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China, but nowhere is this matter discussed systematically and at any length.
The gist of the argument was presented by Caute as follows:
In its more serious intellectual aspects, the phenomenon of fellow–
travelling can best be understood as a postscript to the Enlighten–
ment...It signified a return to the eighteenth-century vision of a ratio–
nal, educated and scientific society based on the maximization of re-
sources and the steady improvement. ..of human nature... Knowledge
and morality are once more viewed as complementary...[the fellow
travellersJ...had little difficulty in convincing themselves that what was
taking shape in Russia in the thirties was not the dictatorship of the
proletariat but the benevolent despotism of enlightened, disinterested
pedagogues working for the common good.
It
is certainly true that for many fellow travellers the attractions of the
Soviet systems were associated with reverence for applied reason, science,
education, planning, rationality, a true meritocracy, and so on, all ofwhich
could be linked to the Enlightenment. But there was more to the appeals of
the Soviet system even in the 1930s; above all it fascinated Western intel–
lectuals because it promised to end all social injustices and at the same time to
make life meaningful by creating a sense of community and purpose. Caute's
argument has been partially correct but incomplete; neither did it fully ex–
plain the appeals of the Soviet system, nor in turn were the values of the
Enlightenment totally irrelevant to the appeals of the new Communist sys–
tems in Cuba, China, and elsewhere. What have been missing are the links
between "fellow travelling" (used here to signify the strong emotional pull of
various communist systems in the 1930s as well as the sixties, seventies,
and eighties) and a romantic rejection of modernity, especially of the Western
capitalist kind. Granted this type ofmotivation was stronger in more recent
times than in the 1930s, it was not altogether absent in the thirties either, nor
were the attractions of primitivism, authenticity, sense of community, and so
on totally dominating the sensibilities of the travellers to China, Cuba, and
other countries at the exclusion of the older Enlightenment values (often also
discerned in these new settings).
Indeed, neither earlier nor in more recent times can the attraction of
these systems be reduced to matters purely political or economic; they were
counterpoints or alternatives to what the social critics (who the fellow trav–
ellers always were) perceived to be the moral corruption, injustice and deca–
dence of their own society. In other words, much of the fellow travelling
originated in estrangement and has been in a large measure a response to
the discomforts of secularization, rather than a new link to the Enlightenment,
