Revolution is a perennial idea. Yet there is no doubt that it has had

greater currency at one time than another. We seem now to be liv-

ing at a time in which the idea of revolution is again experiencing an

upswing in popularity. It is therefore appropriate that we consider what

we think about revolution and what we should think about it.

The West has a long tradition of thinking about the idea of revolution,

which is well represented in Great Books of the Western World. One need

only cite the authors who discuss revolution: Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch,

Machiavelli, Hobbes, Shakespeare, Locke, Montesquieu, the authors of

The Federalist, Hegel, Marx, and Engels. In organizing our symposium,

was asked our contributors to continue this conversation.

Our contributors represent different approaches to the idea of revolu-

tion. None of them is as such an advocate of immediate violent political

re~olution. To represent that position, we reprint in Part Four Lenin s

State and Revolution, which was written immediately before the violent

overthrow of the Russian state in 1917.

Although not advocates of violent revolution, two of our authors find

the idea of revolution more attractive than do the other two. Both Illich

and Goodman, at least by implication, view sympathetically some of the

revolutionary aspirations present in the world today, though both con-

tend that these aspirations need redirecting. Toynbee and Buckley take

a more skeptical attitude toward revolution.

The greatest difference among our four authors lies in the focus of

their interest in revolution. Dr. Toynbee, as a historian, takes an admit-

tedly long view of the subject and considers how revolutions have arisen

in the history of civilization. Dr. Illich speaks as a representative of the

Third World, an expression that he dislikes and criticizes, though he

would not deny that the part of the world that it is used to designate

is often held to be the closest to revolution, even of a violent sort. Per-

haps the most remarkable feature of the current concern about revolu-

tion is the emergence of anarchism as an ideal that is considered attractive

and feasible, and this is the subject on which Paul Goodman writes. The

ideal of a society that can function without the use of coercion is one of

the few anarchist ideals shared by Lenin; in fact, it is the essence of what

he, after Engels, describes as "the withering away of the state." The im-

practicability, if not impossibility, of governing without the sanction, if

not the actual use, of force is one of the main contentions of William

Buckley s analysis of what he calls counterrevolutionary doctrine.

The last part of our symposium consists of an attempt to delineate at

least the main contours of the discussion of revolution as it is found in

Great Books of the Western World.