"The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal"
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Power, Fromm implies, is the difference between virtue and vice in the public record. “The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal” isn’t just a glib reversal; it’s a diagnosis of how legitimacy gets manufactured after the fact. The same act - defiance of an existing order - can be canonized as nation-building or condemned as lawlessness depending on who controls courts, newspapers, and eventually textbooks.
Fromm, writing as a psychologist attuned to social character, is less interested in adjudicating revolutions than in exposing the moral theater around them. “Statesman” signals prudence, responsibility, and the aura of necessity; “criminal” signals pathology, selfishness, and threat. Those labels don’t merely describe outcomes. They recruit the public’s need for cognitive closure: if the new regime wins, people retroactively reinterpret violence as sacrifice; if it loses, they reframe grievances as mere criminal impulse. Success becomes proof of righteousness, a tautology that lets societies avoid the unsettling thought that their moral judgments may be contingent, even opportunistic.
The subtext is also a warning about how easily “law” is confused with “justice.” Revolutions are illegal by definition; what changes is whose laws survive to narrate the breach. Fromm’s mid-century backdrop - fascism’s rise, Stalinism’s consolidation, decolonization’s ferment - makes the line feel like an antidote to naive hero worship and reflexive repression alike. It pushes readers to ask a sharper question than “Was it legal?”: “Who gets to decide what counts as legitimate change, and what psychic comfort do we buy by calling winners statesmen?”
Fromm, writing as a psychologist attuned to social character, is less interested in adjudicating revolutions than in exposing the moral theater around them. “Statesman” signals prudence, responsibility, and the aura of necessity; “criminal” signals pathology, selfishness, and threat. Those labels don’t merely describe outcomes. They recruit the public’s need for cognitive closure: if the new regime wins, people retroactively reinterpret violence as sacrifice; if it loses, they reframe grievances as mere criminal impulse. Success becomes proof of righteousness, a tautology that lets societies avoid the unsettling thought that their moral judgments may be contingent, even opportunistic.
The subtext is also a warning about how easily “law” is confused with “justice.” Revolutions are illegal by definition; what changes is whose laws survive to narrate the breach. Fromm’s mid-century backdrop - fascism’s rise, Stalinism’s consolidation, decolonization’s ferment - makes the line feel like an antidote to naive hero worship and reflexive repression alike. It pushes readers to ask a sharper question than “Was it legal?”: “Who gets to decide what counts as legitimate change, and what psychic comfort do we buy by calling winners statesmen?”
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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