COMMENT
657
tions of socialists and Marxists, among whom, alas, must be counted
many well-intentioned enemies of the Bolsheviks. Ironically enougb
(though the irony is grim), the appeal of Communism for the Western
intellectual is not very different from what it is for the Korean peas–
ant: literary men and literary intellectuals are attracted to Commu–
nism precisely by its great black and white simplifications of history.
Somewhere in the background of the Western intellectual's mind, of
course, there moves the vague feeling that Marxism has also been
established as a science, though he himself has never tested its scientific
claims. Far from being confined to the economic question, this per–
vasive climate positively produces a disgust with all the values of
bourgeois civilization. Decades of Marxism have persuaded the intel–
ligentsia that the values of legality, due process, judicial freedom-–
the values that the great bourgeois revolutions conquered from des–
potic monarchs-are only "formal" freedoms, empty "abstractions,"
and therefore trivial and unimportant. What if the last three decades
demonstrate, as clearly as one could want, that political power takes
precedence over economic power; that it is the Marxist view which
is really abstract, being unable to account for the course of history
since the Russian Revolution; and, finally, that political liberty now
reveals itself as the most concrete and real value in a society? It would
take nothing less than a major revolution of mind to get the European
intelligentsia thinking along these lines.
The historic process here cannot be restricted to economic and
political sectors alone. In Western Europe we witness nothing less
than the decline of a whole civilization, in the course of which all
the older values become one by one devalued.
As
good an illustration
as any is the career of a writer like Sartre. The most brilliant and
energetic intellectual of his generation, Sartre is also one of its most
typical products. Purely as a literary man, he illustrates this new and
complex moment of French civilization: willing to settle for a litera–
ture that is not very far from propaganda and that discards the stan–
dards of the high literature developed during the bourgeois period,
he is part of the general process of abnegation of past values. The
exponent of a philosophy that sets him at odd.s with Marxism, he
nevertheless exists so completely in the Marxist epoch that when he
comes to look at social facts he sees them through the crudest of
Marxist blinkers.
If
we remember that we are dealing here with a man
