THE FUTURE
409
In
part the fashion springs from the evident exhaustion of liberalism:
now rightly seen as a post-revolutionary creed, inappropriate to a
situation where a radical break with the past has to be made. One
may question the communist assumption that liberalism is always and
everywhere synonymous with
bourgeois
individualism. That it is
synonymous with
individualism,
I do not believe anyone seriously
doubts. And it so happens that individualism is a post-revolutionary,
or post-totalitarian, sentiment quite unrelated to the decisions that
have to be made at the peak of a revolutionary crisis.
It
is only when
the tribunes of the people, the terrorists and the dictators, have left
the scene, that individualism can hope to flourish. So today there
is a wave of "revisionist" sentiment in Eastern Europe quite plainly
related to the longings of the newly emancipated intelligentsia-a
group which accepts the system but wants to "humanize" it: in
different terms, to bring it back to the West European origins of the
communist faith.
This too is a post-revolutionary sentiment, the counterpart of
that older liberalism which crept out of hiding in Western Europe
after the Jacobins and Napoleon had vacated the historical stage.
It
is a way of saying that one may have one's cake and eat it, continue
the Revolution (democratic in the one case, communist in the other)
and yet preserve personal liberty and the decencies of civilized life.
And clearly under favorable circumstances this may actually occur.
If
democratic liberalism turned out to be historically possible in the
nineteenth century, why not democratic socialism in the twentieth?
The question can only be answered empirically. It is foolish to deal
with it on a priori grounds, starting from a few abstract propositions
about the "nature" of this or that system. At most one might argue
that under modern conditions the State has become too strong for
society to be as autonomous as it was in the liberal nineteenth century.
The growth of centralized planning must inevitably circumscribe the
effectiveness of the new liberalism, now making its first tentative steps
in the guise of "revisionist" Marxism. But that it should be
impossible,
under so-called communism, to preserve an area of personal freedom,
seems to me an unwarrant,ed assumption. It may be very difficult, for
reasons having to do with cultural history, but it is surely not im–
possible in countries whose way of life is rooted in the traditional
civilization of either Eastern or Western Europe.
