BOOKS

...Kennan's diary entries and other informal writings are interesting as contemporaneous observations...

...And they refuse to conjure a future where the project of social transformation reduces the multiple voices of politics to a couple of starkly defined alternatives...

...I reflected," Kennan writes in Sketches from a Life, "that if you cannot have this sort of recognition from your own government to ring down your involvement in such a relationship, it is nice to have it at least from the one-time adversary...

...Surprising because this movement is now so visible and because a holy alliance of traditional radicals, neutralist liberals, and neo-conservatives has emerged to keep it out of the most visible journals of political discussion...

...After the suppression of the pro-democracy movement in China, I have learned not to use the word "irreversible," but, in my opinion, Laqueur's assessment is, at the very best, premature...

...And the Soviet Union's best-selling author is Valentin Pikul, whose heroes are all ethnic Russians and whose villains are all foreigners or Jews...

...The code governing this text is one of loss and renewal, division and healing, fragmentation and unification, vice and virtue, fall and redemption...

...The party organizer," he writes, "at once took charge and made a speech about how worried they were about the future, how they trusted Roosevelt, but weren't sure about Truman, and look at this fellow Hearst...

...He writes: "The Soviet Union today is a halfway house between tyranny and freedom...

...by Daniel Schorr In his first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, among a group of American intellectuals at the Soviet Embassy in Washington in December 1987, George Kennan was quite moved when he was singled out by the Soviet leader and greeted warmly as a friend...

...For example, he wrote of the ouster from the Politburo of Boris Yeltsin, but since then Yeltsin has made a triumphant comeback in the new Soviet Parliament, heading a quasi-opposition group...

...Reminding us that Herzen proclaimed more than a century ago, "It is glasnost's turn now," Laqueur cautions us to keep our expectations in check...

...Its drive and unity, he argues, depend on its success in conjuring up a dangerous enemy threatening the very integrity of American life-student radicals, the Soviet Union, or terrorism...

...he, too, repeats a few stock formulae whenever his analysis runs into difficulties...

...A postmodern radicalism idealizes the ambiguity of politics...

...And nowhere does he discuss an emergent movement on the Left within the academy which does contest this code of virtue, citizenship, community, polity...

...William E. Connolly (William E. Connolly, professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of "Politics and Ambiguity" and "Political Theory and Modernity...

...My mind tells me not to dismiss Laqueur, but my feelings remain with Kennan...

...And his sadness showed when he made a trip to Moscow in 1984, standing in the rain at a street crossing after a theater performance...

...Strikes have forced the regime into concessions, and there are signs that workers may be organizing an independent force, as they did in Poland...

...if it failed, it would prompt an authoritarian reaction...

...Politics from this perspective is valued because it is an inherently ambiguous medium which enables the pursuit of common purposes while allowing dissident voices to interrogate hierarchies...

...does not quite conceal a despairing substratum...

...And they fear that crusades to "renew" virtue will feed into established campaigns to extend disciplinary controls into new corners of life...

...Neoconservatism rests on a rejection of the idea of progress...

...As deputy chief of mission in Moscow, Kennan made a trip on the Trans-Siberian Express in June 1945 and managed, after some effort, to engage fellow passengers in conversation...

...Nowhere does Birnbaum contest the fundamental code he shares with his non-liberal adversaries...

...Such radicalism does not yearn for a future of virtue and unity, but welcomes the future disturbance of fixed or naturalized patterns of settlement...

...Why is Birnbaum silent about the most energetic voices on the Left to emerge on the American academic scene since 1975, the heterogeneous voices of the "postmodern Left...

...Laqueur spots other signs of uneven-ness...

...The humans who populate Rawls's society," Birnbaum writes, "are curiously disembodied, isolated selves somehow forced into relationship with one another...

...It is both surprising and understandable that Birnbaum ignores this counter-trend of political thought in the academy...

...It does not hold that we have become too fragmented or empty or estranged or rootless, but that we have become too habituated to settled identities that are dangerous and self-destructive...

...It seeks to pluralize the play of possibilites in a culture which constantly tends toward closure...

...Having been expelled as ambassador by Stalin in 1952, Daniel Schorr was CBS Bureau Chief in Moscow from 1955 to 1957, and he returned to the Soviet capital in 1988 for the Reagan-Gorbachev summit...

...then driven out of the diplomatic service by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, Kennan found irony in this belated recognition from the new Kremlin leader of his sixty-year involvement with the Soviet Union...

...So glasnost under Gorbachev was not exactly a new idea, and its application has been far from uniform...

...Glasnost is presented by Laqueur not as a sudden lurch from a secrecy-ridden past, but as the latest manifestation of an impulse that has long struggled to emerge...

...275 pp...

...The major adversary in Birnbaum's text, however, is not academic liberalism but neoconservativism, which he treats as a sustained exercise in revenge against the radicalism of the late 1960s...

...itself a stage setting, tearing at my silly heartstrings with its silent breath of Russia that was— all so much more meaningful to me than the Russia that is...

...This first comprehensive review of Russia and glasnost is a basically downbeat assessment of a glasnost half full, half empty, and not likely to get much fuller...

...And the postmodern leftists are right when they expose the apolitical bias behind such theories, which yearn for a mythical past where virtue replaced the clash and conflict of politics...

...They skip around the world, from Hamburg, Germany, to Marrakesh, Morocco, but always they come back to Kennan's amour propre, the Soviet Union...

...Its advocates—within feminism, literary analysis, ecological studies, international relations, and political theory—find dangerous similarities between radical appeals to virtue and conservative appeals to virtue...

...The compulsive quality of neoconservative advocacy of optimism...

...It thereby believes that every order, particularly the most virtuous, requires the ventilation of politics...

...To his diary Kennan confided his basic confidence in "this gifted, appealing people, purged by hardship of so much that is vulgar and inane in the softer civilizations, organized and prepared as no great people has ever been before for the building of a decent, rational society...

...With similar facts, George Kennan undoubtedly would have come out with a more sanguine conclusion...

...Among the more ominous developments that he describes in detail are the re-emergence of a chauvinistic Right...

...It suspects that every settled arrangement harbors violence and destructiveness inside its hierarchies...

...He, too, offers a holding action until some new version of radicalism emerges to challenge the present...

...He reflected on a scene "so intensely Russian and so impregnated with the past...

...Amid such symptoms of the Stalin anti-glasnost era, the young diplomat looked out at the Soviet Union, born in one world war and emerging from a second, and tried to reconcile his ambivalence about "one of the world's greatest people, a talented and responsive people," yet "strangely tolerant of cruelty and carelessness," separated from the outside world by "a regime of unparalleled ruthlessness and jealousy...

...He takes aim at liberalism and neoconservativism, the pillars of academic political thought today...

...It is a grim prospect that Laqueur holds out: "Glasnost will be increasingly in danger because it makes governing the country more difficult than in the past...

...What Gorbachev is trying to achieve, he says, is "not openness per se as a supreme value and a right of the people, but openness within a political framework, 'socialism' as defined by the Politburo...

...We may witness further progress toward democracy in the not-too-distant future, but a retreat is also possible, as is the likelihood that the present uneasy equilibrium will prevail for some considerable time...

...One needs to be reminded of the continuum from which glasnost and peres-troika emerged, and how it felt in Stalin's time...

...Wherever he finds emptiness, division, fragmentation, and atomization, he calls for a renewal of virtue, commonality, a revitalized public...

...As though accepting the baton passed on by an aging Slavophile, the tough-minded no-nonsense professor, Walter La-queur, undertakes to explain for us the Russia that is—a Russia full of turmoil and tension, paradoxes and contradictions, long on promise of reform, but short on performance...

...Then suddenly everybody began to look guiltily over his shoulder and the meeting quietly dispersed...

...I wonder if Laqueur would modify his gloomy view of the prospect for political reform in the light of events that have occurred since his book was completed...

...Birnbaum's interpretation has become the standard reading of Rawlsian liberalism by communitarians...

...Reading Kennan before Walter Laqueur (The Long Road to Freedom) is not essential, but it helps...

...Kennan's hope for a "decent, rational society" was not fulfilled under Stalin, as he was able to witness when he returned to Moscow as ambassador...

...His critique draws him close to what can be called the Left's doctrine of radical virtue, which aims to reduce inequality, tame the excesses of the market, and subdue technocratic controls by entering into a new world where the language of virtue, polity, fulfillment, citizenship, and community will finally express the practical life of politics...

...In this scheme, the ambiguity of politics—not liberal neutrality, neoconservative virtue, or radical unity—is the key to the good life...

...Nor do they accept the liberal view that a rational consensus on justice can provide a neutral arbiter of political disputes...

...It is a strange fact," writes Laqueur, "that the Soviet leadership can still afford more glasnost with regard to the present than the past, and this may not change soon...

...Adherents of Pamyat, or Memory, sport fascist-style black shirts...

...Such a view is likely to be dismissed as anarchic...

...We had a lively hour of fraternization...

...But Birnbaum's enemy turns out to be too close for comfort to Birn-baum himself...

...He faults neoconservatism's "reactive, strident character, its compulsive iteration of a few quarter-truths, and its instinctive denial of the possibility of constructing a better future...

...17.95 hardcover, $8.95 paper...

...he, too, invokes an ideal of virtue which he fears has been lost irretrievably, and he, too, fails to conceal the very substratum of despair he condemns in neoconserva-tives...

...Norman Birnbaum sets out to assess academic social theory and, through it, the prospects for radicalism in America...

...There are bound to be clashes and disorder, and this will play into the hands of those who were arguing all along that the Soviet people are not ready now, and will perhaps not be ready for generations to come, for political freedom...

...Aleksandr Herzen, the radical reformer of czarist times, invoked glasnost in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, and Lenin referred to it forty times in his published works...

...Laqueur dismisses openness in the Soviet Union as a "specific Russian phenomenon" which attempts to combine "a non-democratic form of government with a certain degree of cultural freedom," and, since there are no real democratic guarantees, is not irreversible...

...We learn of the unhappiness in family life, the alienation of the young, the growth of vig-ilantism, the large-scale mafia-like gangs, the pervasiveness of alcoholism (alcohol is a factor in 80 per cent of divorces), and the corrosive conflicts among nationalities from the Baltic Sea to Central Asia...

...The postmodern leftists have a point: A politics of transformation, such as Birnbaum proposes, would, if it succeeded, almost certainly usher in a politics of detailed management of life...

...And, contrary to the impression of radical "new thinking" on defense and foreign policy, the author finds that reform in these areas "has not been remotely as striking as glasnost on the domestic front...

...There is much glasnost in journalism, the arts, and economics, but much less in discussion of military and political matters...

...Well, yes...

...Beyond Virtue THE RADICAL RENEWAL: The Politics of Ideas in America by Norman Birnbaum Pantheon...

...Nor under Stalin's successors...

...The dangers are clear enough, but that alarmist prediction is not shared by other observers, scholars, and journalists...

...Schorr, a member of The Progressive's Editorial Advisory Board, currently is senior news analyst for National Public Radio...

...The attack on the university radicals, their influence vastly exaggerated, is a holding operation designed to keep the enemy at bay until reinforcements arrive...

...It is the inertia of social life that threatens to stabilize a set of injustices by treating them as natural, normal, or essential...

...Laqueur's account of what is happening inside the Soviet Union is chilling...

...Understandable because an engagement with these voices would require Birnbaum to give a more affirmative, robust defense of the politics of virtue he seeks to restore...

...After that, Russian inhibitions claimed their own and hardly anyone spoke to me for two days...

...Official warnings against sensationalism and appeals to patriotism suggest an inclination in the Soviet regime to put limits on glasnost, which, in any event, to La: queur's mind, already has its limits...

...All kinds of tensions, national and social, which were suppressed before are coming to the fore...

...We are too settled, this radicalism tells us, in our commitment to economic expansion, gender duality, the demands of state sovereignty, the militarization of international relations, the exploitive orientation to nature, the acceptance of inequality...

...It seeks to politicize fixed identities and to expose the disciplines and sacrifices they impose...

...He yearns for a past which never really existed and will not emerge again: "If we are to reenact, in contemporary terms, the early American belief in a republic of virtue, we shall have to find a new philosophical basis for both social inquiry and politics," he writes...

...One-time adversary" is a phrase that no longer raises many eyebrows, but it is now a new generation of Sovietologists, generally more hard-nosed and less Slavophile, that gropes for an understanding of tumultuous developments in the Soviet Union...

...Birnbaum thus discloses himself to be an egalitarian neoconservative, a neoconservative with radical hope, a neoconservative of the Left...

...But the threat of anarchy, after all, arises in such cultures as Lebanon's and Ireland's, where politics is not open and ambiguous but where totalistic and antagonistic identities compete with each other for hegemony...

...Trotsky remains a villain, the ghost of Stalin has not been completely exorcised, and Lenin remains untouchable...

...Birnbaum begins by dismissing the liberalism of John Rawls in the widely acclaimed A Theory of Justice...