The Revolutionary Ascetic: Evolution of a Political Type

Why have the great revolutionary leaders of modern times so often been — ascetics—austere “puritans” with few emotional ties? What functions, political as well as personal, do these ascetic traits perform for the modern revolutionary leader and for his followers? Noted historian and author Bruce Mazlish is convinced that, starting in the nineteenth century, the needs of modernizing revolutions have produced a distinct new type of political leader, the revolutionary ascetic, the man whose denial of personal pleasures and Commitments both enables him to perform politically necessary, if personally repulsive, revolutionary acts and to command the allegiance of his more worldly followers. Starting with Cromwell, Mazlish shows how this asceticism first became secularized with the French Revolution and then was put to the service of a new kind of total modernizing revolution in Russia, China, and elsewhere. And in remarkably vivid portraits of Lenin and Mao Tse-tung, Professor Mazlish demonstrates how two of the century’s best-known revolutionaries have, consciously and unconsciously, used their personal asceticism to induce revolutionary change. Bruce Mazlish, Professor of History and Chairman of the Department of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of, among many other works, James and John Stuart Mill, In Search of Nixon, the Western Intellectual Tradition (with J. Bronowski), and a forthcoming biography of President Jimmy Carter.