Postwar

earlier demolitions of the Soviet myth by Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine.[262]

But timing was all. Intellectual critics of Communism had never been lacking; however their impact had for many decades been blunted by a widespread desire in Western Europe (and, as we have seen, in Eastern Europe through the 1960s) to find some silver lining, however dim, in the storm cloud of state socialism that had rolled across much of the continent since it first broke upon Russia in 1917. ‘Anti-Communism’, whatever its real or imputed motives, suffered the grievous handicap of appearing to challenge the shape of History and Progress, to miss the ‘bigger picture’, to deny the essential contiguity binding the democratic welfare state (however inadequate) to Communism’s collectivist project (however tainted).

That is why opponents of the post-war consensus were so marginalized. To suggest, as Hayek and others had done, that market-restraining plans for the common good, albeit well-intentioned, were not just economically inefficient but also and above all the first step on the road to serfdom, was to tear up the road map of the twentieth century. Even opponents of Communist dictatorship like Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Albert Camus or Isaiah Berlin, who tried to insist upon the distinction between social-democratic reforms for the common benefit and party dictatorships established in the name of a collectivist myth, appeared to many of their ‘progressive’ critics to echo and thus serve partisan political allegiances taken up in the Cold War.

Accordingly, they fell foul of a widespread reluctance, especially on the part of the Sixties generation, to abandon the radical catechism. It was one thing to sneer knowingly at Stalin, now long dead and anyway condemned by his own heirs. It was quite another to acknowledge that the fault lay not in the man but the system. And to go further, to impute responsibility for the crimes and misdemeanors of Leninism to the project of radical utopianism itself was to mine the very buttresses of modern politics. As the British historian E. P. Thompson, something of a cult figure to a younger generation of ‘post-Communist Marxists’, wrote accusingly to Leszek Kolakowski (after Kolakowski published a damning indictment of Soviet Communism in the wake of 1968): your disenchantment is a threat to our Socialist faith.

By 1973, however, that faith was under serious assault not just from critics but from events themselves. When The Gulag Archipelago was published in French, the Communist daily newspaper l’Humanite dismissed it, reminding readers that since ‘everyone’ already knows all about Stalin, anyone rehashing all that could only be motivated by ‘anti-Sovietism’. But the accusation of ‘anti-Sovietism’ was losing its force. In the wake of the Soviet invasion of Prague and its repressive aftermath, and of reports filtering out of China about the Cultural Revolution, Solzhenitsyn’s root and branch condemnation of the whole Communist project rang true—even and perhaps especially to erstwhile sympathizers.

Communism, it was becoming clear, had defiled and despoiled its radical heritage. And it was continuing to do so, as the genocide in Cambodia and the widely-publicized trauma of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’ would soon reveal.[263] Even those in Western Europe—and they were many—who held the United States largely responsible for the disasters in Vietnam and Cambodia, and whose anti-Americanism was further fuelled by the American-engineered killing of Chile’s Salvador Allende just three months before the publication of The Gulag Archipelago, were increasingly reluctant to conclude as they had once done that the Socialist camp had the moral upper hand. American imperialism was indeed bad—but the other side was worse, perhaps far worse.

At this point the traditional ‘progressive’ insistence on treating attacks on Communism as implicit threats to all socially-ameliorative goals—i.e. the claim that Communism, Socialism, Social Democracy, nationalization, central planning and progressive social engineering were part of a common political project—began to work against itself. If Lenin and his heirs had poisoned the well of social justice, the argument ran, we are all damaged. In the light of twentieth-century history the state was beginning to look less like the solution than the problem, and not only or even primarily for economic reasons. What begins with centralized planning ends with centralized killing.

That, of course, is a very ‘intellectual’ sort of conclusion, but then the impact of the retreat from the state was felt most immediately by intellectuals—appropriately enough, since it was intellectuals who had been most zealous in promoting social improvement from above in the first place. As Jiri Grusa, the Czech writer, was to observe in 1984: ‘It was we [writers] who glorified the modern state.’ By its very nature, modern tyranny—as Ignazio Silone noted—requires the collaboration of intellectuals. It was thus altogether appropriate that it was the disaffectionof Europe’s intellectuals from the grand narrative of progress that triggered the ensuing avalanche; and somehow fitting that this disaffection was most marked in Paris, where the narrative itself had first taken intellectual and political shape two centuries earlier.

France in the Seventies and Eighties was no longer Arthur Koestler’s ‘burning lens of Western Civilization’, but French thinkers were still unusually predisposed to engage universal questions. Writers and commentators in Spain or West Germany or Italy in these years were much taken up with local challenges—though the terrorist threat that preoccupied them carried implications of its own for the discrediting of radical utopianism. Intellectuals in the UK, never deeply touched by the appeal of Communism, were largely indifferent to its decline and thus kept their distance from the new Continental mood. In France, by contrast, there had been widespread and longstanding local sympathy for the Communist project. As antiCommunism gathered pace in French public discussion, abetted by the steady decline in the Communist Party’s vote and influence, it was thus fuelled by local recollection and example. A new generation of French intellectuals transited with striking alacrity out of Marxism, driven by a sometimes unseemly haste to abjure their own previous engagement.

In condemning the distortions of radical utopianism, the young Parisian ‘new philosophers’ of the mid- Seventies like Andre Glucksmann or Bernard-Henri Levy were in most respects unoriginal. There was little in Glucksmann’s Les Maitres Penseurs—published to universal acclaim in March 1977—that Raymond Aron had not said better in his Opium des Intellectuels twenty two years earlier. And there was nothing in Levy’s Barbarie a Visage Humain, which appeared two months after Glucksmann’s essay, which French readers could not have found in Albert Camus’s L’Homme revolte. But whereas Camus’s essay was cuttingly dismissed by Jean-Paul Sartre when it came out in 1951, Levy and Glucksmann were influential bestsellers. Times had changed.

The parricidal quality of this local intellectual earthquake is obvious. Its ostensible target was the calamitous Marxist detour in Western thought; but much of its fire was directed above all at those dominant figures of post- war intellectual life, in France and elsewhere, who had peered across the touchlines of History, cheering on the winners and politely averting their eyes from their victims. Sartre, by far the best known of these fellow-travelers, himself fell from favour in these years, even before his death in 1980, his creative legacy sullied by his apologetics first for Soviet Communism, later for Maoism.[264]

The climate change in Paris extended beyond a settling of scores across a generationof engaged intellectuals. In 1978 Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery appeared in French for the first time, the harbinger of a steady absorption into the French mainstream of a whole corpus of ‘Anglo- American’ scholarship in philosophy and the social sciences of which the local intellectual culture had for decades remained in near ignorance. In the same year the historian Francois Furet published his path-breaking Penser la Revolution Francaise, in which he systematically dismantled the ‘revolutionary catechism’ through which the French had for many decades been taught to understand their country and its past.

In this ‘catechism’ as Furet dissected it, the French Revolution had been the urmoment of modernity: the confrontation that triggered France’s division into opposing political cultures of Left and Right, ostensibly determined by the class identities of the antagonists. That story, which rested upon the twin pillars of early- nineteenth century liberal optimism and a Marxist vision of radical social transformation, had now, in Furet’s account, run into the ground—not least because Soviet Communism, the revolutionary heir-presumptive in this morality tale of purposeful radical transformation, had retroactively polluted the whole inheritance. The French Revolution, in Furet’s words, was ‘dead’.

The political implications of Furet’s thesis were momentous, as its author well understood. The failings of Marxism as a politics were one thing, which could always be excused under the category of misfortune or circumstance. But if Marxism were discredited as a Grand Narrative—if neither reason nor necessity were at work in History—then all Stalin’s crimes, all the lives lost and resources wasted in transforming societies under state direction, all the mistakes and failures of the twentieth century’s radical experiments in introducing Utopia by