Working radically: A short essay

“Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” This saying, attributed to the poet Victor Hugo, often serves as proof of the power of ideas, fashions and cultural upheavals. It is used like the final line on a restaurant bill: only the inevitable final amount is written underneath. It couldn’t be any other way, all items are listed. The Hugo idea: a logical consequence of its time, because it “had come”.

However, such an approach is somewhat unsatisfactory; there is something comfortable and retrospective about it. The idea is already there and is now being evaluated. The specific idea (be it the invention of the office, Taylorism, the right to vote for women or the ban on smoking in pubs) is justified by its success. At some point you can’t even imagine what it was like before (or can you remember a time before seat belts were compulsory?).

A retrospective interpretation of a successful idea neglects the personal and institutional battle that was usually fought for it. After all, women’s suffrage and the smoking ban were not given to people from heaven. There were people who fought for it, took to the streets, sometimes even got themselves locked up for it. Hugo recognized the momentum that every successful idea needs. But you have to push and implement every idea first. An idea can also create the time it is intended for, against all odds.

If the idea is rudimentarily connectable, it generates resonance in its environment. People are infected by the idea and can identify with it. Ultimately, they decide how much personal energy they want to put into implementing the idea: Core representatives of the idea, ambassadors, forward thinkers, implementers and followers develop. Like planets, people orbit around the sun of the idea, at closer or further distances.

Finally, when idea and resonance reinforce each other, a social movement emerges. The idea grows beyond itself, changes, restructures itself. It is only at this point that society as a whole identifies the idea in a Hugoian sense. Their time has now come, and everyone can see it.