All of us have taken André Malraux’s words to heart: ‘At the end of the last century, Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God. Now it is for us to ask ourselves whether, today, man is not dead.’1 I am quoting from memory; those were perhaps not his exact words. I will not forget the emptiness we felt within us then. The crowd watching from the steps of the Sorbonne as this tragic actor2 struggled in solitude suddenly saw that it was itself this solitude, and that in this desert of the conscience* a small, gesticulating man was wrestling with the death of man. ‘We must reconstruct an image of man that man can recognize as his own.’ Malraux’s pathos lay, not in the death whose imminence he proclaimed, but in this desperate consciousness of imminent death haunting someone still alive. Even those who did not share his fears could not help but feel a profound apprehensiveness: one does not watch a man treat his destiny as an enemy with impunity.
But in this world that provides us shelter, it is becoming a little clearer every day that men are, in ever increasing numbers, breaking the ties which silently bound them to their fate, and cursing it. Two years after the most atrocious of wars, on this earth covered with peace and ruins, in the mists of the winter that is drawing nigh, silent assemblies are taking place. The murmurs stifled by the clamour of arms, the protests that went unheard amidst the din of war – we can hear them now that calm has been restored. Remarkably, it is from the old lands of Europe that the plaints of peacetime arise. To the east, the. immense Russian people has gone back to work, and is reconciling itself to history through work. ‘Anguish is a bourgeois state of mind. We are rebuilding’ (Ehrenburg).3 To the west, America, intact, counts its dead and its victories, tests its future strength in the air and on the seas, takes up its place in the world as it settles into its future: the American century lies before it, stretching outward to the horizon, like a long summer holiday: ‘our destiny is to be free Americans.’ To be sure, the optimism of effort and freedom continues to mean something to the French and British, most of whom seek in it the justification4 for the hard life they are leading.5 Yet it is in the midst of the ‘Western’ ruins that men are beginning to see that the war waged with arms has not brought the war for souls to an end, that the peace is as murderous as the war, and still more terrible; for now, in peacetime, murder no longer has the clamour of arms for an excuse.
In France we have Malraux, whose tragic discourse has already been mentioned; we have the Camus† of the articles in Combat,6 in which fate seizes men as they murder and releases them only in death; we have Gabriel Marcel, bitterly opposed to the modernity of the world and its ‘techniques of debasement’;7 we have the movement called the ‘Human Front’,8 which thinks it can avert the fatality of war by conducting an international moral campaign; we have examples of commercially minded agitation, like the issue of Franchise about Le Temps des assassins.9 In England, Koestler10 denounces the way totalitarian regimes enslave men, feeding his contemporaries’ resentment of their history with novels. The extraordinary success of his work proves11 that the curses of these modern prophets are finding a broad public response. And certain echoes from Germany give us reason to believe that the defeated ask nothing better than to join the voice of their all too untroubled conscience to that of the victors’ bad conscience – that they too are ready to curse the recent peace and conclude a holy alliance of protest against it. We must ask ourselves what this alliance really signifies. For we are confronted with a phenomenon that is international in scope, and with a diffuse ideology which, though it has not yet been precisely defined, is capable of assuming a certain organizational form: it is said that Camus envisages creating protest groups bent on denouncing crimes against humanity before the conscience of the world, while the ‘Human Front’ is contemplating the use of cinema or radio12 to induce humanity to abandon war. One senses, in these attempts, a mentality in search of itself, an intention13 eager to embody itself in concrete form, an ideology seeking to define itself, entrench itself, and also furnish itself with means of action. If this mentality is international, and in the process of taking institutional form, then a new ‘International’ is in the making. There is perhaps something to be gained from trying to discover what it conceals.
This ‘International’ of humane protest against destiny rests on a growing awareness that humanity is threatened, and has become, in the face of the threat, a kind of ‘proletariat’ of terror. Whereas the labouring proletariat is defined by sociological, economic, and historical conditions, this latter-day ‘proletariat’ would seem to be defined by a psychological state: intimidation and fear. And, just as there is proletarian equality in the poverty and alienation of the workers, so too this implicit proletariat is said to experience equality, but in death14 and suffering. According to our authors, the latest inventions, whether in the domain of atoms or torture, are now and will henceforth be the human condition in which all men are equal. This is a de facto equality, which governs all our acts, in which we live and move unawares, just as a man lives and moves unawares in gravity. And, just as the unity of the proletariat existed before Marx, but only became consciousness [sic]15 with Marx, so this unity in terror of the humanity-proletariat exists for us in consciousness thanks only to the revelations of our modern prophets. In their appeals, we hear the same historical pathos (they, at any rate, think we do) that transpires in Marx’ and Engels’ famous slogans, the pathos common to all appeals to conscience (this conscience which, as Malraux shows, is our sole glory and sole good in the ‘night’ in which we are plunged); we sense the tragic overtones of the words in which men are summoned to be born to the truth, to come to know their condition and master it. Man, know thyself: your condition is death (Malraux), is to be a victim or an executioner (Camus), is to draw steadily closer to the world of prisons and torture (Koestler), or to nuclear war, your total destruction, or to the end of what makes you man and is more than your life: the gaze of your brothers, your freedom, the very struggle for freedom. Humanity, says Camus, is racing towards the abyss like a train hurtling ahead at full speed, while the passengers pursue their petty quarrels. We are madmen grappling on the brink of the abyss, unaware that death has already reconciled us to one another. What sensible man, seeing humanity about to perish, can still put faith in class struggle and revolution? What good is it for an activist in a modern workers’ party to know that he is threatened by the bourgeoisie, if he does not realize that he is threatened by death as a man before being threatened by servitude as a worker, if he does not realize that this threat overshadows all others, and that the proletariat of the class struggle is an historical diversion? We have only one recourse left, they bluntly tell us, in the face of catastrophe: an holy alliance against destiny. Let men learn, if there is still time, that the proletariat of class struggle can only divide them, and that they are already united unawares in the proletariat of fear or the bomb, of terror and death, in the proletariat of the human condition.
The old proletariat having been ‘reduced’ by the new, we need to examine the essential nature of the latter. What is the ‘proletariat’ of the human condition? Camus says in Combat16 that the condition of modern man is fear, and, in a certain sense, this is incontestable. It is of the order of everyday experience; and, whatever the reason, that humanity currently lives in fear may be regarded as an historical fact. But it is also noteworthy that the causes of this authentic phenomenon are hard to identify: if this fear strikes observers because it so plainly exists, it also disconcerts them by virtue of a kind of inherent irrationality. There is a paradox to fear: if human reason has no control over it, it offers little resistance to the reason that examines it and can be defined without‡ difficulty.17
Let us note that fear is, first of all, a psychological context of a very general sort. It is neither inscribed in law codes nor entrenched in institutions; it does not even haunt, as fear, the domains over which it holds sway – the prisons, the death camps. Fear haunts the rich man and the poor, the free man and the prisoner, it holds the soul of every man in its grip, whatever his legal or social status, from the moment he looks his destiny in the face and sees that his destiny awaits him. There are powerful reflections in Bossuet on the proletariat of death, whom the Middle Ages brought together in the stone of the cathedrals and whom history reconciled in the brotherhood of dust. What unites men is not today, where the rich are not attired like the poor, but tomorrow, where they will lie down together in the same death, or be subjected to the same torture. What unites them is the fact that they await a common fate which will make them all equals. The proletariat of the human condition is a proletariat of the morrow. We could quibble with words here, and say that, at this level of abstraction, if human unity is defined by the imminence of a common destiny, it is hard to see why the destiny of daily routine should not also be taken into account: since it ‘rains on the good and the evil alike’,18 there is also a proletariat of the rain and another of good weather, and, since the sun shines upon all, a proletariat of daytime and another of night, a proletariat of Sunday, and Monday, and Tuesday – but we will not play the Preacher’s§ game any longer.19 If fear were in reality nothing but a psychological context, an expectation with no object, it would be an abstraction with no escape. But fear is more than a context; it is also a psychological reaction in the face of a certain real threat. Here the object of fear draws closer to it – and the paradox of fear bursts into view: however intense the obsession, the object of fear always lies outside it, and ahead of it. It is this which distinguishes the labouring proletariat from the proletariat of fear. The worker is not a proletarian by virtue of what-will-happen-to-him-tomorrow, but by virtue of what happens to him every minute of the day. As Camus said so well, not long ago, ‘There is no tomorrow’; the labouring proletariat is an everyday reality, like our daily bread. The proletariat is that which has no future, not even the future of fear: poverty, in the proletariat, is not the fear of poverty, it is an actual presence that never disappears, it is on the walls, on the table, in the sheets, in the air the worker breathes and the water he drinks, in the money that he makes and that is made from his poverty, in the very gestures that conjure fear; proletarians are in poverty the way one is in the night, the way certain sick people are in their suffering, which is so closely bound up with them that it becomes part of their nature. The man who is afraid lives with his back to a wall,20 says Camus, but we do not want to live like dogs. The wall is a horizon, the only horizon, but at least there is a horizon.21 The fearful man lives with his back to the wall; the proletarian is walled in. Thus he does not see his destiny before him, he does not take the corning war or the bombs that chum the seas at the other end of the world for signs of Fatality, he does not fear the peace he has conquered; his condition is his labour, his needs, his daily struggle. He knows that tomorrow will be a today, and that the proletariat of the morrow is, today, a smoke-screen for the proletariat of every day.
Let us add that fear and its object are not things of the same kind, which suggests that a dialectic of fear is inconceivable. The fearful man is at one with his fear, but the object of his fear is not present to him the way his fear is: I am not afraid of another as other, I am afraid of the destiny that awaits me in the other. I am not afraid of the war as war, but of being the wounded man, the invalid, the man in pain the war will make me. The war does not really enter into my fear, in which I find only my body mutilated by war. The true object of my fear is myself imagined as suffering pain at some point in the future; that is, not another, but I myself, and not a real, but an imaginary I. The content of fear is something imaginary, non-existent: that is why, unlike the proletarian, who finds in the proletariat the means of emancipating himself from the proletariat, the man who is afraid cannot convert the object of his fear into the abolition of his fear.22 Prisoners can escape, because theirs is an objective condition, because the bars are real; real bars can be smashed: freedom now! The man who is afraid is a prisoner without a prison and without bars; he is his own prisoner, and threats stand guard in his soul. This is an adventure from which there is no escape, because there is no fleeing a prison without bars: fear is captivity without possibility of flight.
Servitude, however, does have a content: the master and labour. Whereas the object of fear is merely imaginary, the workers’ condition involves appropriating, amidst the domination of the capitalist world, a real object that grounds the real dialectic of proletarian emancipation and provides the means of achieving it. In other words, servitude can transform itself into freedom by reflecting on its own content and transcending its content through action. There can be no emancipation from fear through the consciousness of fear.23 Servitude, in contrast, is a form of captivity from which one can escape, because it is a real prison, with real walls and real bars. That is why anguish is not the proletariat’s lot: there is no emancipating oneself from the human condition, but it is possible to emancipate oneself from the workers’. No matter the price and the patience with which this freedom will be purchased; at least one knows that it is possible, that man can reconcile himself with his destiny and live in the expectation, not of the end of the world, but of freedom; not in despair and absurdity, but in hope. Every day, the proletarian experiences the concrete reality of the content of his condition; every day, he repeats his efforts to get the better of it, and this daily experience furnishes him the double proof that he is not wrestling with shadows, but confronts a real object in his struggle, and that this object, inasmuch as it exists and resists, can be overcome. It is for this reason that the workers’ condition is dialectical, for it can transform its content, converting concrete servitude into concrete freedom. Let us, finally, note that a community forged in fear and the community forged through the emancipation of the proletariat do not have the same import. Apprehension is a collective expectation, an advent, in which human beings are united in spirit but not in truth, and are all the more disoriented in that they already dwell in the same void. But it is not possible to live outside the truth forever. Because the man who is afraid has not grasped the truth of his fear, he makes his fear come true.
Alain‖ liked to point out that wars are myths thus translated into reality, that wars are born of the fear of wars, as sins are born of the fear of sin. This communion in catastrophe is a herd phenomenon, whereby everyone ends up fearing an object endowed with existence only by everyone else’s fear, and no-one can account for the non-existent object all are afraid of. The result is the misunderstanding known as panic. History offers no lack of examples, from the Great Fear of the year 1000 to that of the summer of 1789, from the stock market crashes of the nineteenth century through the atomic panics touched off by radio programmes to, finally, the diffuse panic we live in, precipitated by ill-advised acts that are the fruits of disarray, like a certain issue of Témoignage chrétien24 on the-outbreak-of-war-m-two-weeks’-rime. This apocalyptic fraternity is a pure creation of language. Looking back, we can make out anticipations of it in certain formulations of Man’s Hope, perhaps the most sombre25 book of our times: is it still possible to speak of a ‘fraternity beyond death’? Fear is not a fatherland, nor is courage (we have learned this from the fascists, who now attempt to exonerate themselves by talking about their courage); more, the human condition is not a human fatherland. It is, perhaps, the fatherland of men as they appear to God; because we are Christians, we call this condition original sin. For the man who is not a Christian, and for the Christian who does not usurp God’s place, the human fatherland is not the proletariat of the human condition, it is the proletariat tout court, leading the whole of humanity towards its emancipation. This proletariat has a real content. Speaking of the French socialists, Marx wrote in 1844: ‘For them, the brotherhood of man is no empty phrase but a reality.’26 For us, brotherhood is no longer to be found in fear or words; it can only be found in the truth.
We may say here that the ‘proletariat of the human condition’ (in its present form, based on fear) not only does not call the reality of the labouring proletariat into question, but also turns out, upon analysis, to be an abstraction, i.e., something which has no reality beyond that of discourse and intentions. The proletariat of fear is a myth, but a myth that exists, and it is particularly important that it be exposed as such by Christians. For, as Christians, we believe that there is a human condition; in other words, we believe in the equality of all men before God, and his Judgement, but we do not want the Judgement of God to be spirited away before our very eyes; nor do we want to see non-Christians and, occasionally, Christians as well, commit the sacrilege of taking the atomic bomb for the will of God, equality before death for equality before God (this needs to be said, since Bossuet and certain other preachers have not gotten beyond this position), and the tortures of the concentration camps for the Last Judgement. Yet no-one is more vulnerable to blackmail based on this confusion of terms than Christians. When people talk to them about the equality of men in their unhappy condition, they take this psychological truth for a religious one, and when the panic-stricken declare that the end of time and the destruction of the planet are at hand, they hear echoes of St. John and the Apocalypse: one need only play on the religious ambiguity to take them in as one does a child. What has been written and uttered in the genre ‘theology of the atom bomb’, in Christian circles, beggars the imagination; we have not even been spared the speeches of Churchill or Truman, representatives of ‘Christian civilization’! Whenever he suspects that the political is turning religious, Gabriel Marcel immediately goes into a prophetic trance:
… this war, if it takes place, will in fact be a bilateral crime. But the paradoxical notion of a bilateral crime calls for closer examination. It appears to be indistinguishable from that of sin itself. This would suggest that we shift our attention to the religious plane … Are we not approaching the moment in history when sin will exactly coincide with its own punishment, appearing as the very expression of the wrath of God?27
Gabriel Marcel is a dupe who seeks the reasons for his delusion, and is astute enough to find the real ones. Mauriac, for his part, is a man of disconcerting and disarming naiveté. Childishness, in his case, is a chronic state of mind; he confesses his faith according to St. Koestler with the fervour of a convert, discovers the Passion in the Moscow trials, and divides people up into the good and the bad the way one cleaves an apple.28 We will not be swayed by the talent29 of these novelists turned prophets, or by the fact that Christians and non-Christians alike have come together around a common theme. Although Camus and Mauriac have begun chanting in unison,30 we know very well that the same words do not mean the same thing to both of them; if they are sincere (as I believe they are), they are fooling themselves, and us to boot. This false end of the world is teeming with false prophets who announce false Christs and treat an event as the Advent. But Christ has taught us that we must beware of false prophets, and also that they will reappear as the Last Days draw nigh. The paradox is plain: the end that is close for every Christian is not the end of the false prophets of history.
This ‘International’ of protest does not, then, hold any religious meaning for us; but the fact remains that it is an historical event, one noteworthy in that it cannot explain its own existence, resting as it does on a myth. Thus we are faced with a real phenomenon lacking all internal necessity: an ideology, that is, a trend of opinion which remains historically incomprehensible if we do not refer to the context in which it appears. We have shown that this ideology does not call real historical distinctions into question, since its content is imaginary. We need, then, to confront this ideology with the history it appears in, and to elucidate, in a real history, the reasons for this imaginary construct.a
By way of explanation, let us first note the disequilibrium caused by the war. The transition from war to peace is not risk-free. War feeds on war; peace is initially a void, and dizziness in the face of this void. Those for whom war is a fatherland enter peace as they would a desert: German youth do not know what to do with their hands, they no longer have any future because peace – terra incognita – has been established. How many, even among the victors, fail to recognize in this peace what they sought to achieve during the war, either because they approved of the war for reasons of courage and morality they seek in vain in peacetime; or because they disavow, in the peace, the consequences of a war they accepted?
Those who were willing to accept the concentration camps (I mean the fascists), and those who were willing to accept the 300,000 deaths in Hamburg (I mean the Allies); those who lived off the deaths of millions of enslaved human beings, and those who reluctantly consented to become ‘murderers’ to prevent the massacre from continuing; those who assumed responsibility for their own deaths, and the deaths of those dear to them, and the deaths of their enemies, so that life might become possible again; those who, on the one side as on the other, but in opposite senses (because the cause was enslavement in one case, and liberation in the other), bear the responsibility for millions of deaths – all these people sometimes mingle their voices, now that peace has returned, in curious lamentations. We are all murderers! cries Camus. I think that ‘Europe’ can find reconciliation on the basis of this obvious truth; the first to hearken to it will assuredly be those who, with Camus’ help and contrary to his intentions, are going to clear their consciences at bargain rates. Our crimes make us all equals, they will say, equals because we have killed – behold, we have been absolved by crime, made indistinguishable by crime, reconciled by crime! It is impossible to hear such a monstrosity without a sense of shame. And, when one knows the echo it is finding in Germany, and knows too that the German Churches have, in a perversion of religion, appropriated this secular absolution, one truly wonders whether words and deeds still mean something – whether, in the eyes of men, the act of killing to enslave and killing to set free is the same act, whether man is ultimately defined not by his reasons for living and dying, which are what make him a man, but by the life and death that make him a dog. No death transcends the reasons for dying it; our reasons judge our dead, distinguishing between the corpses united in the corruption of death. But this unity in death is corruption, and corruption everything that entrenches it in the human spirit. We must surely free ourselves of this shame: we are not dogs, and those who wrested freedom from fascism for all of us are not dogs – this freedom we accept without asking its price, forgetting that, if some died to abolish it, others died to defend it! Who stands to gain from this confusion? Obviously, those who died fighting for slavery and those who honour their memory in the country of their birth, and also those who, in certain nations, want to buy, with forgiveness, mercenaries for the next war …
The same desire to conceal real reasons and present realities behind a confusing myth also has something to do with the aforementioned reaction to the end of the war. We are aware that a war does not begin when it is declared; but we have yet to realize that it does not end with the armistice. Peace is supposed to be essentially different from war; in war, they say, death may be inflicted by man, but it must occur naturally in peace (Camus speaks of abolishing capital punishment!b). The laws governing these two situations are supposed to differ so sharply that one can stop fighting a war the way a child stops playing a game, by changing the rules or shouting ‘truce!’ Today one meets people with the best of intentions who explain that the war is over, that we must now put aside its rules, arms, and methods – that this peace is not a peace because war is not only being prepared, but is also being conducted in it, because it has not done away with the concentration camps, because it fosters social antagonisms, because men have, after all, earned the right to live in serenity, and yet the struggle goes on. There is only one means, they say, of combating this scandal of a war that continues in peacetime: protest, the cry of conscience – and we have come back round to our International of Decent Feelings, the creation of all those who have given up the idea of achieving peace in and through action, who want to obtain immediately, by raising an outcry, what they have not quite had the patience to conquer: the sincere (generous religious natures who have strayed into politics by mistake), the indignant, the impatient, those suffering from persecution complexes (not the persecuted). Of course, all these good intentions are inoperative in the short term, and mystified. ‘Not everyone that saith, Lord, Lord …’31 When we merely invoke the Lord, we serve, not the Lord we invoke, but another whom we do not. And when we see Koestler holding up, in his sermon to the ‘European Left’, the example and ideal of English Labour in power, or Malraux turning out luminous myths on the theme of the Western bloc (the world’s freedom has to be saved from America and the USSR), or Mauriac extending Leon Blum32 the vote of confidence of all right-thinking people,33 we are entitled to ask if these desperate people are not nurturing a secret hope, and are not serving a cause or master they do not invoke: the cause of a ‘Western’ socialism without class struggle, that is, the cause of a Europe united in a verbal, moralizing socialism which conjures away social antagonisms, thus maintaining in actual fact, despite concessions of form, the essential positions of capitalism. As to the master who is not invoked, it might well be the kind of capitalism that, as we are seeing in England,34 puts socialism in the government as the best means of ensuring that there will be none in the economy, and would like to extend this system of protection against Communism to the rest of Europe. Here we are afforded a glimpse, perhaps, of the objective significance of the phenomenon under consideration and of the meaning of this hysteria over war, this atomic neurosis from across the Atlantic, nourished by American news reports and Bikini;35 they mean to tear the men of this old world from the very reality of their existence, from their daily political and social struggles, and leave them in the clutches of the myths of fear.
The present reflection has no relevance to Christians as Christians, but it does aspire to reach Christians as men. The vast operation (little matter whether conscious or unconscious) we are here exposing tends to give men the sense that they cannot reconcile themselves with their destiny, that they will not succeed in mastering their technology and will be destroyed by their own inventions, that, far from emancipating them, their labour enslaves and kills them. This is the theme of the sorcerer’s apprentice – and of the childishness that is invading the world, shadowed by a political pessimism (man has not reached adulthood, one cannot depend on man to save man) which all decent souls interpret in the religious mode. Unfortunately, it is still men who preach this kind of morality to men, or who inspire it, or who allow others to propagate it. Unfortunately, these good apostles are precisely those who, before the world ends, have the greatest interest in shaking mankind’s confidence in itself and its destiny, and, in particular, in discouraging those in our camp who have already undertaken to reconcile humanity with its history – those36 who hold that technology liberates rather than enslaves humanity, that humanity’s labour emancipates rather than destroys it. It would be monstrous if man, who is discovering atomic energy, were not also to discover a way of using it for man’s benefit. But this perversion of the atom is nothing new: the bomb is simply a product of human labour, and the world in which humanity trembles before what it has itself wrought is an extravagant image of the proletarian condition, in which the worker is enslaved by his own labour; it is, quite simply, the same world. One sees, then, which ‘proletariat’ encompasses the other, and one also understands where the human will may find a solution: the road to man’s reconciliation with his destiny is essentially that of the appropriation of the products of his labour, of what he creates in general, and of history as his creation. This reconciliation presupposes a transition from capitalism to socialism by way of the emancipation of the labouring proletariat, which can, through this act, rid not only itself, but also all humanity of contradiction, delivering it, moreover, from the apocalyptic panic besetting it. Destiny, said Hegel, is the consciousness of oneself as an enemy.37 We look for the advent of the human condition and the end of destiny. But we know the price of this effort, and the lucidity it calls for. The solution will be attained only in struggle, but we are not so naive as to believe that war does not haunt peace; on the contrary, we …38
In this combat, we will also be battling the myths that are meant to conceal the truth from us: we are hungry for truth, we love it as we love the bread it tastes of. In this combat, we do not reject good will, but we need good will and comrades who are willing to hear and to see. It is not the deaf and the blind who will lead men to befriend their destiny.
* Conscience, which means both ‘consciousness’ and ‘conscience’, an ambiguity Althusser exploits in this essay.
† It is not the least paradox of our times that the most eloquent protests come to us, in peacetime, from those who were the bravest and staunchest in war: Malraux and Koestler fought in the Republican ranks in Spain, Malraux took part in this war, Camus played an admirable role in the Resistance, like many others who rank amongst the best of these modern crusaders. That they have laid down their arms is troubling.
‡ Althusser writes ‘with difficulty’, doubtless a slip of the pen.
§ The preacher of Ecclesiastes.
‖ Pseudonym of the philosopher Émile-Auguste Chartier (1868–1951).
a Let us forthrightly admit that this enterprise is a hazardous one, and that we do not claim to be able to carry it off successfully in a few pages. Lack of information and of detachment are valid excuses that would have deterred us from publishing these remarks, if we had not thought it necessary to call attention to a trend of opinion that is now sufficiently broad to inspire reflection, if not concern. On the other hand, it is all too dear that any ‘reduction’ of human protest to psychological or political causes, even if they are obscure, will necessarily offend the sensibilities of all self-respecting people; it would be absurd to suppose that the risk that their protest might be perverted had escaped them. Today it is always being proven to all of us that we have misunderstood our own intentions, their meaning, and their consequences; the world is full of fortune-tellers more or less in league with history. There is something healthy in the reaction of protesters, we need protesters, but one might also be permitted to wish that they would pay some attention to what becomes of their generous words; or, if they are too profoundly purist for that, that they let outsiders who wish them well signal the dangers it is hard to perceive from the inside.
b Provisionally, to be sure, and as a therapeutic measure.