PARTISAN REVIEW
91
into two groups, although it was sometimes difficult to tell them apart.
We did meet no small number of colleagues who were overtly or covert–
ly critical of, even opposed to, the exercise of power in state socialism. One
distinguished younger Soviet colleague told me, "Marx died a long while
ago; much has happened since then, not least in what some refer to
as 'bourgeois' thought." From another country, a participant explained
his silence: "Under present political conditions at home, I cannot speak
my mind, and I will not say things I do not believe." Criticism, for those
sociologists, consists in describing social reality. They cannot, in general,
deal with it as a political totality- but they can and often do say
enough to illuminate the whole by dealing with its parts. The Poles
and the Czechs were, as we might have expected, masters of the art:
there is evidence that they are being joined by an increasing number of
sociologists from the Soviet Union.
What kind of studies do come from those with a minimally critical
attitude? I heard, or read, accounts of social mobility in the socialist
societies which left no doubt as to the existence there of a stratified
system of social relations - a class system based on state property. There
was an intelligent Polish contribution on workers' participation in eco–
nomic planning as a goal of Polish socialism which left no doubt that
the goal was very remote of attainment. An inquiry on religion in the
Soviet Union pointed to its decline, but also left open the question of
the universality of religious aspiration. Studies of this sort were dis–
tinguished from the pseudo-Marxist harangues not only by their atten–
tion to nuance and detail, but by a superior intellectual level, a realiza–
tion of the difficult relationship between theory and fact, a refusal to
assimilate reflection to political exhortation. There are, of course, limits
beyond which they cannot as yet go.
But as they succeed in developing more valid methods of sociological
inquiry will they not contribute to the consolidation of the state socialist
technocracy by making it more efficient? The answer, unfortunately,
is yes. Of the two groupings of sociologists
in
Eastern Europe who in–
habit our world of discourse, the second is not so much critical as
pragmatic. Some, to borrow a term from von Hayek not heard much
recently, are "scientistic." The enormous development of the culture of
mathematics and the physical sciences in the Soviet Union has induced
some sociologists there (the parallels with our own recent academic ex–
perience are striking) to experiment with mathematical and formal
descriptions of social process. There's a new Soviet version of Lenin's
famous dictum, that socialism equals the Soviets plus electrification–
socialism equals the Soviet state equipped with computers. In a regime
