PAGES FROM A jOURNAL
4"
.)
which I might myself benefit. I devoted to · them a sort of surly
preference; yes: a recurrent preference. But even this critical survey,
I
must admit, remained bourgeois, and
I
know well enough that
had
I
been less privileged
I
could not have undertaken it. That is
also
the reason,
I
thought, why working class people accept so easily
the ideas of others; why so often (some say: always) revolutionary
incentives are a product of the bourgeois class although they are
addressed to the masses and can only succeed through them. (
1933)
*
*
*
There is, no doubt, in the theories of Rousseau, less of the para–
doxical and foolish than people say. But what is irritating is that they
were theories which were sometimes dictated to him by feeling.
I
cannot believe that man, as he claims, is "naturally good". The taste,
the need, even the very sense of truth is to__be found neither in the
child nor in
primitiv~
peoples. This utopian view of the past danger–
ously falsifies every project, every prediction of the future. But how
can
one deny-and precisely because it shapes man and educates
him-that civilization is responsible for many defeats, society for
much that is atrophied. Man is all to be made, to·become, and this
good man
(not at all "naturally good", but a product, a work of
cultivation and of
art)
-one's great complaint against society is for
having done so little, worked so badly, to achieve him.
What
I
particularly dislike, in Rousseau, is the value he places
on ignorance. The misuse which man has made of the discoveries
of science tends to incriminate not science, but man himself who
misuses
them.
It goes without saying: if fire burns us, we will not put it out
for that.
What I hold against Rousseau is that he speaks of "laws of
nature" when it is a question of human matters. Natural laws are
immutable; there is nothing that man creates, there is nothing human
which cannot be changed-beginning (or rather: ending) with man
himself.
*
*
*
In Lenin's
The State and Revolution,
a short unfinished book
but
all
the same most significant and weighty, there is a sentence
that brings me up short. "Up to now", he says, reverting to an idea
dear to Marx and Engels, "there is not a single revolution which,
everything considered, has not resulted in a strengthening of the ad–
ministrative machinery of the state." I am quoting from memory
and I would not swear that these are his exact words; but I think
that I have not distorted his thought. Besides, his whole book de–
velops
this theme. And from this idea he draws inspiration to under-
