Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess Salisbury Quotes
Social stability is ensured, not by the cessation of the demand for change – for the needy and the restless will never cease to cry for it – but by the fact that change in its progress must at last hurt some class of men who are strong enough to arrest it.
Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 1830-1903, 3rd Marquess Salisbury, British Prime Minister (Liberal), British Prime Minister (Conservative), Quarterly Review, 127, 1869
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Stalin was then only 26 years old. This was more than a decade BEFORE the Russian Revolution and Stalin was a young left wing revolutionary planning how to bring about a revolution and how the society should operate thereafter. He was then much the youthful, intellectual, Georgian idealist.
And as the leader of the exploited, after his revolution he became a dictator himself, albeit a very popular one amongst most Cubans.
This is also true in modern politics where almost all petitions and demonstrations are also the apprehension of loss of rights. This is true even when parties contest as in 2011 where the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement both were outraged that they were losing their rights, and in a different ways, both were.
While this is very true in the long term, the Church in the short term has almost always supported actively or by its neutrality, the ruling class as opposed to those who would make revolutionary change even to the extent of participating in the torture, murder, and intimidation of most of the Catholics in the society. The ruling class, in turn, supported the Church and used the power of the state to enforce religious doctrine and prevent alternative religious views and practices to prevail even if only with small minorities. See {632407} for another Mises quotation articulating examples of this.
He was referring to the public unrest and dissatisfaction when an middle, poor or impoverished class is ground down by rigid interpretation and contract laws so that people in debt can rarely get out. He argues that this was a stark reality before most revolutions and a primary cause.
