Many are now wondering whether organized forces in Cairo will take over the revolution, as happened a century ago when the Bolshevik fringe of Russian revolutionaries took hostage the spontaneous and plural movements, imposing its own purposes and ideology. Is this fear justified? Does this comparison with the October Revolution make sense? What instead remains of the wave of protests that swept across Israel in the summer of 2011? There too the better organised and conservative forces seem to have got the better of the spontaneity of those movements. Is it after all possible to envisage serious change without organisation? At the Istanbul Seminars held by Reset-Dialogues, in May 2012, we posed these questions to Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit. An interview by Nina zu Fürstenberg