Revolution and Ideology
According to sociologist James Chowning Davies, political revolutionaries may be classified in two ways:
- According to the goals of the revolution they propose. Usually, these goals are part of a certain ideology. In theory, each ideology could generate its own brand of revolutionaries. In practice, most political revolutionaries have been either liberals, republicans, democrats, nationalists, socialists, communists, fascists or anarchists.
- According to the methods they propose to use. This divides revolutionaries in two broad groups: Those who advocate a violent revolution, and those who are pacifists.
The revolutionary anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Sergey Nechayev argued in Catechism of a Revolutionary:
The Revolutionary is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion—the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy...
Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara said this about revolutionaries: "At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.... We must strive every day so that this love of living humanity will be transformed into actual deeds, into acts that serve as examples, as a moving force."
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Famous quotes containing the words revolution and/or ideology:
“The Husband of To-Day ever considers his wife but as a portion of his my-ship.
Nominative I.
Possessive My, or Mine.
Objective Me.
This is the grammar known to the Husband of To-Day.”
—Anonymous, U.S. womens magazine contributor. The Revolution (June 24, 1869)
“The ideology of capitalism makes us all into connoisseurs of libertyof the indefinite expansion of possibility.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)