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In this world, things are complicated and are decided by many factors. We should look at problems from different aspects, not from just one alone. Only those who are subjective, one-sided and superficial in their approach to problems will smugly issue orders or directives the moment they arrive on the scene, without considering the circumstances, without viewing things in their entirety (their history and their present state as a whole) and without getting to the essence of things (their nature and the internal relations between one thing and another). Such people ar* bound to trip and fall. The man who thus insists on the need for political thinking is not a democratic parliamentarian, but Mao Tse-tung in his active period. He appeals in turn to Lenin's maxim: "In order really to know an object, we must embrace, study, all its sides, all its connections and 'mediations.'M1 Narrow-minded agreement with nationalisms just because they use Marxist slogans is not preferable to applauding the might of their opponents. The fearful events which accompany the trend to a rationalized, automated, totally managed world (including revolts within the military or infiltrations into disputed territory and the defense against these) are part of the power-bloc struggle in an age when all sides have reached the same technological level. The age tends to eliminate every vestige of even a relative autonomy for the individual. Under liberalism the citizen could within limits develop his own potentialities; his destiny was within limits determined by his own activity. That all should have this possibilty was what was meant by the demand for freedom and justice. As society changes, however, an increase in one of these two is usually matched by a decrease in the other; the centralized regulation of life, the kind of administration which plans every detail, the so-called strict rationalization prove historically to be a compromise. During the National So- 1. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, ed. by Stuart Schram (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968). cialist period u was aiready clear that totalitarian government was not an accident but a symptom of the way society was going. The perfecting of technology, the spread of commerce and communication, the growth of population all drive society towards stricter organization. Opposition, however despairing, is itself co-opted into the very development it had hoped to counteract. Nonetheless, to give voice to what one knows and thereby perhaps to avert new terror remain the right of a man who is still really alive Not a few of the impulses which motivate me are related to those of present-day youth- desire for a better life and the right kind of society, unwillingness to adapt to the present order of things. I also share their doubts about the educational value of our schools, colleges, and universities The difference between is has to do with the violence practiced by the young, which plays into the hands of their otherwise impotent opponents An open declaration that even a dubious democracy, for all its defects, is always better than the dictatorship which would inevitably result from a revolution today, seems to me necessary for the sake of truth. Despite her adherence to the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg, whom so many students venerate, said fifty years ago that "the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure."2 To protect, preserve, and, where possible, extend the limited and ephemeral freedom of the individual in the face of the growing threat to it is far more urgent a task than to issue abstract denunciations of it or to endanger it by actions that have no hope of success. In totalitarian countries youth is struggling precisely for that autonomy which is under permanent threat in nontotalitarian countries. Whatever the reasons offered in justification, for the left to help the advance of a totalitarian bureaucracy is a pseudorevolutionary act, and for the right to support the tendency to terrorism is a pseudoconservative act. As recent history proves, both tendencies are really more closely related to each other than 2. Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution/Leninism or Marxism? (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961),

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