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This paper uses Martin Luther and Mao Zedong's translation strategies to philosophize anew the dialectic between the national and the global in the history of revolutions. Luther and Mao each instigated a "revolution" by translating a universal faith into a vernacular; the end product in each case was the globalization of his vernacularized faith and the export of his local revolution all over the world.By vernacularizing a universal faith, Luther and Mao respectively inaugurated a new national idiom, a new national identity and, in the case of Mao, founded a new nation. The far more intriguing phenomenon which I identify – and on which I seek to make my most original contributions is: Protestantism and Maoism developed global reach not despite, but because of, their insistence on a local translation-articulation of a universalist ideology.My paper attends to both the similarities and differences between Luther and Mao.

En placant son travail sous le signe d'une evolution qui part de la Fortune latine pour arriver au Dieu des chretiens, l'A. aborde la place du jeu et de la speculation dans l'ethique calviniste. Tout le probleme est de montrer l'evolution que le probleme de la predestination a impose a la facon de penser le monde. A cet effet, l'A. analyse l'impact du passage de la deesse Fortune au Dieu chretien sur le developpement de l'individualisme et de la propriete privee