RALF DAHRENDORF
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wards. Leber said no and was hanged. Who would not have wished
that Julius Leber had said yes? Who would have had even a trace, a
faint thought of criticism if afterwards he had not kept his side of the
distasteful bargain? And yet the memory of Julius Leber stands to–
day as a signal of hope in an evil world. Manes Sperber lets his
heroes and heroines reach for such hope, which in the end is the one
force that gives shape and meaning to our lives.
Again , it is important to remember the exceptional nature of
the totalitarian experience . I have never liked Max Weber's distinc–
tion between an "ethics of responsibility" (for political leaders) and
an "ethics of conviction" (for saints and other unpolitical people) . It
provides too easy an alibi for the immorality of political decisions .
But it is clearly true that under normal conditions of free speech and
free elections, moral considerations cannot and probably should not
inform all political acts . Governments have to have dealings with
disagreeable regimes; they have to take measures at home and
abroad which in an ideal world one would disapprove of; they have
to cope with real problems in terms of interests rather than moral
principles . Again, the key question is where this quality of public life
and political action becomes unacceptable, where in other words the
non-moral becomes immoral.
It
does so a long way before we reach
totalitarian excesses. Torture and killing can never be justified . Ele–
mentary human rights allow no exceptions . But again we must be–
ware of those excitable souls who invoke moral instances all the time
and thereby devalue the moments at which morality and politics be–
come critically intertwined .
None of this, I am afraid, provides a clear answer to the ques–
tion of what is to be done to rid mankind of the totalitarian scourge.
Learn to discriminate, resist the beginnings, distrust temptations ,
remember moral principles when it matters-these are almost trite
exhortations in the face of the cynical powers which determined the
Second Thirty Years War. In any case, when these exhortations
become relevant , it is usually too late. The real challenge exists as
long as times are relatively normal and as long as we can hope to
make our own small contribution to preserving the constitution of
liberty. The name of this challenge is civil society. A society in which
the rights of citizenship are neither mere promise nor privilege, but
in which every member is equal to every other before the law, has a
part in the political public, a voice, and enjoys a social status which
can be called civilized, is more likely to be immune to totalitarian
claims than any other. There is no perfect civil society, but some are
