'It is by History which is created, lived, and really remembered as "tradition" that Man realized himself or "appears" as a dialectical totality, instead of annihilating himself and "disappearing" by "pure" or "abstract" negation of every given whatsoever, real or thought. It is in the lack of historical memory (or understanding) that the moral danger of Nihilism or Skepticism resides which would negate everything without preserving anything, even in the form of memory. A society that spends its time listening to the radical "nonconformist" Intellectual, who amuses himself by (verbally!) negating any given at all (even the "sublimated" given preserved in historical remembrance) solely because it is a given, ends up sinking into active anarchy and disappearing [here we have Sartre, Fanon, and the greater number of 1960s radicals, who essentially did sink into active anarchy and disappear]. Likewise, the Revolutionary who dreams of a "permanent revolution" that negates every type of tradition and takes no account of concrete past, except to overcome it, necessarily ends up either in the nothingness of social anarchy or in annulling himself physically or politically [this is the logic of contemporary Capitalism and its narcosis and communal withdrawal]. Only the Revolutionary who manages to maintain or reestablish the historical tradition, by preserving in a positive memory the given present which he himself has relegated to the past by his negation, succeeds in creating a new historical World capable of existing [the daunting task of today].'
(Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel)
