POLITICS AND THE FRENCH INTELLECTUALS
599
the development of the social order, into relation. Reviving the error of
the technocrats, they dream of a government of scientists and forget that
men are not comparable to raw materials and instruments of production.
The churches, and in particular the Catholic Church, are one
of the chief forces in Europe opposing the expansion of Communism.
There are not a few Christians, however, outside the narrow circle
of the Left-Wing Christians, whose consciences the Communist message
has troubled and who scarcely hide it from themselves that they are
fellow travelers. However preposterous the identification, Stalin the
Terrible, barbarous builder of pyramids who does not hesitate to heap
up millions of corpses in the "fulfilling" of a plan, still appears to
them as the spokesman of the poor, the interpreter of the masses aspiring
to be free. Anti-Communism is fatal, Emmanual Mounier keeps repeat–
ing in the review
Esprit,
the intellectual confusion of whose pages is
all the more dangerous for being the work of a sincere man of goodwill.
I should perhaps mention a third category of Communist, the
philosophers of history, seeing that all Communists, technical-scientific
and Christian, share in common a vulgarized philosophy of history.
Many European intellectuals refuse to recognize that events have belied
the Marxist predictions in certain crucial points. Because the West
tends gradually toward a society more or less socialist in structure;
because administrative direction is replacing the market; because the
"welfare state" is taking upon itself certain responsibilities formerly
the individual's; because mass organizations are overshadowing the
bourgeois parliaments of the last century-for all these reasons they see
Stalinism as the goal of history in its movement toward a planned society,
the collective ownership of property, and the improvement of the
condition of the masses.
No matter that Western capitalism has been less the victim of its
internal contradictions than of war. These philosophers hold firmly to
the notion that history would only have a rational significance in the
triumph of the classless society. Today the necessity of Communism
seems apparent to them as much in the strength of Soviet Russia as
in the weakness of its adversaries. Logical justification, in their thought,
is confounded with justification by force. Is not this confusion after all
implied in the Hegelian formula of the unity of the rational and the
real?
Acquiescence in the mysterious and imperative law of history,
resignation to a future deemed even more inevitable than glorious,
subservience to the masters of the world-all these feelings play a part
in the rallying of certain intellectuals to Stalinism, or in their refusal to
