Introduction : The Libertarian Tradition
Communalism (1974)
Context: The contemporary world is being pulled apart by two contrary tendencies — one toward social death, one toward the birth of a new society. Many of the phenomena of the present crisis are ambivalent and can either mean death or birth depending on how the crisis is resolved.
The crisis of a civilization is a mass phenomenon and moves onward without benefit of ideology. The demand for freedom, community, life significance, the attack on alienation, is largely inchoate and instinctive. In the libertarian revolutionary movement these objectives were ideological, confined to books, or realized with difficulty, usually only temporarily in small experimental communities, or in individual lives and tiny social circles. It has been said of the contemporary revolutionary wave that it is a revolution without theory, anti-ideological. But the theory, the ideology, already exists in a tradition as old as capitalism itself. Furthermore, just as individuals specially gifted have been able to live free lives in the interstices of an exploitative, competitive system, so in periods when the developing capitalist system has temporarily and locally broken down due to the drag of outworn forms there have existed brief revolutionary honeymoons in which freer communal organization has prevailed. Whenever the power structure falters or fails the general tendency is to replace it with free communism. This is almost a law of revolution. In every instance so far, either the old power structure, as in the Paris Commune or the Spanish Civil War, or a new one, as in the French and Bolshevik Revolutions, has suppressed these free revolutionary societies with wholesale terror and bloodshed.
“There are in every man, at all times, two simultaneous tendencies, one toward God, the other toward Satan.”
Il y a dans tout homme, à toute heure, deux postulations simultanées, l'une vers Dieu, l'autre vers Satan.
Journaux intimes (1864–1867; published 1887), Mon cœur mis à nu (1864)
Original
Il y a dans tout homme, à toute heure, deux postulations simultanées, l'une vers Dieu, l'autre vers Satan.
Journaux intimes (1864–1867; published 1887), Mon cœur mis à nu (1864)
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Charles Baudelaire 133
French poet 1821–1867Related quotes
The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (2005)
Context: A man has two primary drives in early adulthood: one toward power, success, and accomplishment; the other toward love, companionship, and sex. Half of life then was out of order. To go before them was to stand up as a man and admit that I was only half a man.
Recapitulation
1790s, The Age of Reason, Part I (1794)
“Watch every tendency towards militarism, for we know that preparation for war leads to war.”
Opening the Canadian National Exhibition, The Globe, 29 August 1906, page 1.
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 140.
Doo Rags
On Albums, The Lost Tapes (2002)
Miller Newton (1995). Adolescence: Guiding Youth Through the Perilous Ordeal.W.W. Norton and Company, NY, NY, pg 43.
Treatment Approach
“The ultimate tendency of civilization is toward barbarism.”
Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare Guesses at Truth (London: Macmillan, ([1827-48] 1867) p. 459.
Misattributed
Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Prerequisite to Dignity of Labour (1957), p. 245
Context: It is not in a person's nature to desire what he already has. Desire is a tendency, the start of a movement toward something, toward a point from which one is absent. If, at the very outset, this movement doubles back on itself toward its point of departure, a person turns round and round like a squirrel in a cage or a prisoner in a condemned cell. Constant turning soon produces revulsion. All workers, especially though not exclusively those who work under inhumane conditions, are easily the victims of revulsion, exhaustion and disgust and the strongest are often the worst affected.
