DANIEL BELL
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done .... Savinkov sees not the justification of his act (that is impos–
sible), but its deepest moral root in that he sacrifices not only his life,
but also his purity, morality, even his soul for his brothers . In other
words, only he who acknowledged unflinchingly and without any res–
ervations that murder is under no circumstances to be sanctioned can
commit the murderous deed that is truly - and tragically - moral.
And Lukacs concludes:
To express this sense of the most profound human tragedy in the in–
comparably beautiful words of Hebbel's Judith: 'Even if God had
placed sin between me and the deed enjoined upon me-who am I to
be able to escape it?'
When I first read that passage in 1974, I suddenly realized that
it was Lukacs whom Weber had had in mind in those closing pages
of "Politics as a Vocation"; that when he had written, "The propo–
nent of an ethic of absolute ends cannot stand up against the ethical
irrationality of the world," it was Lukacs's decision that had prompt–
ed Weber's anguish.
So many blurred images now came into coherent focus. Long
ago I had discussed with myoId City College classmate Melvin
Lasky the remarkable pages in Franz Borkenau's
World Communism
(1938) in which that knowledgeable ex-Communist (the fallen angel
of the Frankfurt School) had cited a little-known article written in
1921 by Ilona Duczynska (the wife of Karl Polanyi and one of the
founders of the Hungarian Communist movement), on the occasion
of her early break with the Communist movement, referring in a
veiled way to Lukacs:
A theoretician and perhaps the only brain behind Hungarian com–
munism once said to me: 'The highest duty for communist ethics is to
accept the necessity of acting immorally . This is the greatest sacrifice
that the revolution demands of us. The conviction of the true commu–
nist is that evil transforms itself into bliss through the dialectics of his–
torical evolution.'
And it was this "dialectical theory of wickedness" which was the heart
of the famous portrait of Lukacs drawn by Thomas Mann in the
character of Naphta, the Jewish-Jesuit dialectician in
The Magic
Mountain.
In my Hobhouse lecture at the London School of Economics in
the spring of 1977 titled "The Return of the Sacred?", I wrote a sec-
