This is an excerpt from the Introduction to Mr.Boulaziz’s forthcoming book, The Age of Nuclearized Messianism and The End of History (Truth Press, 2026). He describes his book as offering

a provocative Foucauldian exegesis of history’s perpetual disequilibrium, tracing it to an ancient “Judaic code” rooted in Kabbalistic mysticism and eschatological impulses.

It engages themes of ontological subversion, the dissolution of equilibria, and critiques figures like E. Michael Jones, positioning the force as metaphysical rather than merely political—resonating with your readership’s interest in unmasking hidden historical architectures.

“When the Holy One, blessed be He, sought to create the world, He looked into the Torah and created it… and the sparks remain captive.”
— Zohar I, 134a (Idra Rabba)

On the Persistent Non-Equilibrium of Historical Orders

The historical record indicates that instability is not an anomaly restricted to modernity but a recurrent feature of social formation itself. Whenever societies succeed in establishing durable structures of order, they tend to generate internal tensions that render such orders inherently provisional. Across history, equilibrium has functioned less as an endpoint than as a transitional phase.

Political orders repeatedly proclaim moments of culmination—ends of history, durable settlements, final syntheses—only to witness their rapid dissolution into renewed conflict. Periods identified as peace often reveal themselves, retrospectively, as transitional intervals preceding further upheaval.

This persistent oscillation raises enduring questions for historical and philosophical inquiry:

• Why do social and political systems appear structurally incapable of achieving lasting equilibrium?
• Why does international order repeatedly fluctuate between provisional stability and systemic rupture?

Across disciplines, scholars have proposed competing explanations. Philosophical traditions have emphasized dialectical motion; theological frameworks have pointed to inherited moral fracture; economic analyses have stressed desire and scarcity; revolutionary theories have focused on entrenched power structures. While each perspective captures important dimensions of historical change, none has produced a comprehensive account capable of explaining the recurrence and structural persistence of destabilization itself.

This study proceeds from the hypothesis that certain historical dynamics may be better understood not solely through political or economic causation, but through deeply embedded metaphysical and eschatological narratives that shape how communities relate to time, authority, and fulfilment. In this respect, modern political upheavals may be interpreted as surface manifestations of more enduring symbolic and theological tensions.

Existing Explanatory Frameworks

Within contemporary debates, two influential but methodologically distinct attempts to account for recurring patterns of historical destabilization merit consideration.

1. Michael Jones, in The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, offers a theological interpretation of modern revolutionary movements. He argues that the rejection of the Logos—understood within Christian theology as the divine principle of order and measure—generates a persistent revolutionary impulse directed against logos-centred social forms. Jones’s contribution lies in foregrounding the role of theological dislocation in shaping modern political radicalism. However, his analysis remains bounded by a specifically Christian theological framework.

A contrasting explanatory register is offered by Kevin MacDonald in A People That Shall Dwell Alone and subsequent volumes of his trilogy. MacDonald approaches similar historical phenomena through an evolutionary and sociobiological lens, interpreting Judaism as a highly adaptive group strategy shaped by conditions of diaspora existence. Within this framework, features such as cultural boundary maintenance, intellectual specialization, and competitive resource strategies are understood as functional adaptations that may, under certain conditions, generate structural tension within host societies.

Despite their methodological divergence, both authors identify recurring patterns of historical friction involving minority–majority relations, cultural critique, and institutional destabilization. Each provides a partial explanatory model—one theological, the other evolutionary. The present study departs from both approaches. While acknowledging their analytical insights, it suggests that neither framework fully accounts for the underlying metaphysical and eschatological orientation that may lend coherence to the patterns they describe.

Rather than locating causality in theological rejection alone or in evolutionary strategy alone, this article proposes that a deeper animating logic may be found in enduring conceptions of historical precariousness, redemption, and critique that operate across theological, philosophical, and secularized domains.

Historical Precariousness and Eschatological Tension

Rather than treating revolutionary movements primarily as attempts to replace one political order with another, this analysis explores the possibility that certain traditions articulate a permanent critical stance toward worldly order as such. In this view, destabilization functions less as a means toward a final political arrangement and more as an ongoing condition produced by a persistent orientation toward an unrealized ideal.

From this perspective, political unrest may be understood as the historical expression of a deeper tension between what is and what ought to be. This tension, articulated in various theological idioms, frames existing institutions as inherently provisional and therefore perpetually subject to critique. Stability, under such conditions, is never final but always contingent.

Scholarly discussions of Jewish history and thought have frequently emphasized the conceptual polarity between Exile (Galut) and Redemption (Geulah). Rather than treating this polarity as a mere historical circumstance, some interpretations regard it as a constitutive feature of religious consciousness—one that generates sustained critical engagement with prevailing social orders. Importantly, this tension has been interpreted in diverse and often conflicting ways within Jewish intellectual history itself.

The present analysis does not adopt these interpretations as descriptive facts about historical causation. Instead, it examines how such metaphysical narratives—when secularized, transformed, or reinterpreted—may influence modern ideological formations and political imaginaries.

Analytical Framework: Three Recurrent Thematic Structures

To clarify the analytical hypothesis advanced in this study, three recurrent thematic structures are provisionally identified. These structures emerge within certain theological, mystical, and philosophical discourses and are employed here as heuristic categories, not as causal explanations of historical events. They serve to illuminate how historical actors and intellectual traditions have conceptualized authority, temporality, and transformation.

The three thematic structures examined are:

1. The Ontology of Election (Am Segulah)
2. Normative Boundary Construction between In-Group and Out-Group
3. Active or Transformative Messianism

These categories are not presented as exhaustive, uniform, or universally representative of Jewish thought, which is internally diverse and historically contested. Rather, they function as analytical tools intended to clarify how particular metaphysical and eschatological imaginaries have, at specific moments, informed sustained critiques of worldly order and historical stability.

1. The Ontology of Election (Am Segulah)

The concept of am segulah (“a chosen people”), articulated in biblical passages such as Exodus 19:5 and Deuteronomy 7:6, has generated a wide range of interpretations within Jewish intellectual history. In some readings, election is understood primarily as an ethical vocation or covenantal responsibility; in others, it has been construed in more ontological terms, emphasizing a distinct relationship between Israel and the divine.

Certain rabbinic and medieval philosophical traditions articulated this distinctiveness through metaphysical language, sometimes describing qualitative differences in spiritual disposition or religious obligation between Jews and non-Jews.

Medieval thinkers such as Maimonides, working within an Aristotelian framework, explored gradations of intellectual and spiritual perfection, though modern scholarship remains divided regarding whether such distinctions imply ontological hierarchy.

From an analytical standpoint, interpretations that emphasize ontological election may contribute to forms of collective boundary maintenance that are not merely cultural but conceptual. These frameworks can encourage strong internal cohesion and continuity across diaspora contexts, while simultaneously shaping asymmetric modes of engagement with surrounding societies. Historically, such dynamics have been examined in relation to the formation of semi-autonomous communal structures within host polities—structures that functioned both as mechanisms of preservation and as sites of negotiated interaction with political and economic authorities.

2. Normative Boundary Construction between In-Group and Out-Group

A second thematic structure concerns the ways religious legal systems articulate distinctions between members of the community and those outside it. Rabbinic literature employs a variety of terms—such as goy, nokhri, or akum—primarily for juridical and ritual classification rather than ethnographic description.

Scholarly analyses of texts such as Avodah Zarah, Sanhedrin, and Bava Metzia emphasize that many legal distinctions emerge from concerns about ritual integrity, communal survival, and the regulation of economic interaction under minority conditions. These distinctions are neither uniform nor static, and rabbinic debate frequently reflects internal disagreement regarding their scope and application.

From a sociological perspective, such boundary constructions may be understood as normative mechanisms that develop within minority religious communities facing chronic insecurity. Although analogous patterns can be identified in other traditions, the frequency and geographic breadth of Jewish expulsions and exclusions across premodern and modern history have produced a distinctive intensity and longevity in the articulation of communal boundaries.

3. Active or Transformative Messianism

A third structure concerns forms of messianic expectation that emphasize human participation in historical transformation. In Jewish mystical traditions—most notably Lurianic Kabbalah—cosmological narratives describe creation as fractured and incomplete, requiring human ethical or ritual action (tikkun) to restore harmony.

Early modern messianic movements, including Sabbateanism and Frankism, radicalized these ideas in heterodox ways, at times inverting normative religious categories. While marginal and often condemned by rabbinic authorities, these movements have been noted by historians for their long afterlife in intellectual history, particularly through processes of secularization.

Several scholars have explored possible analogies—often metaphorical rather than genealogical—between such messianic imaginaries and modern philosophies of history that emphasize rupture, negation, and transformative struggle. These comparisons remain contested and must be approached with caution, given the complexity of conceptual translation across historical contexts.

Within this analytical frame, “active messianism” refers not to a unified doctrine, but to a mode of historical orientation in which the present is viewed as fundamentally provisional and transformation is conceived as necessary rather than accidental.

Synthesis and Scope

Taken together, these three thematic structures are examined as interpretive lenses through which certain historical actors and intellectual movements have conceptualized instability, continuity, and transformation. They are not treated as timeless essences, nor as exclusive to any single tradition.

This study does not argue that theological narratives mechanically produce political outcomes. Rather, it investigates how metaphysical and eschatological imaginaries—when translated into secular or ideological forms—may shape recurring patterns of critique toward established orders.

Each historical order, as characterized  by a specific épistémè, embeds the conditions of its own destabilization. This instability is structurally produced insofar as critique is epistemically coerced by the three thematic structures that sustain the metaphysical and eschatological imaginaries permeating the épistémè, thereby rendering any stable equilibrium structurally unattainable.

Accordingly, the analysis adopts a diagnostic rather than polemical orientation, seeking to clarify how particular conceptual frameworks persist, mutate, and reappear across historical contexts, especially in periods marked by institutional fragility and ideological realignment.

This article thus prepares the ground for a comparative inquiry into the relationship between metaphysical expectation and historical instability, with the aim of contributing analytical clarity to debates often obscured by moralization or essentialism.

Khaled Boulaziz is chief editor of lanation.net, an independent French media platform.
Khaled@lanation.net