Potentiality and actuality

Potentiality and actuality names a reversal of the familiar picture in which possibility simply strives toward completion in reality. The concept instead asks what has been excluded or betrayed in an accomplished outcome, and how that unrealized potential can still alter the meaning of the present. In the book’s account of Hegel, actuality is not a sealed endpoint: its apparent necessity has a history, and thinking can reopen that history by recovering the contingent choices and unrealized alternatives within it.

From completed outcome to becoming

The usual contrast between Hegel and Søren Kierkegaard seems to assign the past to Hegel and the open future to Kierkegaard. On this account, Hegel’s dialectic closes into a circle in which everything becomes what it always already was, while Kierkegaard’s emphasis on leaps and contingency breaks that closure. The book challenges this opposition. Hegelian thought does not simply view the present as though its outcome had been inevitable all along. It tries to grasp what has happened in the process of becoming, including the contingent path through which an existing necessity was produced. The Absolute, in this sense, is not only Substance but also Subject: the process by which an outcome comes to count as necessary belongs to its meaning.

This approach changes how progress is understood. Instead of treating progress as the full realization of an available possibility, it restores potentiality to what has become merely actual. Actuality may look settled, but it can contain a suppressed striving toward alternatives that did not prevail. Thinking moves against the retrospective illusion that the outcome was the only one possible, making visible the unrealized capacity lodged in what exists.

Contingency, decision, and singular life

The distinction between the arbitrary and the contingent clarifies what kind of possibility is at stake. A person’s speaking English is accidental in relation to the general fact of being a being of language: it is one particular instance within a broader category. But using language instrumentally or using it poetically is not merely another arbitrary variation. Those uses activate different potentials of language itself. The first kind of possibility selects an instance of a general rule; the second concerns what can be done with the universal capacity in a particular situation.

That distinction also marks a difference between cognitive and ethical thought. In a cognitive approach, a singular being can be treated as an example of a universal law. Søren Kierkegaard’s account of the ethically existing subject, by contrast, insists on the actuality of singular existence. The relevant possibility is not just that a person might instantiate one rule rather than another. It is the thorough contingency of the decision about what to do with a singular life. The concept therefore joins potentiality to action without reducing action to the mechanical realization of a prior plan: what matters is how an existing subject takes up, or fails to take up, the possibilities at stake.

Recovering betrayed historical possibilities

Walter Benjamin’s account of revolution as redemption through repetition gives the historical dimension of the concept a sharp political form. A Marxist history of the French Revolution should not stop at describing what happened and explaining the illusions that accompanied it. Nor should it dismiss the Jacobins’ emancipatory hopes as rhetoric that merely served the eventual triumph of commercial capitalism. It should uncover the utopian potential betrayed in the revolution’s actual course and outcome.

Those defeated possibilities do not simply disappear. They persist as historical specters, haunting revolutionary memory and demanding enactment. A later proletarian revolution, in this account, would not merely introduce a new present; it would also redeem those earlier struggles by taking up their unfinished potential. Schelling offers a related formulation at a different level: before Creation, God is conceived as a domain of pure potentialities, and in human thought the potentiality obscured in nature is again brought forth and posited as such. In both cases, potentiality is not a decorative alternative to actuality. It is something whose suppressed or concealed status can become consequential.

Historical necessity and revolutionary transformation

The book applies this way of thinking to the relationship between the October Revolution and Stalinism. It rejects two simplifying explanations: that Stalinism was merely a contingent deviation from the revolution, and that the Communist project was totalitarian at its core. The task, instead, is to hold together the October Revolution’s emancipatory potential and the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome. This formulation does not make the outcome morally acceptable or erase the revolution’s promise. It asks how the later order grew from the history of the revolutionary project, while preserving the distinction between that history and the potentials it betrayed.

Sheila Fitzpatrick’s account locates the revolutionary sequence’s decisive transformation in the late 1920s and 1930s. The years from 1917 to 1921 were difficult and marked by emergency, but the social texture remained largely intact during the subsequent New Economic Policy period. The thrust begun in 1928, by contrast, directly and brutally sought to change society’s composition: peasants were liquidated as a class of individual owners, and the old intelligentsia of teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians was replaced by a new one. The book emphasizes the contrast through Moscow. Someone returning in 1924 after leaving in 1914 would still recognize the city’s shops, offices, theaters, and, in most cases, people in charge; returning in 1934, that person would find the texture of social life transformed beyond recognition.

This history brings the tension between potentiality and actuality into view without treating the transformation as a simple accident or a smooth fulfillment. In the account given here, the terrible years after 1929 combined immense violence with a sincere and enthusiastic drive to remake the social body and create a new state, intelligentsia, and legal system. The revolutionary dynamic, unable to expand beyond the Soviet Union, turned inward: forcible industrialization and collectivization became substitutes for the spread of revolution, while the liquidation of the kulaks took the place of overthrowing bourgeois rule abroad. Potentiality thus helps explain both the force of the transformation and its cost: an unrealized outward movement was displaced into a violent reshaping of society at home.

The concept’s critical force

Potentiality and actuality is not a claim that every unrealized alternative remains available in the same form, or that history can be undone. Its critical force lies in resisting the assumption that what happened exhausts what could have happened or what an event meant. By tracing how necessity emerged from contingency, and how defeated possibilities persist within later arrangements, the concept makes actuality legible as an unfinished historical achievement rather than a self-explanatory fact.

This also distinguishes the account from a simple celebration of possibility. The question is not whether an abstract range of futures once existed, but which potentials belonged to a concrete historical situation, how they were blocked or redirected, and what consequences their defeat continues to produce. The present can then be read from two angles at once: as the actual order that has taken shape and as the site where its excluded possibilities still exert pressure. That tension is the point of departure for thinking change without mistaking either the past’s outcome for fate or an unrealized promise for an already accomplished alternative.