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An interview with István Mészáros on the twentieth century — Hobsbawm's "century of extremes" — and the need for a radical alternative. His answer turns on how to think about revolutions, which he compares to monumental earthquakes: the mountain ranges they throw up cannot be pushed back into the earth. He uses it against the counterfactual conservatism of Walt Rostow, who held that had the First World War not happened, or happened a decade later, Russia would have modernised successfully and been invulnerable to communism — an argument by counterfactual conditional that Mészáros says would not pass an introductory philosophy course, but which propagandistic eagerness greets as wisdom. Great revolutions, he argues, reverberate for centuries until their underlying causes are resolved, and their aftershocks are not confined to where they began: 1789 shook North America as well as Europe, and its demands remain relevant.
Précis by Red Mole.
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