Revolutionary thought

Summary

Dominique Pagani devotes his 2018 cycle to revolutionary thought, from Rousseau to Lénine. He does not treat it as history of ideas but as a continuum, traversed as a loop, in which Hegel holds the middle position as the philosopher of mediation12. Following Clouscard, he argues that Rousseau was the first to unite praxis and psyche. In his view, revolutions failed partly because they did not hold these two dimensions together, and Lénine's "dreaming is necessary" points the same way13. He reads the passage from the state of nature to the civil state in the Social Contract and makes Rousseau a dialectician who comes to dispute the king's enjoyment. For him, dialectics is critical and revolutionary because it grasps the transient character of every form, as the afterword to Capital puts it. He connects this to Hegelian negativity, surplus value, Prometheus and the tool, which Lénine rediscovers in Hegel's Logic2. In 2023, he extends these theses against Heidegger, ecologism and degrowth3.

1. 1#5.0 Presentation of the 2018-2019 workshop15 Oct 2018
2. 2#5.2 The philosopher's Odyssey: revolutionary thought21 Nov 2018
3. 3Praxis and psyche27 Mar 2023

Introduction produced automatically from the 5 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.