414
PARTISAN REVIEW
in the twentieth century, one cannot simply insist, as Furet does, on the
attraction of the anti-fascist myth, but also on appea ls of regimentation,
what La Boetie called
La servitude voLontaire.
To conclude, it is not enough to say, with Furet, that communism
(Leninism) was an illusion, or together with Malia that it was a "house
of cards." The persistence of totalitarian mentalities is inseparable from
the institutional order created by Bolshevism, and especially the central
role of the Party, including the universe of symbolic representations and
myths that explain the paradoxical nature of the Bolshevik (communist)
engagement. The breakdown of state socia li st regimes does not mean
the end of a certain totalizing yearning to which Leninism tried to
respond (more often than not in destructive, expansionist, terrorist
forms).
It
is thus important to keep in mind the significance of the polit–
ical and symbolic structures of Leninism, the underpinnings that
ensured its success as the worldview of a "despotism without a despot,
a democracy without citizens, of a proletariat without a working-class
movement." No matter how we look into this story, Leninism was not
an accident on the trajectory of modernity, but rather the proof that a
certain threshold of the possible has been transcended and that the
political realm contains as much the temptation of authoritarian regi–
mentation as of civic liberty.
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