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demolition of the old governing structures, in the denunciation of the
spurious legitimacy of the Leninist regimes, and in the strategic imagining
of an emancipated territory of free communication.
As Vassily Aksyonov pointed out, because the ruling bureaucracies
saw themselves as exponents of the working class, intellectuals were re–
garded as a stratum or layer, and deprived therefore of the characteristics
of class and the right to partake of power. Yet intellectuals were ex–
pected to participate in the preservation of the ideological domination
and self-reproduction of the status quo. Opportunism, conformity, and
regimentation were generously rewarded; a whole apparatus was created
to construct a parasitical stratum of ideological priests. But despite the
oxymoronic nature of the intellectual under Communism, the overall
political and social dereliction impelled many average citizens to look
among the intellectuals for moral examples. Many intellectuals led the
efforts to articulate the discourse of opposition. At the moment in 1989
when the Communist regimes were collapsing, the prevailing attitude in
these countries toward the critical intelligentsia was one of sympathy and
even admiration. Three years later, intellectuals seem to have lost much
of their moral aura and are often attacked as champions of futility,
architects of disaster, and incorrigible daydreamers. Their status is ex–
tremely precarious precisely because they symbolize the principle of dif–
ference that neo-authoritarian politics tends to suppress.
Confronted with the duplicity of the prevailing dogma, intellectuals
were the first to experience the disenchantment with the Marxist utopia.
In
the 1950s and early 1960s, intellectuals' engagement with the
hermeneutics of subversion served to dispel the mystical veneer of the
Marxist
gnosis.
Dissent meant, among other things, to break with the al–
leged cognitive infallibility of the ruling elite; to search for different
sources of rationality and legitimacy. The ethos of the dissident move–
ments was linked to the rediscovery of the centrality of truth and free–
dom as the essential values of political discourse itself The writings of
intellectuals like Leszek Kolakowski, George Konrad, Vaclav Havel, Janos
Kis, Agnes Heller, Ferenc Feher, and Adam Michnik subjected the
Jacobin-Bolshevik cult of reason (including the celebration of
raison d'etat
or
raison de partl)
to a consistent critique.
Reflecting on the totalitarian experience, these critical intellectuals
realized that the original sin, the beginning of the oracular creed that af–
firmed the omnipotence of reason and the exacerbation of statism,
within the Kafkaesque universe of bureaucratic socialism, could not be
disassociated from the legacy of the French Revolution. They perceived
secular prophesies, the infinite arrogance of illuminated sects that believed
in their providential right to impose limits on human freedom in the
