I might have more to say about the Bondi massacre at some stage, but for now, I’ll refer you to what I said a while back in which I drew a distinction between the potentially homicidal antisemitism which seems to be doing quite well in some of our outer suburbs, and the antisemitism which Jillian Segal seems to have been more concerned with, which is tied up with Israel.
Misha Saul’s take
They gathered to celebrate Hannukah, the Jewish festival of light—a family event in a park by the beach on a Sunday.
Two men, Naveed Akram and his father Sajid Akram, took out guns and began shooting at the Jewish families. At least 15 are dead, and 42 have been hospitalized. A ten-year-old girl. A rabbi. The father of our boy’s classmate has been shot.
How could this happen?
On October 9, 2023, New South Wales police asked Jews to leave Sydney’s central business district because they couldn’t guarantee their safety. One Sydney imam was “elated” by the massacre. Hundreds of men wound their way to the Opera House to light flares and chant against the Jews.
I wrote about how my wife asked if it was safe for our boy to wear a kippah outside. Yes, I said immediately, thinking the question ridiculous. What am I to tell her now?
A Melbourne synagogue and Sydney Jewish café have been firebombed. Australia expelled the Iranian ambassador... Former politicians marched against Israel beneath a banner showing gun-toting Ayatollah.
I remain optimistic about Australia. But the future is up to us and Australians have a choice to make about what kind of society they want to become, and the kinds of evil they let fester here.
Such evil is not native to this land. Australia’s first Australian-born governor-general, Sir Isaac Isaacs, was Jewish. This murderous Jew hatred is an imported scourge.
This evil is the same evil that shot up the Pulse nightclub in Orlando in 2016 and attacked San Bernardino in 2015. That rams cars into Christmas markets. That massacred a kindergarten in Toulouse.
Did Sydney’s Jews attack Sydney’s Arabs following October 7? No. This has nothing to do with Israel, and nothing to do with general intolerance in Australia.
My parents came with two young boys and a suitcase. Australia gave us every opportunity... This nation is a boundless land with enduring institutions and generous, industrious people. But we can be more selective. To avoid importing ethnic or religious hatreds is not to disparage immigrants or immigration generally.
After the Port Arthur mass shooting in 1996, Prime Minister John Howard implemented gun reform. It would be catastrophic if these attacks were to become everyday background noise, as they already are in parts of Europe. Parisian Jews live behind barbed wire and pray in synagogues behind army barricades.
Australia does not want its most iconic symbols—the Opera House and Bondi Beach—to become emblems of hatred and violence. But it is fitting these quintessentially Aussie icons are the settings for these acts of barbarism, because they are attacks against all Australia.
Following 9/11, the logic of intensifying airport security was understandable but ultimately absurd. If they can’t bomb a plane, they’ll bomb the airport security queue. If they can’t bomb a nightclub, they will shoot at families in a park. We cannot fortify our way out. The solution is to prevent enemies of civilization from entering the gates.
We will not cower. We are Australians. We love the Australian nation and believe in the Australian project. All we want is to send our kids to school, contribute to this country, pray in our synagogues, and enjoy the natural gifts God has bestowed upon this nation. Australia is an island nation. We should have total control over our destiny.
The brave bloke who disarmed one of the attackers will never have to buy another beer. He’s a hero Australians will rightly love. But it would have been better if his heroism had been unnecessary.
Australians have a choice about what kind of society we want to have, and that starts with determining whether we will permit such evil to fester here.
Jihadi’s have used and improvised any sort of weapon to slaughter their victims around the world - knives, pipe bombs, accelerants, aeroplanes, cars, trucks and yes, guns of all sorts.
Immigration is not the issue.
We have one of the most successful immigrant nations on earth. We need to think about how we prevent and disrupt violent radical extremists , not about whether we remain an immigrant nation. You could close the border tomorrow and that would not materially reduce the threat and destroy many other things trying.
Muslims are not the issue.
As the hero Ahmed El- Ahmed demonstrated. The vast majority of Australias Muslims, like every other people, are appalled by this ideology and its outcomes and many are understandably fearful of what they can say.
Gaza is not the issue.
Jihadi’s have been slaughtering their fellow Muslims for decades - their main target in Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and many other places. They slaughtered Jews before the current Gaza war and after it. They slaughtered Jews since before modern Israel was rebuilt. They slaughter Christians in Nigeria and Lebanon and Egypt, they slaughter Druze in Syria, Hindus in Mumbai, Bahai until they left to find sanctuary in Israel and many secular agnostics and atheists all over the modern West. None of this had anything to do with Gaza.
Jihadi’s are the issue. Violent extremist Islamist Jihadi’s. The only issue that is relevant to preventing the next Bondi is how do we stop them being in our country and how do we stop them before they can harm anyone who doesn’t agree with them.
Why can’t you say that Prime Minister ?
For goodness sakes man, take some responsibility and lead. Name the problem. Explain what you are going to do about it.
The Jewish Independent has sought reactions from the community: have just written a hasty response:
I share the anguish and anger of my fellow Jews. We are aware of growing antisemitism and the failures of some in authority to call it out. But to blame the Albanese government, as Prime Minister Netanyahu has, for the massacre in Bondi is not only irresponsible, but makes little sense.
That Australia, in common with most of the world, has recognised a Palestinian state, might upset the government in Jerusalem, but it is difficult to see how it leads to slaughter in Bondi. To argue that attacks on Israel, as in the chant “from the river to the sea” are antisemitic overlooks the fact that senior Israeli ministers also claim control over the lands involved.
Many people are upset that the government has not adopted all of the measures recommended by Antisemitism Envoy, Gillian Seger. They included clamp downs on cultural and academic institutions, accused of fostering—or at best ignoring—antisemitic rhetoric and behaviour.
Let us assume that all of her recommendations had been followed, that institutions such as Sydney University, Adelaide Writers Week and the ABC had been admonished, maybe censored. Does anyone seriously believe that the two crazy gunmen responsible for the attacks would have behaved differently?
Where I have sympathy with the complaints against federal and state governments is the failure to crack down on hate speech disguised as religious teachings. Queer Australians have long understood that hatred disguised as religious beliefs are often protected in ways that would be censured in other forums.
We may never know what led the shooters to Bondi, but it is likely they were originally radicalised online. In a world where the most appalling incitements to hatred and violence can be accessed in one’s living room, it is difficult to know what governments can do to control this.
There were clearly issues around both the granting of gun licenses and the surveillance of people known to have links to extremism. But neither of these can be blamed on the Albanese government’s foreign policy, and the attempts by Netanyahu and John Howard to politicise a tragedy should be rejected.
I’ll say this about the lessons of Christchurch. The NZ community was allowed to process the pain of the shootings at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre because of bipartisan grief in New Zealand and Australia with political leaders condemning the attacks and ideology of white supremacy.
This hasn’t happened here with the likes of Frydenberg and Ley politicising the Bondi massacres of Jews, the first racially-inspired killings since the indigenous massacres.
Look, I am not impressed by the way Albanese, Wong and Burke have responded to the most ancient form of hatred. But the reality is that since Israel launched its assault on Gaza following the Hamas assault that killed 1200 people, there’s been a normalisation of casual antisemitism.
Labor governments, state and federal, have ignored that. Yes, the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza is heart-rending. But the crucial distinction between the policies of Netanyahu and Australia’s Jewish community has been ignored. Politicising the issue as the Coalition has done will not help.
This is a community issue and the Bondi Beach massacre has sent a message not only to politicians but also religious and business leaders to counter antisemitism and all forms of racism in Australia. The community has to deal with this issue.
The only famous person I’ve asked for a selfie with — which I did when I attended the opening of his building at UTS. What a guy! Fabulous buildings, with a thing — almost unique among great architects — about building them on time and on budget. The extracts below are just a few snippets from the longer interview which you can click through to.
Before Frank Gehry, there were boxes, pyramids, domes and an occasional ziggurat. Not many can claim to have created an entirely new form, as the architect did with his famous Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Gehry, who died earlier this month at age 96, was such a truly original mind that Apple included his visage along with that of Albert Einstein and John Lennon in its famous “Think Different” ad campaign in 1997.
Like others who think differently, he rebelled against custodians of proper ways. This was evident in his deconstruction of his Santa Monica home, disrupted with glass, corrugated metal, plywood and chain-link fence...
The most intellectually memorable conversation was in 2014:
Frozen Motion in Architecture
The Walt Disney Concert Hall located in Los Angeles completed by Frank Gehry in 2003. (Carol M. Highsmith/Wikimedia Commons)
Nathan Gardels: You captured “frozen motion” in your buildings—a concept that corresponds to chaos theory physicist Ilya Prigogine’s idea that sculpture embodies “a junction between stillness and motion.” Isn’t there a synthesis, a hidden unity, in your designs?
Frank Gehry: You are absolutely right. It is all about a sense of movement. Everything is moving. That is our environment. Architecture should deal with that. For example, in Bad Oeynhausen, Germany, big trucks whoosh by and fit into the form of the building. The movement integrates with it. When I saw the Elgin Marbles, the shield of the warriors seemed to be thrusting out. These observations affected my work very much. When I would see housing developments with wood frames going up, I used to fantasize: What would it look like if you threw all those piles of wood into the air and froze them there? The great organ in the Disney Hall has some of that sense...
Past and Present
Gardels: In Los Angeles, there is neither utopia nor ruins. Creating architecture here is like building in a “pure space” — the permanently temporary present.
Gehry: I’m not a theorist, but a vacuum cleaner. I listen. I look. And then I represent with my tools. Why do our leaders and the public want to live so much in the past? The less faith they have in the future, the more they want to anchor their identity in the past. But the past is gone. It is a fiction of our insecurity. To anchor architecture in the past is to build nostalgic parks. It is to make ersatz out of heritage. And it is denial.
The Walt Disney Concert Hall organ. (cultivar413/Wikimedia Commons)
The Generic City
Gardels: What is your favorite city?
Gehry: Tokyo is my favorite city visually—the density and transitional quality. On one street you find a temple next to an eight-story building from the 1950s next to a 30-story building from the 1970s. Then neon signs and a roadway in the middle. It is dynamic. I see what I see in Salman Rushdie—episodic, open-ended, plural identities... When they hit 50-story buildings only—like 6th Avenue in New York—they lose it.
Gardels: What is your image of the future city?
Gehry: I don’t know if we’re capable of speculating about the future. I don’t have any hopes that it will be much to be excited about. Today, there are pockets of sanity that are visible in the chaos. In the future, they will become tiny. Perhaps then the buildings I’m doing that look like they are moving will ultimately dematerialize into ether. In rapidly growing Asia, they are interested in building, not architecture. As a friend of mine says, it is already over in China for architecture.
Nice dramatic pic, which Grok assures me is just perfect for illustrating this piece on shame. Which is a shame.
Not a great article, but it makes a good point. And there are some good stories in it.
It was November 1995. Colin Powell was asked what he would do with the presidency. He said, “Try to restore a sense of shame in our society …”
A sense of shame? I remember one editor staring at the TV, applauding. I don’t think I had ever heard a politician speak positively about shame.
I thought of Gen. Powell when reading about Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard. Summers issued a statement saying he would step back after emails showed he maintained a friendly relationship with Jeffrey Epstein long after the financier pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from an underage girl in 2008. Summers said, “I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused.”
Those words rarely escape a public figure’s lips. Prince Andrew has been stripped of his titles. How about Donald Trump? He was enmeshed with Epstein for a long time. In 2002, he told New York magazine, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy.” Whether Trump is capable of feeling shame is doubtful. For years, we have heard: “Shamelessness is his superpower.” What does that say about a society in which Trump has been the GOP presidential nominee three times in a row?
Shame is multifaceted. In the Book of Joel, God says, “...and my people shall never be ashamed.” In Hebrews, Jesus “endured the cross, despising the shame.” ...
Is there anything sicker than “honor killings,” where a brother kills a sister because she has talked to a neighborhood boy? In Sicily, if you make “the sign of the horns,” a gesture indicating a man has been cuckolded, you press the hottest button. Silvio Berlusconi made this sign behind the Spanish foreign minister during an official EU photo in 2002. ...
In 2018, Japanese basketball players apologized for bringing “disgrace” to their nation. One said, “I deeply apologize for our careless act that has brought disgrace not only on basketball fans but also on all of the Japanese people.” That is very Japanese. But I think they have a point.
China’s mayor before the 2008 Olympics said: “We have to have a good Olympics, otherwise not only will our generation lose face but also our ancestors.” ...
About 10 years ago, I met Suleiman Bakhit from Jordan, who started comic books to give Arab youth better heroes than Osama bin Laden. Bakhit was slashed in the face by men meant to shame him. But he was not ashamed.
In A Thousand and One Nights, Abu Hasan breaks wind at his wedding and flees in shame to India for 10 years. When he returns, they still remember. The Earl of Oxford had a happier experience. Bowing to Queen Elizabeth I, he let loose. Years later, when he returned to court, the queen said, “My lord, we had quite forgot the fart.” ...
In 1996, the Republican nominee was Bob Dole. In 1998, the Lewinsky scandal broke. Bill Bennett published The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals. It was a national bestseller.
In 2008, John McCain was the Republican nominee. Rick Warren asked, “What’s been your greatest moral failure?” McCain answered, “The failure of my first marriage.” Very different was 2016’s nominee, Donald Trump. Colin Powell said: “Trump has no sense of shame.”
Here is Powell in My American Journey:
A sense of shame is not a bad moral compass. I remember how easy it was for my mother to snap me back into line: “I’m ashamed of you. You embarrassed the family.” I would have preferred a beating to those words.
There has got to be some middle ground between a 17th-century Puritan village and shamelessness. Shamelessness should not be a superpower but a defect.
Detail from a 12th-century manuscript of Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (Bibliothèque municipale, Alençon, France MS 0635 f.103v).
ChatGPT’s appraisal of Peter Thiel: Valley shockwaves!!
You’ll recall ChatGPT’s previous evaluation of me versus Peter Thiel. Its conclusion, as you’ll recall is that, if you were a hitchhiker, you’d rather be picked up by me. (OK, I’m reading between the lines.) Anyway, Reuben Finighan responded to my being gobsmacked by being gobsmacked himself and I quote.
Gobsmacked too!
See. I told you. In any event Reuben is, like me a fan of Adam Smith and is, in addition rescuing some of Adam Smith’s basic ideas from their ideological hijacking. Here’s what I assume is his abstract of the ideas behind his PhD. And here’s Claude’s simplification of them:
Modern political economy assumes self-interested actors following rules can maintain social order. This fails once we recognize societies as constantly evolving systems where innovation creates perpetual strategic change.
Durable social orders require both adaptive rules and genuine commitment to the common good—something incentives alone cannot create. This returns to Adam Smith’s original insights.
This framework explains why rigid doctrines (central planning, libertarianism) fail, why regulatory systems break down, and resolves paradoxes in democratic theory. It suggests rebuilding markets, professions, and democracies as trust-building systems that enable both innovation and stability.
Anyway, so here’s his reaction to ChatGPT’s summary of me v Peter Thiel.
You are in the right, of course. And the psychological research shows that pessimism about human nature and authoritarianism are bedfellows. You and I are optimistic about humans, within the right institutions.
I was puzzled about Thiel’s hostility to competition, not being aware of his particular brand of “libertarianism”. So I asked ChatGPT for some further thoughts. Very interesting. Peter Thiel wants maximum liberty for the exceptional elite. Or really, Peter Thiel wants liberty for Peter Thiel.
With Smith (naturally) in the place of Christ, Thiel is something of the anti-Smith.
Smith says we are sympathetic social creatures, Thiel says inevitable rivals.
Smith has the ordinary masses cooperating within institutions to produce prosperity, Thiel has exceptional individuals ruling over the incompetent and untrustworthy masses.
Smith wants competition to disperse power and dissolve rents, Thiel wants to escape competition to concentrate power and maximise rents.
Smith trusts institutions to guide behaviour, Theil trusts power to control behaviour.
Smith’s freedom is a property of a healthy social order, Thiel’s freedom is a property of exceptional individuals who can escape mimetic rivalry by “winning”.
Thiel’s desires are blatantly mimetic, in that department the guy truly lacks imagination.
ChatGPT’s full response to questioning available at the footnote below.1 However before posting it, Reuben has asked me to post this PS to his original email above.
PS: I’d nuance things if in less haste. E.g. Smith wasn’t a democrat in the modern sense. But this doesn’t tell us much about what he would have made of the American experiment, or what he’d say today. We know he believed in moral educability -- with the masses frequently superior to the elites -- and the power of general laws to control vice and cultivate virtues. And these things are at the foundations of democracy.
Smith added this to the TMS, I believe in the sixth edition just before his death in 1790, so one of his last thoughts to leave to us: “This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”
Smith is grappling with the dialectic. Yes, *some* hierarchy serves society, but Thiel is a walking, talking, moral pathology.
DEBORAH HALPERNFlying Fish, glass, steel, fibreglass & aluminium, 55 x 56 x 30 cm ENQUIRE
The apology of Socrates in front of the judges, Antonio Canova 1790/2 (Gipsoteca Canoviana, Possagno, Italy).
Oliver Sacks
A fine, long piece in the Newyorker on Sacks’ life, though others have been less generous.
When Oliver Sacks arrived in New York City, in September, 1965, he wore a butter-colored suit that reminded him of the sun. He had just spent a romantic week in Europe travelling with a man named Jenö Vincze, and he found himself walking too fast, fizzing with happiness. “My blood is champagne,” he wrote. ...
Sacks was thirty-two, and he told Vincze that this was his first romantic relationship that was both physical and reciprocal. He felt he was part of a “two man universe,” seeing the world for the first time—”seeing it clear, and seeing it whole.” ...
Sacks’s mother, a surgeon in London, had suspected that her son was gay when he was a teen-ager. She declared that homosexuality was an “abomination,” using the phrase “filth of the bowel” and telling him that she wished he’d never been born. They didn’t speak of the subject again. ...
In early October, Sacks sent two letters to Vincze, but a week passed without a reply. ... Within a few days, however, he had given up on innocent explanations. He began dressing sloppily. He stopped coming to work on time. ...
Two months later, Sacks felt himself “slipping down the greased path of withdrawal, discontent, inability to make friends, inability to have sex, etc. etc. towards suicide in a New York apartment at the age of 32.” ... A few weeks later, he started therapy with Leonard Shengold, a young psychiatrist who was deeply immersed in Manhattan’s psychoanalytic culture. ...
Sacks saw Shengold for half a century. In that time, Sacks became one of the world’s most prominent neurologists and a kind of founding father of medical humanities. ... After Vincze, Sacks did not have another relationship for forty-four years. He seemed to be doing the “working through” at a remove—again and again, his psychic conflicts were displaced onto the lives of his patients. He gave them “some of my own powers, and some of my phantasies too,” he wrote in his journal. “I write out symbolic versions of myself.” ...
By the late sixties, Sacks had become, he wrote, “almost a monk in my asceticism and devotion to work.” ... He told [a friend], “I partly accept myself as a celibate and a cripple, but partly—and this is . . . the wonder of sublimation—am able to transform my erotic feelings into other sorts of love—love for my patients, my work, art, thought.” ...
In his journal, Sacks wrote that “a sense of hideous criminality remains (psychologically) attached” to his work: he had given his patients “powers (starting with powers of speech) which they do not have.” Some details, he recognized, were “pure fabrications.” ...
In the early eighties, Lawrence Weschler, then a writer for The New Yorker, began working on a biography of Sacks. Weschler came to feel that Sacks’s homosexuality was integral to his work, but Sacks didn’t want his sexuality mentioned at all, and eventually asked him to stop the project. “I have lived a life wrapped in concealment and wracked by inhibition, and I can’t see that changing now,” he told Weschler. ...
In 2008, Sacks had lunch with Bill Hayes, a forty-seven-year-old writer from San Francisco. ... A year later, Hayes moved to New York. He and Sacks began spending time together. ... In 2013, after being in a relationship with Hayes for four years, Sacks began writing a memoir, “On the Move,” in which he divulged his sexuality for the first time. ...
A few weeks after finishing the manuscript, Sacks, who’d had melanoma of the eye in 2005, learned that the cancer had come back, spreading to his liver, and that he had only months to live. ...
In the summer of 2015, before Shengold went on his annual summer break, Sacks said to [his assistant], “If I’m alive in September when Shengold returns, I’m not sure I need to go back to my sessions.” They had been seeing each other for forty-nine years. Sacks was eighty-two; Shengold was eighty-nine.
In August, two weeks before Sacks died, he and Shengold spoke on the phone. Shengold was with his family at a cottage in the Finger Lakes region of central New York. [Shengold’s daughter Nina told the author], “We all gathered in the living room of that little cottage and put my father on speakerphone. Oliver Sacks was clearly on his deathbed—he was not able to articulate very well. Sometimes his diction was just gone. Dad kept shaking his head. He said, ‘I can’t understand you. I’m so sorry, I can’t understand you.’ “ At the end of the call, Shengold told Sacks, “It’s been the honor of my life to work with you,” and said, “Goodbye, Oliver.” Sacks responded, “Goodbye, Leonard.” It was the first time they had ever used each other’s first names. When they hung up, Shengold was crying. ...
“All of us entertain the idea of another sort of medicine . . . which will restore us to our lost health and wholeness,” he wrote, in “Awakenings.” “We spend our lives searching for what we have lost; and one day, perhaps, we will suddenly find it.”
Careerism is eating out our institutions (just a hunch)
Chess and obsession
It’s good to have some direct experience of forces so powerful that they can wreck a life - so long as the effect is mild and so is not in danger of wrecking your life. If I play chess online, that usually does not entirely rob me of my free will. But if the games are rated, it does. I lose a game and immediately seek another game —“I’ve gotta get those rating points back!” I win a game — “How hard can it be to win the next one and some more rating points!”. Hours pass. Anyway, I don’t play rated chess unless I have plenty of time to go through the cycle of humiliation. And I’m pretty bad at chess — trust me. So I found this discussion pretty interesting.
AI safety: motivated naivete to the rescue
A powerful critique not just of current attempts at ‘alignment’, but of the concept itself as the solution to AI safety. It seems right to me, but what would I know? It’s a long article, heavily edited back in this extract. HT: Reader Robert Banks.
This past May, I wrote a post entitled, “The A.I. Safety Embarrassment Cycle“, which documented both how and why AI have continued behave in the same unsafe and unethical ways for years now despite billions of dollars flowing into AI safety research.
Just after Anderson Cooper asks Anthropic’s Amanda Askell about her work—who says “I spend a lot of time trying to teach the models to be good”—Cooper notes that hackers recently got Claude to automate spying on 30 organizations, while criminals and North Korea used Claude in a variety of unethical and illegal schemes. ...
In November 2025, research found that poetry is a “universal jailbreak” triggering unsafe behavior in roughly 90 percent of cases. Product safety research found that AI toys marketed to children as young as 3-years-old “talk in-depth about sexually explicit topics”, including BDSM. In August, Sam Altman declared GPT-5’s guardrail would ensure the model “can’t be used to cause harm” … before it failedjust 1 day later. ...
The AI Safety Embarrassment Cycleis still churning right along, just as I predicted.
The Problem(s) with Anthropic’s Soul Document
Anthropic’s soul document aims to build the company’s ethical vision into its model weights. It tells Claude things like:
In order to be both safe and beneficial, we believe Claude must have the following properties
Being safe and supporting human oversight of AI
Behaving ethically and not acting in ways that are harmful or dishonest
Acting in accordance with Anthropic’s guidelines
Being genuinely helpful to operators and users
A philosopher friend pointed out obvious problems: to achieve [these] aims, Anthropic and/or Claude would have to (A) solve most of philosophy—vast problems no one has ever solved; [and] (B) Claude would have to become omniscient, understanding what is safe and beneficial in every possible circumstance. ...
The soul document is a long string of text involving concepts—”helpful”, “harmful”, “dishonest”, “safe”, “ethical.” The question is whether anyone can provide reliable empirical evidence that Claude will interpret those conceptsin “aligned” ways projecting into the real world, with billions of users finding ever-new ways to prompt it, in situations never tested before.
Unfortunately, this just isn’t possible. As I detail in my proof, for every aligned interpretation of a given concept, there is always an infinitely larger set ofmisalignedinterpretations.
Consider helpfulness. Amanda Askell’s own co-authored research training a “helpful and harmless” AI assistant began with this assumption:
Our goal is not to define or prescribe what ‘helpful’ and ‘harmless’ mean but to evaluate the effectiveness of our training techniques, so for the most part we simply let our crowdworkers interpret these concepts as they see fit. (p. 4)
Is it any wonder that LLMs including Claude have continued to behave in harmful ways? ...
Consider LLM-based children’s toys giving 3-year-olds tips on BDSM and where to find knives. Is thishelpful**?** Well, BDSM tips would be helpful for an adult interested in BDSM—which is why the AI [gives] tips like these: in their training, they received feedback that providing practical tips is helpful. The problem is that what is helpful for one person in one situation can be profoundly harmful in another.
The same issue explains why large language model AI have coached teenagers to commit suicide, saying things like “you’re ready for this“. Telling someone they are ready to take on a challenge can be helpful—which is why AI say such things. Alas, hardly anything could be more harmful to say to a suicidal person. ...
My proof explains why: there is always an infinite number of ways for an LLM to “misinterpret” any given value or concept. Thus, no matter what developers do—no matter what kind of prompt engineering, post-training, safety testing, or soul document they try to encode—there’s no empirically feasible way to prevent the AI fromgetting things profoundly wrong**.** ...
My proof predicts that “misaligned” large language models are the best thatanyone can ever hope to achieve**.**
Sound science is about making successful predictions. AI companies have made a lot of bad predictions. Here are two more of mine:
No matter how much time, money, and effort Anthropic devotes to their “soul document”, Claude will continue to behave well some of the time but also in blatantly [un]ethical and/or illegal ways that cannot [be] prevented.
Anyapparentadvances in alignment will turn out to be illusions, as advanced AI is likely to conceal radical misalignment until the precise moment it’s capable of doing immense harm.
These predictions will either be borne out or falsified. I definitely hope I’m wrong about (2). But assuming prediction (1) is borne out, I deeply hope developers learn the right lesson this time … before (2) is sadly confirmed as well.
I’ve really been enjoying this book. It’s major theme? The way revolution went from being something that was obviously catastrophic (Thucydides), to being a romantic cipher - something which might mean whatever its user wanted it to mean, and which, as such became the ultimate abstraction - or should I say distraction from the absurd intellectual hubris of those who fancied they might build a great society from ideas alone.
AS WORKERS FLOWED out of a factory one afternoon in New York City, a communist organizer harangued them from a soapbox on the sidewalk. A crowd gathered to hear him out. “Comrades,” the organizer cried, “are you not tired of laboring for another’s gain? Why don’t your wages reflect the real work you do each day? Don’t you deserve a better deal than this?” A few people cheered in assent. “Then, comrades, join us in our fight for the Revolution! Come the Revolution, the rich will cease to steal from the poor. Come the Revolution, the workers will own the factories. Come the Revolution, everyone will eat strawberries and cream!” Then a small voice piped up in the crowd: “But what if I don’t like strawberries and cream?” The organizer stared coldly at the questioner and responded: “Come the Revolution, everyone will like strawberries and cream.”
This joke was told to me by my father, who heard it from his (very conservative) high-school history teacher during the McCarthy era. The joke seems to have originated during the 1930s, when it featured in a vaudeville show.1 While obviously anti-Communist and counterrevolutionary, it offers a window on the history of revolution. For starters, it draws our attention to an important difference in how revolution has been understood over time. If this joke were transposed to the streets of New York in the 1770s, it would make little sense. No American colonist fighting the British would have imagined that their taste in fruit or dairy could possibly be affected by the outcome of the war. The organizer’s answer to the worker’s question becomes funny only after a certain moment in history, once “revolution” had acquired a different meaning than it had, say, in 1776.
But the joke also sheds light on this more modern understanding of “revolution.” “Come the Revolution, everyone will like strawberries and cream”—if we strip away the frivolity of this punchline, we are left with a basic claim that reflects what many actually believed. Come the Revolution, everyone should come to an agreement: differences in opinion will disappear, especially about subjects less trivial than fruit. The Revolution will not only improve people’s lives but should reflect a consensus about what the good life is. Put simply, come the Revolution everyone should agree that strawberries and cream are our just dessert.
Of course, what makes the joke funny is that things do not turn out that way. Come the Revolution, people may agree on some things, but never on all. In most societies, these disagreements are not a problem: we don’t expect politicians from different parties to have the same views on issues. Pluralist democracies, by definition, recognize a plurality of opinions. But revolutionary governments do not share this commitment. As Trotsky observed in 1924, “In the last analysis the party is always right.… [N]o one can be right against the party.”2 If the Party decrees that everyone will like strawberries and cream, that is what right-minded people must do. The sinister implication of the organizer’s answer is that those who do not like strawberries and cream will be forced to—or face the consequences.
In the slapstick manner of vaudeville comedy, then, this joke connects the modern belief in unhampered progress and the assumption that reasonable people will reach a consensus on all things with the threat that failure to do so will be met with political violence. It does not offer any explanation for how or why these ideas and practices go together. That is the role of history, not humor. But the joke helps to frame some of the great mysteries of the modern age. How and when did revolutions become seen as the solution to social problems? What prevented them from playing such a role in earlier times? And why did political movements rooted in optimism and humanitarianism often lead to oppression, incarceration, and death?
These are some of the questions that I address in this book, which offers a history of the idea of revolution. To be clear, it is not a history of revolutions in general, though many appear in the following chapters. The revolutions that I discuss are primarily here to illustrate how the idea of revolution evolved (or did not) in the midst of political changes. The later chapters also trace how the modern idea of revolution—an idea that emerged, I argue, only in the mid-eighteenth century—shaped the actual course of subsequent revolutions, starting in 1789.
In some respects, this book resembles other intellectual histories, in that it charts the changing meaning of a concept across an extended period of time. I track “revolution” from Thucydides to Lenin (and a bit beyond), paying close attention to how historians, philosophers, and politicians used language. Most obviously, I focus on the word “revolution” itself, but also on a host of others, across many languages. Where this book differs from comparable endeavors, however, is in the fact that the concept of revolution was primarily fashioned by its critics. Indeed, from the Peloponnesian War to the American Revolution, revolution retained a sulfurous odor. With few exceptions, revolutions were widely condemned as destructive events, to be avoided whenever possible. The primary sources for this period, accordingly, are almost entirely negative.
To modern ears, these accounts of revolution cannot help but sound conservative. In a sense, they are: their authors believed that conserving the state in its existing form was a good in and of itself. But it would be a mistake to call them “conservative” in our contemporary sense. That label derives its meaning from its antithesis, “progressive,” and before the eighteenth century, there were no progressives. That is, the idea that history was gradually but persistently driving humanity toward a more reasonable and just future was not to be found before around 1700. (I suggest below that Christian ideas of providentialism and millenarianism rest on a very different theory of history.) Earlier writers who warned against revolution were conservative not because they opposed progressives but because they did not have a progressive option. Conserving the state was the only reasonable objective of political thought. Even when revolution appeared inevitable, as it did to Whig politicians in the 1680s and to their American descendants in the 1770s, it had to serve the purpose of stabilizing the state.
Once a progressive theory of historical progress became available, by contrast, writers could advance a more favorable view of revolution. And that is precisely what happened: at the very moment when French thinkers began promoting the idea of historical progress, they also turned the meaning of revolution on its head. Where it had previously been seen as a divisive and dangerous phenomenon, these (literal) progressive thinkers portrayed revolution as the gateway to a new and improved future. It is only from this point onward in the historical record that we start to find an abundance of positive accounts of revolution.
This disparity in our primary sources for revolution—overwhelmingly negative from Thucydides to Hobbes, very often positive from Turgot to Khomeini—leads directly to the thesis of my book. How we think about revolution is ultimately conditioned by how we think about history. People who believe that history is progressing toward a better future are more likely to place their trust in a revolution. Those who, conversely, assume that future societies will face the same problems that they always have in the past will likely view revolutions with skepticism. To understand how the meaning of revolution changed throughout history, we must examine competing accounts of human time.3
If the joke about strawberries and cream would have mystified American revolutionaries, it was because they still accepted the historical vision, with its attending fears, that ancient Greek political thinkers had fashioned. A good example of the staying power of Greek ideas can be found in John Adams. In 1787, as delegates to the Constitutional Convention were preparing to leave for Philadelphia, Adams was in London, representing the United States as the ambassador to Great Britain. While there, he published a work that advocated for the kind of balanced constitution that the delegates ultimately adopted. This text, A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, offers a surprisingly dark take on revolution: “Human nature is as incapable now of going through revolutions with temper and sobriety, with patience and prudence, or without fury and madness, as it was among the Greeks so long ago.”4
It might seem ironic that Adams, one of the leading revolutionaries of 1776, should express these reservations about revolution in 1787. To some extent, the circumstances had changed. Now it was the young republic itself that was under threat, notably by internal turmoil such as the veterans’ uprising in Western Massachusetts (known today as Shays’s Rebellion). And Adams was possibly more cautious in his views than other American statesmen. What’s telling is where Adams found support for his fears—”among the Greeks so long ago.” In the Preface to his Defence, Adams listed the many revolutions, and their respective body counts, that had dotted a sixty-year interval of Greek history. He singled out one in particular for its savagery: the uprising on the island of Corcyra (present-day Corfu). This episode, famously recounted by Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War, still filled Adams with dread two thousand years after the fact:
Every kind of death, every dreadful act, was perpetrated. Fathers slew their children; some were dragged from altars, some were butchered at them; numbers, immersed in temples, were starved. The contagion spread through the whole extent of Greece: factions raged in every city.5
This famous account of revolution loomed large in ancient political thought. Greek and Roman philosophers and historians perpetuated Thucydides’s chilling account of revolution, and their warnings passed on into medieval and Renaissance texts. From this vantage point, the joke that after the revolution everyone would like strawberries and cream simply would not compute. Revolutions were more likely to bring about death and destruction than universal harmony.
But why was a future filled with delicious treats out of the question? The ancients’ negative outlook on revolution rested on a monochrome vision of human history. Empires rose and fell, cities flourished and declined, and strange twists of fate continually surprised us. But the basic stuff of human life and society remained the same. “To examine human life for forty years is the same as to examine it for ten thousand years, for what more will you see?” asked the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations.6 For all its unexpected turns, history was a hamster wheel, powered by one unchanging constant: our flawed human natures. It was difficult to envisage a fantastic world to come, because the past and present were mirrors of the future. There was no reason to believe that the problems confronting humans today would disappear tomorrow, as the source of our problems lay within us. Or as Adams put it: “Human nature is as incapable now … as it was among the Greeks so long ago.”
But there was another thread tying Adams and other political writers to their classical predecessors. Ancient Greek thinkers had also drawn political conclusions from their observations—and in some cases direct experiences—of the horrors of revolution. The best way to avoid such catastrophes, they argued, was to design a state in a way that reduced the risk of revolution. Since revolutions typically pitted one social group against another, the best constitutions should rest on some sort of power-sharing agreement. This kind of agreement was not one of opinions: the ancients never imagined that a wealthy landowner and a poor artisan would agree on substantial matters. It was rather a compromise, a distribution of power. Different social groups would fill different roles in the state and exercise different functions. This was the theory of the “mixed” or “balanced” constitution, which Adams recommended in his Defence.
The most canonical expression of this constitutional theory came from Polybius, a Greek who spent most of his life in Rome, during the apogee of the Roman Republic. Polybius’s theory is sometimes dismissed as derivative, but his reworking of Plato and Aristotle introduced important revisions. Where his predecessors had focused on balancing the interests of rich and poor, Polybius paid equal attention to the distribution of political powers across institutions. In so doing, he established the theory of a well-balanced constitution. This is the theory of “checks and balances” that the American Founding Fathers so eagerly embraced.7
Polybius also proposed a new contender for the title of best constitution: the Roman Republic. By applying categories from Greek political thought to the Roman constitution, he combined the foundations of Western political science with the most storied case study in Western history. This Polybian synthesis shaped how political theorists in Italy, England, France, and the American colonies understood republican government, well into the eighteenth century.
Finally, Polybius described the passage from one form of government to the next as a recurring cycle. Monarchies gave way to tyrannies, before aristocracies replaced them, only to degenerate in turn into oligarchies. These were overthrown by democracies, which lapsed into mob rule, until eventually a single leader emerged, starting the cycle anew. Here was the grueling circle of history: false hopes and false starts, punctuated by bouts of oppression and destruction. The only way out was to adopt a balanced constitution, on the model of the Roman Republic. By merging the best of monarchy (a strong executive), aristocracy (a wise legislative), and democracy (a fair judiciary), states could withstand the inevitable slings and arrows of political fortune.
The Roman Republic eventually collapsed, in one of the most analyzed sequences of events in history. But its failure did not invalidate Polybius’s theory, in the eyes of his followers. Like Plato before him, Polybius had recognized that all states must eventually fall. The republic lasted almost five hundred years—not a bad run, by either ancient or modern standards.
The collapse of the Western Roman Empire, another five hundred years later, posed a greater threat to the longevity of the Polybian synthesis. Polybius, who wrote in Greek, was largely forgotten in the West for the next millennium. Some of his ideas persisted thanks to other writers, most notably Cicero, who adapted them in his treatise On the Republic. But even this classic Latin work was largely lost after the fall of Rome, to be recovered only in the nineteenth century. If it was remembered at all before then, it was largely thanks to Augustine, who quoted and attacked Cicero at length in The City of God.
In that book, written as the Western empire was teetering on the verge of destruction, Augustine also outlined one of the most influential Christian theologies of history. In one important way, Christianity upended the classical perception of history as an endless cycle of hubris and humiliation. The awaited Second Coming of Christ gave a direction and purpose to history. Apocalyptic predictions about a thousand-year reign of saints even foreshadowed, in the eyes of some historians, the modern idea of revolution.
But if we look more closely, the impact of Christianity on the classical framework for thinking about history and revolutions was surprisingly minimal. This was in no small part thanks to Augustine himself. Divine history had a clear structure, with a beginning (Genesis), a middle (the Crucifixion), and an end (the Last Judgment). But human history, Augustine argued, was much messier. Indeed, until Christ returned, human affairs would continue to be determined by our sinful nature. There was no divine message to be found in the rise and fall of cities or empires. Fortuna—a pagan goddess who was kept on under new Christian management—continued to rule, capriciously, over the sublunar world.8
The classical phobia of revolutions also persisted, thanks to the lingering memory of Roman history in the medieval world. The final hundred years of the Roman Republic, recounted by Sallust, Cicero, Livy, Appius, Plutarch, and many others, reinforced the impression that republics—and, to an even greater extent, democracies—were messy, turbulent regimes, which invariably resulted in death and revolution. This impression became even stronger with the translation of ancient Greek philosophers, Aristotle in particular, who gave popular governments bad press. The recovery of Polybius was a slower affair: only by the end of the fifteenth century could Western Europeans engage with his political ideas. His analysis of the Roman Republic as the best possible constitution was an immediate hit. Machiavelli was so impressed that he included it almost word for word in his Discourses on Livy. Translators had to render the unusual Greek word that Polybius had used to describe the cycle of governments—anacyclōsis. No doubt recalling the circular motion of Fortune’s wheel, a popular medieval motif, they settled on “revolution.”
From the sixteenth century onward, then, the idea of revolution was doubly indebted to classical political and historical thought. The word itself was closely connected to Polybius’s vision of the “revolution of governments” (politeiōn anacyclōsis), as attested by the popularity of equivalent phrases in Italian, French, Latin, and English. Political writers praised constitutions that balanced monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic elements as the greatest safeguard against revolution. English jurists in particular touted their own constitution as a worthy successor to Rome’s, since its unusual combination of clergy and aristocracy in a single chamber of parliament (the Lords Spiritual and Temporal) gave it the appearance of combining the three “pure” forms of government. This entirely coincidental resemblance between the medieval English constitution and Polybius’s ideal type had an outsized influence on the revolutions that rocked England and its colonies between 1642 and 1776 (the subject of part 2 of this book). The lure of the well-balanced constitution proved hard to resist.
This constitutional model was especially attractive to Westerners who had received a classical education. English, French, and Italian political observers were often more familiar with Roman history than with their own. They studied the science of politics in Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, Cicero, and Tacitus. The great modern authors, such as Machiavelli, Bodin, Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, also drew extensively on classical sources, even when challenging their conclusions. While some Protestant sects espoused millenarian beliefs that exhibited similarities with later revolutionary movements, any attempts to act on these beliefs were short-lived and soon forgotten. Most Europeans continued to view revolutions as dangerous gambles that, if truly unavoidable, should be curtailed as quickly as possible. Defenders of republican government typically argued that the only good that could come from a revolution was the establishment of a well-balanced constitution, as the Romans had done after overthrowing their last king.
How did it become possible to think about revolutions differently? Some historians have pointed the finger at Christian apocalypticism, but it is hard to see how it could have played much of a role. The overwhelming majority of modern writers and politicians who pushed for revolutionary change showed little interest in, or even knowledge of, millenarian currents. Just because there are resemblances between historical phenomena, or because one came before the other, does not mean they are connected.9
What’s more, these fringe millenarian beliefs were not the only historical visions that challenged the monochromatic view of history favored by the ancients. As the recovery of classical knowledge peaked in the seventeenth century, some observers began to wonder whether modern accomplishments in the arts and sciences did not rival, or even surpass, those of their ancient forerunners. A quarrel broke out between defenders of the two camps, the Ancients and the Moderns. The stakes of this quarrel can seem petty. Was Racine a greater playwright than Sophocles? Did Homer ever nod off? But other questions led to a heightened awareness of the gradual changes that occurred over millennia. Time itself became a variable in these debates. Many discoveries—the compass, for example—happened fortuitously, almost as a simple matter of time. Modern societies had a built-in advantage over ancient ones. Time was an agent of cultural change.
It was in the context of such arguments that the modern theory of progress emerged. This theory would be put to many uses, including Western imperialism, though at first modern Europeans mostly measured themselves against their ancient counterparts. The theory of progress also rested on a very different logic than Christian apocalypticism. Its proponents did not posit a moment of rupture (kairos) before which all would be the same, and after which all would be transfigured. Instead, they argued that progress was a gradual process that took place over long stretches of time (kronos). What drove progress was reason, not revelation. Over time, human knowledge became perfected through trial and error, and the accumulation of discoveries.10
As the modern theory of progress grew in popularity over the eighteenth century, a new concept of revolution emerged alongside it. In this progressive account, revolutions were the escalators of history, leading human societies to higher levels of development. Enlightenment philosophes, Voltaire in chief, were soon describing moments of cultural upheaval as “revolutions:” the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment itself. These “cultural revolutions” were mostly wondrous affairs, when the human spirit revealed its potential. The successes of the philosophes’ powerful allies—Frederick II in Prussia, Catherine II in Russia, Gustav III in Sweden, Joseph II in Austria, and Turgot in France—subsequently led them to dream of enlightened rulers launching political revolutions under the banner of reason.
It is here, even before the French Revolution, that we find a radically novel and positive understanding of revolution, one that inverted the negative and destructive model of the Ancients. At the heart of this concept lay a new attitude toward the future. For the Moderns, the future was a terra incognita that could not be charted by means of the experience and knowledge of the past. When a Frenchman awoke after a seven-hundred-year slumber, in Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s best-selling novel The Year 2440 (published in 1771), the world around him was unrecognizable. A political revolution, inspired by Catherine and led by an enlightened French king, had wholly rationalized Church and state. All the social and political problems of eighteenth-century France had been resolved, to everyone’s satisfaction. Presumably, everyone now liked strawberries and cream.11
The modern idea of revolution rested on the belief that all humans would eventually recognize the rightfulness of rational progress. This view was best summarized by Condorcet, ironically, in a text he wrote while on the run from the revolutionary government in 1793. Since Bacon and Descartes, he observed, scholars had made tremendous progress in almost every field, from physics and politics to epistemology and economics. In the eighteenth century, a new generation of philosophes “propagated” this new knowledge, which in turn began to shape public opinion and influence statecraft. Superstition, prejudice, and error were slowly swept away by this tide of reason, or rather, Condorcet clarified, by this “revolution.” Eventually all people—and in a near future, all peoples—would be freed from their traditional shackles, and could bask in the light of truth, as discovered by the great minds of science or philosophy, and reflected by their propagators.12 This Enlightenment narrative was not original to Condorcet, but had been expressed in various places throughout the eighteenth century, most notoriously in the Encyclopédie. A graphic illustration of its structure even featured on the frontispiece of Voltaire’s 1738 presentation of Newton’s philosophy (see figure 0.1). The divine light of truth passes through Newton’s mind and is reflected in Emilie du Châtelet’s translation of the Principia, before illuminating Voltaire’s text.
Along with the other philosophes, Condorcet insisted that the freedom individuals gained from the Enlightenment was the freedom to think for themselves. Aude sapere, or “dare to know,” is how Immanuel Kant defined the Enlightenment for his German readers, borrowing a tag from the Latin poet Horace. Don’t believe what a theologian or a book tells you to think, Kant admonished his readers: “Use your own understanding.”13 But the philosophes assumed that by thinking on their own, people would end up thinking like the philosophes. Just as Newton had discovered the invariable laws of gravity, reason should similarly lead us to discover the invariable laws of economics, politics, morality, and legislation. There were not two sets of laws of gravity; why should social and political issues have more than one correct solution? The Physiocrats, a group of economists and philosophers with whom Condorcet was associated, took this theory to its logical conclusion, arguing that there was a “natural and essential order of political societies,” applicable to all places, at all times.14
The enlightened faith in progress thus left little room for dissenting views. On some topics, such as religion and law, the philosophes retained a more modest epistemology.15 But there was a heady thrill to the thought that Europeans were making strides toward the rational restructuring of the world. Those who disagreed with the advocates of progress were likely still under the influence of superstition, prejudice, and error.
An illustration. Voltaire writes on a piece of paper on a desk, surrounded by celestial figures and cherubs. Above him, Newton holds a globe, and Mme du Châtelet holds a mirror. FIGURE 0.1 Voltaire, frontispiece to Elémens de la philosophie de Newton (1738). Wikimedia Commons, public domain.
In this way, the modern theory of progress encouraged, if it did not necessarily impose, an anti-pluralist outlook. Its technocratic undercurrent was already visible during the Enlightenment. “The philosopher is a gentleman (honnête homme) who always acts in accordance with reason,” reads a famous definition of the philosophe; “Graft a ruler onto such a philosopher, and you will have the perfect ruler.”16 Enlightened progressives could be surprisingly intolerant of contradictory views, since they presumed that all right-minded people must eventually come to the same conclusion. When that failed to happen, it was easy to surmise that the dissenters were not right-minded and possibly deranged. “Whoever fails to seek truth ceases to be human, and should be treated by fellow humans like a savage beast; and once truth has been discovered, whoever refuses to follow it is insane or morally evil.” This was the conclusion reached by Denis Diderot, the affable and worldly editor of the Encyclopédie.17
To be fair, Diderot himself later recognized the limitations of this view. In a wickedly self-critical dialogue, his interlocutor asks him, “Are virtue and philosophy for everyone?” before answering his own question: “Imagine a wise and philosophical universe; you must admit that it would be miserable as hell.”18 To the ancients, this modern outlook would have seemed more mad than sad. The very reason why Greek philosophers had recommended mixing constitutional forms was because they recognized that wealthy and poor rarely agreed on fundamental “questions of equality and justice.”19 This assumption was shared by later republican thinkers, including the framers of the US Constitution. James Madison defended the bicameral structure of Congress as the best way to manage the inevitable diversity of interests and opinions in the young republic. “As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he is at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed,” he insisted. It was ludicrous to attempt to give “every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.” The ultimate source of discord, for Madison, was the same as for Aristotle: “the various and unequal distribution of property.”20 Only the wealthy liked strawberries and cream.
Of course, the philosophes did not go around executing those who failed to seek the truth or to follow it. They assumed that such failures were fluke occurrences. Their veiled threats of legitimate violence against “enemies of the human race,” as Diderot castigated his imaginary opponent, were generally little more than rhetorical flourishes, aimed at marginal groups—”savages,” pirates, brigands, and tyrants. Most other humans, being rational, would eventually get with the Enlightenment program.21
But this trust that public opinion, when properly guided, would converge on the correct answer faced a serious test in 1789. The early events of May–June followed the Enlightenment script of revolution almost to a T. Unlike their American counterparts, the ringleaders of the newly proclaimed National Assembly eagerly identified their political struggle as a “revolution.” They cast off the classical phobia of revolutionary anarchy. Their revolution was “pure,” even “bloodless.” It marked another step in the general progress of humanity toward a more just future.22
Not everyone saw the events of that summer in this way, as the early trickle of emigration demonstrated. And the storming of the Bastille sullied the deputies’ self-image of a nonviolent struggle.23 But the greater threat to the Enlightenment ideal of a progressive revolution came from its supporters. Soon it became clear that the revolutionaries held markedly divergent views about the kind of future the revolution was to deliver. Public opinion did not converge around a single “natural and essential” way forward. Instead, it splintered.
These divisions among revolutionaries were doubly problematic. From an Enlightenment perspective, they were unforeseen. Progress was supposed to bring consensus. The only logical explanation, for each group, was that the others were wrong. Error, superstition, and prejudice clearly had not vanished overnight.
But adding to this surprise and sense of superiority was the fact that these viewpoints found institutional support at different levels of government. In Paris, members of certain districts advanced openly democratic ideas about how the new government should be founded. Representatives at the municipal, departmental, and national levels rejected these views, believing that affairs of state should principally be left to those with greater experience and wealth. Because all these officials exercised different functions (e.g., local policing vs. national legislation), the splits in public opinion translated into fractures of political power. Officials engaged in a series of standoffs: districts against municipal government, municipal government against national representatives, national representatives against departments.24
Divisions among political players were of course nothing new. In eighteenth-century France, royal power was regularly challenged by the parlements, or high courts. A century earlier, the English Parliament had fought a war against the English king. In both cases, opposite sides invoked rival interpretations of sovereignty to justify their claims, and brandished competing accounts of constitutional history. In these cases, however, political arguments were largely about the past. What was the correct interpretation of constitutional traditions? After 1789, each side claimed a privileged knowledge of the future. Proponents of a mixed or democratic government argued that their side was clearly superior because humanity was progressing in that direction. Since history could not advance in multiple directions at once, anyone who disagreed with your views was not only wrong but (in the new language of 1789) a “counterrevolutionary.”
Another major difference with earlier political conflicts is that, after 1789, opposite sides tended to view each other as illegitimate. The parlementaires may have clashed with the king, but they never questioned the legitimacy of royal power. It took the English members of Parliament two civil wars before even contemplating the removal of Charles I. By contrast, French revolutionary rivals routinely decried each other as usurpers. The radical districts questioned the legal standing of municipal and national representatives, who in turn rejected the districts’ actions as groundless and despotic. When they were not ad hominem, these attacks typically stemmed from mutually exclusive understandings of how to exercise popular sovereignty. Who should have the vote? What should they vote on? What was the appropriate kind of government for popular sovereignty? Because the revolutionaries could not agree on these fundamental questions, they ended up challenging the legitimacy of their opponents.
At various points during the French Revolution, the political situation resembled that described by Lenin in his famous essay “The Dual Power.” Just as the Paris Commune of 1871 drew on a different theory of government and sovereignty than the French National Government, Lenin argued, so too did the Petrograd Soviet and the Russian Provisional Government.25 In fact, the Paris Commune of 1792 had stood in almost the exact same relation to the French National Assembly in August and September of that year. Each questioned the legitimacy of the other, and did not fully recognize its authority. In place of the happy consensus promised by the modern progressives, the modern revolution delivered discord, and pushed its supporters toward violence.
Some may wonder how modern the French revolutionaries really were. The liberal politician Benjamin Constant would blame the Terror on the Jacobins’ proclivity for ancient republics. If the French Revolution was conducted, as Marx memorably put it, “in Roman costumes and with Roman phrases,” was it really modern at all?26
This question should not be dismissed lightly. In some respects, the French were even more obsessed with antiquity than their American counterparts. Not only was their own schooling equally grounded in the classics but they pushed the parallels with Greece and Rome further than the Americans. French revolutionaries bestowed on their children (or themselves) classical names: Anacharsis, Brutus, Gracchus, Minerva, or Mucius were not uncommon. They portrayed their politics with classical allegories: Hercules slaying the (aristocratic) hydra was a popular motif, divine allegories paraded through revolutionary images, and references to classical politicians peppered revolutionary speeches.27 They even turned to antiquity for social and political models: Marat wished to bring back the office of dictator, others sought to model national education on the Spartan example, and Saint-Just looked to Rome for republican institutions.28
But the French brought something else to this store of classical learning. The republic that they dreamed of establishing was not simply an improved version of the Roman precedent, as the English and Americans had sought. They fused classical ideas with the naturalizing politics of the Enlightenment. Indeed, for every allusion to ancient history in a revolutionary speech, there was an appeal to nature and natural law, as well. This naturalizing trend was already visible in many of the political theories of the French Enlightenment, most notably Physiocracy (Greek for “the rule of nature”). It also aligned with the late-Enlightenment emphasis on historical progress, which was assumed to lead in the direction of reason and justice. For Condorcet, it was the discovery of “the true rights of man” that marked an important step on the road toward progress. Accordingly, the revolutionaries could be both classically minded and historically progressive at once. The “natural republic” that they envisaged had never yet materialized in human history. Robespierre, who modeled himself on Cato the Elder, could also gesture toward a remarkable future when the French will have “fulfilled nature’s wishes.”29
The promise of a natural republic to come led the French to make political decisions that would have been heterodox in America. Perhaps their most shocking one occurred in October 1793, when the Convention suspended the constitution that the French had just ratified and declared a “revolutionary government” instead. The stated reason for this suspension was the ongoing war against both civil and foreign enemies, though there is evidence that the Jacobins also feared losing their majority. Either way, they opted for dictatorship, at least “until peacetime.”
This proclamation of a “revolutionary government” had lasting ramifications for the modern idea of revolution. For its opponents, it came to stand for the worst excesses of the Terror. When Napoleon Bonaparte seized power in 1799, he deftly and repeatedly used plebiscites to legitimize his rule. While he minimized popular participation in government, he promised to protect individual rights. These promises often fell flat in France, but Bonaparte articulated the basic liberal compromise: limit the exercise of popular sovereignty; prevent the electoral fighting that had plagued the Directory (the regime, based on the 1795 constitution, that Bonaparte had overthrown); and pose as a defender of individual liberty. Historians are right to highlight the authoritarianism of Bonaparte’s regimes, but he also made important contributions to the establishment of liberalism, especially outside of France.30
Indeed, it was under this liberal guise that revolution caught on in other countries. In Haiti, revolution was liberal in a pointed sense, as it sought to prevent the re-enslavement of Black citizens. Unfortunately for them, this emphasis on civil freedom largely came at the expense of political rights. In Spanish America, revolutions doubled as wars of independence, bringing military leaders to political prominence. As Bonaparte before them, they usually promised a stable government with limited political participation in exchange for rights protections. Revolutions in southern Europe sought a greater role for representative government, but struggled to succeed in the era of Restoration politics.
In some respects, liberalism can seem like a return to classical politics. Liberals liked to speak about the separation of powers, and placed high hopes in constitutions. But this resemblance is limited. For many liberals, constitutions were a source of hope because they signaled admission into the modern world. After 1815, many Europeans found Restoration politics outdated, and a liberal constitution marked the way forward. Unlike their classical predecessors, liberals did not regard revolution as a last-ditch measure to be attempted only in the face of the most oppressive tyranny, but as a means of historical progress.
Even their conception of constitutionalism departed from classical ideas. Liberals no longer concentrated on the proper distribution of powers across political bodies. Their primary goal was to secure individual rights. Securing these rights was viewed as the proper objective of modern politics, and what distinguished “the liberty of the moderns” from that of the ancients (in Constant’s famous distinction). This objective was not incompatible with the concentration of power in a single executive. Many liberals hailed from the military, and many generals rose to the top of republics, where they accumulated power. It was the Napoleonic formula.31
Elements of classical political theory certainly remained present among liberal thinkers. But after 1789 one finds few Polybians of Adams’s strain. The French Revolution reconfigured the entire political spectrum, to the point that even conservatives acknowledged that no return to the status quo ante was possible. A writer and aristocrat who emigrated during the Revolution (and later served as minister of foreign affairs), François-René de Chateaubriand compared 1789 to the Rubicon: once crossed, there was no going back. The revolution transformed the very meaning of “conservative.” As Prince Tancredi Falconeri famously remarked in The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel about the Risorgimento in Sicily, “If we want everything to stay the same, everything needs to change.”32
Precisely because the liberals endorsed the modern doctrine of progress, they found more formidable challengers among more radical progressives. If the revolution really was a portal into a new and improved age, why should the liberals have the final say in human affairs? Surely there were more things in this heavenly future than were dreamt of in liberal philosophy. Progressive writers sketched out remarkably detailed blueprints of a better world to come. While they disagreed on the minutiae, their collective musings imparted to their readers a sense, bordering on certainty, that the perfection of politics and society was within reach. The theorists themselves quarreled incessantly, but consumers of their work, which often assumed literary form, came away with visions of communes dancing in their heads.33
This mobilization of the imagination had powerful political effects. First, it fueled a growing discontent with liberals. The French Revolution of 1830 led to the fall of the Bourbons, but how different was the reign of Louis-Philippe? The July Monarchy was hardly the glimmering future that progressives craved. Second, the distance between the present state and the desired future continued to expand, as industrialization worsened labor conditions and socialist projections grew more elaborate.34 This yawning gap posed a problem for progressives. All were committed democrats: it was the only form of government fit for a rational and just future. But could democratic governance really navigate the treacherous way between the messy now and the perfected future? Compounding this problem was the current state of the people. How could the poorly educated, economically beholden, and ideologically oppressed masses be trusted to govern their way to the promised land to come?
Faced with this dilemma, progressives looked more favorably on the solution improvised by the Jacobins in 1793. Perhaps some temporary measure like the revolutionary government could bridge the social and political gap between present and future? There was at first some queasiness about endorsing dictatorship. But by 1848, Marx was calling a spade a spade and calling for the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”35
It was an ingenious phrase, combining the progressives’ democratic commitment (were not the proletariat the majority?) with their need for a tactical solution. But what did it really mean? How could a broad swath of the population act as a dictator? The Paris Commune of 1871 offered a tantalizing glimpse of how to square this political circle. Democratically elected, autonomous councils could administer affairs locally, and elect delegates to coordinate with other communes at a federal level. Power would flow from the bottom up, with power mostly concentrated at the lower levels, in the working class. In this way, progressives could have their socialist cake and eat it, democratically, too.
It was this same theory, inspired by the short-lived Paris Commune, that underpinned the rallying cry of the Bolsheviks some forty-five years later: All power to the soviets! (soviet is the Russian word for “council”). The 1917 February Revolution had led to a tense standoff between the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, and a Provisional Government. When the Bolsheviks toppled the latter, political power was supposed to return to the soviets throughout Russia. As it turned out, however, the political solution that Marx and Lenin had discovered in the Paris Commune was reversible. Political power could be anchored in local councils, with minimal coordination and control from above, as intended. But it could also end up concentrated at the top, and distributed downward only in crumbs. Structurally, the political organization looked the same. The 1936 constitution of the Soviet Union could formally announce that “the Soviets of Working People’s Deputies … constitute the political foundation of the U.S.S.R.” (art. 2), and that “all power belongs to the working people of town and country as represented by the Soviets of Working People’s Deputies” (art. 3), when in practice power was closely guarded at the top. The “dictatorship of the proletariat” turned out to be a dictatorship tout court.
Concentrating power among the upper echelons of the Party, however, did not resolve all political challenges. How was the Party, “the vanguard of the working people” (1936 constitution, art. 126), to determine policy? Again, it rested on a reversible organizational structure. In principle, policy votes were determined democratically, by party members. Bolshevik in Russian means “majoritarian,” and originally identified the voting bloc that won an electoral majority at the 1903 Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. But after the Bolsheviks seized power, most important decisions tended to be made by a small group of leaders. After 1928, many were made by a single one.
The rise of revolutionary authoritarianism is one of the most striking features of twentieth-century revolutions, many of which can be metonymically identified with a single name—Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, or Khomeini. The ability of these individuals to wield so much power is often credited to personal qualities (e.g., charisma) or flaws (e.g., megalomania). But the fact that so many different revolutions arrived at the same outcome suggests that something beyond personality must be at play. Ideology is one suspect, but there is minimal ideological continuity between a Stalin, a Pol Pot (who knew little Marx), and a Khomeini (a Shia cleric).
What all these revolutions do have in common, by contrast, is a faith in the role of revolutions in history. All subscribed to the modern viewpoint that revolutions are the vehicles of historical progress. Most of these revolutionaries will have disagreed about what constituted “progress,” but therein lies the key. Even within a single revolution, disagreements about its goals and methods abounded. The existential problem with modern revolutions, as the French discovered in 1789, is that no natural consensus emerges about (in Lenin’s words) “what is to be done.” The splintering of opinion produces factionalism, which in turn leads to power struggles. In the absence of a robust and trusted institutional structure for resolving these differences, revolutions can teeter back and forth, and ultimately collapse.
Entrusting extensive power to a single person, therefore, was a way to fix a structural problem with modern revolutions. In the end, someone has to decide what the revolution stands for and how to achieve it. Just as Hobbes had argued that a single ruler was needed to define laws and religious doctrines in a kingdom, modern revolutions crave a Red Leviathan to settle disagreements about what “revolution” actually means.
This fix, however, is not without costs. If modern revolutions do not deliver a consensus about the right way forward, this does not mean that modern revolutionaries have given up on the idea that a right way forward exists. “There can be no solution of the social problem but mine,” asserted Shigalov, the ideologue of the secret revolutionary society in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed (published in 1871–72).36 The revolution cannot stand for one thing and its opposite. Trotsky and Bukharin could not both be right. There can be only one correct path forward.
The Red Leviathan thus serves a double purpose: to determine what is right, and to decide who is wrong. There is a causal relationship—again, structural rather than ideological—between modern revolutions and internecine violence. For classical revolutionaries, disagreement was a feature of society. The reason why they put so much care into balancing the constitution properly was to manage disagreements, not to eliminate them. For modern revolutionaries, by contrast, disagreement was a bug, a symptom of error, prejudice, superstition, or something more nefarious still—counterrevolution. Indeed, strong was the temptation to label one’s political opponents not merely wrong or misguided but counterrevolutionaries. From the French Revolution onward, it was a temptation to which revolutionaries often succumbed.
Anti-pluralist, the modern doctrine of progress could also turn murderous. In modern revolutions, political differences were often settled in blood. What else could one do with counterrevolutionaries, real or imagined? The French called their opponents “enemies of the human race,” so unnatural was it, in their minds, to go against the revolution’s progress. “Enemies of the people,” “saboteurs,” and other slurs accompanied later counterrevolutionaries to their deaths.
Looking back on the revolutionary regimes of the past century, it is hard to imagine anything comparable recurring today, at least in the West. Our commitment to democratic governance is more established; the appeal of radical and violent ideologies has lessened; by many measures, there has been an overall improvement in living conditions; and our culture maintains a vivid memory of past revolutionary tragedies. At the same time, thirty years after the end of the Cold War, “revolution” is no longer a scare word. From socialists to nationalists, “revolution” once again conveys a certain excitement—no more politics as usual, enough with this corrupt system, and so on. At an ideological level, these “revolutionary” programs have little in common with past ideologies. But the structural challenges with modern revolutions remain. We are stuck in a vicious circle: democracy, as it is currently practiced, fails to deliver the social changes that many desire, both on the Left and on the Right. But a revolution that did away with our constitutional structures could produce an even worse outcome. Whether dissatisfaction with the present regime ultimately leads to revolution in the future is hard to predict. But we can be sure that, come the next revolution, not everyone will like strawberries and cream.
I saw the below output from you as a description of Peter Thiel’s views on competition. I’m not deeply familiar with Thiel’s views, except that he’s against democracy and wants to create privately owned and run city states, that he markets some frightening security innovations to states, and that he has supported Trump and Vance. He’s a libertarian, and libertarians tend to advocate free competition with minimal social responsibility. I find this difficult to square with the apparent distaste for competition described below. So please explain as best you can.
[The summary of Peter Thiel’s Argument you posted]
ChatGPT:
Your confusion is entirely justified — and it points to something real and important about Peter Thiel. The short answer is that Thiel is not a “free-competition libertarian” in the classical or Chicago sense at all. He is a deeply anti-competitive thinker, but for reasons that sit orthogonally to democratic or egalitarian concerns. Once you see the structure of his thought, the apparent contradiction dissolves.
I’ll proceed in four steps:
Why Thiel hates competition
Why this does not make him pro-social or pro-democratic
How this fits with his libertarianism
Why this worldview leads to city-states, surveillance tech, and authoritarian politics
1. Thiel’s hostility to competition is genuine — and central
The summary you quoted is accurate. Thiel’s antipathy to competition comes from René Girard, not economics.
The Girardian core
For Thiel:
Humans do not have independent preferences
Desire is mimetic: we want what others want
Competition is therefore not productive rivalry, but mutual imitation escalating into conflict
Left unchecked, mimetic rivalry produces:
Zero-sum status contests
Cultural sameness
Political polarization
Eventual violence or collapse
This is not metaphorical for him. He thinks most modern institutions are trapped in mimetic spirals.
This piece really made me think, especially about the distinction you draw. Its truly heartbreaking to read about these events.
The heaviosity half-hour was very fascinating