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Welcome to the LSE Events podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
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Okay. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to this inaugural lecture, which is a hybrid event. So welcome both to those of you in the audience in the room and to those that are joining us online. I'm Andrew Murray and I'm the Dean of the LSE Law School. And it's my very great pleasure to co host this event along with my colleague, Professor Andreas Velasco, who is the Dean of the School of Public Policy, sat on your left. So tonight we gather to celebrate the inaugural lecture of Professor Lee, who holds the Ralph Miliband Chair in Politics and Philosophy, a position held jointly between the Law School and the School of Public Policy. This joint appointment reflects both the breadth of professor upi's scholarship and the interdisciplinary nature of the questions that animate her work. Questions about justice, freedom, democracy and legitimacy of political authority that sit at the intersection of political philosophy, legal theory and public policy. It's therefore very fitting that Andres and I should welcome you together to this event, representing, as we do, two schools that are privileged to count Professor E.P. amongst our faculty. So tonight, Leah will discuss Are Revolutions Justified? After which, Andres will offer some reflections. Afterwards, there will be a chance for you to put questions to LEA for our online audience. You can submit your questions via the Q and A feature at the top left of your screen. You can. Questions will be submitted to myself. Please let us know your name and affiliation. And we're particularly keen to hear from our students and alumni. So please let us know if you're one of those. For those of you here in the theatre, I will let you know when we open the floor for questions. If you raise your hand and wait for the microphone, I will ask you to provide your name and affiliation. Before posing your question, I will try to ensure a range of questions from both our online audience and our audience here in the theatre. Now, let me say something about our distinguished lecturer. Professor IPP was born and raised in Albania, coming of age during one of the most dramatic political transformations of the late 20th century, the collapse of Europe's last Stalinist state. That experience of living through revolutionary change, of watching one political order crumble and another take its place, has profoundly shaped her intellectual trajectory. It is not, I think, a coincidence that she will stand before us today to pose the question, are revolutions just? Her academic journey took her from the University of Rome, La Sapienza, where she obtained a degree in both philosophy and literature to the European University Institute in Florence for her doctorate, and then to Oxford, where she was a prize research fellow at Nuffield College before the pinnacle of her career joining lse. Her scholarly work ranges across normative political theory, democratic theory, theories of justice and migration, enlightenment and political thought, with particular expertise in Kant and Marxism and critical theory. Her academic publications are formidable. Her monograph Global justice and Avant Garde Political Agency, breaks ground in thinking about cosmopolitan duties and political action. The Meaning of Partisanship, co authored with Jonathan White, offers a defence of political parties at a time when they face unprecedented skepticism. And the architectronic of Reason demonstrates her deep engagement with Kantian philosophy, an engagement that, as those of you who will hear tonight's lecture, continues to animate her thinking about ethics of political transformation. But Professor Uepi has achieved something rare in our profession, as she has reached far beyond the academy to speak to a truly global audience. Her memoir, Coming of Age at the End of History, won the Royal Society of Literature En d' Achie Prize and has been translated into more than 35 languages. It was serialized on BBC Radio 4 and was named by the Sunday Times as one of the 12 most exceptional memoirs of the past three decades. Her more recent book, Indignity, continues to explore the relationship between personal history and philosophical inquiry through the life of her grandmother, and it's a fantastically good read. The recognition Professor U P has received is extraordinary. She was named one of the world's top 10 thinkers by Prospect magazine and one of the six most important thinkers of 2023 by El Pei. It's profoundly appropriate that Professor Uppi holds the Ralph Miliband Chair. Ralph Miliband was associated with this institution for over 30 years. His work, including Parliamentary Socialism, the State of Capitalist Society, Marxism in Politics, shaped how a generation thought about power, class and democracy. He was a passionate socialist and a formidable intellect. But those who knew him speak equally of his gifts as a teacher, his commitment to rigorous inquiry, and his belief that scholarship should serve the cause of human emancipation. There's a wonderful resonance between Ralph Miliband's life and tonight's lecture. His doctoral thesis, completed here at LSE under Laski's supervision, examined popular thought in financial evolution, something that ties in very nicely with Professor EP's themes for tonight. So there could be no better embodiment than the spirit of Professor Epi's work through the Ralph Miliband Chair. And I'm delighted to say also that she will co deliver with Professor Albena Asimova and Professor Peter Wagner a lecture in the Ralph Miliband Lecture Series on Wednesday 4th March on Capitalism, Democracy and the the radical legacy of Claus Offen. So if you like tonight's lecture from Leah, come on the 4th of March to hear another one. Now that's the end of my opening remarks but before I ask Professor Uppi to deliver her lecture, we we're honoured tonight to be joined by Ralph Miliband's son, David Miliband. David, of course, has had a distinguished career of his own as a Member of Parliament for South Shields, as Foreign Secretary and now as President and Chief Executive Officer of the International Rescue Committee, where he continues his father's commitment to refugees and those displaced by conflict and persecution. It seems particularly fitting that David should be here tonight as we celebrate a chair named for his father. And as Professor U Ps addressed, questions about political transformation were so central to Ralph Miliband's life and work. So I would now like to invite David Miliband to come up and say some words about his father and his contribution to political science. David.
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Thank you very much. It's really an enormous honour and pleasure to be here tonight. Of course, you know my dad as a writer, I know him as my dad. Some of you may have read his books, may have seen some of the videos. I remember him as the person who took me to play football in leeds as a 10 year old in the 1970s. So it really is an honor as well as a pleasure to be here. I know my brother would have very much wanted to be here. He's in Germany on government business tonight, but is coming, coming here later. It's fantastic that his kids and his wife Justine are here and on behalf of the whole family, I think it's really wonderful to have the chance to think back to someone who died sadly in 1994, so some time ago, who was born in 1924, but for whom the LSE was such an important institution. My first task, though, is to say huge congratulations and huge thanks to Leah Ipbec, because I only got to know her through this remarkable book that she wrote, Free and you're right, Andrew, it was, it is brilliant, it's profound. It's also, and this is unusual for a political science text, utterly hilarious. The comedy of the oppressive society is almost the ultimate thing that undermines it. And I think that the way in which Leah Ipi summoned up what it meant to live in an unfree society is really a lasting testimony to the importance of building free societies. As you say, Andrew, her new book, Indignity surpasses, even free, with the story of her grandmother. And for the purposes of my remarks tonight, both about my dad and slightly more broadly, the way in which Leo Ipi's writing fuses memory, history, ideas and ideals is really quite remarkable and, I think very important today. It's the fusion of the personal and the political that makes her writing, in my view, quite so powerful. I think my dad would be absolutely thrilled that Lea Ippy was the Ralph Miliband Chair, the London School of Economics. He may even wryly say that her appointment rediscovers the true spirit of the lse, which he thought was so important. I've been asked to say a few words about my dad's relationship with the lse, much of which happened in this lecture theater. Simply put, the LSE changed my dad's life forever and in some ways gave him purpose in professional life. And there's a particular reason for that. My dad was born in 1924 in Brussels in Belgium to a Jewish family. His dad was a leather worker and never went to university. Neither did his mum. This family spoke French as a first language, Yiddish as a second language. And when the Nazis invaded in May 1940, my dad and his dad came to the UK. They came to London. My grandfather helped clear out bombed buildings and my dad went to Acton Technical College to learn English. After a year he applied to the lse. He matriculated from Acton Technical College and he applied to come to the lse. He was admitted and at the time the LSE was in Cambridge. And so he spent the year 194142 in Cambridge as a student. I remember him saying to me that he thought it was ridiculous to be studying in Cambridge when he should be fighting fascism. And so after a year, he joined the Royal Navy. Some irony in this, in that he was perpetually seasick in the Royal Navy, but he spent three years serving his country and contributing to the fight against fascism. He came back to the LSE and he was only allowed to stay in the UK because he was a student. He had a student visa. He became a student of Harol Vlaski, as you say. Andrew was professor of Politics, Chairman of the Labour Party, actually, in the late 1940s. And I think my dad found a home at this school, both as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student. Harold Lasky's graduate seminar in politics was the crucible of debate in the school. It brought together all shades of opinion in passionate encounters, he told me. Laski unexpectedly died in March 1950. And quite incredibly, my dad was asked to continue the seminar. That's how he became a teacher and a lecturer, and he stayed here until the early 1970s. It's also very significantly where he met my mum, who was a student here in the middle 1950s. This leads to my second point that I think is relevant tonight and relevant to Leah Ipi's work. My dad believed that teaching wasn't just central to his life, it was absolutely crucial to the sustenance of a decent society. The importance of teachers to him was paramount, and he was convinced that being a teacher was an art and a craft that needed time and attention like no other. He said he learned from his students as well as they learning from him. And I think maybe because English was not his first language, he took special attention to make detailed notes for his lectures, and those notes remain today. He was explicit also, and I think this is relevant in the modern context. He was explicit about being a Marxist, but he always said he was equally explicit in his responsibility to teach Edmund Burke with as much passion as he taught Karl Marx. He loved the story of a lecturer who taught in Cambridge in the 1910s. It's probably apocryphal, but it's a great story of how a lecturer in economics came into the first lecture of An Introduction to Economics, one of the greatest halls in Cambridge for 800 people. And there was one student in the audience. And throughout the eight weeks of term, the lecturer gave the lecture as if it was full of 800 people. And after eight weeks, the lecturer came down from the stage on which he was speaking and said, young man, thank you very much for attending my lecture series. I know you're the only person who's attended this lecture. As a matter of interest, what's your name? And the student said, my name is John Maynard Keynes. My dad liked that story because you just don't know who's in front of you when you're teaching. One symbol of my dad's commitment to teaching is that the Ralph Miliband program exists because a man called Bob Wooliger, who died in Bangkok in the middle of the 1990s, had no heirs, no commitments, and left all of his money to found the Ralph Miliband program. Because for him, the graduate seminar that he'd attended in the early 1960s was the most important experience of his life. I just want to say one other thing about our current situation. It's that universities have never been more important and universities of social science never more needed. We live in a world where facts are under threat, where debate is marginalized by culture. War or can be the contest of ideas left in the sidings by the algorithms of social media. And the relationship of economics to politics, of prosperity to democracy, has never been more contested. And where better to hash out those issues than here? Because this is not just the London School of Economics, it's the London School of Economics and Political Science. And it's, in my view, in the interrelationship between those two forces, economics and politics, that the great questions of our time need to be resolved. And I fully believe that Leah Ipi's role, part of our role in holding this professorship is to help contribute to that process of understanding and distilling the relationship between economics and politics today. I just want to finish because in the following way. Reading Leah Ipi's books, I was reminded of a wonderful piece of writing, a remarkable piece of writing by a man called C. Wright Mills, who was an American sociologist. Some of you may know him. He was an enormous friend of my dad's. They were incredibly close. And at the end of a book that C. Wright Mills wrote, Sociological Imagination, he wrote the following. Know that the human meaning of public issues must be revealed by relating them to personal troubles and to the problems of individual life. Know that the problems of social science, when.
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Act.
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When. When adequately formulated, must include both personal troubles and public issues, both biography and history, and their range of intricate relations. Within that range, the life of the individual and the making of societies occur. And within that range, the sociological imagination has its chance to make a difference in the quality of human life in our time. I can't think of a better description of what Leah Ipi does in her writing relating personal challenges to public issues than that quotation. And that, it seems to me, is why she is so deserving of her new role and why I'm so grateful to be able to hand over the platform to her to give her remarks. Thank you very much indeed.
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Thank you. I'm. I'm so honored and delighted to have been appointed to this chair in Politics and Philosophy and to join all these wonderful colleagues in both the Law School and the School of Public Policy. But I'm especially delighted to be holding this chair, the name of Ralph Miliband, whose work I've been researching and teaching since joining the LSE now more than 15 years ago. So I hope you'll indulge me if I spend the first few minutes explaining why Ralph's work has been so important to me. I never met Ralph Miliband. As you heard, he passed away in 1994. And in 1994, I was in secondary school in Albania, just starting struggling with power cuts and with shock therapy and with the transition from socialism to capitalism. And I was also a staunch anti Marxist. I encountered his work in Rome when I was less of an anti Marxist, but still not quite fully a Marxist. And then I started to really engage with him when I arrived in the UK and moved to Oxford where I was a prize fellow at Nuffield College. And one of my most important mentors and teachers was a philosopher called G.A. cohen, Jerry Cohen, who was part of the so called Analytical Marxist school, also for those of you known as the non bullshit Marxism school. So this non bullshit Marxism attracted me. So obviously you don't want to be attracted to bullshit Marxism. But also it attracted me because it was a way of thinking about socialist things theory that was in conversation with in particular liberal egalitarianism and with the philosophy of John Rose, people like Dworkin and many others who thought about the question of what is justice, what is a just society? How should we think about the ideal distribution of resources in society? And there was a productive conversation and many overlaps between those two traditions. Marxism on the one hand and liberal egalitarianism on the other hand. But there was something missing in these debates and that was politics. And in fact there was one question that had actually stopped preoccupying both the Marxists and the liberal egalitarians and the world as a whole at the time in which I arrived in Oxford, which was so how do we realize these great ideas of justice? How do we think about the role of politics, about the state, the bureaucracy, the civil service? What is the function of elites in enabling and constraining political change? And how do we really pursue these ideal principles of justice that we all, liberals and Marxists alike, seem to agree upon? So these were the kinds of questions that neither the non bullshit Marxists nor the liberal egalitarians were interested in and they had decided to ignore them. But if you came from the part of the world that I was coming from, these were not the kinds of questions that you could ignore. And ignoring them wasn't just a matter of intellectual oversight or professional narrow mindedness. It kind of committed you to a complicity with the injustices of the 20th century and with those crimes in the name of which many of those pursuits of the ideally just society had been permitted. So these were for me political questions. They were also personal questions. And so I became really interested in exactly the kinds of things that analytical Marxists tended to ignore. The dictatorship of the proletariat what is the relationship between society and the state? What is the function of elites in different kinds of political systems? And as it happens, these were also exactly the kinds of questions that Ralph Miliband had been working on all his life. So I think there were a lot of reasons for why I'm coming here, so I can't see his family. So there are a lot of reasons for why Ralph's work resonated with me. And some of them were biographical reasons. Both of us had roots in Eastern Europe. Both of us actually were immigrants in the uk. French was our first language. In both cases, we both hung out, as I discovered in Acton and Chisik and lse, although I suspect I liked LSE more than he did. But there is also a deeper reason, which is that I found in Ralph Miliband's work the kind of theoretical resources that helped me understand the two failures that I think have shaped my life. So, on the one hand, all my life is not over, so one can still be renegade. But one is the failure of state socialism that I experienced during my childhood in communist Albania, and the other one is the failure of liberal capitalism that I experienced in my adult life, first as an immigrant in Italy and then in the uk. So Ralph Miliband was really scathing on the first failure, the failure of state socialism. And actually, in engaging with these reasons for this failure, he didn't follow the path of many people who thought about this over the 80s and 90s, which was to focus on the failures of markets, on the economy, on the problems of central planning or the efficiency of socialist society. He focused on what was, to my mind, a much more profound failure, which was the failure of democracy. And so the way in which socialist states had parted with this idea of freedom, that was animating. That was animating the thought of Marx and Engels was one of the things that really preoccupied Ralph Miliband. And although, as he argued in this last book, which was about socialism and skepticism and was a book that was written in 1994, so after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and I quote, socialists had no reason to mourn the passing of the old regime, but he said they had good reason to mourn the catastrophic failure of Gorbachev to achieve a transition from the authoritarian collectivism of the Brezhnev era to something resembling socialist democracy now, Ralph Miliband was also scathing on the other failure, on the other problem, on the kind of society that followed replaced the Soviet Union. He was scathing on the limits of liberal parliamentarism. And the possibility of living with capitalism to create the values that socialists care about. The failures of the socialists of the reformist project that just tried to tame capitalism rather than try to overcome it. And those failures were kind of obvious for everyone who had eyes to see and lived in post communist worlds, in post communist society in the 90s, but I think have now also become very obvious to anyone who has eyes to see and lives in 2025 anywhere in the world, really. So I think Ralph's work, Ralph Miliband's work helps us understand why that is the case. Because, as he says, piecemeal reform is not sufficient to cure the fundamental evils of the system. Because the abandonment of socialism as a radically transformative project has a profound impact on the nature of reform itself. And so, as he explains, the history of reform under capitalism shows it to have been a very partial response to a very specific problem. And those problems were often themselves shaped by the logic of capital. And as he also understood, the state is itself a deeply conservative mechanism when it comes to social change and when it comes to challenging the kind of measures that entrench power and privilege. So the state is, as he explains, structured to dilute, redirect and contain the pressures for radical change and limits the influence of these pressures on policy and on practice. So now this takes me to tonight's problem. If reform has failed, are revolutions justified? And to answer, to start answering this question, let me start in the spirit of non bullshit Marxism with some definitions. So what is a revolution? The first time I asked for a definition of revolution was in Albania. And I was about 11, and my mother was in a dissident movement then and seemed to be involved in a kind of revolution, real life revolution. And until that point, revolution for me was something that was just in the book. So we had read in school about the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, which was the greatest of all. Sometimes even the English looked like there had been a revolution. People weren't quite sure what to make of it. But I had actually never heard of revolution in a contemporary in the present. And so since my mother was involved in it and it was everywhere, it was on radio, on television, at home. And since I couldn't quite see the connection between the events that I had read about in my schoolbooks and the kinds of things that my mother was talking about, I asked her, so what is a revolution? She gives me this long, suspicious look. She probably thought I was a spy. And she said, it's a mess. And then I was like, okay, I get it's a mess, but what is it exactly? And I was kind of disappointed and trying to get her to say more, she gives me another look and says, don't do it. So as you can see, I have followed my mother's advice because I'm here to talk about revolution, not to do it. And one can't do it at the LSE anyway, as Ralph Miliband discovered. That's why he moved to to Leeds, but he couldn't do it in Leeds either. So what I can do is try and start with a slightly more comprehensive definition from the one that my mother gave me or the non definition she gave me, which is to say that a political revolution, as I will use the term, is the attempt, sometimes accompanied by violence, to overcome domination and to create a juridical order that changes the structure of social relations, including political and economic ones. And I'll go back to this definition in a minute, but for now I want to stress three key elements. The first one is revolution is an attempt. The second one is that violence is sometimes, but not always part of it. And the third one, that freedom plays a really important role in understanding what it is. So first, the question of violence is very important because peaceful revolutions, although they are rare, they exist. And the Velvet Revolution of 1989 in Central Eastern Europe and in the south of Balkans is just one example of this kind of revolution. So it's a mistake to try to distinguish reforms from revolutions just based on how violent they are. As a famous Marxist, Rosa Luxembourg explains, reform and revolution are not two different methods of historical progress that you can pick, as she says, from the counter of history, like hot and cold sausages. Often revolution is the act, as she says, of political creation, while legislation is the political expression of a life that has already come into being through its revolution. And so in this sense, every process of legal reform has at its basis a revolution. And this is also something that, as Ralph Miliband insists in his writing, was the perspective of social democracy, the real social democracy, the social democracy of before 1914, that is to say, an accumulation of social reforms so radical and so substantial as to bring about a revolutionary transformation of the social order. So it's also important that any definition of revolution is about the attempt to change things rather than the success in doing so, because we have to make conceptual space. And this is an important part of the argument that I will make to the concept of a failed revolution. So again, think about the importance of the Paris Commune of 1871, or think about the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. That led to the government of immerengy. And so failed revolutions sometimes are just as instructive as successful ones. Now, the term revolution, as Hannah Arendt explains, is originally started circulating in the 14th century as an astronomical term. It was popularized by Copernicus to indicate the rotation of celestial bodies in the orbit, following a circular motion of predictable, specific scientific laws. So this early scientific use of the term revolution is actually quite different from the way in which we use the term revolution now, because in the scientific case, the concept of revolution is about predictability, about change that can be measured, anticipated, foreseeable motion, circularity, this motion of the bodies in the orbit. And the political one is exactly the opposite. It's about upheaval, it's about rupture, it's about treading through paths that you don't anticipate. So in the first case, Copernicus, revolution brings us to the workings of nature. And in the second one seems to be the work of freedom. But this discrepancy between the scientific and the political views of revolution is actually settled if you think about how revolutions are usually justified by revolutionaries themselves. So for revolutionaries, the political struggles to which they devote their lives are often understood as a return to something, to some natural condition of freedom or justice or. Or equality. And so, in the words of a famous revolutionary, which I will give you the name in a minute, we wish to fulfill the intentions of nature and the destiny of men, realize the promises of philosophy and acquit providence of a long reign of crime and tyranny. So that was Robespierre. And Robespierre says, virtue is natural in the people. And if governments neglect their interest, the light of principles should unmask their treasures. But now revolutions have to have their principles which explain where we need to return. They also have to have their champions. Otherwise they just end up being a discussion. That happens when you're passing the port on the right or on the left at Oxford. And the championing of these principles often comes at very high cost. So revolutionary politics is, as Lenin emphasizes, citing the socialist Chernyshevsky is not the pavement of the Nevsky Prospect, so the clean, large and broad principal street of St. Petersburg. Or this will be more familiar with Chairman Mao's famous saying, the revolution is not like a dinner party, or writing an essay or painting a picture or doing embroidery. It cannot be something, Mao continues, as refined or leisurely or gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous and magnanimous. So revolutionaries must put up with significant emotional and physical harm, and often, actually, they are the first victims of their own attempts. So think again about Robespierre or think about Trotsky. And most of the time they fail, but sometimes they succeed. And when that is the case, the revolutionaries of the past have to become the rulers of the present. And if their governments are to be considered legitimate in the eyes of the whole people, they actually have to rule with the support of everyone and in the name of everyone. So that means they have to rule not just on behalf of the fellow revolutionaries who supported this struggle, but also of everyone who tried to undermine them. So the people who were indifferent to their calls, the people who ridiculed them, the people who were first persuaded and then changed their mind, the people who made decisions to persecute them, the bureaucrats who carried over these decisions, the militaries who tortured and shot them. So they have to create political institutions that command the widespread allegiance of everyone, knowing that they actually didn't have this allegiance in the first place. And so, for this to be possible, the defenders of the present order have to forget that they are the same guys that tried to undermine the order previously. And extremism, this infantile disorder, as Lenin calls it, the refusal to kind of negotiate that might characterize the initial stages of the revolutionary project, has to give way to compromise. And so, from their point of view, the previous revolution is always the last revolution, from the point of view of the revolutionaries. And so that's why revolutions are these really ambiguous phenomena, because morality is necessary to their genesis. But it's a condition of the success of revolution that they have to give way to a legal point of view. And so their means are often in tension with the ends that they have. And the genesis of revolution also often stands in the way of the validity of revolution. So this explains why the question that I'm going to talk about is the question of the justification of revolution is so difficult, and also why it's subject to two different ways of thinking about the justification of revolution. So the people who criticize revolution on grounds of legalism, and the people who endorse it on grounds of moralism, moralists think that since the ends of revolution are right, revolution can never be wrong. And legalists think that since the means of revolution are wrong, revolution can never be right. So tonight I want to revisit their arguments, and I want to try and give you an answer that tries to cut across this divide. But before I give you the answer, I want to look at the critiques, both in a bit more detail. So, in defending revolution, moralists usually hold on to the notion that there are valid claims that trump whatever standing legitimate authorities might have. And so there's different ways of articulating what counts as a valid claim. You might say some people have natural rights or human rights that the state should respect, and when it fails, it has no legitimacy. Some people will say, core interests of humans that state needs to protect. And when political institutions don't reflect these commitments, so the argument goes, the people have a right, a moral right to revolution, so they must be able to fix the wrong from which they suffer. So this is the moralist argument. And to this argument, the legalists give different responses. The first one is prudential. They say, look, many revolutions end up in carnage, and they involve widespread unrestricted protests, sometimes armed conflict. They bring harm to individuals and to communities. They can bring about the displacement of populations. They can violate whatever rights were there without bringing new ones. And they don't really bring real progress in society. Sometimes they bring regress. The second argument is more about the second hostile argument. Revolution is more about the mechanisms of change. So many people say, look, all things considered, even if you have the right ideas, people should try to reform through lawful channels, working with existing political structures, because they say, the arbitrariness with which revolutionaries come to power risks sanctioning an ongoing arbitrary behavior. And this second argument is actually what explains why a lot of intellectuals who support in principle the idea of revolution often end up disliking any concrete manifestation of them. So they like the idea in principle, but they never like it when it happens. So think about Orwell's position vis a vis the Bolshevik Revolution and the end of Animal Farm, which a lot of you will be familiar with. I read somewhere that when people cite Animal Farm, it's because they haven't read any other books. I promise you, I've read books. Maybe I thought you hadn't. So this is what Orwell says when he explains how the farm animals at some point witness Napoleon the pig playing cards with Mr. Pickleton. And Orwell gives you this devastating final sentence of the book, which is, the creatures outside. Look from pig to man and from man to pig and from pig to man again. But already it was impossible to say which was which. And so. So this is Orwell making a familiar point, which is that since revolutionaries themselves end up betraying their principles, one might applaud revolutions in general. You might think it's a good idea, but actually, in any particular case, it's not a good idea. And you prefer a more gradual approach and a more evolutionary approach to social change. Now, the critique of revolutions that I find most persuasive and I'm going to talk about. Talk to you about. Which then results into a defense of revolutions, which is a very strange, curious case, is the one formulated in the political writings of my favorite philosopher, Immanuel Kant, who is very famous for a strange position on revolution which is exactly the opposite of Orwell's. So Kant rejects revolution in general, but he loves one particular revolution, the French Revolution. So Orwell likes revolutions in general, but hates the particular revolution that he has to deal with. Kant is exactly the opposite. And I'm going to run you quickly through the argument. Apparently, when Kant received the news of the French Revolution having the installment of the Republic in France, he was then 65, which was very old for that time. And he burst out and said, now I can say, like Simon, God, let your servant die in peace. Since I have already lived this memorable day. Now you might say, well, that was just when it had started revolution. Also, the French Revolution turned out to be a bit of a mess. It ended up in the Reign of Terror. Turns out Kant loved terror as well around 1793, which is exactly at the time in which the French Revolution had entered its darkest days of terror. And actually, many of Kant's colleagues had become like Orwell. They were like, no, not really. It's not a good idea. One of his students, Nicolobius, writes in his letters that Kant insisted in exactly this year that all the horrors that took place in France were nothing compared to those that people had suffered under a despotic regime. And the. And now this is, Kant continues, the quote, the Jacobins were probably right in all their actions. Now Kant is really famous, not just for this, for defending the Jacobins, but for rejecting revolutions in general. So now I'm going to take you to the other part of his argument, which is, why was he so hostile, since he was so enthusiastic about terror and about the Jacobins, how come he was so hostile to the idea of revolutions in general? And here is now another quote from Kant that explains what his argument was and the call that he makes. He says, a people have a duty not to rebel even against an unjust government. They have a duty to put up with even what is held to be an unbearable abuse of supreme authority. Now, Kant's argument against revolution is the same argument that he deploys when he criticizes colonialism and European civilizing missions in other parts of the world. He says that a group of people cannot unilaterally use coercion to change by force social relations that are based on some recognition of some principle of right. So he thinks that the submission to a political authority is the sort of foundation on which human beings can make right based claims on each other, and that revolutionary attempts to dismantle this political authority are contradictory because they undermine the basis on which those kinds of claims can be made. So basically what Kant is saying, revolutionaries put themselves outside the sphere of publicly recognizable rights and in doing so act unilaterally. It's some group out there that has decided to undermine public order and the public order that represents some form of collective will. And so any unilateral act that is placed outside the context of public recognition is, for Kant's wrong, because it can't be universalized. You can't generalize this case. So I think this is a coherent position and we can argue about it later, because I didn't have time to exactly unpack how Kant makes it. But there's a tension here, and I think it goes back to the tension that I outlined at the beginning, between the claims of revolutionaries when they act outside the state and the claims of revolutionaries when they become part of the state and they need to command the allegiance of everyone. And it's this insight, this tension, that actually motivates Kant's position. But my question is, is there a way of reconciling this strange stance on revolution? And now I'm going to make a suggestion which is, yes, you can reconcile these two, but only by focusing not on the actions of individuals, but as Kant does, by placing the justification for revolution in a broader historical context and within a historical context that is understood and analyzed from a particular philosophical perspective. So. So doing that which Kant calls philosophy of history, and in a philosophy of history that is based on a more general standpoint, the standpoint that I will call in a somewhat old fashioned way, the standpoint of the species being. And I'm going to explain in a minute what the species being is. But basically, as I see, the species being is a way of talking about humanity more generally that goes beyond existing individuals at any particular point in time, and that tries to reflect more holistically on humanity as a temporarily stretched moral relation. So I've already talked a little bit about Kant's rejection of revolution in general. To explain what this means, to look at the question of revolution from the point of view of the philosophy of history, I'm going to turn to Kant's argument on the desirability of the French Revolution and the way in which it unfolds through a more general question that Kant asks around, is there a sign of progress in history? So the question of progress in history is, broadly speaking, the question of if we acknowledge the abstract force of moral norms or the abstract force of philosophical ideas of justice or fairness or egalitarian society, what have you, is there any evidence that these ideas, that these ideals have purchased in the world in which we live? Now, the difficulty with asking this question is problem Kant acknowledged, which is that here we are dealing with the actions of human beings, and so we can't quite predict how they will go because they are free. And being free, they can decide whether to follow these moral imperatives or to ignore them. And also external circumstances always conspire against you. There is ideology, there is false consciousness, there is brutal force. So for Kant to ask this question of whether these moral principles have any purchase in the world in which we live is to ask, as he says, whether we can single out an experience, a phenomenal, visible experience, which, as Kant says, as a sign, points to the disposition of human beings to follow their moral imperatives. And to say that something is possible is not the same as saying that it will occur. We're not predicting anything. All we have, therefore, is an analysis not of the causes of moral progress, but of the signs of progress. And it's really important that we don't talk about causes, but signs, because if progress were causal, it would be deterministic and it would also be irreversible. And if that were the case, we wouldn't have had the Holocaust after Kant's lectures and we wouldn't have Donald Trump here today. So a sign is just that. It's a sign. It's not a cause. It's an empirically observable phenomenon of a moral disposition that tells us something about the human beings more generally. And here we're not looking for evidence of progress in the lives of individuals, but in the life of humans, taken in this species being way as a temporally stretched relation. And so for Kant, the French Revolution gives us just this sign. So why does it give us a sign? First of all, it's interesting to think about the alternatives, because there were other models around the time in which Kant was writing which were writing about signs of progress. And usually they focused on the actions of leaders or politicians. So there was discussion around Univ. Voltaire's century of Louis xiv, or you have the kind of narrative around the emergence and the decay of ancient political structures. You have Machiavelli on Rome, or you have Montesquieu on considerations on the Greatness and Decline of the Romans and so on. So Kant focuses on something very, very different, which is just beginning to emerge in the 18th century, but that is around us now, and that's the beginnings of the public sphere, the emergence of the public sphere. And he focuses on the public sphere because he focuses on the public reaction triggered by the French Revolution. Or as he puts it, this is a quote in this mode of thinking of the spectators, the attitude they reveal publicly in this great game of revolutions, and show us a universal yet disinterested sympathy for the players of one side against the other, even at the risk of their own personal disadvantage. So this was the sign for Kant. And so, unlike the justification of revolutions in general, it's the partiality of an impartial public towards the revolutionaries that is celebrated here. Why? Because that response, the response of the public, shows us that human beings are capable of being motivated by things other than self interest. Sometimes they can go against their personal self interest. And that's why Kant identifies a sign of moral progress in the enthusiasm that the French Revolution engenders in those who take sides and who choose the interests of humanity more general and raise themselves above their particular interests, even at the cost of sacrificing their lives. So what is the link between revolution as a sign and enthusiasm as a visible manifestation of this sign here? There's two arguments that one can make. One is about the expansion, and I'll say something very briefly on each of them before wrapping up. One is on the expansion of the boundaries of political feasibility, and the other one is about the cultural effects of education. So it's an aesthetic argument. So let me start with feasibility. How many times have you suggested a radical idea or a project or a proposal, and you heard, yeah, that sounds really great in theory, but it doesn't really work in practice. So when Keir Starmer a few years ago was accused of breaking a few campaign pledges, he said, I quote, I have to be realistic about what is possible. In other words, I have to lie, because it's a very tough world out there. But of course, what is and isn't possible is itself subject to different interpretations, because there are no hard facts in the world, and certainly no hard facts that concern humans, that are free in their dispositions. Everything is an interpretation of a fact. And so what is or isn't realistic depends on how we balance priorities, how we think about facts, how we order and value the facts. And of course, there are a lot of things that contribute to make a proposal genuinely unrealistic. So things like people are self centered, or they're ideologically motivated, or if they're afraid to speak, or they're manipulated by propaganda, or they're at the mercy of fake news, you name it. So interestingly, Ralph Miliband also mentions this question of feasibility when talking about radical change in his last book, in Socialism for Skeptical Age, with a quote from Machiavelli's Prince, but a very anti realist quote, and it's interesting that he brings this quote. So Machiavelli says the reformer has enemies in all who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order. And this lukewarmness arises partly from fear of their adversaries who have the law in their favor, and partly from the incredulity of mankind who do not truly believe in anything until they have had actual experience of it. So these were the obstacles for Machiavelli, for Kant, for Miliband, for us. But for Kant, the presence of revolutionary enthusiasm show that people can go beyond all that. And so enthusiasm is the sign of identification with the actions of revolutionaries whose cause is advanced in the name of the whole humanity. So from this point of view, the French Revolution, Kant thought, is valuable because it culminates in into the achievement of this formal condition through which human beings can resolve disagreements through a framework of principles of right. And of course, now we know that Kant might have been very optimistic about this, because might still dominates contemporary politics. Don't need to tell you that now. But it's easy to see how, as far as the French revolutionaries and the kind of sympathy that they trigger is concerned. The point is that they contribute to the establishment of this republican party order based on the principle of peaceful coexistence in respect of mutual freedom. So this is how the French Republic expands the boundary of what is feasible given the ancien regime and given the political structures of the ancien regime. So is the action unilateral? Yes, empirically speaking, it's universal, it's unilateral, it's the work of a group, not everyone. And there were lots of people who are hostile to the French Revolution. Although Kant liked to say, say everybody loves the French Revolution, it was very clear that only some did, and Burke for one, hated it. So the point is that the philosophical view on history is slightly different here from the philosophical view on the state. And so what seems to be unacceptable from the point of view of the present becomes, with hindsight, something that you can rationally justify by thinking about how it has expanded Feasibility. So second argument has to do with. With these aesthetic effects of revolution, which is the impact of enthusiasm as a mark of the sublime, as Kant calls it. And that's because the enthusiasm is, for him, a kind of moral feeling that stretches the mind towards moral ideals. And so, from a symbolic perspective, and in particular, in times of crisis, when the old world is in crisis and struggling and. And the new one hasn't been born, we go back to these events, and we go back to the memory and the legacy of these events and look for orientation in the present, in the world in which we live. So revolutions, even when they fail, they often leave a mark in culture, in art, in film, in products that we can then engage and we can kind of draw comfort when we return to them. And when we're thinking about way in which we face similar challenges. So we learn in those cases, not just from the triumph, but also from the failure. And we bring ourselves to educate ourselves in this more aesthetic way. Now you might say, does this apply to other collective events as well? So what's so special about revolution? If you think about war, War also has an effect on culture, on film, on literature and so on. And the difference is in disposition. So wars make us give up on humanity. Revolutions, on the other hand, are humanity affirming. And in war, there is no enthusiasm. There's at most a celebration of heroism. Whereas in revolution you have what Lenin called the festival of the oppressed. And you see this kind of aesthetic references there as well. But of course, Ralph Miliband reads this Lenin saying, revolutions are the festival of the oppressed. And he says, yeah, that sounds great, but festivals don't last very long. And revolutions are also, as he says, followed by resistance. So what we need to think about, Ralph Miliband says, is the difference between what can be hoped for in the short and in the middle term, and what can be achieved in the long term by generations which have been educated in a world in which values like cooperation or egalitarianism or democracy or sociality have become part of our common sense, in which our dispositions are such that we are educated into these values. And we don't find it so strange that we have altruism or we have solidarity or we have equality in society. So in this sense, revolution, as I think Ralph Miliband was pointing out, is the work of generations. And it's not just the act of intervening within a particular process here and now, but it's also about the legacy that it leaves behind. So now I'm going to conclude and As I come to my conclusion after all this, you might ask, so are revolutions justified or not? Well, maybe that's the wrong question. I mean, no one's ever asked, can I please have a revolution? And then waited for LSE or Oxford academic to tell them, yes, go ahead, friends, you can do it. Revolutions happen. They always happen. They will continue to happen whether we think they ought to happen or not happen from a moral point of view. So the key question for me is not so much whether revolutions are justified or not, but what can we learn to ensure that the next revolution doesn't repeat the errors of the previous one? And this is exactly, I think, what is needed to navigate another tension that Ralph Miliband identifies when talking about, about social change. The challenge of finding the really third way. The third way, but the real third way, the difficult path between, on the one hand, as he says, quote, a reckless and catastrophic voluntarism on one side, which starts from the premise that everything is immediately possible, but on the other side, an exaggerated caution, which can easily turn into retreat and paralysis. So to avoid all of this, I suggest, in the spirit of Ralph Miliband, focusing not on the actions and the aims of revolutionaries themselves, but on the effects of revolution, both in space and in time. And I also suggested thinking about how revolutions help us, on the one hand, expand the boundaries of political feasibility, and on the other hand, think about the legacy in art, in culture, in aesthetic education, of these events in order to understand that. The point is, the causes of political change are always bound up in processes that are both conflictual and cooperative. And the way we address these political challenges is very difficult and very different at any particular point in time. Which is also why it's partly pointless to ask this moralizing question from a normative perspective of our revolutions, justified or not, but rather to ensure that you can learn something to avoid the tragedies of the past. And for this, Kant thought, and I agree, and a lot of Marxists also thought after that we need a kind of philosophy of history and a kind of philosophy of history that centers on revolution as a sensible sign of progress in history and of our moral progress as a species. And I think those people who made that argument had a point, and I think they were right. And that's how I'm going to conclude. Thank you very much. Hi, I'm interrupting this event to tell you about another awesome LSE podcast that we think you'd enjoy. Lseiq asks social scientists and other experts to answer one intelligent question like why do people believe in Conspiracy theories or can we afford the super rich? Come check us out. Just search for lseiq wherever you get your podcasts. Now back to the event.
- [58:09]
D
Good evening, everyone and thank you, Leah, for an absolutely fascinating lecture. And congratulations for this appointment as the inaugural Ralph Milband professor in Politics and Philosophy. I can't think of anybody who embodies the LSE spirit better than Ralph Miliband, even though, as Leah hinted, his relationship with the school was not always the easiest. I'm sure he's not alone in that. And I think it is hard to think of someone who embodies the Milliban spirit better than Leah. And I think in that sense this is an extraordinary, a fantastic appointment. Great for the school and of course, great for the School of Public Policy, where I belong, where she will be doing half of her work and half of her teaching. So, welcome to the SVP earlier. It is great to have you there. Now, I said the LSE spirit. What can I possibly mean by the LSE spirit? Let me stick to the party line and simply quote the school motto, which, as I'm sure everybody here knows, it's about knowing the causes of things, but very importantly for the betterment of society. And as I was thinking about what to say this weekend, it struck me that that is not a bad way of describing Miliband's work, Miliband's life and his legacy. On the one hand, he was a committed scholar, spent some time with his political theory. It's pretty heavy going, but at the same time, this was not for fun and games. It was really for the betterment of the world. And Ralph Miliband was a scholar. He was a very erudite scholar, but he was also a political actor. Everybody in this room knows that he was very involved with the British Left and with the Labour Party. I didn't know, but I learned in recent days that he was also very involved with the ANC in South Africa, was great friends with Joe Slovo. And I also learned that he was very involved with the Chilean exiles after the coup in Chile. And as David told me this weekend, he even put up a young Chilean exile. And David and Joe and Annette had to share the kitchen with him, a young man who had fled repression and dictatorship in Chile. So here you have it. Great scholarship, serious political commitment. Now, you may agree or disagree with everything that Ralph Miliband had to say, but I think there's no denying that he was not only politically committed, he was also pretty far sighted, pretty prescient, you might say, as to what politics might bring. Look at one paragraph he wrote decades before Trump, decades before Farage, and I quote, the failure of social democracy implicates not only those responsible for it. Because of that failure, the path is made smoother for would be popular saviors whose extreme conservatism is carefully concealed beneath a demagogic rhetoric of national renewal and social redemption, garnished whenever suitable, with an appeal to racial or any other kind of profitable prejudice. That was written in 1969. I read it and I thought it could have been written last week. Pretty amazing foresight, I think. So once, in addition to being a scholar and a political activist, Miliband could write. And that is, of course, something that brings him very close to Leah, because Leah can write. If you have any doubts, dash out of here. And if you haven't done it, buy a copy of free and buy a copy of Indignity. I took Indignity with me home for Christmas, and it made a very happy holiday even happier. But she can not only write about personal experience and, as David say, bring personal experience to bear on the world and on politics. She can also also right when she does political theory. And let me quote one line from the lecture, from the written version of the lecture. Maybe you didn't quite say it this way, but it's a great line. It left me thinking, and it really summarizes the gist of what Leah had to say. She writes, moralists think that the ends of revolutions are right and therefore revolution can never be wrong. Legalists, on the other hand, think that since the means of revolution are wrong, revolutions can never be right. I want to suggest to you that if every political theorist could write that way, lecture halls would be as full every day as this lecture hall is today, and the world would be a better place. Now, let me say something about the lecture tonight. I will certainly not say, try a full philosophical response. I'm utterly unqualified for that. But I do want to dwell on an aspect or two. As you can, as you just heard, Leah's case for revolutions very much draws upon Immanuel Kant, whose take on revolution was rather peculiar. She put it one way. I'm going to describe it differently. We had one allusion to Keynes already, so forgive me for a second quote from Keynes. As probably most people in this room know, after World War I and the economic consequences of the peace, Keynes was rather nasty toward Clemenceau, the French prime minister, and he said Clemenceau had one illusion, France, and one disillusion mankind. You might say that Kant had the same feeling about revolutions. He had one disillusion, revolutions in general, but he had one single lonely illusion, the French Revolution. And how you make these two things come together, how you justify what seems like a contradiction, is very much the subject of Leah's lecture tonight. And to be brief, I just want to dwell very briefly on two words that are repeated several times, both in the written remarks and in the lecture you just heard. And those words are imagination and enthusiasm. They recur again and again. Imagination. Because thanks to revolutionary fervor, and this is a line from Lear, what was previously thought impossible becomes real. Who wouldn't like a revolution if, thanks to that imagination, what we thought was impossible suddenly becomes real? What about enthusiasm? Well, only revolutions can trigger a certain kind of enthusiasm. And here the quote is from Kant, without which nothing great could be achieved. So you said. In the end you sort of shifted the question. It's not about justifying revolutions, it is about understanding the consequences and making sure that the next one is not as bad as the previous one. And in understanding those consequences, the impact of revolutions on imagination and enthusiasm is absolutely key. Now, I would not be acting in the LSD tradition if I didn't raise a doubt or two. So let me do that very quickly before I conclude. Start with imagination. One could argue contrably that revolutionaries have not too much imagination, or perhaps too little, too little imagination, that is about what happens after the revolution. Or to put it in somewhat less academic terms, perhaps your mother was right, or perhaps Orwell was right. Leah very quickly dismisses Orwell's case that revolutions are things that mean very well but always end badly. And I have to say I sympathize with Orwell's claim. Ultimately, our politics is always personal. So let me be personal here for a minute. I come from Latin America. In my lifetime, Latin America has had three revolutions. Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. In all three, the revolutionary pigs. That's not my image, it's Orwell's ended up not simply mingling with the humans, doing business with the humans. They ended up imprisoning and exiling other animals, giving them electric shocks and shooting them in the head. So forgive me, Leah, if I side with your mother on this one last but not least, enthusiasm. Surely Kant is right, and in her use of Kant's work, Leah is right that enthusiasm is great. In fact, the word is sublime. And without enthusiasm, we could not mobilize the energy that we need to make the LSE spirit, the world, a better place. But here is my doubt. Why is it that we limit the Range of things about which we can be enthusiastic to revolution, with its promise of what do I want Revolution, when do I want it? Now, with its promise of immediacy. I used to be in politics and I learned that immediacy doesn't yield many good things. So let me quote not Kant, but Weber, who in his very famous lecture, Politics as a Vocation. As I'm sure you know, Weber defined politics, and I quote, as a strong and slow boring of hard boards. Slow boring of hard boards, which takes passion and takes perspective. I want to end simply by suggesting that instead of preaching enthusiasm about revolution and its promise of immediate change, we should be preaching enthusiasm for slow and hard work. For the slow boring of hard boards, we should be writing Europeans not to revolution, but to persistence. If we did, and I will end by reminding you of the earlier Miliband quote, maybe social democracy would not be failing. And if social democracy were not failing, we would be spared. Those would be popular saviors, their populism and the chaos they bring. Thank you very much. Not me.
- [69:39]
A
It's not me refusing to ask.
- [69:43]
B
Okay, so we've now come to the end of the presentations. Leah made lots of comments to reply to to Andreas, but I'm very brutally cutting her and him off because I want to give all of you a chance to ask your questions. And anyway, they're going to go to dinner afterwards so she can answer him there. So we've now reached a point where we're going to open the floor to questions from the audience, both in the room and online. So I'm just going to go very quickly through how these operate. If you're online, type your short question and please do keep it short so we get a chance to answer as many many as possible into the Q and A box and we'll answer them there. If you're here in the room, indicate in the usual way, which if you don't know means raise your hand and wait for the microphone to get to you. When the microphone gets to you, just say who you are very quickly, very briefly, and then ask a brief question. And we would like questions rather than statements or other points, and we'll try to get through as many as possible. We might go slightly over the hour if people can wait a little bit. So we'll start by taking questions from in the room. So can I see indications of. So we will take. First of all, there's a gentleman, I think it's right at the back with a yellow jumper on and glasses. And we shall also take from the lady down Here in the front row as well, in a second. So, gentlemen, first, Hello.
- [71:11]
C
I'm an LSE student, My name is Kai.
- [71:15]
A
I was wondering if revolutions are always a change for the positive. So maybe there could also be revolutions.
- [71:23]
C
Conducted by people with negative goals. Negative from the perspective of people who might be in support of democracy. Thank you.
- [71:34]
B
We're going to take Nsatsi 3, is that all right, Blair?
- [71:37]
D
Yeah.
- [71:37]
B
So lady down here in the front row, second from the end. Sorry. Thank you.
- [71:45]
A
Hi, my name is Anjali. I'm also in the School of Public Policy. My question focuses on the fact that I also agree that we shouldn't be asking the questions are revolutions justified? But more of what can you do? And how do you maintain a system where people feel oppressed and are oppressed? How do you basically help situations where people feel the need that they have to engage in violence? Right. When you have this power dynamic of say a country, say I'm American, that has such a power dynamic over its people.
- [72:19]
B
Thank you. And we'll take one from the upper level. So there's a gentleman there.
- [72:24]
A
Hello, thank you very much for your talk. Towards the end of, Towards the end.
- [72:35]
C
Of your speech you mentioned that maybe.
- [72:37]
A
The purpose of studying revolutions is to understand them for the purpose of preventing the same mistakes from being repeated, acknowledging.
- [72:46]
B
That revolutions are diverse. What would you say are the mistakes of past revolutions?
- [72:51]
C
And how can we claim as people.
- [72:53]
A
Sitting here in the old theater to be able to actually prevent these big social movements from committing certain follies? Thank you. Great. So Kai, the first question about whether revolution is always a change for the positive, that was partly something that I was trying to respond by giving a definition of revolution where freedom and the fight against domination is a crucial part of what makes a revolution. So not all, all resistance to a juridical order is with an effort to promote freedom in the way which, in this revolutionary tradition and the revolutionary discourse that I was mentioning, freedom plays a really important role. So at least in the actions and in the self understanding of the revolutionaries. And in this debate that I'm interested in, the Enlightenment discussion around the French Revolution, the idea of returning to a state of equality or freedom or something that we have by rights, and then the ancien regime has taken away from the people plays a really important role and is what makes that revolution progressive. I think often also scholars refer to reaction or regression. And so in the intuitive use of the term revolution there is always this hint to freedom. But certainly in the argument that I gave was very much part of what of the definition of revolution, the second one about violence, I think it's really important when asking the question of revolution to remember that violence isn't just the revolutionaries. The state is always violent. The state is violent, but is authorized to exercise violence. Now, often the question is, what happens when a state, who has this coercive capacity, who has this monopoly over the use of violence, seems to exercise this power that it has in ways that depart from justified norms. Just think about ice, for example, and the murder of people. So I think when we're asking, and this is partly why it becomes so difficult to answer this question of revolution before it has happened in the more consequentialist, calculating attitude, precisely because if you're thinking just about violence, as Fanon explains, or as many authors in the postcolonial tradition explain, you have violence on the side of constituted powers as well on the side of authorities. The difference is that in the one case you have a juridical order that somehow rests on the justification of violence for whatever reasons I tried to unpack when I was explaining why Kant is so against the French Revolution. In the other case, you have a group that claims to represent a whole, but we don't really know whether it represents that whole or not. And whether it does or not depends on, in many ways, how the revolution goes. That was also part of Kant's argument. He says, when a revolution is not successful, the revolutionaries were just fools or were adventurous, or we, they were crazy people, they were murderers. If it works, if it constitutes, if it starts, then a juridical transformation that then also inspires reform, then we consider that revolution, one way or another, to have been successful. And it's part of the discussion. The legacy of what it leaves in inspiring reforms is also an important part of the discussion. So in terms of what can we learn about this, for this last question about what can we learn about what are the shortcomings of revolutions? I. I always think the shortcoming of all revolutions is impatience, because people want in their lifetime to see change. And the more desperate they are, the more oppressed, the more angry, the more likely it is that they will take radical action, often action that undermines themselves, their own lives, put their bodies on the line to try and make that change happen, regardless of the outcome and regardless of how it connects to their self interest. And part of the reason. And now I want to connect to, to Ralph Miliband's arguments more generally for democracy. Part of the reasons for why we think about democracy as a way of channeling change, whether it's revolutionary or reformist is that democracy has a temporal structure that isn't limited to the life of the individual and therefore, through democratic bodies, through democratic engagement for radical change, as in Ralph Milibaun's case, we don't need to rely on the short lifetime of one individual. We don't need to rely on just their actions, on their heroism, on their giving the example. We can rely on structures of solidarity and institutions that somehow continue to channel these structures of solidarity. But again, that's not something that you can lecture about, because there are obviously cases where there is no democracy, where there are no structures of solidarity, where an action like that is exactly what's needed to initiate this sort of change. And that's why the discussion is very hard to be had in this normative moral terms of do it or don't do it. It's sort of beside the point somehow.
- [77:22]
B
Okay, we're going to take a couple of questions from the online audience. One from Michael, Michael Joffer, who is an LSE alumnus, and he asks, could you please say something about the revolution that ended apartheid in the early 1990s? It was incomplete in the sense that, as its supporters typically said, on the one hand, Mandela's compromises prevented a brutal civil war, but on the other hand, power, especially economic power, remained in the same hands as before. What lessons can we learn from that experience? So I'll give you that one. I do have another one, but I think they don't fit very well. So if you want to answer that one, and then we'll take another one from here, and then we'll go back to.
- [78:04]
A
Well, I will. I will say it's the same lesson that Ralph Miliband, who engage with apartheid with an inc, which is that it's not enough to fight apartheid. You also have to fight capitalism, because capitalism is what enables, in many ways, apartheid as well. And so, yeah, that's just so.
- [78:18]
B
Actually, maybe the two questions do match, because the other one is from Mark Wright, which is maybe more of a capitalist revolution. How do technological revolutions sit within the Kantian enthusiasm? Or should we ask AI?
- [78:36]
A
I think we shouldn't ask AI, but I also think we should not just blame AI. And so this gives me an opportunity to give my 30 seconds on AI, which is that AI is, as I always say, like a kitchen in your. Like a knife in your kitchen. You can use it to slice salami and bread, or you can use it to kill someone. And the knife, the kitchen knife is just a tool. And the responsibility is with the agent who Is uses the tool. And so I find that often arguments who blame AI or say, oh, it's the problem of AI or it's digital age. It's a very easy way of shedding responsibility from the agents in whose name AI and for whose purposes and whose values AI reflects. And it's a very easy way of saying was nothing to do with the humans, it's just the AI.
- [79:19]
B
Okay, we're back in the room. So we've got gentlemen there in the brown jack in the tie. And I'll take a couple from the upper level so I can see a gentleman somewhere in the middle. Yeah. Microphone to him and then we'll get another one in a second. So we'll start here with you, sir.
- [79:35]
C
Thank you so much. My name is Joachim von Hallas.
- [79:37]
B
I'm the chairman of Tuesday Club, a.
- [79:40]
C
Transdisciplinary think tank covering geo economic topics. Thank you so much for your presentation.
- [79:46]
B
My question is the following. Last week you participated in the panel.
- [79:52]
A
Last week, Thursday at the LSE on.
- [79:54]
C
The topic the politics of polarization. How does polarization overlap or cross pollinates this revolution? Thank you.
- [80:06]
B
Hello there. Sorry, one second. So Leah writes that one down. Okay, if you can indicate to Leah so she can see you as well. There we go.
- [80:14]
A
Hello there. Yes. Thomas Mitchell, lse. My question is about Leah's fantastic point about the generations, about the role of the revolutionary generations.
- [80:22]
C
What do you do when the revolution.
- [80:24]
D
Is less popular in the next generation.
- [80:27]
C
That the revolutionaries give birth to, or.
- [80:30]
A
More popular, paradoxically, and when they care about this idea of democracy in regard to that.
- [80:34]
C
Thank you.
- [80:35]
A
Sorry, I didn't understand that point very well. Could you somehow formulate a bit differently just so that I can get the word?
- [80:41]
C
Yes.
- [80:41]
A
The revolutionaries of one generation, when they give birth to this next generation and the revolution is not popular anymore, or the sort of real revolutionary parts of that are lost in that next generation.
- [80:53]
C
And they have to really think about.
- [80:54]
D
Boring things like how are people living.
- [80:57]
C
And do people have enough fridges? How does that coincide with that idealistic.
- [81:01]
A
Sense of, you know, the glorious revolution and this brilliant international course? Thank you.
- [81:08]
B
Yeah, you got that one. And then lady there, if you can indicate to Leah so she can see where you are, give her a wave. There we go.
- [81:15]
A
Hi, Leah. I am Albanian as well, so I want to say from a personal perspective, it's really important to me personally that you are where you are. So thank you for that. I've only lived through the echoes and the effects of our home country. And I've seen, seen how that has shaped how we think of things. So with that in mind, now, in the current era that we live in, back then in Albania, everyone joined in a way to have a common enemy. I think that's what sparks a revolution. Set simply, very simply, that everyone has a common enemy. They go against them. And then revolution happens with values and revolutionaries. As you put it in today's age, when enthusiasm is spread thin between different poles and imagination grows thin and corroding because of algorithms and the ever shedding personal responsibility, as you put it, who is the common enemy? And will we, if we get to identifying one, given in a boorish and slow way, to head to revolutionary action, positive action, positive change, will we still have the strength to self justify the revolution or ourselves? Okay, so first question about polarization. I think, I mean, if you were in the talk on Thursday, my take on polarization is that there is a difference between ideological polarization and effective polarization. And that while we have reasons to resist effective polarization, people getting really angry and not arguing certain ways and so on, we might want to have forms of polarization cultivating political adversarialism that enable people to have conversations on issues that they profoundly disagree. Again, what is the link with revolution? This all is premised on having a functioning democracy where voices are really heard, where you can have disagreement that is reasonable rather than unreasonable, where we have shared criteria of rationality, all of which in the world in which we live some places more than others, but increasingly is undermined. Democracy looks increasingly like oligarchy. You don't have the conditions for genuine democratic debate. And so in those cases you have then circumstances where change takes a very radical, very different direction. The hardship of revolution and the question of generations. Maybe I can cluster the two questions together. First, the enthusiasm and the hardship. I think part of Kant's argument was a selective argument. So. So he didn't think that, you know, we always have the means of remembering or that generations have all the means of remembering. He also didn't think that revolutions engender enthusiasm in everyone. It was clear that we act in sort of polarized societies and circumstances where there is very deep disagreement. But it really mattered that we can connect the principles in the name of which a revolution is being conducted. And this criteria of is it universalizable? Is it general? Is someone promoting radical change just on their own self interest? Or are they doing it because there is a more, there is a broader struggle? And there is a connection to this idea of freedom that I try to articulate with Kant. So in that Sense, I think, as I say, it's a selective reading of history, and it's a reading of history that it's as much about drawing resources from the past in ways in which you recover them. You try to populate, you find the silences, and you try to give meaning to these silences with the idea of encouraging and motivating people who act in the present. The present generation somehow draws strength from this memory of past revolutions and learns from the failures and tries to avoid the same mistakes. And this is where this argument plays this role in this intergenerational way, I would say, about the present. Again, I mean, this is my personal take. It also happens to be Ralph Miliband's take. So I'm very comfortable articulating it here. The greatest dangers of 21st century are capitalism and nationalism. Now, of course, this takes a longer discussion. One needs to articulate it and explain. And I think that it's a much more appropriate understanding and diagnosis of the failures of globalization. A reading that thinks about power struggles, about socioeconomic power, about asymmetries in the use of power, and that draws from that a project and. And a program in the name of which it's worth fighting for the future, rather than one that reduces these conflicts to conflicts of religion or culture or identity, as the far right or the right even tends to do these days. So I would say there's a kind of progressive reading of society and of crisis, which is one that I happen to subscribe to. And there is a sort of regressive reading. And we are all out here making democratic debates for which of these diagnoses. So I'm not saying you should all agree with me. You should agree with me, but not right now. Basically, I think it's part of a democratic debate to explain how we understand and how we diagnose the world and what we see as a way forward.
- [86:06]
B
Okay, right. It is 8 o'. Clock. But if I can beg forgiveness from the people who are here to maybe have one or two more questions before we all go. So this one, I like this one. It's from an online. It's from Kanchan, who is a student at Imperial College. My question is how can people come to identify or acknowledge the revolution that they may not want, but they rather desperately need?
- [86:33]
A
That's a very, very poetic question, actually. I think this connection to humanity that Kant makes and. But I think Ralph Milibaum makes and that I've been trying to make is what are in the name of what is a change being sought and is that just reinforcing a group's personal interest or a group's perspective or a group's power? Or is it done in the name that goes beyond what they are after, beyond their role obligations, or beyond their particular position? I think, I mean, this is a very, very broad criterion in philosophy by which we make moral decisions. We say, what distinguishes moral action from selfish action? It's exactly this capacity to think about an action or a principle or a virtue that is universalizable. And I think that universalizability criteria that comes from Kant can be deployed in a range of contexts and in a range of institutions. But I think probably also productively to this question of what is the kind of change that I think I could subscribe to.
- [87:33]
B
Okay, and this is. I'm afraid the questions in the room are now spent. Sorry, but this last question I want to put to you, which I think is a really good question given all we've heard about Ralph Miliband tonight and how important education was to him and being part of the university sector. From anonymous user what advice would you give to an A level student wanting to pursue political science?
- [88:03]
A
Read Ralph Miliband.
- [88:07]
B
I think we can leave it at that. I just have here a small gift on behalf of the two departments, the two schools, to thank you for everything tonight, Leah. And thank you also to David for what he said about his father. Very eloquent and really good insight. And thank you on behalf of the two of us to everyone who's put this event together, all the teams who've organized it, the stewards who are here tonight, guy who's taking photographs and they'd say thank you finally again to Leah. Thank you very much, Leah.
- [89:08]
A
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