polite offer-meant-to-be-refused: it is a ‘habit’ to refuse such an offer, and anyone who accepts such an offer commits a vulgar blunder. The same goes for many political situations in which a choice is given on condition that we make the right choice: we are solemnly reminded that we can say no – but we are expected to reject this offer and enthusiastically say yes. With many sexual prohibitions, the situation is the opposite one: the explicit ‘no’ effectively functions as the implicit injunction ‘do it, but in a discreet way!’. Measured against this background, revolutionary-egalitarian figures from Robespierre to John Brown are (potentially, at least) figures without habits: they refuse to take into account the habits that qualify the functioning of a universal rule:
Such is the natural dominion of habit that we regard the most arbitrary conventions, sometimes indeed the most defective institutions, as absolute measures of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice. It does not even occur to us that most are inevitably still connected with the prejudices on which despotism fed us. We have been so long stooped under its yoke that we have some difficulty in raising ourselves to the eternal principles of reason; anything that refers to the sacred source of all law seems to us to take on an illegal character, and the very order of nature seems to us a disorder. The majestic movements of a great people, the sublime fervours of virtue often appear to our timid eyes as something like an erupting volcano or the overthrow of political society; and it is certainly not the least of the troubles bothering us, this contradiction between the weakness of our morals, the depravity of our minds, and the purity of principle and energy of character demanded by the free government to which we have dared aspire.22
To cast off the yoke of habit means: if all men are equal, then all men are to be effectively treated as equal; if blacks are also human, they should be immediately treated as such. Recall the early stages of the struggle against slavery in the US, which, even prior to the Civil War, culminated in armed conflict between the gradualism of compassionate liberals and the unique figure of John Brown:
African Americans were caricatures of people, they were characterized as buffoons and minstrels, they were the butt-end of jokes in American society. And even the abolitionists, as antislavery as they were, the majority of them did not see African Americans as equals. The majority of them, and this was something that African Americans complained about all the time, were willing to work for the end of slavery in the South but they were not willing to work to end discrimination in the North. […] John Brown wasn’t like that. For him, practicing egalitarianism was a first step toward ending slavery. And African Americans who came in contact with him knew this immediately. He made it very clear that he saw no difference, and he didn’t make this clear by saying it, he made it clear by what he did.23
For this reason, John Brown is the key political figure in the history of the US: in his fervently Christian ‘radical abolitionism’, he came closest to introducing the Jacobin logic into the US political landscape:
John Brown considered himself a complete egalitarian. And it was very important for him to practice egalitarianism on every level. […] He made it very clear that he saw no difference, and he didn’t make this clear by saying it, he made it clear by what he did.24
Even today, long after the abolition of slavery, Brown is the dividing figure in American collective memory; those whites who support Brown are all the more precious – among them, surprisingly, Henry David Thoreau, the great opponent of violence: against the standard dismissal of Brown as blood-thirsty, foolish and insane, Thoreau25 painted a portrait of a peerless man whose embrace of a cause was unparalleled; he even went so far as to liken Brown’s execution (he states that he regards Brown as dead before his actual death) to Christ. Thoreau lashes out at the scores who voiced their displeasure and scorn for John Brown: the same people cannot understand Brown because of their concrete stances and ‘dead’ existences; they are truly not living, only a handful of men have lived.
It is, however, this very consistent egalitarianism which marks simultaneously the limitations of Jacobin politics. Recall Marx’s fundamental insight about the ‘bourgeois’ limitation of the logic of equality: capitalist inequalities (‘exploitations’) are not the ‘unprincipled violations of the principle of equality’, but are absolutely inherent to the logic of equality, they are the paradoxical result of its consistent realization. What we have in mind here is not only the tired and old motif of how market exchange presupposes formally/legally equal subjects who meet and interact on the market; the crucial moment of Marx’s critique of ‘bourgeois’ socialists is that capitalist exploitation does not involve any kind of ‘unequal’ exchange between the worker and the capitalist – this exchange is fully equal and ‘just’, ideally (in principle), the worker gets paid the full value of the commodity she is selling (her labour-power). Of course, radical bourgeois revolutionaries are aware of this limitation; however, the way they try to amend it is through a direct ‘terrorist’ imposition of more and more de facto equality (equal wages, equal health treatment …), which can only be imposed through new forms of formal inequality (different sorts of preferential treatments of the under-privileged). In short, the axiom of ‘equality’ means either not enough (it remains the abstract form of actual inequality) or too much (enforcing ‘terrorist’ equality) – it is a formalist notion in a strict dialectical sense, i.e., its limitation is precisely that its form is not concrete enough, but a mere neutral container of some content that eludes this form.
The problem here is not terror as such – our task today is precisely to reinvent emancipatory terror. The problem lies elsewhere: egalitarian political ‘extremism’ or ‘excessive radicalism’ should always be read as a phenomenon of ideologico-political displacement: as an index of its opposite, of a limitation, of a refusal effectively to ‘go all the way’. What was the Jacobins’ recourse to radical ‘terror’ if not a kind of hysterical acting out bearing witness to their inability to disturb the very fundamentals of economic order (private property, etc.)? And does the same not go even for the so-called ‘excesses’ of Political Correctness? Do they also not display the retreat from disturbing the effective (economic etc.) causes of racism and sexism? Perhaps, then, the time has come to render problematic the standard topos, shared by practically all the ‘postmodern’ Leftists, according to which political ‘totalitarianism’ somehow results from the predominance of material production and technology over intersubjective communication and/or symbolic practice, as if the root of the political terror resides in the fact that the ‘principle’ of instrumental reason, of the technological exploitation of nature, is extended also to society, so that people are treated as raw material to be transformed into a New Man. What if it is the exact opposite which holds? What if political ‘terror’ signals precisely that the sphere of (material) production is denied its autonomy and subordinated to political logic? Is it not that all forms of political ‘terror’, from the Jacobins to the Maoist Cultural Revolution, presuppose the foreclosure of the sphere of production proper, its reduction to the terrain of political battle? In other words, what it effectively amounts to is nothing less than the abandonment of Marx’s key insight that the political struggle is a spectacle which, in order to be deciphered, has to be referred to the sphere of economics (‘if Marxism had any analytical value for political theory, was it not in the insistence that the problem of freedom was contained in the social relations implicitly declared ‘‘unpolitical’’ – that is, naturalized – in liberal discourse’26).
As to philosophical roots of this limitation of egalitarian terror, it is relatively easy to discern the roots of what went wrong with Jacobin terror as lying in Rousseau who was ready to pursue to its ‘Stalinist’ extreme the paradox of the general will:
Apart from this original contract, the votes of the greatest number always bind the rest; and this is a consequence of the contract itself. Yet it may be asked how a man can be at once free and forced to conform to wills which are not his own. How can the opposing minority be both free and subject to laws to which they have not consented? I answer that the question is badly formulated. The citizen consents to all the laws, even to those that are passed against his will, and even to those which punish him when he dares to break any one of them. The constant will of all the members of the state is the general will; it is through it that they are citizens and free. When a law is proposed in the