Per angusta ad augusta
I myself live in an intellectual environment of friends and acquaintances who are engaged in politics, reflect on the present state of the world and, almost without exception, hold views about how we might move from the present society – which they regard as unjust – towards a more just and peaceful one.
My point here is not that one ought to agree with their political and social views. The substance of their ideas is therefore not discussed in this study. My concern lies elsewhere. I often find the strategies by which they believe they can realise the condition they desire and consider worth pursuing to be naive and based on mistaken assumptions about how societies function and, above all, about how purposive social change can be brought about within them.
With Sun Tzu and The Art of War in mind, I would therefore like to say to my dear friends: if you want to change the world, you must first understand how that world changes. And if you want to defeat your political ‘opponents’, you must know them: understand their motives, know why they act as they do and, above all, understand how their ideas ever became sufficiently socially operative to shape the existing order.
This study seeks to help at precisely that point.
I have tried to formulate my views on society as scientifically as possible. This means that the sociological and psychological mechanisms described in this study must be open to testing, falsification and gradual improvement. I may be wrong. Parts of the theory may prove incorrect, and the theory can undoubtedly be improved.
My study of political science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the 1970s suddenly proved surprisingly useful when I began to think about these questions. The separate ideas I use are certainly not all new, and I have drawn inspiration from many original thinkers. Norbert Elias deserves explicit mention. What may be new is the way in which I have brought together various existing insights into civilising, power, institutions and social change within a single coherent theory.
This also provides an important test of the theory. If it is at least broadly correct, the mechanisms described must not apply only to political views with which one sympathises. They must operate irrespective of the substance of the political change being pursued. Historical social movements and processes of change offer numerous examples in which the mechanisms described here can, at any rate, be recognised.
Although it is fully implicit in the theory, this study has deliberately not become a practical recipe book for aspiring revolutionaries. I nevertheless believe that engaging with this perspective can teach a politically motivated citizen something important: which efforts are likely to achieve little, why certain political strategies repeatedly appear to fail, and through which mechanisms ideas can become socially operative.
Even that path offers no guarantee of success. Anyone who wants to change the world will still have to travel along difficult and sometimes barely passable roads: Per angusta ad augusta.
Through difficulties to higher things. Hence: The Art of Revolution.
Dick Ahles
Enkhuizen, 5 September 2026