The Devil in History

Lessons from Eastern Europe

Any social Utopia which purports to offer a technical blueprint for the perfect society now strikes me as pregnant with the most terrible dangers. I am not saying that the idea of human fraternity is ignoble, naive, or futile; and I don’t think that it would be desirable to discard it as belonging to an age of innocence. But to go to the lengths of imagining that we can design some plan for the whole society whereby harmony, justice and plenty are attained for human engineering is an invitation for despotism. I would, then, retain Utopia as an imaginative incentive… and confine it to that. The point where despotism differs from totalitarianism is the destruction of civil society. But civil society cannot be destroyed until and unless private property, including the private ownership of all the means of production, is abolished.

—Leszek Kolakowski (in George Urban ed., Stalinism)

More than in any other period of human history, individuals in the twentieth century were tempted by the promises of revolutionary messianism rooted in grandiose teleological fantasies imagined by prophets who mostly wrote their manifestos during the previous century.¹ Or to use the formulation of Czech philosopher and dissident Jan Patocka, the last century experienced the rise of “radical super-civilizations” that sought forms analogous to that of a “universal church.” According to him, they were “geared toward the totalizing of life by means of rationalism; we deal with a yearning for a new center, ‘from which it is possible to gradually control all layers all the way to the periphery.’”² From both extreme left and right, the quest for an absolute reshaping of the human condition inspired frantic endeavors to transcend what appeared to be the philistine carcass of liberal institutions and values.³ Many Bolsheviks, including Aleksandr Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and quite likely even Lenin found Nietzsche’s proclamation regarding the advent of the Ubermensch (superman) exhilarating or at least intriguing. This type of influence “touched a deep chord in the Russian psyche that continued to reverberate long after his [Nietzsche’s] initial reception…. Ideas and images derived from his writings were fused, in various ways, with compatible elements in the Russian religious, intellectual, and cultural heritage, and with Marxism.”⁴

In Communism and Fascism, ideology was there to justify violence, sacralize it, and to discard all opposite views as effete, sterile, dangerous, and fundamentally false. In the ideological binary logic (Lenin’s kto-kogo, who-whom principle) there was no room for a middle road: the enemy— always defined by class (or race) criteria—lost all humanity, being reduced to the despicable condition of vermin. Stalinists and Nazis proudly avowed their partisanship and abolished human autonomy through loyalty to the party/leader/dogma. The main purpose of revolutionary ideological commitment was to organize the mental colonization (heteronomy) of individuals, to turn them into enthusiastic builders of the totalitarian utopia. In brief, totalitarianism as a project aiming at complete domination over man, society, economy, and nature, is inextricably linked to ideology.⁵ The ideologies of Communism and Fascism held in common a belief in the plasticity of human nature and the possibility of transforming it in accordance with a utopian blueprint: “What totalitarian ideologies therefore aim at is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society, but the transformation of human nature itself.”⁶ Ideology cut across all regime dynamics, “grounding and projecting action, without which governance, violent action, and socialization were impossible.”⁷ Both Leninism and Fascism have inspired unflinching loyalties, a fascination with the figure of the perfect society, and romantic immersion in collective movements promising the advent of the millennium.⁸

THE ENDURING MAGNETISM OF UTOPIA

Despite Leninism’s decline, the utopian reservoir of humanity has not been completely exhausted: refurbished ideologies have resurfaced, among them populism, chauvinism, and fundamentalism of different shades. The ghost of the future conjured up by young Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto has been replaced with revamped specters of the past, summoned into the present by disconcerted political actors unable to come to terms with the hardships of the democratic project and the challenges of (post)modernity. To the soulless “Europe of butter” lambasted and decried by various neoromantics, they often contrast the myth of the original communal democracy of the agrarian societies. In short, the end of Communism, the revolutions of 1989, and the disturbing Leninist legacies have created a world full of dangers, in which traditional lines of demarcation have completely disintegrated and new forms of radicalism simmer under the carapace of pseudostability. With the breakdown of Leninism a crucial threshold was crossed, but the readiness to indulge in ideological fallacies is not totally extinct. This is the reason for Kolakowski’s wry conclusion to the new epilogue of his masterful trilogy: “No one can be certain whether our civilization will be able to cope with the ecological, demographic, and spiritual dangers it has caused or whether it will fall victim to catastrophe. So we cannot tell whether the present ‘anti-capitalist,’ ‘anti-globalist,’ and related obscurantist movements and ideas will quietly fade away and one day come to seem as pathetic as the legendary Luddites at the beginning of nineteenth century, or whether they will maintain their strength and fortify their trenches.”⁹

Marxism was a protean political movement, but what distinguished it as a movement were its grandiose and ideologically driven political ambitions.¹⁰ According to Jan Patocka, the systematization of man and history, culminating in Marx, made evident “that, in a full working out of the spirit of metaphysics that means man, as historical and as social, placing himself in the position once reserved for the gods and for God, myth, dogma, and theology were reabsorbed into history and flowed into a philosophy that discarded its time-honored name of a simple love of wisdom in order to become a scientific system.”¹¹ Once this scientific pretense ceased to inspire genuine commitment, the spell of Marxism as a promise of earthly salvation started to dissipate. The eclipse of Marxism as a strategy for social transformation ended an age of radicalism and justified a number of reflections regarding the destiny of utopian thought in this century. One can agree with Ferenc Feher’s masterful obituary of “Marxism as politics,” but we still need to discuss Marxism’s utopian component, which Marxism has never acknowledged.¹² On the contrary, Marx and his followers were convinced that they possessed access to the hidden laws of historical development and that their historical waver was meant to result in an immanent kingdom of freedom.

With characteristic nineteenth-century hubris, Marx declared his social theory the ultimate scientific formula, as exact and precise as the algorithms of mathematics or the demonstrations of formal logic. Not to recognize their validity was for Marx, as for his successors, evidence of historical blindness, ideological bias, or “false consciousness,” which were characteristic of those who opposed Marxist solutions to social questions. Prisoners of the bourgeois mentality, alienated victims of ideological mystifications, and non-Marxist theorists—all purveyors of false consciousness—were scorned and dismissed as supporters of the status quo. At the opposite pole, the proletarian viewpoint, celebrated by Marx and crystallized in the form of historical materialism, was thought to provide ultimate knowledge and the recipe for universal happiness. Thanks to proletarian class consciousness, the doctrine maintained, a revolution would occur that would end all forms of oppression. Mankind would undertake the world-historical leap from the realm of necessity (scarcity, injustice, torments) into the realm of freedom (joy, abundance, and equity). This would end humanity’s prehistory and begin its real history. All human reality was thus subordinated to the dialectical laws of development, and history was projected into a sovereign entity, whose diktat was beyond human questioning.

Here lies a fatal methodological error in Marxism: its rendering of history as a gesetzmassig (law-governed) succession of historical formations, and the corollary of this rendering: the dogma of class struggle as the engine of historical progress. In this theory, individuals are nothing more than hostages of forces whose workings they can scarcely understand. This combination of philosophy and myth, so persuasively explored by Robert C. Tucker,¹³ prevented the German radical philosopher and his disciples throughout the decades from grasping the subjective dimension of history and politics. The main difficulty with the Marxian project is its lack of sensitivity to the psychological makeup of mankind. This obsession with social classes—what French sociologist Lucien Goldmann once referred to as the