52 Philosophical Frames
abermas rejects radical change in contemporary society and in H
political power, at least in Europe and the United States, and his warn-
ings against “social revolutions” increased after the collapse of the Soviet
experience. The classical Marxist project of workers’ power is abandoned
by him because the working class had failed in making good the promise
of liberalism. It revealed itself incapable of bringing capitalist social and
political institutions into conformity with such professed “bourgeois” ide-
als as freedom, and democracy. He even goes so far as to say that capitalism
(i.e., the capitalist market and the capitalist state) cannot be superseded.^7
The surprising thing about Habermas’s thesis here is his assumption that
equality was a “bourgeois” ideal. The confusion no doubt arises from the
assumption that the French Revolution was itself a “bourgeois” revolution.
e point to be made here is that the decisive transition in Europe to Th
democracy was not only a function of the political influence of the public
sphere, but the product of radical violent political and social revolutions in
which the popular masses played a major role. The end result was finally a
radical change not only in the form of the state but in its very nature and
function. The democratization process was thus a historical process that
combined radical revolutions (four in the case of France, in 1789, 1830,
1848 and 1870) and protracted periods of cumulative change to finally
produce the structural transition from absolutism to democracy.
n fact, each of the two major European revolutions, the English and I
the French, unleashed not one but two revolutionary processes: a revolu-
tion for liberty and a revolution for equality. Each represented a different
alliance of forces. In the English experience, the radical elements were
represented by such movements as the Familists who called for the aboli-
tion of private property. The Levellers opposed both feudalism and capi-
talism and advocated equality of all Englishmen and the representative
franchise to all males without property requirements. The end result in
both revolutions was a forced compromise in which the idea of equality
was restricted to the legal and political fields whereas inequality remained
the norm in the socio economic field. It is of course known that that com-
promise—which in the French experience produced the famous trinity
of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité—was imposed on the representatives of the
subaltern classes by the violence of the state and its legislation.