ABSTRACT
Violence and social change are given prominence in Chapter 11, which examines the violent passions triggered by political doctrines, particularly those that link the possibility of social change exclusively with the exercise of collective force. This chapter interrogates Vico, Marx, Engels, Lenin, but also Burke and Schiller. It reads Shakespeare’s Henry VI and the poetry of Auden to then move on to Musil and his idea of social change brought by ‘men without qualities’. Like Hamlet, do those who fight for radical social change have to be cruel only to be kind?
