VLADIMIR TISMANEANU
413
is right to reproach Furet about the neglect of the anti-totalitarian cri–
tique formulated by the Western democratic Left (for example, the
French groups
Sacialisme au barbarie
and
Arguments
and Italian
"heretics" such as Carlo Rosselli, with his vision of "liberal socialism").
Lenin's revolutionary novelty consists in the cult of the dogma and the
elevation of the Party to the level of uniquely legitimate interpreter of
the revealed truth (a major distinction with the right-wing revolutionary
totalitarian movements). Indeed, Lenin carried to an extreme the idea of
a privileged relation between "revolutionary theory" and "practice."
The latter substantiates itself in the figure of the presumably infallible
Party, custodian of an omniscience that defines and exorcises any doubt
as a form of treason.
In
opposition to Furet, who was ready to grant Marxism and Lenin–
ism certain legitimacy in their claim to a liberal-democratic pedigree,
Lefort demonstrates that Leninism is inherently inimical to political lib–
erties.
It
is not a deviation from the democratic project, but its direct
and unequivocal opposite. As Tocqueville stated: "To grant the epithet
of democratic to a government that denies political freedom to its citi–
zens is a blatant absurdity." The annihilation of democracy within the
Leninist practice is determined by the nature of the Party as a secular
substitute for the unifying mystique in the political body of the absolute
sovereign (the medieval king).
In
other words, the Leninist model breaks
with the Enlightenment tradition and reasserts the integral homoge–
nization of the social space as a political and pragmatic ideal. There is
therefore no way to democratize Leninist regimes precisely because the
doctrine's original intention is to organize total domination. At the
opposite pole, writes Lefort, "liberal democracy was born from the
refusal of monarchic domination, from the collectively shared discovery
that power does not belong to anybody, that those who exert it do not
incarnate it, being simply the repositories of public authority, in a tem–
porary form.... " Herein lies the essence of the Leninist (or communist)
question: the institution of the monolithic, unique Party that emerges as
a "besieged fortress" after
1903
(the great schism between Bolsheviks
and Mensheviks) and acquires planetary dimensions after
1917.
Marx–
ism, converted and adjusted by Lenin, ceases to be a revolutionary doc–
trine aiming at grasping/conceiving
(begreiffen)
reality, and becomes an
ideological body that requires from militants a discipline of action that
makes them "members of a collective body." Thus, Bolshevism adds
something new to the nineteenth-century revolutionary mythologies: the
inclusion of power in a type of representation that defines the Party as
a magical entity. For understanding the impact of the communist ideas
