Memoir of an Ideologue
DALLIN, ALEXANDER
Memoir of an Ideologue The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century By François Furet Translated by Deborah Furet Chicago. 596 pp. $35.00. Reviewed...
...It is also distinctively "French" in its intellectual style and excursions...
...This underscores his excessive focus throughout on the "intellectuals," rather than political reality...
...What we have learned since 1991 surely confirms a greater complexity than Furet would admit...
...There are long asides on personalities as varied as Willi Munzenberg, Elie Halévy, György Lukacs, and Waldemar Gurian: They are superfluous and entertaining and illustrative of his view of the role of individuals and their ideas...
...During Leonid I. Brezhnev's reign the Soviet state is said to have been in its least legitimate phase, because it was in the hands of a bureaucracy of corrupt old men...
...Since Furet does not recognize the evolution of "bourgeois society" from the primitive stereotype that he works with, he never considers the possibilities of regulatory power and a social safety net...
...Hence this book, published in France several years ago...
...Communism, he believes, was seen as scientific and in step with history...
...Furet adopts the snide caricature of American Sovietology, andmore broadly social science (essentially Martin Malta's indictment...
...Nowhere does Furet examine the fundamental differences between Bolshevism and fascism—surprisingly for one who takes ideology as seriously as he does (and in the process exaggerates fascism's intellectual appeal...
...The end of World War II, in Furet's view, was a political victory for the Communist idea (despite the fact that military contests are not over ideas...
...Never mind that Leninism took shape earlier in the century, and that in contrast to the French Revolution (the author's lifelong central interest), World War I hardly inspired succeeding generations...
...The "illusion" of the title is the gap between the perception and the reality of the Soviet experience...
...But it is hard for him to demonstrate the victory of Communism in Western Europe (China and the rest of the world hardly exist in his Eurocentric account...
...His picture of Western individualism and the consumer society, for instance, leads him to assert that the West did not care about the extermination of the Jews...
...It is a formidable tome, very much the work of a skilled historian, with a vast and impressive bibliographic apparatus...
...He had been a Communist after World War II, then broke with the French party after Stalin's death and shifted to a no-nonsense anti-Soviet stance...
...Soviet-style Communism was compatible with nationalism and with some private enterprise, Furet contends, but never with a basic revision of its ideology or with any political liberty...
...One of Furet's pet themes, hatred of the bourgeoisie, is yet another link between the two...
...Chacun à son goût...
...In the end, Furet is as unhappy about the West as he was bitter about the Soviet Union...
...Time and again, Furet hammers home the kinship between Bolshevism and fascism: They "gave rise to one another," made a religion of power, and were tyrannical party-states...
...The bourgeois system "produces inequality unceasingly—more material inequality than any other known form of society...
...François Furet, who died in 1997, was an eminent French historian, a prolific author and a member of the select Académie Française...
...They sought to see the Soviet Union in a comparative context with other societies, exploring elements of pluralism within it whose existence became amply apparent in the Gorbachev years...
...As has been true of so many other ex-Communiste, Furet foundhrmself propelled to the opposite end of the political spectrum in regard to the USSR, but unlike many others he maintained and gloried in the impulses and values that made him a Communist in the first place...
...His book offers a passionate, elaborate and sadly outdated account of capitalist culture...
...More than that, the great secret of the "complicity" between them was the existence of that common enemy—democracy...
...The only choices after 1945 were American democracy and Soviet-style Communism, he says, and the United States "was too permeated with Christian faith and too confident of the spirit of free enterprise" to attract the intellectual children of the French Revolution...
...We are told, for instance, that the genesis of both Bolshevism and fascism is to be found in World War I, which "played the same generative role in the 20th century as the French Revolution did in the 19th...
...This condition, Furet concludes, "is too austere and contrary to the spirit of modern societies [whatmodern societies?] to last...
...Democracy, in his use of the term, "creates the need for a world beyond the bourgeoisie and beyond capital, a world in which a genuine human community can flourish...
...But then, his image of the West is hardly less stereotypical...
...To him, capitalists are symbolized by money and mediocrity: "It is money that unites them against the prejudices of the aristocrats, the jealousy of the poor, the contempt of the intellectuals, the past and the present, and expels them from the future...
...Furet is prepared to concede that under Nikita S. Khrushchev the Soviet Union moved from totalitarianism to being a police state, although he ignores the fact that this implies a redefinition of totalitarianism at variance with its classic model...
...Having totally given up on the Soviet experiment...
...The Past of an Illusion would be a more accurate rendering of the original French title, Le passé d'une illusion) Furet's well-informed survey of Soviet history is an uncompromising story that allows no shadings, no doubts, no questions...
...It is some of his maj or interpretive themes that constitute the challenging part of this book...
...Finally, he has no time for the Mikhail S. Gorbachev years, which he sees as a fraudulent attempt to wrap Bolshevism in a synthesis with liberal-democratic pluralism...
...The collapse of Communism left the world (read Western European Leftist intellectuals) with no alternative to the bourgeois world, which is not only unjust but lacks any vision of a better future...
...Reviewed by Alexander Dallin Professor emeritus of international relations, Stanford University Another version of The God That Failed...
...Specialists will find little here that is new...
...After all, nowhere did the Communists come to power except by means of Soviet troops...
...But then he also argues that "fascism was in many ways a response to the threat of the proletarian revolution"—a very debatable assertion...
...Modest in its transparently autobiographical passages, it is ambitious in seeking to be a history of 20thcentury ideas—at least of French Leftists and like-minded Western intellectuals...
...No, this book aspires to be both more and less...
Vol. 82 • June 1999 • No. 7
