This chapter starts with a warning that may seem excessively defeatist and an excuse that may seem excessively immodest: the author knows in advance that he will not be able to do justice to the complexity of the subject. Ideally it should cover the varieties of the intellectuals’ experience both in time (before, during, and after totalitarian rule) and in space (the direct experience of totalitarianism as a reality and its image as seen from outside). It should cover both Marx and Havel, both Sartre and Solzhenitsyn. It attempts to do so, but some aspects will be much more developed than others. One experience—that of French intellectuals during the Cold War—gets much more emphasis than it probably deserves, for a simple biographical reason: the author’s experience as a young student emerging out of communist Romania and undergoing the shock of the contrast between his own perceptions and attitudes and those of his French fellow students or teachers.
The excuse for not being able to put into coherent and comprehensive perspective the objective and the subjective, the reality of fascist or communist totalitarianism, the hope, attraction, and disappointment they produced among many Western intellectuals, and the author’s own polemical reactions to both is that the same criticism applies to two important books, to which the present chapter is essentially a footnote. They are L’opium des intellectuels by my teacher Raymond Aron1 and Le passé d’une illusion by my friend François Furet.2 The theme of both books is the mystery of intellectuals’ fascination with totalitarianism, particularly communism. But both cover simultaneously a narrower and a broader ground. They are based primarily on observations of French intellectuals, and they inevitably offer, directly or indirectly, an interpretation of communist totalitarianism itself.
Both works are based on deep reflection and scholarship with which I substantially agree. What I add, besides a few personal observations, is a look at the same phenomenon, however brief, that encompasses an even more extended period. I go back in time and follow the story beyond the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of the two great totalitarian ideologies into the present time.
The most convenient starting point may be an even greater and earlier French thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville, on whose thought both Aron and Furet built. The first chapter of book 3 in Tocqueville’s classic L’ancien régime et la révolution is entitled: “How, toward the Middle of the Eighteenth Century, Men of Letters Became the Country’s Leading Politicians, and the Effects Which Resulted from This.” In it he argues that eighteenth-century France was the most cultivated and literary nation in Europe and the least free politically: “We had kept one freedom amid the ruins of all others; we could philosophize almost without constraint on the origins of societies, on the essential nature of governments and on the primordial rights of the human race.” Intellectuals in France, unlike those in England, had no practical political experience; but unlike those in Germany, they were interested in politics, in “a kind of abstract and literary politics.” They all agreed on one starting point: “All think that one should substitute simple and elementary rules, drawn from reason and natural law, for the complicated and traditional laws that rule the society of their time.” Hence, “the political world got to be divided into two separated provinces without any contact with each other. In one, administration was practiced; in the other the abstract principles on which any administration should have been founded were established.” An “imaginary society, in which everything seemed simple and coordinated, uniform, equitable, and in conformity with reason was built.” The American Revolution appeared as its confirmation and its application. This “literary politics” soon became passionate, for “general theories, once accepted, inevitably come to be transformed into political passions.” Conversely, “each public passion was disguised in philosophy; political life was violently converted into literature and the writers, taking the leadership of opinion into their hands, found themselves for a while occupying the place that party leaders hold in free countries. Nobody was any longer in a position to challenge this role.”
The consequence, Tocqueville says, is that “the French revolution was conducted in precisely the same spirit that presided over the writing of so many abstract books of government.” But what is a virtue in a writer is sometimes a vice in the statesman. “The language of politics itself adopted some of the features of that spoken by the authors; it became full of general expressions, of abstract terms, of literary turns. This style, helped by the political passions that were using it, penetrated all the classes and filtered down with incredible ease into the lowest ones.”3
Whereas in this chapter Tocqueville focuses on literature and “the literary spirit,” in the following chapter, which examines the consequences of the antireligious passions, he announces the birth of “a kind of a new religion” (which Aron later called a “secular religion”) that produced some of the noblest effects of the great religions but also led to the appearance of “revolutionaries of an unknown type, who carried daring to the point of madness, whom no novelty could surprise, whom no scruple could slow down, and who never hesitated in front of the execution of a design.”
These were no longer men of letters. Their true ancestors are indicated in the following and third chapter: “Toward the middle of the (eighteenth) century, one witnesses the appearance of a number of writers who deal specifically with questions of public administration, and who, on the basis of several common principles, were given the name of economists or physiocrats. The economists shine less in history than the philosophers; they have perhaps contributed less to the coming of the revolution. But I believe that it is above all in their writings that one can best study its true nature. The philosophers have hardly gone beyond very general and abstract ideas about government; the economists, without leaving the theories, have nevertheless descended closer to the facts. The former have said what could be imagined, the latter have sometimes indicated what was to be done” (uncannily Tocqueville anticipates the title of Lenin’s famous manifesto). And what is to be done is to suppress all the past (“The past is, for the economists, the target of a limitless contempt”) and to change human nature through the means of an omnipotent state in the name of the people.
“The state, according to the economists, should not only lead the nation, but mold it in a certain fashion.... In reality, there are no limits to its rights nor to what it can do; it not only reforms men, it forms them; perhaps it would be in its power to produce other men! ‘The State does what it wants with men,’ says [abbé] Bodeau. This sentence sums up all their theories.”
Tocqueville points out that this huge social power imagined by the economists is not only greater than any other but different in origin and in character. “It is impersonal: it is no longer called the king, but the state, it is the product and representative of all, and must bend the right of each under the will of all.”
This is what Tocqueville calls “democratic despotism: a people composed of individuals who are almost alike and completely equal, this confused mass recognized as the only legitimate sovereign, but carefully deprived of all the powers that would enable it to lead or even to supervise its government by itself. Above it, a unique representative, whose mandate is to do everything in its name without consulting it. To control this representative, a public reason deprived of any organ; to stop it, revolutions, not laws; in principle, a subordinate agent; in fact, a master.”4
I apologize for the length of these quotations. They seem to me, however, to indicate with unsurpassed and prophetic lucidity a number of distinctions and paradoxes that the reality of totalitarian regimes and intellectual attitudes in the twentieth century were to illustrate. First, the double face of the assertion of the critical, universalistic spirit, protesting against the irrationality or the immorality of the existing order: the virtue of standing up for truth and human rights and the danger of abstract utopianism. Second, the duality of the romantic man of letters and of the fanatic and doctrinaire “economist” or revolutionary. Third, the double role of the totalitarian state, as a servant of the people and as its godlike master. The convergence of these three oppositions explains, in our time, the paradoxical situation of the public intellectual, which I later describe, as tyrant or slave, as martyr or slayer of the totalitarian regime.
Before and after Tocqueville, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, warnings denouncing the role of intellectuals in the French Revolution and announcing their fate in future ones abounded. The link between abstract blueprints and the unleashing of terror was denounced from Burke to Arendt via Hegel and Heine. Another illustrious Frenchman, Napoleon Bonaparte, coined the term “ideology” to denounce the political role of the “ideologues,” a philosophical school that drew its name from its doctrine on the origin of ideas but represents the left-wing intellectuals of the time. In a familiar development, Napoleon broke with the ideologues after having come to power with their help: “It is to ideology, to this obscure metaphysics which, through looking with subtlety into first causes, wants to build the legislation of peoples on this basis instead of adapting laws to the knowledge of the human heart and to the lessons of history, that one must attribute all the misfortunes of our beautiful France. These errors were bound to bring about the reign of men of blood and they actually did. Who flattered the people by proclaiming its entitlement to a sovereignty it was incapable of exercising? Who has destroyed the respect and sanctity of laws, by basing them not upon the sacred principles of justice, of the nature of things and of civil justice, but only upon the will of an assembly composed of men alien to the knowledge of civil, criminal, administrative, political and military principles?”5
The irony is that Napoleon himself was seen by Hegel as “the world soul,” the representative of the “world spirit,” precisely because he was standing for universal rationality against decaying traditions, and because he was introducing in actual legislation this extraordinary innovation (“the most fantastic one since the earth rotates around the sun”) brought about by the French Revolution, the attempt to make society stand on its head—to build it on thought.6 But the universal principles needed a strong prince and a competent administration to put them into practice, or they would lead to anarchy, hostility toward government as such, or terror.
A similar view on the ambiguity of the role of revolutionary intellectuals is found in Heinrich Heine’s History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany. On the one hand, Kant is the Robespierre of philosophy; the German philosophical revolution is even more important than the French political one. But the welcome liberation from dogma that it represents can lead to unprecedented terror, through the negation of recalcitrant realities and the elimination of all moral doubts or restraints. Heine adds, however, a new and important element when he announces that “most of all to be feared would be the philosophers of nature were they actively to mingle in a German revolution and to identify themselves with the work of destruction. For if the hand of the Kantian strikes with a strong unerring blow, his heart being stirred by no feeling of traditional awe; if the Fichtean courageously defies every danger, since for him danger has in reality no existence; the philosopher of nature will be terrible in this, that he has allied himself with the primitive powers of nature, that he can conjure in him the demoniac forces of old German pantheism.”7
Isn’t this a premonition of the “anti-intellectual intellectual” that found its fulfillment in fascism, in the affirmation of the prevalence of vital forces, of “soil and blood,” over abstract ideas, of war over humanitarianism, of action over thought? From the Thomas Mann of the Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen to the Heidegger of the Rektoratseede we find the same post-Nietzschean attack against the “civilization intellectual” and the same submission of the intellectual to the deeper or nobler powers of youth, force, life, and nature.8
But the opposite ideology, communism, presents an even more paradoxical reversal in the position of the intellectual. Both Marxism as a doctrine and communism as a regime can be seen as the triumph of the intellectual and as his abdication, self-sacrifice, or prostration in front of not the victors but the victims, not natural hierarchy but absolute equality. The Polish anarchist Machajski, in his criticism of Marx and in his proposed remedy, is a good prophet of both tendencies.
He argued that Marx’s idea of socialism specifically expressed the interests of intellectuals who hoped to attain a position of political privilege by means of the inherited social privilege of knowledge, which they already possessed. As long as the intelligentsia were able to give their children advantageous opportunities of acquiring knowledge, there could be no question of the equality which was the essence of socialism. The working class, which was at present at the mercy of intellectuals, could only achieve its ends by depriving them of their chief capital, namely education.9
Finally, the rule of the infallible guide in the name of a primitive and dogmatic ideology based on the Volk or the proletariat was to carry both the triumph of a simplified idea, the power of one former intellectual, and the destruction of intellectual activity as such to their logical extreme.
There is a sociological view sometimes propagated by dissident intellectuals, according to which Machajski’s prophecy has indeed come true. In their book The Intellectuals on the Road to State Power,10 György Konrád (a famous independent Hungarian writer, the inventor of the term “antipolitics”) and Istvan Szelenyi (an independent sociologist) described the communist regime as the one that, being based on ideology and central planning, gave intellectuals the greatest power as distinct from either capitalists or workers. But by “intellectuals” they, like Machajski, meant “the technicians, organizers, administrators, educators, and journalists.”11 If the party apparatus, as well as the opponents of the regime, is included within the broad category of the intelligentsia, then the intellectuals are by definition both rulers and oppressed. It is important to distinguish both types of intellectual (using Tocqueville’s distinction between “philosophers” or writers on the one hand and “economists” or men of action on the other) and types of relation to power. A Ukrainian author has enumerated five categories of the latter: (1) the ideologist intellectuals (or the communists in power); (2) the supernumerary clerks (or the sympathizers who were the reservoir from which the first category was selected); (3) the conformist intellectuals; (4) the marginalized intellectuals; and (5) the independent intellectuals or dissidents.12
Combining the two types of classification points to interesting paradoxes. For instance, the planners are constantly caught between the rigidity of the ideology, the arbitrary decisions of the leader, and the resistance of social and economic reality. Hence, the need for scapegoats to justify their failure. The scientists were to some extent (except in the most extreme ideological moments as when Stalin imposed his dictates on biology) protected from these perils and enjoyed a privileged material status; yet the very exercise of their task called forth frustrations and demands that could put them in conflict with the regime. Andrei Sakharov’s critique started by asking for the freedom to communicate with Western fellow scientists; from there it developed into a plea for reform and tolerance and finally into a general stance based on human rights and moral responsibility. The ideological intellectuals proper were faced with the paradox of a regime based on ideology, hence on ideas, but whose particular ideology affirmed the subordination of ideas and of truth to a non- or anti-intellectual point of view, that of the elected race in one case, of the proletariat in the other, of the tyrant’s power in both. Their task was to substitute, through terror and manipulation, belief in an imaginary world for the exercise of thought and the experience of reality. As Pasternak put it in Doctor Zhivago: “People had to be cured, through any possible terroristic means, of the habit of thinking and judging with their own head, and constrained to see something which did not exist.”13
Intellectuals were indeed to be, as Stalin put it, “the engineers of the soul,” but the classical question was never forgotten: Who will engineer the engineers? Fortunately, however, the totalitarian attempt at exercising total control over the human mind has never been totally successful any more than the attempt to direct and control the evolution of societies. The difference between phases of totalitarian regimes and the resistance offered by different forces or traditions in different societies provide in some cases a fragile protection to marginal and independent intellectuals or even an opportunity to strike back. This is particularly the case in the beginning of totalitarian regimes and during their decline. When totalitarianism is in full swing, however, the activity of the independent intellectual can only be that described and practiced by Solzhenitsyn—the “underground writer” whose work is hidden and sometimes not even written but only learned by heart; he cannot dream of publishing it. His hope is that somehow a copy will reach future generations.14 Yet a few years later, to his own surprise, Solzhenitsyn himself was banging his head against the imposing trunk of the totalitarian oak to the point of shaking it until being expelled. Even during the time of terror, however, some authors like Ilya Ehrenburg were spared and could exert an ambiguous role, partly as court jesters, partly as false witnesses destined to give phony reassurance to the outside world, but partly, too, as forces for change. In later times, Gorbachev’s “glasnost,” which was originally motivated by a desire to revitalize and modernize the regime, tried to create artificially a partly fake “loyal opposition” that he could use against the resistance of the party apparatus, only to find that the genie of freedom could not easily be brought back into the bottle and could endanger his very rule and the survival of the regime itself.
In other countries where the regime’s control over intellectual life was less complete, alternations of limited tolerance, brutal repression, and general relaxation produced an even greater variety of individual and collective experiences. Here I can only mention some of them.
In Nazi Germany, almost all critical intellectuals chose exile, while illustrious thinkers linked to the “conservative revolution” started by supporting the regime before choosing (or being driven to) a position of more or less silent detachment while continuing their own work. This was the case of Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Ernst Jünger.
A similar phenomenon occurred in communist East Germany. Illustrious writers who had spent the war years as refugees in the United States chose, after their return, to lend their name to the prestige or propaganda of the regime that they considered the more democratic or at least the more hopeful part of Germany. Well-known playwright Bertolt Brecht likened the socialist Germany and the capitalist one to a young pregnant prostitute and an old vicious and refined roué, with the implication that the former deserved being helped to survive rather than the latter. Novelist Stefan Heym, philosopher Ernst Bloch, and, from a greater distance, Thomas Mann himself made the same choice. They occasionally and discreetly distanced themselves from the worst excesses of the regime before either emigrating again, like Bloch, or becoming official and tolerated mavericks, like Heym.
The secret police was playing a cat-and-mouse game with many others. Some apparently independent intellectuals were in reality spies or “agents provocateurs” of the Stasi; others, like Wolfgang Templin, went from being Stasi informers to being critics who were genuinely persecuted by it. Still others, like the poet and singer Wolfgang Biermann, permanently combined both roles, criticizing the regime and reporting to the Stasi15 until they were expelled. Finally, some dissidents found a refuge under the protection of the church; they were the ones who started the demonstrations that led to the downfall of the regime.
In Poland, the paradoxes were even sharper. Many of the best intellectuals started as true believers who went on to raise, like Leszek Kolakowski, the banner of free criticism and moral responsibility and lead the “revisionist” movement of 1956. After the half failure of their revolution, which nevertheless led to a regime that was never as truly totalitarian as its neighbors, they abandoned the attempt to reform communism and started, sometimes under the protection of the church, an outright opposition to the regime in the name of civil society. Some were temporarily imprisoned or expelled from the country during the period of repression in 1968. Others (at home or abroad) continued their work half clandestinely.
In the late 1970s, a new development emerged. On the one hand, detente and increased communication with the West, combined with the less repressive rule of Gierek (who wanted, for economic reasons, to gain the West’s goodwill), opened a space of freedom, or at least toleration, for dissident intellectual activity. On the other hand, this space was filled with the intense activity of the group of intellectuals gathered in KOR (Committee for the Defense of Workers), who participated in the creation of a series of parallel activities: a semiclandestine press, a parallel “flying” university meeting in private apartments, and so on.
They conceptualized the theory of their practice under the name of the “new evolutionism” (Michnik) or the “self-limiting revolution” (Kuron). The idea was to build a civil society facing the totalitarian party-state or rather turning its back on it. The idea was not to unseat the totalitarian power but to live as if it did not exist, first by refusing the permanent lie of the party “doublespeak” (an inspiration that they had in common with Solzhenitsyn and Havel, who both insisted that the main task was to “live in truth”) and second by creating as many ties and activities at the social level as possible, so as to build an alternative parallel society that let the official communist one continue as an empty shell whose only function was to let the nomenklatura keep their privileges and to prevent Soviet troops from intervening.
This conception had a tactical side, trying to circumvent communist power without engaging a frontal battle that would be lost in advance, and a deeper moral and philosophical one, the search for integrity, truth, and autonomy over the search for power. The result at least in Poland (and indirectly for the whole Soviet empire) was as much a surprise for the dissidents as for the communist leaders. As Marcin Krol, a leading Polish intellectual, later put it in an oral communication with humor and insight: “We thought it made no sense to try to overthrow the regime since, being totalitarian, it could not collapse from within, and Gierek thought the same: he let us ‘do our thing’ in a kind of Indian reservation because he was confident that the regime, being totalitarian, could not be endangered by our activities.” Yet, in the very year when a talented writer, Tadeusz Konwicki, wrote a novel, The Little Apocalypse, describing the slide of the Polish people into apathy and cynicism, Solidarity, a mass movement of 10 million people, dealt the first and decisive blow to the Soviet empire. It was a workers’ movement but was heavily influenced by dissident intellectuals who ironically took up the role of “organic intellectuals,” both advisers and cheerleaders of the people, assigned to them by Marxist theory.
This is not the place to retrace the story of Solidarity, the Jaruselski coup, and the years of repression in which the regime was unable to “normalize” Poland and finally had to negotiate with the same leaders it had imprisoned for six years, like Adam Michnik. Suffice it to say that, as in the Catholic doctrine of the three churches—the suffering, the militant, and the triumphant—they emerged from the state of victims through that of fighters into that of victors.
The Polish story is the most edifying and important one in the whole of Eastern Europe. It has been replicated elsewhere but without the support of a mass movement and with a positive dénouement which, in the later cases, owed much more to external circumstances.
In Hungary both the revisionist phase and the popular revolution initiated by the intellectuals of the Petöfi circle had taken place much earlier, in 1956. After a period of particularly harsh repression, the Kadar government adopted the not very totalitarian slogan “Who is not against us is for us.” Instead of the Stalinist total suppression of intellectual dissent and civil society, instead of Poland’s protracted and limited confrontation between the system and the society, Hungary lived through a much more complex game in which at different times various degrees of cooptation, corruption, seduction, and interpenetration were tried. Prestigious intellectuals like György Lukács alternated between attempts at independence and submission to the party line, between esoteric writing and intellectual abdication. Lukács’s students were sometimes tolerated as unreliable but not too dangerous, sometimes forced to choose exile. In later years, a group of real dissidents was formed; János Kis, Miklós Haraszti, Gaspar Miklos Tamás are the best known. They were cosmopolitan, westernizing philosophers caught by the communist leadership’s offer of dialogue and participation while on sabbaticals in the United States. As one of them (László Bruszt) put it: “They call me to discuss the future of Hungary and I haven’t even spent six years in prison like Adam Michnik!”
In Czechoslovakia, as in Hungary, there was no mass movement of the Solidarity type but also no conciliatory communist government. The Prague Spring of 1968 was led by revisionist intellectuals, mostly former communists looking for a third way or a “socialism with a human face.” Their fate was either exile or twenty years of survival as window cleaners or stokers. For nearly a generation, the regime lived with an almost complete abolition of intellectual life. But in the late 1970s, a movement, close in its inspiration to Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, and to the Polish intellectuals of KOR, was born around Charter 77. It enjoyed neither a popular following as in Poland nor government overtures as in Hungary. But it was led by some of the most thoughtful and eloquent advocates of “living in truth.” Václav Havel and the philosopher Jan Patocka, a creative disciple of Husserl and Heidegger, were seeing in totalitarianism the most extreme form of dehumanizing tendencies present in the world of modernity and technology. They adopted some of Heidegger’s themes but with the crucial difference of stressing an ethical position, precisely what was lacking in Heidegger.
Romania offers an alternative road. Intellectual opposition or dissent was almost nonexistent. Adaptation (sometimes with tongue in cheek) to successive orthodoxies and dictatorships as well as sycophantic praise of the leader were the almost universally followed rule. Yet toward the end of the Ceausescu era something interesting occurred. A well-known philosopher, Constantin Noica, who had been a sympathizer of the pro-Nazi Iron Guard and had spent several years in prison under the communists, gathered around him a number of young, talented students with whom he was reading the great philosophers while teaching them about the ontological and cosmic value of everything Romanian, from the peasant way of life to the language. He was discouraging his disciples from becoming dissidents because in his view the important task was the maintenance of culture. It was not clear, however, if what was meant by that was devotion to, and knowledge of, philosophy or a national and nationalist mythology. Nationalism, at any rate, provided a common ground with Ceausescu’s dictatorship as well as with earlier fascist or militarist ones and allowed Noica to be tolerated and used by the regime. From a philosophical point of view, one may argue that belief in communist utopia had long been dead and that the intellectual case for or against the regime was presented in terms of either universal morality (as for Patocka or Sakharov) or national identity, which in turn could lead either to collaboration with the regime in the name of the national interest (as in Noica’s case) or to opposition in the name of fighting its betrayal of the nation’s traditions and dignity (as in Solzhenitsyn’s).
If communist utopia had died long ago among those who had direct experience of its translation into reality, at least in Europe, it survived much longer among those who lacked direct experience and were comparing the reality of their Western societies with the claims or stated purposes of totalitarian regimes. This was particularly the case in important segments of the West European (above all French and Italian) left.
If I may be excused for being personal again, my own political experience, roughly between 1948 and the mid-1970s, was the gap between what I knew about communist regimes and the notions of my fellow students or teachers, including those who were not communists. My discovery of Raymond Aron came in 1948, a few months after my arrival in Paris, when I read a few newspaper articles that for the first time described Eastern Europe as I knew it. The great Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz describes a similar experience with Albert Camus:
Camus was one of those few Western intellectuals who offered me a welcoming hand when I left Stalinist Poland in 1951, while others were avoiding me, as they considered me an untouchable and a sinner against the future. Hegelian intellectuals will never understand what consequences their ratiocinations could have at the level of human relations, and what gap they were creating between them and the inhabitants of Eastern Europe, whether or not the latter were knowledgeable about Marx. Philosophy is something very physical: it makes your look icy or, like with Camus, it introduces into a man the cordiality of a brother.16
Sixteen years later, Raymond Aron wrote a magnificent counterpart to this article by showing the fundamental impossibility of a dialogue between Solzhenitsyn and Sartre.17 He comments on the passage of The Oak and the Calf, in which Solzhenitsyn explains his refusal to meet Sartre when the latter expressed the desire to see him during a visit to Moscow, and the bafflement of Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s companion, at this refusal. Solzhenitsyn says he hesitated but thought that Sartre—who had just insulted genuine Russian literature by promoting the official Stalinist writer Sholokov for the Nobel Prize—would never understand what he had to tell him and might misuse their conversation while he, the persecuted and clandestine writer, would have no way to set the record straight. Aron shows how Solzhenitsyn’s message (the return to basic decency, the refusal of the ideological lie that justifies any criminal act) is at the other extreme compared to Sartre’s attitude. In spite of being a great thinker and basing his choices on a moralistic attitude that made him divide the world into good guys and bad guys or oppressors and victims, Sartre was the prisoner of what Aron called a “distorted practical reason” due precisely to the ideological commitment that made him excuse or condemn the same crimes according to the side that was perpetrating them.
Paradoxically, less than two years after this article was written, Sartre and Aron were pleading the cause of Vietnamese boat people with France’s president, Giscard d‘Estaing, prompted by the “new philosopher” André Glucksmann, who had been successively a student of Aron and a Maoist. In 1977, while Giscard d’Estaing was greeting Brezhnev in Versailles, all important French (predominantly left-wing) intellectuals were greeting Soviet dissidents in a small theater at a counterreception. After thirty years of bitter debate, left-wing and conservative intellectuals were finally united in criticizing the detente policies of their governments and competing for the attention of the victims and opponents of communist totalitarianism.18
How could this happen? Space does not permit us to examine the four-cornered struggle between communists and former communists (which, according to former communist intellectual Ignazio Silone, one of those who renounced “the God that failed” in a well-known book,19 would be the most decisive struggle on the world scene) or between “half virgins” (the fellow-traveling left) and “fallen angels” (the refugees and former communists who had a direct experience of the Soviet utopia) according to the formula of Arthur Koestler, another of the famous antitotalitarian intellectuals who founded the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Much of this story has been told by Pierre Grémion in his book on the French left and the Prague events of 196820 and his history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom.21 Here we are limited to a few suggestions, based largely on Aron and Furet, about the sources of many intellectuals’ attraction to totalitarian regimes and a few thoughts about possible explanations for the belated conversion of most of them to antitotalitarianism.
The phenomenon to be explained includes three dimensions: the disaffection of Western intellectuals, their belief in revolution or in utopia, and their identification of the latter with a particular totalitarian regime.
Aron’s The Opium of Intellectuals addresses all three. He expresses his disagreement and wonder about many intellectuals’ tendency to be deeply pessimistic about the present, Western society, and wildly optimistic about the future, a postrevolutionary world. But he attacks even more strongly their identification of “the recognition of man by man” (an ideal that, as an abstract regulatory idea in a Kantian sense, he tends to share) or of “the end of history” (an idea that, also on Kantian grounds, he strongly dismisses) with a particular regime, that of the Soviet Union. He reproaches them both with judging this regime, contrary to Marx’s prescription, according to what it claims rather than what it does, and with making its success or failure the test of the meaning or absurdity of history.
Furet puts less stress on conceptual inconsistencies and more on sociological and psychological explanations. Following a line that goes from Tocqueville to Daniel Bell’s Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism22 via Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy,23 he stresses, like Aron, the trend toward the alienation of intellectuals from the bourgeoisie. But, more than Aron, he traces it to the weakness of the bourgeoisie as a ruling class (whose legitimacy, based on wealth, those who are inferior in this respect but feel superior in others find difficult to accept) and, even more, to the self-hate of the bourgeoisie itself.
The theme of antibourgeois passions, which opens Le passé d’une illusion, is one of the most powerful of the book. Furet finds in this hatred (and self-hatred) of the bourgeoisie the common root of fascism and communism. While he is certainly right and insightful in this emphasis on revolutionary passions and on the identification of their common enemy, he might, as many critics have argued, distinguish more clearly between the respective passions inspiring the two totalitarian ideologies.
Bourgeois attitudes, with their emphasis on self-interest, calculation, and material goods, can be attacked, either in the name of an aristocratic, warlike, or Nietzschean morality—in the name of greatness, nobility, heroism, and artistic creativity—or in the name of a Christian morality—that of the Sermon on the Mount, compassion, solidarity, the thirst for total equality or the essential right of the suffering, the oppressed, and the poor. While both emphasize struggle and stress sacrifice and violence as opposed to the bourgeois quest for security and comfort, one could say with Gaston Fessard, a Jesuit theologian who was a student of Kojève and a friend of Aron, that Nazism was a pagan heresy, derived from the point of view of the master, and communism a Christian one, derived from that of the slave.
These two passions turned against each other with at least as much intensity as against their common bourgeois enemy. Furet, building on what Aron called “the dialectic of the extremes,” shows how anticommunism and antifascism fed on each other, how the struggle against communism misled some intellectuals toward fascism and how antifascism became, even more, the great legitimizer and the great alibi of communism or at least the great psychological inhibition against an anticommunist stand that might give aid and comfort to the fascist enemy.
We have, then, the two basic ingredients of the totalitarian temptation endlessly analyzed by Aron, of which Sartre was the prototype: on the one hand, a passionate desire to oppose the bourgeois conservative order and to identify with its victims and on the other hand, a conceptual mystification that consisted in a chain or succession of abstract identifications. From the proletariat to the young, via the colonized masses of the Third World, Sartre and his followers led a tireless search for the causes in the name of which to rebel against their own social and cultural origins. In a sense, they remained faithful to a vision of society and politics well summed up by Sartre in his definition of the left: “A man of the left is someone who looks at society from below.” The real scandal is the justification of oppressive organizations and regimes in the name of the oppressed. One of Sartre’s most famous dicta is the one according to which Soviet concentration camps, while real, should not be made the target of a public campaign in order not to “reduce Billancourt to despair,” Billancourt being the site of the biggest Renault car factory. To be against the bourgeoisie one had to be for the working class; to be for the working class one had to be for the Communist Party, which spoke in its name (and, at the time, was getting a great part of its votes); to be for the Communist Party one had to be for the Soviet Union to which it proclaimed its loyalty.
This did not necessarily prevent criticism of Soviet policies. Sartre’s relations with the Stalinists, whether Russian or French, went through various phases, from close association to violent polemics. The invasion of Hungary in 1956 and of Czechoslovakia in 1968 prompted eloquent denunciations. But in both cases, Sartre concluded that “this blood-soiled monster was still socialism,” and Marxism remained “the ultimate horizon of our time.” He stuck much longer than his associate Maurice Merleau-Ponty to the strange idea expressed by the latter in a book on the Moscow trials published in the late 1940s: if the Soviet experiment failed, history was in Macbeth’s terms “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”24
Yet, fail it did, and that basic truth progressively penetrated the consciousness of Western left-wing intellectuals. For many, the occasion was some particularly revolting action of the Soviet Union that could no longer, for the particular individual, be rationalized by ideology: the Moscow trials, the Stalin-Ribbentrop pact, the interventions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Each of these events took its toll of true believers, who, in general, remained nostalgic or, on the contrary, became ideologues of the right. The case of François Furet, who left the party in 1956 and remained moderate ever since, was rather exceptional. More surprising (or is it?) is the fact that what most made left-wing intellectuals turn against, or at least away from, the Soviet Union was that it became less totalitarian.
Stalinist terror fascinated—it had, for would-be revolutionary intellectuals, the somber appeal of the witches’ chant in Macbeth: “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” When the ideological “supersense” (to use Hannah Arendt’s expression) started to dissolve, and the Soviet Union started to become a more normal regime, it ceased to fascinate. Diplomats were looking forward to the day when it would become “less of a cause and more of a country.” For intellectuals, it could no longer be utopia incarnate. Khrushchev’s secret speech, which was only repeating what anticommunists had known all along, produced a sharp decline in interest toward the Soviet Union. Revolutionary intellectuals started looking for a more romantic and exotic incarnation of the socialist utopia: Cuba, China (with which the same phenomenon repeated itself: intellectuals were carried away by the madness of Mao’s cult and of his grandiose and criminal enterprises—the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, etc.—and turned away when Deng started it on the road to embourgeoisement); even Albania represented, for some, the purity of the revolutionary ideal. For others, the struggle of decolonization played the same role, but the aftermath of independence in the Third World was equally disappointing.
This again was a passing phase: the cult of Guevara or the student movements of the 1960s more and more represented revolution for its own sake, the appeal of community and action, almost totally emptied of any specific social content or of any vision of history. Marcuse’s “great refusal” was the expression of this mood. In some cases, as in Italy, this led to almost senseless terrorism against “the system.” In others, particularly in France, the break with revolutionary Marxism, however diluted, was more complete. It led, at least among a group of French intellectuals, who usually had been Maoists, to two unexpected developments.
One was the renouncement of ideology in favor of humanitarianism. The “new philosopher” André Glucksmann and the founder of “Doctors Without Borders” Bernard Kouchner presented what they called the “ethics of extreme emergency.” Instead of working or hoping for a radiant future, one should fight suffering (whether hunger or torture) immediately wherever it occurs and without accepting national or political choices and limitations. This had, and still has, a real appeal among the young, who could be called the orphans of Marxism and Realpolitik, who no longer wanted to believe either the official establishment, which had lost credibility with Vietnam and similar adventures, or the communist counterestablishment, which had discredited itself through both crime and embourgeoisement. They wanted to follow their urge to solidarity, compassion, and action without being fooled once again.
A related but even more unexpected development is the one I already mentioned—the belated discovery of totalitarianism.25 For some revolutionary intellectuals, often the same ones (in particular André Glucksmann) who needed not only a cause but an enemy, Soviet totalitarianism, just when it was declining and when American sovietology was abandoning the concept altogether, took the place of American imperialism. By the same token, the victims of the Gulag took the place of those of colonialism, and the “heroic struggle of the Polish workers” replaced that of the Cuban or the Vietnamese people.
For the first time, then, Western left-wing intellectuals took an interest in Eastern Europe, started a dialogue with its dissidents, and found themselves competing for their attention both with traditional anticommunists and with another faction of the left (the so-called antitotalitarian left represented by organizations like the Christian Union CFDT or the periodical Esprit that liked Solidarity better than the socialist-communist alliance in France).
What happened was in great part due to Solzhenitsyn (whose impact, at least in France, particularly through his televised appearance in the crucial year 1977, was immense) and to Walesa and Solidarity. For the first time, left-wing intellectuals could become anticommunists without having, as Sartre had always feared, to rally the ranks of the bourgeoisie. Always faithful to the idea that the right cause was that of the deprived masses, they found in the inmates of the Soviet camps the substitute for the Western working class or the Third World peasants and in Solzhenitsyn a prophet who through his suffering, his eloquence, and his criticism of the West provided the romantic appeal to which a bourgeois thinker like Aron could never aspire.
All this did not go without new misunderstandings. Both French and East European intellectuals tended to dismiss or underestimate the decline of Soviet totalitarianism—the former because they just discovered the notion or because if the Soviet Union no longer represented the absolute good it had to represent the Absolute Evil, the latter because they at last had a chance to discuss it. Orwell and Arendt, even though they depicted the phase of acute terror, still pointed to a truth those who had lived through it could recognize, unlike the banal jargon of American social sciences. More important, Western left-wing intellectuals still projected some of their categories on the different realities of the East. Some of them were shocked to discover that Walesa was against abortion and that Solzhenitsyn was a traditionalist rather than a man of the left. Conversely, certainly not Solzhenitsyn but many of the Eastern European dissidents tended to tell their Western interlocutors what they wanted to hear. As Gaspar Miklos Tamás has argued with some exaggeration,26 they adopted concepts like “civil society” but gave them a different meaning from that of Western authors, or they stressed universal ideas and human rights because that could more easily attract the goodwill and the help of Western friends of an open society. Although detente and communication with the West undoubtedly gained them precious moral and material support, it converged with their chosen strategy toward communist power of replacing political analysis with a moral or legal but somewhat abstract discourse.
The new convergence between Western and Eastern intellectuals risks having a double face, on the one hand liberation (from pernicious myths in one case, from oppressive tyranny in the other), mutual recognition, and dialogue, but on the other, a convergence into a common letdown and a common fear of becoming irrelevant. For the first time, the problems of Western and Eastern societies are similar: those of capitalist societies where the message of intellectuals has little resonance and relevance and is drowned by the chaotic multiplicity of contradictory messages, the stringency of technical constraints, and the power of money. Those features are felt even more strongly by former dissidents who, in general, have to struggle with new rules of the game, more brutal and corrupt than in the West, and enjoy neither the privileged position of official intellectuals nor the psychological boost of suffering and fighting for a noble cause and representing their whole people. Some of them, like Solzhenitsyn, become voices in the desert. Others chose to emigrate or remain in the West, and still others become politicians with varying degrees of success. Their marginalization is much less total than indicated by Tamás. They may even, in some cases, enjoy a comeback, as Havel’s “revanche” over Klaus’s arrogant dismissal of intellectuals and civil society would seem to indicate. But the structural problem—the disaffection of intellectuals in societies where there is no alternative to capitalism and liberal democracy but where the level of political discourse, particularly under the influence of the media, is more and more stultifying—remains.
The problem is compounded by the fact that in the West, as in the East, not only do public intellectuals find it hard to get a hearing, but it is not certain that they have something to say. The legacy of ideological politics and of antipolitics is an obstacle to be overcome. Ideology consisted of giving political answers to metaphysical questions and metaphysical answers to political questions. This is fortunately behind us; the temptation, then, is that of a total separation between philosophy and politics. This would condemn both to sterility and would be the best way to resurrect the totalitarian temptation. A new articulation between theory and practice, between philosophy and politics—based on both their distinction and their mutual need of each other—is the new and indispensable task for public intellectuals.
Raymond Aron, L’opium des intellectuels (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1955).
François Furet, Le passé d’une illusion (Paris: R. Laffont, 1995).
Alexis de Tocqueville, L’ancien régime et la révolution, bk. 3, chap. 1.
Tocqueville, L’ancien régime, bk. 3, chap. 2.
Napoleon Bonaparte, Speech to the Conseil d’Etat (1805).
Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), 412. See also Philosophy of Right, para. 258.
Heinrich Heine, Religion and Philosophy in Germany (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 159–60.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 311.
Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 3:162.
György Konrád and Istvan Szeleni, The Intellectuals on the Road to State Power (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949).
Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York: Collier, 1961), 355.
Volodymir Polokhalo, “Intellectuals and Power in Postcommunist Societies,” in The Demons of Peace and the Gods of War (Kiev: Political Thought, 1997), 186–200.
Quoted by Victor Zaslavsky, Storia del Sistema Sovietico (Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1995), 119.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, Section 1, “The Underground Writer,” 8–9 of the French translation.
See his “Auch ich war bei der Stasi,” Die Zeit, 1990.
C. Milosz, “L’interlocuteur fraternel,” Preuves, April 1960. Reproduced in Preuves, une revue européenne à Paris, ed. P. Grémion (Paris: Julliard, 1989), 389.
Raymond Aron, “Alexander Solzhenitsyn and European Leftism,” Survey 100–101, Summer-Autumn 1976.
See Hassner, “Western European Attitudes towards the Soviet Union,” in “Looking for Europe,” Daedalus, Winter 1979, 113–50.
Ignacio Silone, The God That Failed (New York: Harper, 1949).
Pierre Grémion, Paris-Prague: La gauche face au renouveau et à la régression tchécoslovaque, 1868–1978 (Paris: Julliard, 1985).
Pierre Grémion, Intelligence de l’anti-communisme: Le Congrès pour la liberté de la culture à Paris, 1950–1975 (Paris: Fayard, 1995).
Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1947).
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanisme et terreur (Paris: Gallimard, 1947).
See Hassner, “Communist Totalitarianism: The Transatlantic Vagaries of a Concept,” Washington Quarterly, Fall 1985.
Gaspar Miklos Tamás, “The Legacy of Dissent: Irony, Ambiguity, Duplicity,” Uncaptive Minds, Summer 1994.