ABSTRACT
The relations of leader and led are a constant subject of history, though their particular form and content are constantly changing. This chapter examines a part of this relation, which is placed under the rubric "revolutionary asceticism", as an ideal type. In analyzing the pure type of revolutionary ascetic, and then its visible and partial representatives such as Cromwell, Robespierre, James Mill, Chernyshevsky, Lenin, and Mao, the authors have employed mainly libidinal theory. The classical Marxist view of revolution, as promulgated in the nineteenth century, was that revolution would occur in the advanced, industrialized countries of the West. It would be proletarian, and it would be the "last" revolution. The aesthetic revolution, then, with its removal of repression and control in innumerable areas of personal behavior, sex, clothes, manners, and drugs, is merely the public expression of a long-term secular development.
