directed a peaceful revolution in Athenian governance, implementing a radical democracy in which the entire body of citizens would theoretically hold power, voting on legislation and policy directly in the Assembly. No more elites!

What actually happened? Let us ask Thucydides: "So, in what was nominally a democracy, power was really in the hands of the first citizen (Pericles)."

Instead of "power to the people," the revolution produced one-man rule!

I am not aware of a single revolution in history, violent or peaceful, that did not produce a result significantly different than that the early leaders intended. Why will yours be any different?

"But I'm not power hungry!"

Exactly. That is why, when the revolution is over, you won't have power. Someone who is hungry for it, and will do whatever it takes to get it, will have power instead.

"But my revolution will only occur once people are convinced that grabbing that power is immoral." (Ah, the new anarchist man!)

What that guarantees is that no moral person will seize power. You have ensured that it will be seized by someone even more vicious than usual.

Comments

  1. traumerei6:37 PM

    "You have ensured that it will be seized by someone even more vicious than usual."

    Not necessarily. If the ruler is bad enough, then even a somewhat brutish replacement may be an improvement.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Prateek11:37 PM

    Professor Callahan, would you be bold enough to say that George Washington was a good example of this tendency?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah4:22 PM

      Prateek, I'm not sure what you are asking.

      Delete
  3. PH3:33 PM

    "I am not aware of a single revolution in history, violent or peaceful, that did not produce a result significantly different than that the early leaders intended."

    Not a single one? The Roman revolution of Caesar Augustus certainly seems to qualify.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah4:20 PM

      Hmm, but I don't think Augustus really had a plan, other than get more power. I think he made it up as he went along.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more