Reformation and Revolution: Reflections on Luther, Lenin, and Liberal Democracy in Dark Times

Abstract

The 1517 Protestant Reformation and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution represent two crucial moments in the history of modern politics, in which forms of rebelliousness gave way to new forms of oppression. Luther’s rebellion asserted the metaphysical primacy of the individual believer, searching for an authentic relationship with and justification by God. Accused of heresy, Luther inaugurates a movement fiercely hostile to those who blaspheme against his Truth. Accused of radicalism, Luther becomes an apostle of a new kind of authoritarianism centered on an absolutist state. Lenin’s rebellion asserted the primacy of a disciplined and determined revolutionary party acting in the name of a revolutionary proletariat. Claiming to inaugurate a universal emancipation, Lenin institutes a (“proletarian”) dictatorship. Anticipating the “withering” of the state, he lays the foundations of an all-powerful, totalitarian state, foundations on which his successor, Stalin, constructs precisely such a state. Neither of these individuals anticipated or fully sought all of consequences of their acts, much less all that was done in their names after their passing. At the same time, both were zealous revolutionaries acting with an unwavering faith in the righteousness of their causes and the essential, even metaphysical, malevolence of their opponents. In this way, each achieved real “greatness,” one reason we now, today, recall their efforts. At the same time, each also engendered, and adamantly justified, much destruction, violence, and suffering.

In this chapter, the author expands on the power, and limits, of such ideological zealotry, and then reflects on some of the lessons that can be drawn for liberal democrats in the dark times in which we currently live.

Even historically, theoretical emancipation has specific practical significance for Germany. For Germany’s revolutionary past is theoretical, it is the Reformation. As the revolution then began in the brain of the monk, so now it begins in the brain of the philosopher. Luther , we grant, overcame bondage out of devotion by replacing it by bondage out of conviction. […] But, if Protestantism was not the true solution of the problem, it was at least the true setting of it. It was no longer a case of the layman’s struggle against the priest outside himself but of his struggle against his own priest inside himself, his priestly nature.

—Marx 1843

I would like to thank Mihaela Miroiu for her inspiration and her comments on an earlier version of this essay.