Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please
"In his pamphlet on Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx struck a middle path between voluntarism and structuralism when he wrote: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language. What happens in a crisis depends on a multiplicity of factors, and not just on revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries. Revolutions are usually initiated by a minority taking advantage of an exceptional conjuncture which they have not created. If the revolutionaries triumph, they must establish an authoritarian regime to convince others of the righteousness of their aims, or they must give power (usually through the suffrage) to the masses; but if the masses are not in tune with the revolutionary minority, a process which no one had foreseen may develop."
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