PAUL HOLLANDER
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the contemporary sOCletles generally considered socialist, socialist
indeed?
It
is hard to overestimate the importance of systematically
confronting this question since there has always been a tendency in
the West to go along with the self-characterization of societies which
assert that they are socialist. But terminology matters. Even when
critics of such societies observe their shortcomings while bestowing
on them the "socialist" label, they concede something of importance,
some basic if limited legitimacy and moral virtue which by implica–
tion capitalist democracies are devoid of. And even those who dispute
the "socialism" of these societies seem to acquiesce in their usurpa–
tion of the appellation.
This state of affairs, in turn, allows these countries to harvest at
least the residual goodwill of Western idealists and become benefi–
ciaries of their benefit of doubt. Displaying the socialist label thus
becomes at least a proof of good intentions - if not results; in turn
such intentions tend to disarm Western intellectuals, who rarely
devote to the analysis of societies so labelled the same emotional
energy and determination to locate the gaps between theory and
practice they display in the study and criticism of their own societies.
Feher, Heller, and Markus go a long way toward demolishing
the self-serving claims of putatively socialist societies. Moreover,
they suggest that there is
some
connection between the deformations
of practice and the theories which inspired them:
. . . since socialism does not exist except as the sum of its histor–
ically existing varieties, nineteenth and early twentieth-century
socialist doctrines are at least co-responsible for the "real social–
ism" of today, even if we reassert our statement that the upshot is
not socialism in any meaningful sense of the term.
They locate, as a key problem in the realization of socialist
ideals, ".. . a very wide gap between an uncritically maintained idea
of human perfectibility ... as the public doctrine and that of virtue
in minority, a desperately pessimistic view of human substance, as
the secret doctrine."
While regarding themselves as "radical socialists," they tell the
reader in the first sentence of the book that "the emotional and in–
tellectual motivation for writing this book was the exact obverse of
the French maxim:
tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.
By contrast . ..
we sought to understand the whole of 'real socialism' in order critically
to expose this new and formidable system of internal and external
