I'm John Dotsch with Professor Sean McMeakin. The new book is to overthrow the world,

The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism.

Professor has done us the favor of putting together in a continual narrative

how the idea of communism, the Communist Manifesto, penned by Karl Marx with Friedrich Engels,

his co-pilot, how that has influenced different cultures where it never was native, travel that book, those phrases have traveled around the world and continue to reverberate. But I learned from the professor that communism, Marxist-Leninism or just Marxism, prospers

only in conjunction with extreme violence.

As the professor says again and again, no communist dictatorship has ever come to power

through the ballot box.

It's extreme violence and the disintegration of norms, that's the modern word we're using,

around the governance that creates conditions for this fiction of the dictatorship, let's say,

the old-fashioned way, conspiracy of equals. We need to touch on a man

named Babouf. Gracchus Babouf was his nom de Guerre, a Frenchman who was executed for being a troublemaker.

What do we need to know about Babouf that is inspirational to those who come across his

final speech? I believe it was in a courtroom.

Well, that's right.

Now, Babouf was drawing on certain ideas common in the French Enlightenment,

but not necessarily the ones that were most familiar with today.

A lot of people have read Rousseau, and they might have discussed the ideas in the social contract

about this idealized Republican community where there is a kind of binary people have read Rousseau and they might have discussed the ideas in the social contract about

this idealized Republican community where there is a kind of binary opposition between those inside

and outside the community, the idea of the general will, the idea almost to some extent of

a state being able to label those outside the circle of loyalties, enemies of the people. But someone who was writing

...