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PARTISAN REVIEW
blossomed into shrewd politicians or remain relicts of a reverse Stalinism.
Impassioned politicians creep off into introspection and silence; timid
loners are promoted as the champions of the hour. Impromptu liberals are
confronted with old and new conservatives, extremists, idealists, ideo–
logues. Old and new profiteers, the formerly and the newly naive stir up
the great and by no means innocent masses, who in turn regenerate their
own adaptation instincts.
Those who for years were forced to suffer through tedious lessons in
Marxism and political economics discover that capitalism, not socialism,
teaches that "existence determines consciousness" and that the workers of
the world never did unite, precisely because they were interested only in
their own material lives, which differed so greatly from one country to
the next. Should we still be surprised by the recent threats of extremism
under different banners or by the potential explosiveness of discontent
that could pave the way for new forms of dictatorship? Mter the failed
experiment in "abolishing man's exploitation of man," its survivors will
be subjected to another painful experiment: the transition from state
ownership of evil to individual ownership of good and evil.
However fantastic its stagings may often have seemed, totalitarian so–
ciety was not an unearthly or demonic deviation, as many believe, but a
human reality. The pulse of totalitarianism beats in man (and can be de–
tected in the family, in schools, at work, and so on); otherwise, it could
not have (and cannot) become an ideology and a system of government.
Totalitarian "social engineering" grew out of dissatisfaction with and
criticism of democracy's imperfections and adapted itself to a transcendent
ideal. We should keep in mind that Hitler came to power in Germany
through free elections in a time of acute industrial and political crises; that
the Russian Revolution of October 1917 did not erupt in the most
gruesome period of tsarism, but under Kerensky's brief democratic gov–
ernment. As Lenin said, every revolution needs five minutes of freedom.
The fact that the first free elections in Algeria in 1992 gave fuel to the
fundamentalists reminds us that the Ayatollah Khomeini first came to
power when the shah began to "liberalize" his rule. Are we allowed to
see Nazism as a trivialized and diseased "Romanticism"? Or only as racist
nihilism that led to the Holocaust? Should we consider communism a
demagogic "humanism"? Or only a simplistic rationalism that is sub–
servient to tyranny, culminating in the gulag? When Stalin called writers
the "engineers of the human soul," he styled, condensed, and revealed an
entire pedagogy of terror, justifying its horror with a utopian vision.
It is no coincidence that intellectuals have experienced with particular
intensity the contradiction between the "ideal" and the critical intelli–
gence that reveals the ideal's weaknesses. While many intellectuals from
the East can be reproached with opportunism (one hardly needs an espe-
