Here
A bit of context for the quote:
WARS and revolutions- as though events had only hurried up
to fulfil Lenin's early prediction - have thus far determined
the physiognomy of the twentieth century. And as distinguished
from the nineteenth-century ideologies - such as nationalism
and internationalism, capitalism and imperialism, socialism and
communism, which, though still invoked by many as justifying
causes, have lost contact with the major realities of our world -
war and revolution still constitute its two central political issues.
They have outlived all their ideological justifications. In a con-
stellation that poses the threat of total annihilation through war
against the hope for the emancipation of all mankind through
revolution -leading one people after the other in swift succession
'to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and
equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God
entitle them' - no cause is left but the most ancient of all, the
one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has deter-.
mined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus
tyranny.
This in itself is surprising enough. Under the concerted assault
of the modern debunking 'sciences', psychology and sociology,
nothing indeed has seemed to be more safely buried than the
concept of freedom. Even the revolutionists, whom one might
have assumed ·to be safe]y and even inexorably anchored in a
tradition that could hardly be told, let alone made sense of, with-
out the notion of freedom, would much rather degrade freedom
to the rank of a lower-middle-class prejudice than admit that
the aim of revolution was, and always has been, freedom. Yet if
it was amazing to see how the very word freedom could dis-
appear from the revolutionary vocabulary, it has perhaps been
no less astounding to watch how in recent years the idea of
freedom has intruded itself into the centre of the gravest of all
present political debates, the discussion of war and of a justifiable
use of violence. Historically, wars are among the oldest pheno~
mena of the recorded past while revolutions, properly. speaking,
did not exist prior to the modern age; they are among the
most recent of all major political data. In contrast to revolution,
the aim of war was only in rare cases bound up with the notion
of freedom; and while it is true that warlike uprisings against a
foreign invader have frequently been felt to be sacred, they· have
never been recognized, either in theory or in practice, as the
only just wars.
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