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[...] there is no possible evolution in a totalitarian society. Terror does not evolve except toward a worse terror, the scaffold does not become any more liberal, the gallows are not tolerant. Nowhere in the world has there been a party or a man with absolute power who did not use it absolutely.
The first thing to define totalitarian society, whether of the Right or of the Left, is the single party, and the single party has no reason to destroy itself. This is why the only society capable of evolution and liberalization, the only one that deserves both our critical and our active support is the society that involves a plurality of parties as a part of its structure. It alone allows one to denounce, hence to correct, injustice and crime. [...]
in an essay denouncing Kadar's Hungary (written 1957, so soon after the revolution)
[...] A press or a book is not true because it is revolutionary. It has a chance of being revolutionary only if it tries to tell the truth. [...]
In order to strike a construtive note, however, I shall propose as one of the preliminaries to any future gathering the unqualified acceptance of the following principle: none of the evils that totalitarianism (defined by the single party and the suppression of all opposition) claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.
the last "totalitarianism" is spelled with a "sim" ending but I think that's just a typo
In conclusion, I believe [...] that the indispensable conditions for intellectual creation and historical justice are liberty and the free confronting of differences. Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others. But without freedom, no socialism either, except the socialism of the gallows.
[...] Many laws consider a premeditated crime more serious than a crime of pure violence. But what then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? [...]
hint: he's against the death penalty
also just realised that "capital" originally meant "head" (via Old French from Latin capitalis, from caput 'head') which explains the terms "capital punishment" and "decapitation" and even "capital city"; for "capital" as in "capitalism", it comes from heads of cattle (and other animals) being the original proto-currency
To cut short this question of the law of retaliation, we must note that even in its primitive form it can operate only between two individuals of whom one is absolutely innocent and the other absolutely guilty. The victim, to be sure, is innocent. But can the society that is supposed to represent the victim lay claim to innocence? Is it not responsible, at least in part, for the crime it punishes so severely? [...] every society has the criminals it deserves. [...] we already have our schools of crime, which differ from our federal prisons in this notable regard: it is possible to leave them at any hour of the day or night; they are the taverns and slums, the glory of our Republic.
he also goes into the culpability of alcohol and the fact that its production is subsidized by the government
[...] The number of bad or morbid predispositions our antecedents have been able to transmit to us is, thus, incalculable. We come into the world laden wih the weight of an infinite necessity. [...] there never exists any total responsibility, or, consequently, any absolute punishment or reward. No one can be rewarded completely, not even the winners of Nobel Prizes. But no one should be punished absolutely if he is thought guilty, and certainly not if there is a chance of his being innocent. The death penalty, which really neither provides an example nor assures distributive justice, simply usurps an exorbitant privilege by claiming to punish an always relative culpability by a definitive and irreparable punishment.
[...] Tomorrow another expert testimony will declare the innocence of some Abbott or other. But Abbott will be dead, scientifically dead, and the science that claims to prove innocence as well as guilt has not yet reached the point of resuscitating those it kills.
[...] But precisely because he is not absolutely good, no one among us can pose as an absolute judge and pronounce the definitive elimination of the worst among the guilty, because no one of us can lay claim to absolute innocence. Capital judgment upsets the only indisputable human solidarity--our solidarity against death--and it can be legitimized only by a truth or a principle that is superior to man.
it's a really long essay and he's definitely preaching to the choir here but his writing is, as always, v good
(the principle he is referring to here is religious in nature)
[...] The greatest renown today consists in being admired ot hrated without having been read. Any artist who goes in for being famous in our society must know that it is not he who will become famous, but someone else under his name, someone who will eventually escape him and perhaps someday will kill the true artist in him.
not especially notable except insofar as it echoes the moral of his story Jonas
also a bit of Jonathan Franzen's essay Why Bother