How to Criticize Our Society Without Destroying It
How to Criticize Our Society Without Destroying It

Summary/Abstract: Social critique today is threatened by a double danger: to be too timid or to be too arrogant. The last book of Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World? Marx and Marxism 1840–2011, casts light on this disequilibrium of critique. The collapse of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 has been hastily understood as the definitive triumph of liberal democracy and capitalism. Twenty years later, the world financial and economic crisis has been hastily considered the sign of the forthcoming failure of liberal democracy and breakdown of capitalism, and this has provoked the revengeful rehabilitation of ideas that had been until recently suppressed: those of social revolution and of communism. The social critic who is ashamed by the first failure risks being unnecessarily self-restrictive, resigned to the current form of society; the social critic inspired by the second failure risks being extremely speculative and arbitrary, neglecting the concrete experience of social actors. Regardless of his well known and honestly acknowledged ideological creed, Hobsbawm claims that we should accept both failures: State socialism, as it was realized in Eastern Europe, has failed once and for all and cannot be restored, and the same is true of the ideology of the free markets. Neither of these two failures should make us forget the other. Actually, if social critique wants to be historically relevant, it ought to invent new ways of changing the world without mechanically reverting to the old revolutionary vocabulary and imagery.

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