48. Kołakowski, 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 Tamás-Pleșu exchange, see http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2009-06-16-tamas-ro.html. In my own exchange with G. M. Tamás, 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. Tamás & 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. Tamás, “Un delict de opinie,” in Revista 22 (Bucharest), July 2-26, 2010, pp. 5-9.
52. Review of The Structural Crisis of Capital by István Meszáros, 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 démocratique (Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 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 Lukács to Agnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, György Márkus, Mihaly Vajda, János Kis, Győrgy Bence), the experiences of Jacek Kuroń, Krzysztof Pomian, Leszek Kołakowski, 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-François 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. Václav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in The Power of the Powerless, ed. Václav 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 Kołakowski, “Totalitarianism and Lie,” Commentary (May 1983) p. 37.
66. In my Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), I defined, with reference to Eric Hoffer's analysis of political fanaticism, ideological hubris as “the firm belief that there is one and only one answer to the social questions, and that the ideologue is the one who holds it” (p. 28). Also see Eric Hofer, The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York: Time, 1963); Elie Halevy, a French thinker who, in the 1930s, wrote about the age of tyranny dominated by the “etatisation of thought” and the “organization of enthusiasm.” See Alberto Toscano, Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea (London: Verso, 2010), p. 206. Political religions were also instruments for the organization of social resentment, envy, and hatred. See Gabriel Liiceanu, Despre ură (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2007).
67. Richard Shorten, “François Furet and Totalitarianism: A Recent Intervention in the Misuse of a Notion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 3, no. 1 (Summer 2002): 10-11. For an extensive presentation of Lefort's analysis of ideology, see Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society (Oxford: Polity Press, 1986).
68. I am paraphrasing Ken Jowitt's conclusions on the neotraditionalism of the Soviet-type system. See Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 121-58. See also Ken Jowitt, “Stalinist Revolutionary Breakthroughs in Eastern Europe,” in Stalinism Revisited, ed. Tismaneanu, pp. 17-24.
69. Roger Griffin, “Ideology and Culture,” Journal of Political Ideologies 11, no. 1 (Feb. 2006): 77-99.
70. See for instance Stephen Kinzer, “In ‘East Germany,' Bad Ol' Days Now Look Good,” New York Times, August 27, 1994. This restorative theme was the gist of Russian leader Gennady Zyuganov's 1996 presidential campaign. He challenged Boris Yeltsin in the name of an idealized vision of the historical past, heroic value, ethnic solidarity, and opposition to corruptive Western influences. E.g., David Remnick, “Hammer, Sickle, and Book,” New York Review of Books 23 (May 1996): 44-51.
71. I am putting together here two of the essential statements Ken Jowitt made in his analysis of Leninism and its legacy. The first: “The political individuation of an articulated potential citizenry treated contemptuously by an inclusive (not democratic), neotraditional (not modernized) Leninist polity was the cause of Leninist breakdown” (Ken Jowitt, “Weber, Trotsky and Holmes on the Study of Leninist Regimes,” Journal of International Affairs [2001]: 3149). The second: “It should be equally clear that today [1992] the dominant and shared Eastern European reality is severe and multiple fragmentation” (Ken Jowitt, New World Disorder, pp. 299-300).
72. Findlay, Caring for the Soul, p. 133.
73. Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution, vol. 3, The Breakdown (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 526-30.
74. Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), p. 109.
75. George Konrád, The Melancholy of Rebirth, p. 23.