THE LITERARY IMPACT
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OF THE AMERICAN AND FRENCH REVOLUTIONS
program you are proposing itself undermines liberal political values. This
radical market program is something that prevents us from being able to
really use our democratic rights, our democratic possibilities, in many
ways." For us to make this kind of distinction between issues of liberal
values and issues that are economic might help us to understand better
the crisis facing liberal intellectuals.
Vladitnir Tisl11aneanu:
In Eastern Europe, in Western Europe, and in
America, the term "liberalism" is, of course, a very ambiguous one. Many
people understand many different things when they refer to it now. In
one particular publication, I saw that liberal intellectuals were given
more or less a moral definition, that they were those who believe in an
open society, and defend and try to protect the values of an open soci–
ety. Here I would turn
to
one of my favorite recent books, Ralf
Dahrendorfs
Rej7ectiorls on the Revolutions in Europe.
I agree with his
definition of liberalism being on one level a contractual dimension of a
new society, based on what he calls constitutional politics. We agree that
the ultimate value for a society is to agree that individuals should be
protected, that minorities should be protected, and that no infringement
on human rights should be accepted. Dahrendorf identifies a dichotomy
between constitutional values and what he calls normal politics. I would
place economic liberalism on the level of normal politics, as opposed to
those liberal values that belong at the level of constitutional politics. We
see this dichotomy occurring in a number of places, but the situation is
most pronounced in Russia. There, those intellectuals associated with the
free market and shock-therapy approach to economic reform are
perceived by strong groups of the Russian intelligentsia as alien to the
Russian soul, as creating problems that will destroy the Russian
community, and so on.
I don't think I have an answer. There is still a lot of theoretical
confusion in the region and very few serious economic and political
programs. In my earlier remarks, I deplored the lack of political parties -
there are plenty of formations that call themselves parties, but they are
not groups that are shaped around particular interests. This is so partly
because the old regime so thoroughly atomized society. The new parties
are based more on moral and intellectual affinities; they are barely able to
discern and express deep-seated or little-understood social needs and in–
terests. These new societies are in the process of self-discovery.
Another limiting factor is that in Eastern Europe we have a number
of parties that have evolved outside of the newly formed parliaments, or
before the parliaments came into being. In contrast, in the West, parties
