The New Politology of Eric Wilson
ABSTRACT
Eric Wilson put it clearly: if one wants to craft a realistic theory of political violence, one will find oneself entre dos aguas. On the Right, one will get no cooperation whatsoever from conservative hawks whose job is to salute the advent of the modern Liberal State as a teleological master-stroke: Liberalism, they affirm, is all humans have ever striven for (“democratic consensus”), and now it is here. In their vision, an organism as flawlessly balanced and efficient as the modern Liberal State is ipso facto immune to conspiratorial activity: the mere possibility of degenerative internecine feuds at the top is averted by the joint operation of transparency and democratic turnover.
This is an introduction of mine to an essay by Eric Wilson on the dynamics of the Cold War as seen from his perspective, in which political events are projected as the reflection of a game of mirrors—a game in which violence dissipates in a desperate attempt to assume some higher meaning within a vortex whose movement seems to be the annihilation of any form of meaning.