It is only by realizing that love of power is the cause of the activities that are important in social affairs that history, whether ancient or modern, can be rightly interpreted.
the fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in whic Energy is the fundamental concept in physics. Like Energy, power has many forms, such as wealth, armaments, civil authority, influence on opinion. No one of these an be regarded as subordinate to any other, and there is no one form which the others are derivative.
P14 Love of power, though one of the strongest of human motives, is very unevenly distributed, and is limited by various other motives, such as love of ease, love of pleasure and sometimes love of approval. It is disguised, among the more timid, as an impulse of submission t... (查看原文)
Government by a Church or political party—which may be called a theocracy— . . . was revived by Lenin, adopted in Italy and Germany, and seriously attempted in China.
In a country such as Russia or China, where the bulk of the population is illiterate and without political experience, the successful revolutionary found himself in a very difficult situation. Democracy on Western lines could not possibly succeed; it was attempted in China, but was a fiasco from the first. On the other hand, the revolutionary parties in Russia . . . said: ‘We, the party that has made the revolution, will retain political power until such time as the country is ripe for democracy; and meanwhile we will educate the country in our principles.’
The result, however, was not quite what the Old Bolsheviks had ho... (查看原文)
Marx pointed out that there could be no real equalisation of power through politics alone, while economic power remained monarchical or oligarchic. It followed that economic power must be in the hands of the State, and that the State must be democratic. Those who profess, at the present day, to be Marx’s followers, have kept only the half of his doctrine, and have thrown over the demand that the State should be democratic. They have thus concentrated both economic and political power in the hands of an oligarchy, which has become, in consequence, more powerful and more able to exercise tyranny than any oligarchy of former times. (查看原文)
