Review: Waller Newell’s “Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger”

“Beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, proceeding through the luminaries of German Idealism and Romanticism—climaxing with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—then marching beyond Hegel to Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, Newell gives a reading of philosophy gone wrong. Horribly wrong.”

One of the great lies of modernity is that the ancient world was despotic, totalitarian, and authoritarian while we, by contrast, living in the afterglow of the Enlightenment (the greatest propaganda term ever invented), are freed from that ancient darkness and tyranny. The actual record of history calls this narrative into question. Modernity is witness to the “utopian genocides” of the last 200 years, beginning with the Terror of the French Revolution and proceeding with horrifying mass murderous regimes of the Bolsheviks, Nazis, Maoists, Khmer Rouge, ISIS, and others. Far from some glow of liberty, we live in the era of de-humanizing totalitarianism. How did we go from the noble humanism of the ancients and Christians to the de-humanizing tyranny and terror of the moderns?

This is the question that Waller Newell attempts to answer in his brilliant and provocatively insightful new book, Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger, which was released this past September. Beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, proceeding through the luminaries of German Idealism and Romanticism—climaxing with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—then marching beyond Hegel to Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, Newell gives a reading of philosophy gone wrong. Horribly wrong. Or did it really go horribly wrong upon a second reading?

At first glance, Rousseau and the men and women inspired by him wanted freedom. Peter Neumann, in his recently translated work Jena 1800, called these men and women “free spirits,” who sought the liberation of the soul from what threatened to enslave it. As I noted in the conclusion of my review of that book, “ironically, their ideas have often ended up enslaving and tyrannizing billions more despite the promise of liberation and liberty they desired.” Most educational institutions and professors teach Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, even Nietzsche, and sometimes Heidegger as desiring a liberty denied by fraudulent bourgeois liberalism. I can recall from my first exposure to some of these philosophers (like Rousseau) in Advanced Placement European History as a high school student to my more immersive experience as a philosophy undergraduate that many of these philosophers were presented as champions of liberty. This is still the faulty and misleading presentation of them today which clouds our reading of them.