THE LITERARY IMPACT
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OF THE AMERICAN AND FRENCH REVOLUTIONS
have spoken lately more and more, as has, for example, Alain Besan<;:on
about
Ie besoin d'idmtite,
the need for identity, and also about
la patrie,
something that was not exactly part of the terminology and rhetoric of
the French intelligentsia.
I will, however, try to be a bit more modest and speak about East–
ern Europe. First of all, I wonder about the role of certain intellectuals.
At least in some countries, intellectuals have been very helpful and pro–
ductive, although from our perspective, the democratic one, I would say
that some of them have been counterproductive,. Intellectuals have been
producers not only of symbols and mythologies on behalf of democracy
but also against democracy.
The golden generation of the Romanian intelligentsia of the inter–
war periods, induding some of the luminaries that have been written
about, such as Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, or even Panait Istrati, pro–
duced ideas that were about what I would call a mystical revolution.
There was a mystical revolution, at least in imagination, and not only in
Romania. To quote a point made recently at George Mason University
by Daniel Chi rot, there has been a great deal of anti-democratic mimeti–
cism in Central and Eastern Europe. Many of the illiberal trends that
prospered during the interwar period in the whole region were imported
from the West, and adapted from ideas that had tended, after all, to first
be dominant in Western Europe. Many Western European intellectuals,
with the exception of a few such as Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse,
embraced one variety or another of the anti-democratic creed. The pre–
vailing dogma in the intelligentsia then was that democracy was rotten
and putrid and that it could not solve any problems. These ideas imbued
the anti-parliamentary, anti-bourgeois writings of young Eliade or young
Cioran. They read Papini , and Heidegger, and Maurras, and they exe–
crated "philistine" democracy.
N ow the message coming from the West is different, because, I
think, the intelligentsia in the West has come to a kind of compromise. I
hope it will be a long-term compromise, with the values of liberal
democracy. So I feel that the source of anti-democratic intellectual
thinking that had an enormous impact in Eastern and Central Europe has
now vanished and so far has not reappeared.
Susan Sontag:
Or they have had their consciousness raised, to use an
old phrase, by the experience and the translation of values that we pur–
ported to represent here but did not take seriously. It's been a great
education for us.
