Conclusion
Less than six months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vaclav Havel claimed that the end of Communism signified the end not only of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but also of 'the modern world as a whole'. The modern era, he wrote, had been dominated by the belief that 'the world ... is a wholly knowable system governed by a finite number of universal laws that man can grasp and rationally direct for his own benefit'.[437] Havel presented the Soviet experience as the perverse extreme of scientific rationalism.
The Soviet Union did indeed appear to many people to offer a vision of modernity that was more attractive than Western capitalism, especially in the 1920s and 1930s when capitalism was in deep crisis, and the commitment to science and the claim to be guided by a scientific theory were important elements in that vision. Optimism about science was high again in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when successes in space dramatised the possibilities of scientific-technical progress and de-Stalinisation offered the prospect of political change. These hopes were not realised, however. From the late 1960s on, it became increasingly clear that central planningwas not effective at generating technological progress, that the party leadership feared reform and that the state had pursued industrial development with little regard to the consequences for public health or for the environment. The Soviet system began to lose legitimacy at home and abroad. This shook the self-confidence of the political leadership and prompted the attempts at radical reform in the late 1980s.
Andrei Sakharov proposed an alternative approach to politics, derived from his conception of science. The state, in this model, would be guided in its policies by a public opinion formed in the process of reasoned debate and discussion. 'Progress is possible and innocuous only when it is subject to the control of reason,' he wrote in his 1975 Nobel Peace Prize lecture.138 A reasoned approach to the great challenges of the scientific-technical revolution, such as nuclear weapons and environmental change, would be possible only if human rights were guaranteed. Only then would society be able to engage in the process of debate and discussion that would ensure that decisions were grounded in reason. Sakharov's views can be read as a commentary on the Soviet experience of harnessing science to politics: debate and discussion were extremely restricted in the Soviet Union, with harmful consequences for science and for society. Sakharov's views can be taken also as a rejoinder to Havel's equation of modernity with the Soviet experience, by suggesting an alternative vision of the application of reason to human affairs.
138 Andrei Sakharov, 'Peace, Progress, and Human Rights', in Andrei D. Sakharov, Alarm and Hope (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), p. 9.
83 Nauchnye kadry SSSR: dinamika i struktura (Moscow: Mysl', 1991), p. 40.
437
Vaclav Havel, 'The End of the Modern Era',