H.
J.
KAPLAN
375
of Stalingrad, the Russians are rather the object of compassion and ofwonder
than of hatred and fear. Driven presumably by economic impasse, by the
clamor of their people and the growing demoralization of the
Nomenkl,atuTa
itself, they have given up the effort pursued with so much energy and inge–
nuity since 1917 to construct a vast Potemkin vi llage designed (with the help
of their cl ients and dupes in the West) to convince the world they were con–
structing a better society, one that the West wou ld be obliged to respect, fear
and pay tribute
to,
and finally emulate, of course, so that in the words of the
old anthem, "The
Inlernationale
sha ll be the Human Race. " But now , in ef–
feet, they are saying: it's no use, it won't work, we have murdered, tortured,
and imprisoned millions of people to no avail. T he results are pure catastro–
phe, and there's more: our failure cannot simply be attributed to the inade–
quacy of our leaders, the mess we inherited, the absence of what the Marx–
ists used to call "objective conditions." No, the project was wrong and rotten
£i'om the outset, informed by a false view of man and history, unworkable.
Such a declaration of defeat, redolent perhaps of a certain frenetic
Russian literary style but unprecedented, so far as I can see, in the history of
any other nation, produced no less effect here than e lsewhere as sheer
drama. However, for the reasons 1 have already suggested, it had no dis–
cernable effect on political thinking except perhaps to confirm those tenden–
cies - Aron ian, sociological, skeptical, but with curious outcroppings of interest
in religious phenomenology, for example, Emmanuel Levinas - already at
work here long before the Berlin wall came down ; tendencies, I shou ld add,
displayed ubiquitously throughout the cu lture, but most brilliantly exemplified
in two relatively new reviews: Pierre Nora's
Le Debal
and Jean-Claude
Casanova's
C01l11nentaire .
Surprised, then, and moved by the swift pace of events, French political
thinking seems to be waiting (or the dust
to
settle,
C01mne toulle monde.
The
great upheaval of 1989, after all, was on ly a beginning. The decline and fall
of the Soviet system would now obv iously raise the question of Western as–
sistance, change the strategic balance in Europe, open up new economic per–
spectives, and perhaps even (with the fad ing of yet one more of the secular
religions announced by Nietzsche as a consequence of the alleged demise of
God) bring about a rebirth of interest in various approaches
to
the transcen–
dental, old and new.... On all this, it seems to me, the French intelligentsia
and the so-called
classe politique
(overlapp ing but not identical categories) are
largely agreed. What has happened is a ll to the good. What lies ahead wi ll
involve problems, of course, but none of these seem insurmountable, given a
bit of time and goodwill, and none raise great philosophical issues. Above all,
we can stop thinking ofArmageddon. Then why does one detect a note of
dissatisfaction, occasionally even of disquiet, among the professors and pun-
