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What Is Life Like After Revolution? Administration, Habit, and Democracy in Lenin’s “The State and Revolution”—and Beyond

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Book cover The Russian Revolution as Ideal and Practice

Part of the book series: Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice ((CPTRP))

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Abstract

This paper analyzes the scenario for a post-revolutionary society as developed in Lenin’s “The State and Revolution.” Lenin heavily relies on Marx and Engels’s metaphors of waking up and falling asleep: Post-revolutionary society is marked by a grand awakening and a conversion of dreams into reality, while the State is said to fall asleep or wither away. Lenin applies these metaphors yet applies them in a strangely inverted manner. Instead of embracing agency, he argues for a new regime of “habit,” which has sedating effects on humans, while the state survives its demise and returns under the title of “administration.” Lenin’s plea for “habit” and “administration” is discussed in a broader context of other philosophical accounts reaching from Kant to Hegel, Max Weber, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hannah Arendt and beyond. These critical considerations lead to some general findings on the status of moral agency in revolutionary change. Trotsky’s account of permanent revolution with its experimentalist and theatrical implications is a case in point here. The paper concludes by discussing the intricate relation between revolution, democracy, and the state.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Dieter Thomä

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  1. Dieter Thomä
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Correspondence to Dieter Thomä .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Thomas Telios

  2. University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Dieter Thomä

  3. University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Ulrich Schmid

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Thomä, D. (2020). What Is Life Like After Revolution? Administration, Habit, and Democracy in Lenin’s “The State and Revolution”—and Beyond. In: Telios, T., Thomä, D., Schmid, U. (eds) The Russian Revolution as Ideal and Practice. Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14237-7_7

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