BOOKS
Marxism was a mixture of an unequivocal enthusiasm for modernity,
rational organization, and technological progress with the same yearn–
ing for the archaic community, and it culminated in the utopian ex–
pectation of the perfect world of the future, in which both sets of val–
ues would be implemented and make a harmonious alloy: modern
factory and the Athenian
agora
would somehow merge into one.
485
The breakdown of the messianic teleologies by the end of the twen–
tieth century, the end of the eschatological belief in the goddess History,
has left space for a more modest, essentially skeptical approach to issues of
conflict, order, and stability in modern societies. This farewell to the re–
demptive paradigms formerly called radicalisms (of leftist or rightist per–
suasion, it doesn't matter any more) is brilliantly captured by Heller and
Feher in their kaleidoscopic survey of the phenomenology of the secular–
ization of Marxism. By becoming mundane and revealing its ambiguity,
by abjuring its salvationist pretense, Marxism has ceased to inspire collec–
tive passions and neuroses. This leaves many intellectuals with a sense of
bitter abandonment: what are they going to believe in and what idols are
they going to serve? After all, the end of ideology, correctly diagnosed by
Daniel Bell in his pathbreaking essay published several decades ago, seems
to have resulted in a vacuum of oracular creeds. True, there is national–
ism, and there is the Fukuyama-style, thundering glorification of the "end
of history. " But are we really dealing with an end of history? Is modernity
completely exhausted? And what role can be discovered for intellectuals
when they seem to have lost the opium they needed (remember
Raymond Aron?) for their continuous warfare with the status quo? For
Kolakowski, the issue is to overcome the idolatry of politics, to rediscover
the true bonds that keep politics together in a civilized manner. His an–
guish is primarily linked to the disappearance of the frontier between
good and evil, and to the postmodern (and neo-Nietzschean) attempt to
completely relativize our traditional moral norms. At the risk of shocking
his former admirers on the left, Kolakowski goes as far as to state that "it
is perhaps better to believe in the validity of apparently silly taboos than to
let them
all
vanish." Indeed, if the major achievement of intellectuals in
this century has been to suspend and question the legacy of the bourgeois
experience, if many of them have done their best to use blinders in their
reading (or misreading) of the totalitarian inferno, then it is perhaps useful
to invite them now to a much-needed mental housecleaning.
Kolakowski's book, full of biting irony, is precisely a call for intellectual
responsibility, perhaps the one quality this social group has superbly disre–
garded for the last hundred years.
Although some of the most atrocious experiences of the century were
