History, Freedom, and Utopia

My dear Andre,

If I have not written to you until today it is not out of laziness or forgetfulness, but because, after our frequent and somewhat inconclusive conversations, I felt I owed it to myself (and to you) to try to set forth, with what little order I can muster, the few reasons why I do not share your views on “revolution,” “nihilism,” and the duty of the “good citizen.” The reasons are not merely polemical. . . .

In broaching the subject about which I should like to converse with you, I should immediately point out that when I say “your opinion” I refer to those views you dwelled on recently. I do not mean this or that view (with which I might even agree) on the present state of society, social justice, etc., so much as the general position you seemed to hold with a certain tenacity during the conversations we had lately and which, through my fault, were all too frequently interrupted. As far as I can define it, this position seemed to me to consist of a combination of three elements: (1) philanthropy, that is to say, the insistence on the necessity of siding with those people whom the present organization (or disorganization) of society keeps in a state of social inferiority or economic oppression; (2) a relativism, which claims to be absolute (and which seems rather fitful to me), respecting the order of ideas, that is, of propositions that we should consider true or false in the course of a discussion; (3) a dogmatism that, if not absolute, is at least fairly insistent about our moral duty to accept certain notions about the class struggle or private property, under pain of being classified with outcasts and monsters.

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