From Revolution to Krisis

8/3/2019 From Revolution to Krisis

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From Revolution to Krizis: The Transcending Revolutions of 1989-91Author(s): Richard SakwaReviewed work(s):Source: Comparative Politics, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Jul., 2006), pp. 459-478Published by: Ph.D. Program in Political Science of the City University of New YorkStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20434012 .

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From Revolution ToKrizisThe Transcending Revolutions of 1989-91

Richard Sakwa

"Wars and revolutions...have thus far determined the physiognomy of the twentiethcentury."' So Hannah Arendt begins her study of revolutions. Wars continue to bedetermining, but the nature of revolutions has changed, as has the relationshipbetween war and revolution. An exemplary case is the revolution of 1989-91 inRussia and eastern Europe. Vladimir Tismaneanu wrote: "it is now obvious that thehistorical cycle inaugurated by World War I, the Bolshevik seizure of power inRussia inOctober 1917 and the long European ideologicalwarfare that followedha[s] come to an end."2 There has been a long, if unilluminating, discussion over thenature of the "revolutions" of these years. Timothy Garton Ash coined the term"refolution" to indicate the combination of reformist political style and the profoundly revolutionaryconsequences of the events.3 JiirgenHabermas dubbed theprocess "the rectifying revolution," n attemptto overcome the distortionsof "actually existing socialism" while recognizing that the logic of capitalist accumulationbattered down the "Chinese walls" (as the Communist Manifesto described the waythat cheap commodities forced all nations to adopt the capitalist mode of production)of postcapitalist as well precapitalist societies.4 Leslie Holmes characterized them as"rejective" revolutions, and in the case of eastern Europe they are doubly rejective,repudiating not only Communism but also the Soviet domination with which itwasassociated.5

This article will discuss some aspects of the "epochality" of the fall ofCommunism, in particular, the repudiation at the social level of revolution as anemancipatory act. Epochality is defined as the eschatology of endowing parochialevents with universal significance. The emergence during the eighteenth century of adiscourse of progressive social change based on a universal model of rationality anddevelopment applicable to all societies was clearly an event of epochal significance.This ideology in the hands of some Enlightenment thinkers (but certainly far fromall) was combined with a revolutionary approach to social change, that the act ofrupture itself had a liberating and progressive political effect. For want of a betterterm, it can be called Enlightenment revolutionism.In thenineteenth century thisidea of political revolution was combined with a social agenda, above all by Karl

Marx, based on the idea that through an act of political rupture society could achieve459


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its emancipationnot only from oppression but also from subordinationto contingency in the very broadest sense. This ideology can be called emancipatory revolutionism, and itwas the project that in one way or another Lenin and Stalin sought toimplement in Russia and that after the second world war developed in easternEurope. By the end of the twentieth century, however, the notion of emancipatoryrevolutionism lost whatever popular resonance it once might have had in the countries that claimed to be building Communism on its basis. Thus, the events of1989-91, when one eastern European country after another shook off theCommunist incubus, represented he overthrownot only of a specific power systembut also the repudiation of the social philosophy of emancipatory revolution onwhich it was based. Itwas this repudiation, as much as the geopolitical rearrangement of the international order, that rendered these events epochal.

Three Circles of RevolutionEpochal thinking since the ancient world is characterized by a sense of the unfoldingof time, but in the modern era it became allied to a progressive understanding ofsocial change. The Russian revolution was the first large-scale attempt to implement

Marxist revolutionary theory, the first attempt to build a society based on the rejectionof western modernity while trying to fulfill it.This utopian project displacedpolitical discourse from pragmatic reason towards a political practice that generatedclosure and exclusivity.6 The pursuit of transcendent and universal (epochal) goalsunderminedhuman specificity and nationalparticularism.Evenwhen Soviet leaders

were most "national" in practice, the tension between universalism and particularismdid not disappear. The pursuit of emancipatory revolutionism provoked a permanentcrisis of the regime. In The End of the Communist Revolution, R. V Daniels detailsthis process in a chapter entitled "The Long Agony of the Russian Revolution."7 Neil

Harding also talks in terms of "the Marxist-Leninist detour."8 In the end, MikhailGorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU)between 1985 and 1991 and initiator at that time of what he called perestroika(restructuring), attempted to put an end to revolutionism while retaining the emancipatory core of Marxism, but this combination (which harked back to the PragueSpringof 1968) ultimatelyfailed.

The Communist revolution can be classified as an experiment, and the various"detours" and "agonies" associated with it suggested that the experiment was a failure.9 The permanent crisis of the regimes and their ultimate dissolution certainlybetoken failure, but the roots of the collapse lie not only in specific inadequacies ofperformance and adaptivity to changing global circumstances, but also in a deepercontradiction arising from the combination of Enlightenment revolutionism and theemancipatory agenda. To understand precisely what ended in 1989-91 it is necessary

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to disaggregate threeconceptionsof revolution,each of which representsa theoryofpolitics and a concept of the epoch. Only by understanding the nature of emancipatory revolutionism as a political practice can one begin to comprehend the reason forits failure.

Naturalistic Cyclicity Medieval messianism's vision of the future was clear andineluctable: the final judgment and the end of the world. In the seventeenth centurythis vision gave way to a general concept of revolution as circularity, just as

Copernicus in his De revolutionibus orbium caelestium in 1543 had noted the circularmovement of the planets and the stars. Astronomy, and its social manifestation inthe form of astrology, introduced the transhistorical concept of revolution into thepopular mind, as an infinite turn of the wheel of fate in individual lives and the riseand fall of constitutions in public life.10 Revolution would give way to restoration, asClarendon noted in the case of the reestablishment of themonarchy in the person ofCharles II in 1660. Naturalistic cyclicity as a form of revolution (the turn of thewheel) is passive, reactive, and contingent. The next two types of revolution soughtto transcend precisely the tyranny of the past, inherited authority, and ascriptiveidentities.

Enlightenment Revolutionism Modernity is associatedwith a certain uniformquality of time that develops towards an unknown but usually improved version ofthe future. The naturalistic cycles of the rise and fall of empires, states, and constitutions gave way to a new concept of revolution as an instrument of progressive socialchange. The concept thus gained a new meaning. As Koselleck notes: "The conceptof 'revolution' is itself a linguistic product of modernity."Il Koselleck's translatorsummarizes the shift as follows.

Enlightenment rationalism raised the prospect of unending progress and human improvement, and thisvision was transformed into a future, realizable utopia through its articulation in the political programof the French and, later, European revolutions...society was now perceived as accelerating toward anunknown and unknowable future, but within which was contained a hope of the desired utopian fulfilment. These utopias and the hopes embodied in them in turn became potential guarantees of their ownfulfilment, laying the basis for the transformation of modern conflict into civil war.12

The logic of revolution as civil war was precisely the one repudiated by Gorbachevduring perestroika, and he thereby repudiated themodern notion of revolution itself.He did not, however, repudiate the notion of a humane and democratic socialism; itwas revolutionary socialism based on civil war that he sought to transcend. The passage of time retained a progressive element, and thus he sought to prevent a return tothecontingencyof naturalisticcyclicity.

The French revolutionis the first trulygreatmodern revolution.13 hat made itgreat was the appearance of Enlightenment revolutionism.14 Its exemplary exponent

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was theMarquis de Condorcet.15 He sought to demonstrate "by appeal to reason andfact that nature has set no term to the perfection of human faculties; that the perfectability of man is truly indefinite; and that the progress of this perfectability, fromnow onwards independent of any power that might wish to halt it, has no other limitthan the durationof the globe."16Condorcet's project called for "the destructionofall historical civilizations and the standardization of mankind according to the pattern of the Paris intellectual."17 As he put it inProgress of theHuman Spirit, custom

was to be replaced by reason, and the task of the intellectual was to act as no morethan the acid corroding all obstacles to modernization, to which modernity wasreduced.ForCondorcet,moreover: "Theword 'revolutionary'an be applied only torevolutions whose aim is freedom."18 Although violence was not eschewed, itwouldbe subordinated to the attempt to sweep away the old and to create a new worldorder. 19

There was still some way to go before the traditional concept of a revolution as ametaphor for the cyclical "ups and downs of human destiny," without law and legitimacy but based on character and fate, gave way to the idea of revolution as an irresistible instrument of human reason and progress, but amajor step had been taken. 20The French revolution inauguratedmodern history and, perhapsmore importantly,themodem concept of history, above all formulated by Hegel's view that philosophical absolutes were now revealed in the realm of human affairs. It is odd in this context that Kojeve should have taken Hegel's arguments to suggest the end of history; it

was, in fact, the beginning. Historicism, the view that history is both knowable andcontrollable, was born.21 While repudiating the historicism implicit inMarxian revolutionary socialism, Francis Fukuyama only succumbs to the more profound historicism embedded inEnlightenmentnotions of progressand humandevelopment.22Emancipatory Revolutionism Enlightenment revolutionhad provided the chargethat provoked the permanent civil war of utopian change, but itwas the emancipatory revolutionism of Marxian socialism that provided itwith specific social content.If Enlightenment revolution was highly political, in the hands of Marx and his followers it became "socialized," with "the political" itself becoming little more than anepiphenomenon of social processes and the logic of the emancipatory act itself.23The whole superstructure of law, individual freedom, and the state was reduced to nomore than an exploitative mode of production.24 The power of the Russian revolutionin 1917 was derived in part from the coincidence of the Enlightenment and emanci

patory revolutions inwhich the political and the social were fused. It proved difficultthroughout the rest of the Soviet experience to differentiate between what was political and what was social.Marxian revolutionary socialism was a variety of a broader species, Enlightenmentrevolutionism, but deepened to encompass all aspects of the social. Revolutionary

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socialistideologydrew liberally romtheEnlightenment erspective f progress,deculturation, and denationalization but added to it an emancipatory agenda that sought toliberate the individual from the tyranny of time itself.25Both Raymond Aron and Robert

C. Tucker note theway thatMarxism sought to provide a secular and materialist idiomfor traditionalmillenarian aspirations.26 istory transcends henaturalisticcycle ofhubris and nemesis and moves towards its denouement in a moment of transformation.As John Gray puts it: "Marxian communism is a secular version of Christian eschatology, inwhich the promise of universal salvation is translated into a programme of universal human emancipation."27 Lenin added a distinctive political style thatArfon Reeshas called "revolutionary achiavellism."28 he paradoxof Leninismwas ultimatelythat it failed to sustain the emancipatory elements of Marxism while ruthlessly implementing thepolitical aspectsof Enlightenmentrevolutionism nd the social aspectsofemancipatoryevolutionism.

The destructive storm launched by Lenin after October 1917 failed even to reachthe level of "the Paris intellectual" but was patterned after the standards of a deracinated "Russian" ntellectualwith a severebehaviorialdisorder.29 alicki has recently demonstrated how close the Bolshevik revolution remained to the basic Marxistvision, above all the destruction of commodity production and all that it entailed.30Similarly, Erik van Ree argues that Stalin remained recognizably and firmly withintheMarxist tradition, stressing in particular that both Jacobinism and Bolshevism

were "important branches" of the Enlightenment tradition.31 David Hoffman alsostresses the Enlightenment features of Stalinism, notably the attempt to achieve arational and harmonious social order.32Of course, Daniels is quite right to argue thatitwould be mistaken to attribute "all the misery of the revolution.. .to the wrongheaded ideas of revolutionaries whose thinking supposedly traces back to theEnlightenment and the hubris of rational intervention in the affairs of society."33Revolutions are indeed more complex than that, reflecting complex patterns of historical development and attempts to overcome specific social and political crises andat the same time evolve in response to changing circumstances.Because of its ideological roots,Koselleck consideredthe revolution,defined as"civil war," as "endemic, self-generating and, in principle, endless."34 Itwas considered endless for the simple reason that the social contradictions that provoked therise of emancipatory socialism had not only not been resolved in the "actually existing" socialist revolutions, but in principle could not be resolved. This condition ofendemic civil war ended with the dissolution of Communist power in the Soviet

Union, not because the solution had been found, but because technological andsocial developments (above all in the sphere of information and communications)renderedemancipatory revolutionism structurallyobsolete. These twomodernistcycles were transcended during perestroika. The putative restoration of naturalisticcyclicity, however,provokedproblemsof itsown.

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The Transcendence of RevolutionismEnlightenment revolutionism and its emancipatory socialist offspring appeared tohave exhausted themselves intellectually even before they expired as a political

movement. From Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre to Max Weber, EduardBernstein,Karl Popper,andmany others, theEnlightenmentnotion of revolutionandits emancipatoryversionwere accompaniedby a sophisticatedand explicitly antirevolutionary ideology.Bernstein's revisionismrepudiatedapocalypticconceptions thatcapitalismwould collapse because of its inherenteconomic contradictions,whilereasserting the centrality of democracy in the socialist project and the unity of endsand means, which meant giving up on the idea of a "final goal."35 In The Protestant

Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Weber criticized the limitations of the "intellectualtools" of Marxism, and above all condemned the political strategy of modernizationit advanced.36Inmethodological terms,Weber rejected theMarxist hierarchy of

determinations in history, and his analysis of the development of bureaucratic paternalism, "a social order inwhich maximum regulation, instrumental reason andimpersonalityhad triumphed t the expense of individualresponsibility," edhim tobelieve that socialism "was poised to intensify this system rather than to abolishit."37 Rather than representing the cutting edge of modernity, revolutionism as a

mode of action and political discourse, inWeber's view, itself became archaic andrepresented hegreatestobstacle to social self-regeneration.

Fundamental critiques of the ideology of emancipatory revolutionism had developed in Russia even before the revolution. The epochal significance of the Vekhi(Landmarks) collection of essays of 1909 was that for the first time in such a formal

manner a group of the Russian intelligentsia, many of whom had been sympatheticto socialist aspirations, repudiated both the concept and the content of revolution.38

A century of Russian political thinking was dramatically reversed, but only for asmall group.39 For most socialists, as F. Stepun put it, the revolution was idealized"as a kind of dazzling archangel, whose sudden appearance had brought happiness toRussia."40The critiqueof revolutionary hilosophy and thephilosophyof revolution

was developed in a later book, Iz glubiny (De Profundis-From theDepths) of 1918,in which some of the same authors reflected on the terrible consequences of theintelligentsia's thirst for revolution.41 In that tradition Iz pod glyb (From under the

Rubble), published at the height of Leonid Brezhnev's stagnation, called for thereassertion of moral values against the incompetent cynicism of a decayed revolutionism.42

The avatars of perestroika drank deeply at the fountain of critiques of revolutionism and its moral practices.43 Perhaps most surprising is not that they came to repudiate revolutionary practices, but that it took them so long. The politburo memberAlexander Yakovlev, the intellectual force behind Gorbachev's reforms, has outlined

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his views in numerous works that together represent perhaps the most sustained andintelligentcritiqueofMarxist-Bolshevik revolutionism.44nhis addresson theoccasion of the two hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution in July1989,Yakovlev not only argued that the USSR should adopt the separation of powersand an independent judiciary, but he also condemned the Bolsheviks' romanticizationof revolutionary iolence as opening the door to Stalin's terror.45hroughout,heinsisted that above all perestroika had been a "revolution of conscience."46 Manyother leaders of the period noted the gulf between their public pronouncements andtheir inner beliefs. A deep gulf had opened up between the system's core and operating ideologies.

Gorbachev was one of the first to realize that the choice was indeed betweenreformand revolution, n themost profoundsenseof political philosophy, ethics, andpolitical practice. He sought to overcome the gulf between ends and means and thusto overcome the double consciousness.Gorbachev's antirevolutionwas integrative.

Gorbachev sought to "remoralize" politics, and thus he repudiated Lenin's instrumental class-centered view of morality and Stalin's organicist view of society.Gorbachev sought to return to the agenda of the Enlightenment in its Kantian version, to strip the revolution of some of its social content to allow the language ofindividualrights to be relegitimated nSoviet discourse.He tried to purge emancipatoryrevolutionism f its distortionswhile drawingon theuniversalprogressivismofEnlightenment revolutionism.Gorbachev's revolutionwas cleansing, to remove thedeformations and accretions of the operating ideology to allow a return to the coreideas.However, the cleansing process came into contradictionwith his integrativeagenda, since integration in the event turned out to be something much larger thansimply a return to core principles. His attempt to put an end to the permanent civil

war inherent in emancipatory revolutionism transcended the language of class politics but failed to find an adequate revalidated nation or people, or indeed individualsocial subject, on which to base his integrative postrevolutionary politics. Itwas histragedy that the dissolution of Communism as a political order was accompanied bythe disintegration of the Soviet Union as a state. This coincidence was in part an outcome of a long-term economic crisis, but itwas farmore than this.47

Gorbachev questioned "Marx's formula that revolutions are the locomotives ofhistory" and proclaimed that "I renounce revolution as a means of solving problems."48 In its place he adopted a policy of evolutionary reform, although couched inthe early days of perestroika in the rhetoric of revolutionism. He insisted, for example, in his 1987 book that "perestroika is a revolution."49 By the time of the twentyeighth party congress in 1990 the CPSU was describing itself as "the party ofnational consensus."50lthough stilldefending the "socialistchoice,"theconceptofrevolution as civil war had been decisively repudiated. Unlike his Czech colleagueand long-time friend, Zdenek Mlynar, who after the crushing of the Prague Springunderstood that itwould be impossible to devise a democratic variant of Leninism,

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Gorbachev remained loyal to within-system reform and the modernization ofLeninism.5' Gorbachev envisaged perestroika as the repudiation of the logic of thesocialist revolution while trying to remain true to the spirit of democratic socialism.52 By the summer of 1988 at the latest Gorbachev was committed to dismantlingtheCommunist system.53As Gorbachev's translatorputs it, "Gorbachevand hissmall group of supporters in the Soviet leadership had set out to achieve revolutionary changes-both in the country itself and in its relationship with the outsideworld-by using evolutionarymethods."54Gorbachev'sadviser,Anatolii Chernyaev,however, goes too far when he argues:

All epochal changes in thehistory of humanity areprefigured by powerful ideological currents,massmovements, influentialorganizationsor political parties....Nothing like thiswas at Gorbachev's disposal.He alone did it.And he alone decided on it, placing himself at great risk, putting indoubt thesuccessfulpoliticalandmaterial prospects thatawaitedhim.55

The revolution as an ideology and set of political practices had been thoroughlyrefuted long before, but it lived on in a social order that oscillated between conservatism and reform, both elements of which only confirmed the crisis in which itfound itself. 56Gorbachev's genius lay in the recognition of the depth of this crisis,and he had the moral and political courage to act on this knowledge. He did so, however, in a manner that caused maximum confusion because of his continued adherence to Enlightenment revolutionism and neo-Leninist principles and his cleansingstrategy, which came ever more into contradiction with the real transcendence ofthese ideas that had taken place among large sections of society, above all the intelligentsia.57 Only sections of the bureaucracy remained loyal to a residual Leninism,and thus objective pressures drove Gorbachev into alliance with parts of the nomenklatura elite at the very time that he was repudiating the principles on which the ruling status of that elite was based. Out of this situation emerged the almost incompre

hensible confusion of the winter of discontent of 1990-9 1.

TheAntirevolutions asTranscending RevolutionsFrom this argument it can be suggested that the end of the Communist era entailed atheoretical shift affecting not only former Communist countries but also the wider

world.58 It represented a turning point no less profound than 1789 or 1917. The significance of the new epoch and the role of eastern Europe in establishing it has,however, been denigrated by almost every major commentator on the issue.Habermas argued that not a single theoretical innovation came out of easternEurope.59 Claus Offe stressed the untheoretical nature of these revolutions.60 In hislast book the historian of the French revolution, Francois Furet, asserted that "noth

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ing else is visible in the ruins of the communist societies other than the familiarrepertoire f liberaldemocracy."61hese commentatorsmiss the largersignificanceof the onset of postcommunism. The final phase of the transcendence ofCommunism brought into play a rich tradition thatwas anything but untheoretical orbereft of ideas. The logic of the "antirevolution" has launched an era in which thefamiliar landmarks of politics have been swept away. The transcendence of

Communism opened up the era of postcommunism that is anything but derivativeand retrograde. The new period is marked by a return to naturalistic cyclicity, but itopens the door to a fourth phase in our understanding of historical time.

Antirevolutions The transcending revolutions were part of the logic of what maybe called antirevolutions at the end of the whole period of modern development.Alain Touraine has argued (echoing Condorcet) that "the idea of revolution is at theheart of theWestern representationfmodernization,"based on theaffirmation that"modernity had to be produced solely by the force of reason, and that nothing shouldresist thatuniversal inspiration hichwould destroyall social andcultural traditions,all beliefs, privileges and communities."62his rationalcapitalisticandwestern-centered view of modernization became dominant, and even today it is difficult toenvisage an alternative, even less with the failure of the Communist and mostnationalistically nspiredmodernization processes.In the past thosewho opposed revolutionswere called counterrevolutionaries,term coined by Condorcet and applied by the Bolsheviks to define their opponents intheirown terms.63The revolutionwas everything, and everythingwas conducted

within its frame of reference. The concept of revolution, in the French and Russianrevolutions, was one of the main forms in which the tyranny was sustained. Theevents of 1989-91, however, moved beyond the discourse of revolutionary thinkingthat kept the people in thrall and precisely in this sought freedom. To borrow Josephde Maistre's distinction, the rejection of revolutionary socialism was not "a contraryrevolution" a counterrevolution, arrowlydefined), but "the contraryof revolution"(opposed to the revolutionary process in its entirety).64 The former found few takers

while the latter triumphed. Arendt was quite wrong to comment that de Maistre'sstatement "has remained what itwas when he pronounced it in 1796, an empty witticism."65 In fact, that so-called empty witticism contains one of the most profoundinsights of our times. Opponents of the transcending revolutions were not labeledcounterrevolutionariesecause thatwould have legitimated heiroppositionandconceded precisely the intellectual terrain that the antirevolutionists sought to free. It

would have meant adopting the language of the system that they sought to transcend.The avoidance of the traditional militarized lexicon of revolutions also made obvioustactical sense, since if it came to shooting, the regimes were clearly at an advantage.The exhaustion of revolutionary discourse, moreover, was apparent in the fact thatvery few defenders of the old regime had the courage to talk in terms of defending

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the gains of the revolution. The order on which revolutionary socialism was based, asHorvath and Szakolczai point out, had already undergone a long process of internaldissolution even before the events of 1989-91.66 The Soviet regime sapped the viability of its own ideology by suppressing all sources of internal renewal.67

The revolutionsof 1989-91 generated amiserablyweak countermovement or theobvious reason that the historical conjuncturethat theoriginal socialist revolutionsreflectedhad long sincedisappeared.The concept of an emancipatoryrevolutionhaditself become an irrelevance, and in the absence of a new universal transformatoryideology thewhole conceptof revolution fell into desuetude.The Japaneseoptionoftransformationithout revolutionappearstohave triumphed.68

Features of the Transcending Revolutions There was a profound logic not onlyin the mere fact of the fall of the Communist regimes, but also in the manner in

which theywere disposed of.69These revolutionswere transcending, ot only overcoming the Communist systems of power, but also repudiating the political practicesand logic on which they were based.70 The argument so far has suggested that thetranscendence f Enlightenmentand emancipatoryrevolutionismwould leadback tonaturalistic cyclicity, where human destiny would be contingent and once againdevoid of transcendent purpose. The transcending antirevolution would transcendtranscendence itself. This argument would suggest a historical dead end. However,the transcendence of Communism in the antirevolutions of 1989-91 does not necessarily mean two steps backwards to naturalistic cyclicity, but perhaps has opened the

way to a fourth circle whose outline is as yet indistinct but which draws on the practicesof the transcending evolutionsthemselves.On the theoretical level, Adam Michnik detailed the strategy whereby the insur

gency against the Communist regime not only made redundant the classical antinomy between revolution and reform but also rejected classical revolutionary strategies. In his seminal article "A New Evolutionism" of 1976, Michnik concluded thatthe systems were unreformable and thus proposed a third strategy in which civilsociety itself, rather than the state, became both the subject and the object of thechanges.71 Much of the writing on the fall of the Soviet system incorporates ele

ments of Michnik's thinking. More broadly, Jeffrey Isaac has suggested that thephilosophical issues raised by 1989 are farmore profound than usually suggested.72He argues that the essays of Vaclav Havel, for example, "reveal serious reflections onthe banality of mass society and the ill effects of technology and instrumental rationality on modern life," while publicistic works contained "numerous argumentsabout the ethical and strategic prospects of different forms of resistance, the natureof democratic citizenship, and the importance of civil society."73 Isaac concludes byinsisting that "the most dramatic development of contemporary history has been therecent defeat of the Jacobin revolutionary model that has been heralded by the revolutions of 1989." 74Barbara Falk took up the challenge to assess the contribution of

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East European dissident thinking, and she concurs with Isaac in dismissing the viewthatthey had nothing new to offer intellectually. he rejectionof Jacobin-Bolshevikmodes of thinking, the assertion of a civic and nonviolent mode of political change,and the "resubjectification" of civil society as a political actor on a global scale represent in her view an epochal shift in civilizational development.75

The subjectof the transcending evolutionwas no longeran elite bandof intellectual-revolutionariesnor the desperatemass of exploited peasants or immiserated

workers of classical revolutionarydiscourse, but society itself, reflectingnot theamorphous classlessness of earlier debates about the end of ideology but expandingthe positive goals of the universal class of modernity. The role of intellectualsremains a matter of debate, but the Polish case demonstrates the expansive dynamicof its antirevolution. As Alain Touraine puts it, "Solidarity was at the same time asocial movement and an action for the liberation of society."76 The antipolitical styleof the struggle of civil society against the Communist state marginalized the role ofinstitutionalized olitical leadership.While the absenceof organized leadershipinthe popular revolutions of the late 1980s was not a new phenomenon, the explicitnature of the politics of the self-organization of civil society can be explained less bytheories of spontaneity (against, in particular, Lenin's idea of revolutionary consciousness) thanby the inherentlynormative characterof these antirevolutions.The"self-limiting"natureof these revolutionsreflectedobvious tacticalconsiderations.77But their "gentleness" was more than incidental; itwas intrinsic to the very model oftransformation towhich they aspired.78 Itwas both their strength and weakness.

Civil society in the transcending revolutions is used in at least three specific senses. First, it is an act of historical reconstitution, returning to Europe in the philosophical sense of reconnecting with traditional liberal discourses of theWest from

Hobbes to Locke, Mill, and beyond. Second, it is a form of resistance, wherebyoppositionists sought to create spaces in civil society where the logic of action didnot so much directly challenge the party-state as ignore it, a policy of circumventionthat proved extremely effective in delegitimating the Communist regimes in eastern

Europe and eroding their base in society.79 Third, it is a form of emancipation. In thelatter sense the concept assumed the outlines of a positive program to transcend bothcommunism and capitalism by recovering politics for the social body itself. Thenotion of antipolitics ismost closely associated with George Konrad, but the featuresof the new politics remain at best vague.80 The self-limiting understanding of asphere of politics separate from the state, however, did not deny a legitimate role forthe state, and thus differed from Marx's view on its ultimate transcendence or theanarchist denial of a valid role for itwhatsoever. While Havel's critique condemned

modernity and technology in general, thinking on antipolitics contained a critique ofliberal capitalism as well as the general discontents of modern times. The classic liberal distinction between state and society was maintained in repudiation of the spirit

of 1917 and indeed of 1789.81 The "carnival of revolution" in 1989 prefigured the

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development of antiglobalizing social forums and other forms of popular politicalintervention.82

The notion of antipolitics that can be constructed from the works of Havel,Michnik, and Konrad focuses on a notion of power and politics thatmoves beyond

theWeberian idea of the state as the monopoly of legitimate violence. State power isdelegitimated and social struggle elevated to the status of the classic heroic resistancemovements againstoppression.Havel stressed the element of moral recuperation in the revolutions of 1989, declaring on December 10, 1989, to a crowd inPrague that they had achieved a revolution "against violence, dirt, intrigue, lawlessness, mafia, privilege andpersecution."83 onrad noted that"Iknow of no way forEastern Europe to free itself from Russian military occupation except for us to occupy them with our ideas."84 And the idea, of course, was the notion of living in truth,thepolitics of parrhesia (truth-telling) hatSolzhenitsynhad for so longurged on hiscompatriots. As a form of reconstitution the idea of civil society triumphed; as aform of resistance it played a crucial part in the transcending revolution that ledtowards 1989-91; but as a form of emancipation the antipolitical school of thought

was itself transcended by the fall of Communism. In the harsh light of postcommunism itwas liberalism, with its necessary limitations on the scope of politics, thatsoon eclipsed hopes for a self-managing society.

The transcending revolutions were rich in political practices, too. One of themwas the repudiation of violence and the practice of the mass peaceful populardemonstration. This practice has been much noted in the case of eastern Europe(with the singular exception of Romania), but is perhaps even more impressive in

Russia, Ukraine, and the Baltic republics, where popular mobilization was far moreextended, lasting some two years rather than ten days as in Czechoslovakia. InRussia popular mobilization was witnessed in demonstrations of hundreds of thousands of people between 1989 and 1991, in the explosion of social activism, and inthe electoral politics inwhich official candidates were defeated throughout Russia inthe March 1990 parliamentary elections. In their refusal to take up arms, the transcending revolutions struck a direct blow at the violence that had for so long been asystemic featureof Communistdespotism.

A second feature was the prevalence of forum politics, beginning with the variousroundtables that negotiated their way out of Communism and culminating in the for

mation of antipolitical bodies like Civic Forum in the Czech lands and Citizensagainst Violence in Slovakia in November 1989. IfMichnik sought to subvert theCommunist regime by ignoring it, in the USSR such a strategy, where the openingfor overt political activism was measured not in decades but by little more than several dozen months, civil society activism was instead directed towards the state.85Because of the lack of a tradition of an autonomous sphere of civil association inRussia, the regime had a point when it argued that it had no one with whom it could

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negotiate. Instead, he system itself sought to sponsorparties and other civic associations.86The thirdpoint follows from the second: the negotiated (and electoral) natureof

the exit from Communism in a number of countries, in particular Poland andHungary.Nowhere in easternEuropewere thereorganized counterelitesor seriousattempts to sustain a counterideology. Nomenklatura elites had ceased to believe inthe viability of the old ways and had already achieved a mental liberation from revolutionarysocialism, an inner transcendence that preempted a Tiananmen Squaresolution. The weakness of the attempted putsch inAugust 1991 reveals the extent to

which even in the heartland of the Soviet system the ideology of emancipatory revolutionism had been transcended.Gorbachev's policies had deep social roots andshouldnot be considered a voluntaristicact divorced from the context.Gorbachev'spersonal decisions were important, but they emerged out of a long tradition that transcended the premises of both progressivist and emancipatory revolutions. This tradition repudiated he political bases on which the revolutionary mancipatoryproject

was based and sought instead to ground politics in at least a minimal Kantian ethicsof personal responsibility.

From Revolution toKrizis:The Fourth Circle?The decline in the pursuit of transcendental revolutionary goals opened the way forthehistorically locatedpursuitof politics, concernedwith temporalmatters of policyrather than the achievement of suprapolitical goals. The heresies that the Sovietregime called dissent, grounded in the religionof Communism, shifted toproblemsof achieving coherence within the constitutional state. The emancipatory revolutionhad fulfilled whatever historical potential it may have had, and the culmination ofone era made possible the antirevolutionary integration of social existence on a newbasis. As Bauman notes, the disappearance of emancipation from the historical horizon, and with it plans for the wholesale reordering of human affairs, has profoundeffects on social theory and political practice. Contemporary humanity has to getused to "living without an alternative."87

The revolutions of 1989-91 put an end to the age inaugurated by Marx'sEconomic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which tied the idea of revolutionto the notion of the liberation of a class. The Marxist revolution was thus inalienablyassociated with civil war, not necessarily taking a violent form but dominated by thelogic of a society riven by conflict and characterized by a shifting war of position

between two great forces in which politics was no more than instrumental. Thedomestic roots of the cold war should thus be stressed, a cold war inwhich the protagonists were allegedly locked in battle until the end of history. All this was sweptaway in 1989-91 together with the ideology of civil war and its concomitant cold

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war played out on the larger stage. Emancipatory revolutionism had exhausted itselfand with it, almost as an afterthought, the Leninist party. The end of SovietCommunism put an end to all talk of revolutionary socialism.88 Of course, revolutionsas liberation romoppression, poverty, and elitemanipulationwill continue, asevidenced by the rose revolution inGeorgia inNovember 2003, the Orange revolution inUkraine in fall 2004, the tulip revolution inKyrgyzstan in spring 2005, andpossibly any number of other revolutionsof the colors.Mobilized forms of resistance to capitalist discourses and practices at the global and local levels may wellcome to the fore.89 Liberatory revolutions return to the idea of a re-volution as a turnof the wheel to restore legitimate authority and are rooted in naturalistic cyclicity,whereas the concept of time inEnlightenment and emancipatory revolutions is linearand the ultimate goal chiliastic.Enlightenment andemancipatoryrevolutionismsustainedcritiquesthat sought totranscend the brute reality of the given. With the crash of the future-orientedEnlightenment and emancipatory revolutionarycycles, thenaturalistic appears tohave been restored, leaving only the traditionalist revolt typical of the epoch of naturalistic cyclicity. History has lost its goal and, as Jean Bodin always stressed, politicsis once again concerned with chance and probability. The revival of the medical

metaphor of crisis in public affairs, one that was prevalent in the premodern era,reflects the historiosophical reality that the practice and conduct of politics hasindeed revolved back to an earlier period when class struggle existed but lacked thedimension of social emancipation and when revolutions were liberating rather thanemancipatory.

The very language used to describe politics, the language of political analysis andthe terms applied to describe political concepts, buckle under the pressures generated by the end of the revolution. The price to be paid for the end of the revolution hasbeen noted by the philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy. "In France, politics has alwaysbeen defined by the Revolution. If the Revolution ceases to be desirable, then sodoes politics. Perhaps what we are witnessing now is the death of politics."90 Therevolution has ended, but a disenchanted order takes its place in which the unpredictable and multiple consequences of political intervention paralyze consciouspolitical mobilization. The bases for political intervention are not clear. The absenceof utopia and the possibility (however illusory) of a total and revolutionary change insocial existence afflicts art and culture in the broadest sense. Another place of theimaginationno longerexists.

Moreover, the transcendingntirevolution as enormousconsequencesfor the conduct of politics in the postrevolutionary era. The new politics is torn between a return tonaturalistic cyclicity and the development of a fourth circle of political activism grounded in the practices of the transcending revolution itself.With the end of the idea of revolution as away of overcoming contingency in human affairs, the notion of crisis needsto be elaborated more. For the Greeks krizis was amoment of reflection in the life of the

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community, while the Chinese character for the concept ismade up of symbols for danger and opportunity. The language of crisis in part reflects a return to naturalistic interpretations of human destiny, but it also poses a new challenge. Today, there is no longerrevolution, but there is still crisis, but a crisis born no longer out of a belief in progressbut by its absence. Contemporary politics and popular political subjectivity have a tendency towards the passive.91 At the same time the positive spirit of the antirevolutionlives on inmovements such as theWorld Social Forum.

The politics of krizis is a form of resistance to the passivity of naturalistic cyclicity and provides an opportunity to devise nonepochal solutions to the problems thatarise from the realities of society. There is a renewed emphasis on Tocquevillianthemes, theprimacyof cultureover sociallydeterminedmodalities of political actionand indeed the relativization of directed political action. Contrary toMarx (in Ash'swords), "consciousnessultimatelydeterminesbeing...thekey to the future liesnot inthe external,objectiveconditionof states-political, military, economic, technological but in the internalsubjectivecondition of individuals."92thics andmorality,living by truth and rejecting the lie, worked as potent weapons against the partystate, and they now act as the basis of a new moral culture. The new culturalism, nodoubt, contains its own dangers, in particular the neglect of the inequalities emergingout of new patterns of stratification.93 But it also provides an opportunity to treat thepolitical as amoment to examine hierarchies of sovereignty.94

Only a critique of naturalism can allow human development itself to become thesubject of history. In the countries of the antirevolution it remains latent.Contemporary Russia and other postcommunist countries have done little more thanto objectify social processes inways reminiscentof Enlightenmentand emancipatory revolutionism, but now without a social subject other than the state itself acting inthe name of objectified processes like globalization and marketization. The antirevolution has not yet fulfilled its potential by provoking a politics of krizis.

Conclusion: The End of Epochality?Historical time, according toKoselleck, is defined by differentiating between past andfuture or, as he puts it, in anthropological terms, experience and expectation.95 In thepostcommunist world the balance between experience and expectation is heavilyweighted to the former as a result of the failure of utopian aspirations vested in the permanent civil war of emancipatory revolutionism. Transcendental emancipatory historicism has given way to themean localized historicism of the Fukuyama type. Althoughdemands on the future are structurally increased (given the failure of the past), theexpectation that the future will fulfill these expectations is decreased. Societies where

modernist progressivism reached its apogee are being reintroduced to modernity at a

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time when social optimism is on the wane. The future is no longer justice but a thinrationalistic echnocratism;heprice of thepursuitof justiceproved toohigh. Today the

weight of the future in social consciousness has decreased, compensated by theenhanced value of foreign role models as temporal utopianism gave way to spatialones.96

The fundamental consequence of the end of the revolution is that the epochalthinking associated with the modem revolutionary tradition has now given way tothe possibility of a groundedpolitics. The Enlightenmentrevolutionswere not followed by the anticipated metanoia, that change of heart on which a new societycould be built. Rather, the regimes, after the delay in the arrival of the anticipatedmillennium, adapted to the environment and native tradititions.97 For emancipatoryrevolutions itwas precisely the impossibility of adaptation that endowed them with afundamentally tenuous quality. For this reason, where the political is subsumed intothe social revolution,thepostcommunistrestoration smore complex than those following theEnlightenment revolutions.Only with the fall of the revolutionary egimecan a politics grounded in the political concerns of society emerge. The antirevolutions of 1989-1991 mark not only the point at which the revolution ended but theinauguration of a new type of politics of crisis whose resolution remains to be found.

NOTESIwould like to thank Yitzhak Brudny, Robert V Daniels, and Andreas Umland for their support and helpful comments.

1. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 11. Some of the ideas in thischapter are drawn from Richard Sakwa, "The Age of Paradox: The Anti-revolutionary Revolutions of1989-91," inMoira Donald and Tim Rees, eds., Reinterpreting Revolution in Twentieth-Century Europe(London: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 159-76.

2. Vladimir Tismaneanu, "Introduction," in Vladimir Tismaneanu, ed., The Revolutions of 1989(London: Routledge, 1999), p. 1.3. Timothy Garton Ash, "Refolution in Hungary and Poland," The New York Review of Books, Aug.17, 1989, pp. 9-15; also, Timothy Garton Ash, "Reform or Revolution?," The New York Review of Books,

Oct. 27, 1988, pp. 47-55.4. J?rgen Habermas, "What Does Socialism Mean Today? The Rectifying Revolution and the Need

for New Thinking on the Left," New Left Review, 183 (September-October 1990), 3-21.5. Leslie Holmes, The End of Communist Power (Oxford: Polity Press, 1993), p. xi md passim; also,

Leslie Holmes, Post-Communism: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997).6. See Ruth Levitas, The Concept of Utopia (New York: Philip Allan, 1990); Jerzy Szacki, Utopia i

traditsiya (Moscow: Progress, 1990). For application to the USSR, see Jerome M. Gilison, The SovietImage of Utopia (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975). For an interesting Soviet analysis, see M. P.Kapustin, Konets Utopii? Proshloe i budushchee sotsializma (Moscow: Novosti, 1990).

7. Robert V Daniels, The End of the Communist Revolution (London: Routledge, 1993).8. Neil Harding, "The Marxist-Leninist Detour," in John Dunn, ed., Democracy: The Unfinished

Journey, 508 BC toAD 1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp 155-88.

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9. For a useful empirical analysis, see Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR,and the Successor States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). However, the concept of experiment isnot developed theoretically.

10. Fred Halliday, Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (Durham:Duke University Press, 1999), p. 31, notes that, when the concept of revoluzione emerged in late medievalItaly, it signified radical change that returned to an earlier era.

11. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge, Mass.: MITPress, 1985), p. 40.

12. Keith Tribe, "Translator's Introduction," inKoselleck, Futures Past, p. xv.13. The American revolution from 1776 might have been epochal in its consequences, but in form it

was a revolt of colonists in defense of what they claimed to be ancient liberties and rights. Itwas on thenight of July 14, 1789, that Louis XVI, on hearing news of the fall of the Bastille, exclaimed, "C'est uner?volte," to which his informant, the Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, gave his famous correction:"Non, Sire, c'est une r?volution." Arendt, On Revolution, p. 47. The word "revolution" was here used forthe last time in its old sense of the restoration of legitimacy, but also for the first time in its new sense ofan irresistible movement to the future. Liberatory revolution of the type pursued by the Americancolonists in 1776 now gave way to a new type of universal revolutionism.

14. This paper stresses only one aspect of Enlightenment thought, the late Enlightenmentphilosophisme that suggested benevolent outcomes would be worth human sacrifices. This view was condemned, for example, by Michael Oakeshott. For a recent study, see Roy Tseng, The Sceptical Idealist:

Michael Oakeshott as a Critic of the Enlightenment (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2003). The sacrificialapproach was far from universal. Rousseau, for example, came out against revolution. See Reinhart

Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis ofModern Society (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1988), p. 161, n7.

15. The main work by Antoine de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, is A Sketch for a Historical Pictureof the Progress of theHuman Mind, written in 1794, the year that he poisoned himself in prison. As aGirondin deputy, he had been incarcerated by the Jacobins.

16. Marquis de Condorcet, A Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind(London: 1955), p. 4, cited in Alex Callinicos, Social Theory: A Historical Introduction (Cambridge:Polity Press, 1999), p. 25.

17. The characterization is by Eric Voegelin, From Enlightenment to Revolution (Durham: DukeUniversity Press, 1975), p. 167.

18. Cited inArendt, On Revolution, p. 29.19. For a recent study, see David Williams, Condorcet and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2004).20. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 42.21. For a brilliant exposition of this theme, see Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York:

Zone Books, 1995), esp. ch. 5, "Time and History."22. Francis Fukuyama, "The End of History," The National Interest (Summer 1989), 3-17; Francis

Fukuyama, The End ofHistory and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).23. For comments on Marx's weakness as a theorist of politics, see, for example, Gianfranco Poggi,

The Development of theModern State: A Sociological Introduction (London: Hutchinson, 1978), p. ix andpassim.

24. See Jean L. Cohen, Class and Civil Society: The Limits of Marxian Critical Theory (Amherst:University of Massachusetts Press, 1982); also, Andrew Arato and Jean L. Cohen, Civil Society andPolitical Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).

25. Cf. Stephen E. Hanson, Time and Revolution: Marxism and the Design of Soviet Institutions(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).26. Raymond Aron, Democracy and Totalitarianism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968);

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Robert C. Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970).27. John Gray, "Fanatical Unbelief," Prospect (November 2004), 68.28. E. A. Rees, Political Thought from Machiavelli to Stalin: Revolutionary Machiavellism

(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).29. In his introduction to a collection of hitherto unpublished documents, Pipes notes Lenin's "utter

disregard for human life, except where his own family and closest associates were concerned." "Lenin isrevealed in these documents as a thoroughgoing misanthrope." Richard Pipes ed., The Unknown Lenin:

From the Secret Archive (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 8, 11.30. Andrzej Walicki, Marxism and the Leap to the Kingdom of Freedom: The Rise and Fall of the

Communist Utopia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).31. Erik van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin (London: Routledge, 2002).32. David L. Hoffman, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-1941 (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 2003).33. Robert V Daniels, "Revolution, Modernization and the Paradox of Twentieth-Century Russia,"

Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, 42 (September 2000), 250.34. Tribe, p. xv.35. Eduard Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation (New York: Schocken

Books, 1961).36. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1992).37. Max Weber, The Russian Revolutions (Oxford: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 23-24.38. See, in particular, S. M. Frank, "Etika nigilizma," in Vekhi: Sbornik statei o russkoi intelligentsii

(Moscow: 1909, reprinted Frankfurt a.M., Posev, 1967), pp. 175-210.39. David Anin noted that in 1917 the inability to understand the threat posed to the achievements of

the February revolution by left-wing maximalism "was not an accidental feature but a 'psychologicalstate' that pervaded all parties or, rather, the whole Russian intelligentsia." Cited by John Keep, "1917:

The Tyranny of Paris over Petrograd," Soviet Studies, 20, (1968-69), 22.40. Ibid., p. 34.41. Iz glubiny: Sbornik statei o russkoi revolyutsii (Moscow: 'Iz glubin', 1989).42. A. Solzhenitsyn et al., From under the Rubble (London: Fontana/Collins, 1974).43. Although the role of westernized elites is important, as argued by Robert D. English, Russia and

the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2000), native sources of antirevolutionism were no less significant.

44. In English, see Alexander Yakovlov, The Fate ofMarxism in Russia (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1993); Alexander Yakovlov, Striving for Law in a Lawless Land: Memoirs of a Russian Reformer(New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1995); Alexander Yakovlov, A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 2002).45. Sovetskaya kultura, July 15, 1989, p. 3.46. See Philip Boobbyer, Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia (London:

RoutledgeCurzon, 2005).47. Vladimir Mau and Irina Starodubrovskaya, The Challenge of Revolution: Contemporary Russia in

theHistory of Revolutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).48. Quoted retrospectively inM. S. Gorbachev, On My Country and the World (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2000), p. 11.49. Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (London: Collins,

1987), p. 49.50. K gumannomy, demokraticheskomu sotsializmu: Programmnoe zayavlenie XXVIII s 'ezda KPSS

(Moscow: Politizdat, 1990), p. 7.51. Mikhail Gorbachev and Zden?k Mlyn?fi, Conversations with Gorbachev on Perestroika, the

Prague Spring, and the Crossroads of Socialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

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RichardSakwa52. Archie Brown argues that Gorbachev was "an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary by conviction." Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 308.53. Ibid., p. 309 andpassim.54. Pavel Palazchenko, My Years with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze: The Memoir of a Soviet

Interpreter (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), p. 370.55. A. S. Chernyaev, Shest' let s Gorbachevym: Po dnevnikovym zapisyam (Moscow:

Progress-Kultura, 1993), p. 519.56. See Stephen F. Cohen, "The Friends and Foes of Change: Reformism and Conservatism in the

Soviet Union," in Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917 (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1986), ch. 5.

57. Gorbachev's continued declarations of allegiance to Communism up to and beyond the 1991 coupis sensitively portrayed by Leszek Kolakowski, "Amidst Moving Ruins," inTismaneanu, ed., p. 56.58. Krishan Kumar, "The Revolutions of 1989: Socialism, Capitalism and Democracy," Theory and

Society, 21 (June 1992), 309-56; Krishan Kumar, "The 1989 Revolutions and the Idea of Europe,"Political Studies, 40 (September 1992), 439-61.

59. Habermas, "What Does Socialism Mean Today?," p. 5.60. Claus Offe, "Capitalism by Democratic Design? Democratic Theory Facing the Triple Transition in

East Central Europe," Social Research, 58 (Winter 1991), 865-902.61. Fran?ois Furet, Le Pass? d'une illusion: Essai sur l'id?e communiste au XXe si?cle (Paris: Robert

Laffont/Calmann-L?vy, 1995), p. 13.62. Alain Touraine, "The Idea of Revolution," Theory, Culture and Society, 1 (June 1990), 121.63. Krishan Kumar "Introduction," in Krishan Kumar, ed., Revolution: The Theory and Practice of a

European Idea (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), p. 2.64. Joseph de Maistre, "Supposed Dangers of Counter-Revolution," in Considerations on France

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 105. The original, cited inArendt, On Revolution, p.18, reads as follows. "La contre-r?volution ne sera point une r?volution contraire, mais la contraire de lar?volution."

65. Arendt, On Revolution, p. 18.66. Agnes Horv?th and Arp?d Szakolczai, The Dissolution of Communist Power: The Case of Hungary

(London: Routledge, 1992).67. Dmitrii Furman, "Revolyutsionnye tsikly Rossii," Svobodnaya mysl', 1 (1994), 9.68. S. N. Eisenstadt and Eyal Ben-Ari, eds., Japanese Models of Conflict Resolution (London: Kegan

Paul, 1990). See also S. N. Eisenstadt, Revolution and the Transformation of Societies: A ComparativeStudy of Civilizations (New York: Free Press, 1978).

69. For an illuminating discussion of the question, see Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feh?r, The Grandeurand Twilight of Radical Universalism (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1991). See also S. N.Eisenstadt, "The Breakdown of Communist Regimes," inTismaneanu, ed., pp. 89-107.

70. David Ost, Solidarity and the Politics of Anti-Politics: Opposition and Reform in Poland since1968 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990).

71. Adam Michnik, "A New Evolutionism," in Letters from Prison and Other Essays (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1985), pp. 135-48.

72. Jeffrey C Isaac, Democracy inDark Times (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), esp. the chapter "The Meanings of 1989."

73. Jeffrey C Isaac, "The Strange Silence of Political Theory," Political Theory, 23 (November 1995),640.

74. Ibid., p. 648.75. Barbara J. Falk, The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe: Citizen Intellectuals and

Philosopher Kings (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2003).

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76. Alain Touraine et al., Solidarity: Poland 1980-81 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1983), p. 135.77. Cf. Jadwiga Staniszkis, Poland's Self Limiting Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1984).78. Arato, "Interpreting 1989," p. 613.79. The landmark western formulation of the strategy is Andrew Arato, "Civil Society against the

State: Poland 1980-81," Telos, 47 (1981), 23-47. See, in particular, John Keane, ed., Civil Society and theState: New European Perspectives (London: Verso, 1988); and John Keane, ed., Democracy and CivilSociety (London: Verso, 1988).

80. George Konr?d, Antipolitics: An Essay (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984).81. L. Nowak, Power and Civil Society: Towards a Dynamic Theory of Real Socialism (Westport:

Greenwood Press, 1991), p. 57.82. Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2002), stresses the long-term, eclectic, and popular nature of the movement that swept the Communistsystems away in 1989, encompassing environmentalists, feminists, peace campaigners, pop musicians,and even professors of sociology.

83. David Selbourne, Death of the Dark Hero: Eastern Europe, 1987-90 (London: Jonathan Cape,1990), p. 236.84. Konr?d, Antipolitics, p. 129.85. See M. Stephen Fish, Democracy from Scratch: Opposition and Regime in the New Russian

Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).86. One of the founders of the Russian Christian Democratic Movement, the former priest Vyacheslav

Polosin, notes how at the time of the RCDM's founding congress in 1990 he "refused the honour of beingthe clerical version of Zhirinovsky." "Zamysly i ikh realizatsiya," NG-Religii, Apr. 12, 2000, p. 4.Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party, was accused of being a KGB stooge inthe democratic movement.

87. Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992), chs. 7 and 8.88. Capitalism, of course, is still prone to crises, but the immediate prospects of an ideology based onthe abolition of private property and the market would appear to be slim. For an excellent debate on thesubject, see Alexsandras Shtromas ed., The End of "isms "? Reflections on theFate of Ideological Politicsafter Communism's Collapse (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).

89. See, for example, Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution (London: Continuum, 2003).90. The Observer, May 7, 1995, p. 16.91. Andrew Gamble, Politics and Fate (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000).92. Timothy Garton Ash, "Does Central Europe Exist?," inG. Schopflin and N. Wood, eds., In Search

of Central Europe (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), pp. 200-1.93. A point argued, for example, by Theda Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 203.94. One author who has most systematically tried to deal with this question is Chantal Mouffe, The

Return of the Political (London: Verso, 1993); Chantai Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso,2000); and other works.

95. Koselleck, p. xxiii.96. See, for example, Bo Petersson, National Self-images and Regional Identities in Russia

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), esp. pp. 107-12.97. An argument made by Voegelin, From Enlightenment toRevolution, p. 252.

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