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PARTISAN REVIEW
heretical Praxis group in Yugoslavia. His CfltlCISmS of authoritarian and
bureaucratic socialism (and of capitalism) were precise . The rest of us were
searching obsessively for new ideas. My own pursuit led me outside the sem–
inar room , to speak with some of the dramatis personae of Europe 's political
drama.
The President of France is aware of the intolerable heaviness of the state
apparatus. He has enunciated ideas of "an advanced liberal society" and of
" qualitative growth " for reasons other than the making of images . His
regime, however, includes some very hard rightists , but even their leader,
Poniatowski, felt obliged to publish a book entitled
Guiding Change .
It
also
includes a large Gaullist rump installed in its own version of
la gloire:
the
patronage system . Finally, it encompasses the capitalists. The difficulties of
changing French society under these auspices seem insuperable .
I
put the
problem to a member of the government, a civil servant promoted to cabinet
rank . He did not underestimate the difficulties . He spoke with feeling of the
problem of curbing real estate speculation, of the role of local concentrations
of economic power-not all of them sublime .
I
was struck by his sense of the
whole, by his willingness to use the state to develop a more just community,
by his commitment to the idea ofa public interest both liberal and effective .
I
was no less struck by technocratic underestimation of the role of public politi–
cal will , his reliance on an administrative rationality which not infrequently
turns into its own opposite .
President Giscard d 'Estaing in 1974 won a very narrow victory over the
forces of the Union de la Gauche . A year later, all that was evident was the
Disunion de la Gauche. As a small "bourgeois" radical group wrung its
hands , as millions of voters turned away in apathy and disgust, the Commu–
nists and Socialists have quarreled. They have disagreed over Portugal, over
the Socialists' alleged infidelity to the alliance, over the question of common
lists in the forthcoming municipal elections . These issues are real, but the
fundamental ones are often unstated. The first is the question of who shall
dominate the electoral alliance . Under Mitterand, a revivified Socialist Party
seemed likely to displace the Communists as the largest group on the left. The
second question concerns the kind of advance
to
socialism a left government
would undertake. The Communists have advocated heavily statist versions of
socialism-if with parliamentary control. Nationalization and centralized
economic planning remain the keys to their vision of the future . The Socialists
don't dispute this, but they emphasize other things . A good deal of the re–
vival of the party (and of its attractiveness
to
the middle class and to technical
workers) comes from its hesitant but developing interest in participatory
democracy. An uneven mixture of ideas of cultural revolution, left Catholic
conceptions ofcommunity, modernized remnants of the syndicalist tradition,
