Life & Wisdom Quote by Ernest Mandel

“Mistakes in themselves are unavoidable” reads like a calm refusal to indulge either perfectionism or melodrama. Ernest Mandel, a Marxist economist and public intellectual who spent a lifetime arguing about how societies change, isn’t offering a bumper-sticker absolution. He’s laying groundwork for a politics of experimentation: if you’re serious about transforming the world rather than merely interpreting it, you have to accept that missteps are built into action.

The phrasing matters. “In themselves” is a little legalistic, a qualifier that shifts attention away from shame and toward structure. Mistakes aren’t framed as moral failures; they’re treated as predictable byproducts of complex systems, incomplete information, and contested goals. That’s a deeply Mandel move: error isn’t an exception, it’s evidence that reality isn’t as tidy as ideology wants it to be.

Subtext: the real scandal isn’t that mistakes happen, it’s how institutions weaponize them. In politics and economics, opponents use errors to argue for paralysis (“See? Change only makes things worse”) or to justify managerial control (“Leave it to the experts”). Mandel’s line denies them both: inevitability doesn’t excuse incompetence, but it does demand humility, feedback, and revision.

Contextually, Mandel wrote in the long shadow of 20th-century socialist projects, where “mistakes” could mean anything from policy blunders to atrocities. The sentence implicitly draws a boundary: unavoidable error is one thing; preventable harm, disguised as necessity, is another. It’s a plea for accountability without surrendering the right to try again.