JEFFREY HERF
IlS
intelligence
to
a policy of many small steps, of moderation , and of talking
rather than shooting. You have demonstrated political possibility where cyni–
cal
realists would abandon hope. These are images and messages that need
to
be heard , especially where the romance of 1789 and 1917 has not yet
expired. So at the outset, 1 want to express our admiration for your courage
and persistence, and our congratulations for your accomplishment.
All of us who have come to talk to you this week share a youthful
leftist radicalism from which we have distanced ourselves. We have
"deradicalized" ourselves. That means that we, too , came to reject the im–
ages of 1789 and 1917 for the more prosaic and humane practices of
classical political liberalism, practices such as talking, arguing, compromising,
and tolerating those who disagree. On the path of deradicalization, we read a
great deal, just as we had on our previous path of radicalization. The differ–
ence, of course, is that we read better books the second time around, books
like Czeslaw Milosz's
The Captive Mind
and
Native Realm ,
and Leszek Ko–
lakowski's
Main Clinenis oj Marxism,
and his superb response to the British
and American new left of the 19605, "My Correct Views on Everything."
Both Milosz and Kolakowski, in piercing the totalitarian faith in History and
the total reshaping of human beings at the hands of a political project, found
common ground with deradicalizing American intellectuals of the 1950s, and
with us deradicalizing intellectuals of the 19705 and 19805.
Our intellectual debts to the Polish struggle against totalitarianism began
long before 1989. In the 1960s, when Jean-Paul Sartre was setting the in–
tellectual fashion and "revolutionary violence" was in vogue, it was Milosz,
Kolakowski, and other Polish intellectuals who came
to
the defense of the
then out-of-fashion liberal values of European civilization.
In
the 1960s, when
Western intellectuals were turning against liberal values of tolerance and
peaceful change, Polish and Eastern European intellectuals reinvigorated
those traditions. In the early 1980s, when many Western intellectuals,
especially in West Germany, Britain, and the United States, found it difficult
to make moral distinctions between "both superpowers," Solidarity was a
constant reminder that the issue of peace could not be separated from the is–
sue of freedom . When these same intellect.uals took political freedom for
granted, dissidents from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were a con–
stant reminder of how precious it is. Now, let us hope, political realities will
catch up with the temporarily suppressed but never extinguished sense of
European civilization. This "common European home" stretches across the
Atlantic to include the United States.
It
is really a common Western home,
though its values have been institutionalized most firmly in Western Europe
and
the United States.
We Americans with our "second thoughts" about the new left have
