ABSTRACT
V. I. Lenin, in The State and Revolution, suggests some revealmg dilemmas for every student of the phenomenon of coercion. Lenin was unquestionably an authority on the subject in his own right; it is therefore unimportant for our present purposes to decide whether Lenin was simply explicating, removing ambiguities from, or drastically distorting the classical Marxist conceptions of the state and of post-political society. By way of anticipation, I maintain that if we accept Lenin’s analysis, we shall be very hard put to avoid the pessimistic conclusion of theologians and others (reported elsewhere in this volume by Professor Cook) that coercion is an all-pervasive, non-eliminable feature of life, with its roots, perhaps, in being itself. My ultimate purpose in this essay, written at a time in American history at which daily events seem to furnish the 179most utterly incontrovertible evidence in favor of this same conclusion, is to try to leave open the possibility of the conclusion’s being false.
