33. Costica Bradatan, “Philosophy and Martyrdom: The Case of Jan Patocka,” in In Marx’s Shadow, ed. Bradatan and Oushakine, p. 120.
34. Ibid.
35. Ijabs, “’Politics of Authenticity’ and/or Civil Society,” p. 255.
36. Vaclav Havel, “The Post-Communist Nightmare,” New York Review of Books 27 (May 1993): 8.
37. George Konrad, The Melancholy of Rebirth: Essays from Post-Communist Central Europe, 1989-1994 (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1995), p. 101.
38. Findlay, Caring for the Soul, pp. 141-42.
39. Tucker, Philosophy and Politics, p. 136.
40. Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, N.J., and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 54-55.
41. Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, p. 1212.
42. Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 5-13. For an interesting comparison of Walicki’s approach to other seminal attempts to evaluate the degree of influence of Marxism- Leninism in Soviet politics and systemic dynamics, see David Priestland, “Marx and the Kremlin: Writing on Marxism-Leninism and Soviet Politics after the Fall of Communism,” Journal of Political Ideologies 5, no. 3 (2000): 337-90. For example, Priestland stresses that Walicki noticed a tension between Marx’s concern that man be free from subordination to others and his demand that man be free from dependence on nature. He then inscribes this observation, by comparison to other authors (including N. Robinson, S. Hanson, M. Malia, and M. Sandle), into a larger picture of the multiple dichotomies that characterized Bolshevism: “The conflict between participation and technocracy… the conflict between voluntarism and evolutionary determinism… t he tension between a position which one might call ‘populist radical’… and an ‘elitist radicalism.’” Antonio Gramsci wrote about the tension between fatalism and voluntarism as a permanent feature of revolutionary theory.
43. Claude Lefort, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
44. Neil Robinson, “What Was Soviet Ideology? A Comment on Joseph Schull and an Alternative,” Political Studies 43 (1995): 325-32. For a detailed application of his approach (the telos of radical democratization and Communism vs. the vanguard party), see Neil Robinson, Ideology and the Collapse of the Soviet System (Aldershot: E. Elgar, 1995).
45. Rachel Walker, “Thinking about Ideology and Method: A Comment on Schull,” Political Studies 43 (1995): 333-42; and “Marxism-Leninism as Discourse: The Politics of the Empty Signifier and the Double Bind,” British Journal of Political Science 19 (1989): 161-89.
46. In the fifth chapter (“Melancholy, Utopia and Reconciliation”) of Another Country, Jan-Werner Muller provides an excellent example of the point I am making. The writer Jurek Becker (a former emigre from the GDR) stated that “somehow, across all experiences and beyond all insight, existed the hope that the socialist countries could find another path. That’s over now.” In justifying his vote against reunification, he stated: “The most important thing about the socialist countries is nothing visible, but a possibility. There not everything has been decided like here.” Or Uwe Timm: “One has to remember that socialism in the GDR was an alternative to the FRG, admittedly an ugly, bureaucratically bloated alternative, but still an alternative, and that this ‘real socialism,’ despite all ossification, would have been capable of self-transformation is not a mere assertion. That is demonstrated by the grassroots democratic movements” (my emphasis). Jan-Werner Muller, Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification, and National Identity (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 125; also see pp. 124- 29.
47. Raymond Aron, Memoirs: Fifty Years of Political Reflection (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990), p. 414; Vladimir Tismaneanu, Despre communism: Destinul unei religii politice (Nucjhares: Humanias, 2011).
48. Kolakowski, Main Currents, p. vi.
49. See Marx and Engels, Manifestul Partidului Comunist, ed. Cristian Preda (Bucureti: Ed. Nemira, 1998), p. 150. The volume includes the Manifesto as well as a number of post-1989 reactions to it.
50. For the Tamas-Ple?u exchange, see http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-06-16-tamas-ro.html. In my own exchange with G. M. Tamas, I argued that his espousal of Alain Badiou’s extolment of the “communist hypothesis” amounted to a frivolous ignorance of historical realities and an implicit rejection of bourgeois-liberal modernity. See Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Marxism histrionic (G. M. Tamas & co.),” Revista 22, July 20, 2010, http://www.revista22.ro/articol-8603.html (accessed on February 27, 2010).
51. See Tismaneanu, “Marxism histrionic”; and G. M. Tamas, “Un delict de opinie,” in Revista 22 (Bucharest), July 2-26, 2010, pp. 5-9.
52. Review of The Structural Crisis of Capital by Istvan Meszaros, Monthly Review Press, Feb. 7, 2012, http://www.monthlyreview.org/books/structuralcri-sisofcapital.php, accessed August 24, 2010.
53. For the famous slogan “Gray is beautiful,” see Adam Michnik, Letters from Freedom: Post-Cold War Realities and Perspectives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 317-27. On the relationship between radical ideas and totalitarian experiments, see H.-R. Patapievici, Politice (Bucharest: Humanitas, 1996).
54. I examine these trends in my Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998; paperback edition, 2009).
55. Olivier Mongin, Face au scepticisme: Les mutations du paysage intellectuel ou l’invention de l’intellectuel democratique (Paris: Editions La Decouverte, 1994); in the same vein, Jorge Castaneda emphasized the postutopian transfiguration of radical politics in Latin America.
56. For example, the Budapest School (from old Lukacs to Agnes Heller, Ferenc Feher, Gyorgy Markus, Mihaly Vajda, Janos Kis, Gyorgy Bence), the experiences of Jacek Kuron, Krzysztof Pomian, Leszek Kolakowski, and Zygmunt Bauman, Ernst Bloch’s impact on East Germany’s revisionists, and so on.
57. For example, Carlo Roselli, Norberto Bobbio, Cornelius Castoriadis, Claude Lefort, Edgar Morin, and Jean-Francois Lyotard.
58. See Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), p. 133.
59. Raymond Taras, ed., The Road to Disillusion (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992).
60. Milovan Djilas, Of Prisons and Ideas (San Diego, Calif., and New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984).
61. Walicki advocates a similar approach when he argues that because of the dilution, domestication and of emptying Marxism of its utopian revolutionary aspect, one is bound to aim at, nowadays, a “defamiliarization” of Marxism “by paying proper attention to its millenarian features.” Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the Communist Utopia (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 2.
62. Findlay, Caring for the Soul, p. 132.
63. Vaclav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in The Power of the Powerless, ed. Vaclav Havel et al. (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), pp. 36-37.
64. Agnes Heller, “Toward Post-Totalitarianism,” in Debates on the Future of Communism, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu and Judith Shapiro (London: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 50-55; see Agnes Heller, “Legitimation Deficit and Legitimation Crisis in East European Societies,” in Stalinism Revisited: The Establishment of Communist Regimes in East-Central Europe, ed. Vladimir Tismaneanu (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2009), pp. 143-60.
65. Leszek Kolakowski, “Totalitarianism and Lie,” Commentary (May 1983) p.
