A curious book, François-Xavier Bellamy’s Waiting. Violence, History, Happiness  (Rialp, 2024). Curious about the uniqueness of its chapters. The first deals with violence, the second with history and the myth of continuous progress, and the third with happiness. Of the three, the least convincing, it seems to me, is the last. It begins with violence and presents, concisely, the proposals of those who proclaim violence, war, and combat as the essence of life and history. Heraclitus, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Marx, and Weber parade through its pages. It brings Clausewitz onto the scene, who maintains that war is politics continued by other means. The important thing is not to win the war, but to achieve the stated political objective. Otherwise, situations of extreme violence can be reached, the result of which is nothing but desolation. Our author leans more toward Hannah Arendt’s proposal, who—in line with the classics—points out that politics is the response to violence: dialogue, controversy, agreements, consensus, ethics of responsibility.

The global landscape presents a backdrop of wars and outbreaks of violence that greatly support the idea that struggle is the midwife of history. A history without perpetual peace or a happy ending. Economic interests, nationalism, hatred, and religious and racial prejudices prevail. Is it illusory to think of a world without violence? Is it futile to advocate for peace? A paradise where everything is happiness, peace, and love does not seem achievable, but working for a world “that preserves us from our own violence” through political experience, understood as the art of the possible, seeking to interweave the various threads that make up the fabric of society, is an endeavor worth sustaining.

Is there progress in history? Bellamy asks. The idea of ​​progress—that is, that in history we go from less to more thanks to science, technology, customs, and class struggles as the midwives of history—all of these have been and are a constant in social thought. A consequence of this simplistic view of history is the belief that what is new, because it is new, is better than what came before. This approach has had important proponents, among them Hegel, who attempted to think through all of history from beginning to end. Marx himself, with Hegelian dialectics, believed he had discovered the scientific and necessary laws of history: its end would be a communist paradise, without classes, without violence. History itself showed them that this aspiration was not only unattainable, but also monstrous. We know the final outcome of this fatal arrogance.

I agree with Bellamy’s modest proposal for our present in terms of achievements and failures. He says: “How do we make true progress possible? With respect to what absolute value, what invariable objective are we going to adopt on our path to progress? What do we want to preserve? And what do we accept to lose?” (p. 107). All these questions are the framework of political practice that, among other things, teaches us that progress, the future, is not predetermined. With this perspective and writing from this Peruvian latitude, I believe that our country—and so many others—is not condemned to follow the paths and social drifts that other latitudes of the world have taken. The expression “it will come to your country anyway” remains a remnant of the myth of the inevitability of the laws of history. With a calm spirit, we can find creative responses to the challenges that the future presents: neither mimicry nor imitation, but rather discernment. History is not over, it continues.