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second Solidarity, in 1988–1989,
The liberal-democratic world did not want such exoticism in their midst, and would have been embarrassed if the Poles had persisted in their initial ambitions.
The Poles grasped this quickly and the majority of them adapted to the expectations without protest and without regret. There was, of course, an unpleasant side to it. The societies that liberated themselves from the old rules adopted new ones, but were unaware that the new rules gave them less liberty and fewer opportunities than they had naïvely hoped, being blinded by the radiant vision of the free world.
still moved inevitably in another direction.
Communism and liberal democracy are believed to be the ultimate stages of the history of political transformations.
nothing politically superior can arise in the wake of liberal democracy, which, per a common though rarely explicitly articulated conviction, exhausted the process of political transformations.
Both communism and liberal democracy are therefore perceived—from an inside perspective—as having no alternatives.
The communist would say: if communism is rejected or prevented, then society will continue to be subjected to class exploitation, capitalism, imperialism, and fascism. The liberal democrats would say: if liberal democracy is not accepted, then society will fall prey to authoritarianism, fascism, and theocracy.
The belief that socialism had no alternatives stemmed from a presupposition that this system eliminated the root causes of social and economic conflicts, which—it will be recalled—allegedly set in motion the machine that in the course of history transformed one political order into another.
By fully implementing the idea of class justice, communism put an end, once and for all, to that state of disequilibrium from which societies suffered since the earliest stages of their existence.
Hegel
Liberal democracy is also viewed by its supporters as the final realization of the eternal desires of mankind, particularly those of freedom and the rule of the people.
slowly, but irresistibly liberated the people from tyranny and empowered them with political instruments of self-government,
It is therefore more than natural that both systems identified existing structures with human ideals.
Communism was social justice, and social justice was communism. This marriage between the system and the ideal gave birth to a peculiar type of mentality, inadvertently prone to political moralizing. Living in such a system one could not simply describe facts or express one’s political persuasion because everything had to be entangled in the phraseology referring to the good of humanity,
From the very beginning, socialism/communism was sanctioned in moralistic terms without which it was as a system inconceivable; every communist or socialist, even if cynical and cruel, was compelled to see some communist and socialist ideals reflected even in the simplest matters and could not express the simplest thought without referring to them.
Liberal democracy boasts of bestowing freedom on individuals and emancipation on groups, while simultaneously taking it for granted that freedom and emancipation are possible only in a liberal democracy, or rather, that freedom and emancipation are liberal democracy.
Over time, the mind of a liberal democrat began to resemble that of a socialist, exhibiting the same tendency to combine the languages of morality and politics, as no other discourse could possibly do justice to the nature of the system. There are no topics, no matter how trivial, that the liberal democrat could raise or discuss without mentioning freedom, discrimination, equality, human rights...
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Communism did not represent class justice, nor was liberal democracy the sole representative of freedom.
First, liberalism was certainly not the only orientation expressing the desire for freedom, nor was it particularly consistent in this devotion. The supporters of republicanism, conservatism, romanticism, Christianity, and many other movements also demanded freedom, and did a lot to advance its cause.
If freedom as we understand it in Western civilization is not only an abstract value, but has a concrete shape well-grounded in institutions, social practices, and mental habits, then the contribution of liberalism is one of many, far from decisive. It is hard to imagine freedom without classical philosophy and the heritage of antiquity, without Christianity and scholasticism, without different traditions in the philosophy of law and political and social practices, without ancient and modern republicanism, without strong anthropology and ethics of virtues and duties, without Anglo-Saxon and
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attribute the term “liberal” to everything they think succeeded in making a breakthrough in the walls of oppression and authority.
they were quite dogmatic on the issue of freedom on a theoretical level, but very opportunistic in practice.
In the twentieth century they engaged in a long-term flirtation with socialism, including its Soviet version, being probably motivated by a similar assumption. Even the most liberal of liberals displayed extraordinary softness against the Soviet Union and the Soviet communism and sometimes even actively supported the idea of unilateral disarmament of the West, as did libertarians—all in the name of freedom.
Their freedom-related account is therefore not overly clean.
The above similarities point to something more significant.
systems, by being final,
utopianism. Both are—simp...
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Utopia is—I beg the reader’s pardon for such a vile-sounding phrase—the final solution.
After these rather simple-minded criticisms he felt entitled to refer to his own theory as “scientific,”
was the movement’s utopian and not scientific nature that made the Marxist version of communism so phenomenally popular.
The utopianism of liberal democracy is not so obvious.
there were also highly optimistic versions according to which the free market was a miraculous instrument to eliminate war and bring about the global brotherhood of humanity
This rediscovery of liberal utopianism in the twentieth century, especially in free-market theories,
Economic liberals could not get over the popularity of socialism,
Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Ayn Rand, Robert Nozick, and many other libertarians did precisely this. It went far beyond the realm of the free market.
Nozick wrote in his famous work under the symptomatic title Anarchy,
utopia of u...
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final order incorporating all o...
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When Tocqueville
M. Forster is famous for saying that it deserved two cheers, not three, which is exactly as many as Irving Kristol granted to capitalism
found in Derrida. Finally, the word “utopia” had to appear, and it did. The man who called the liberal-democratic political system a utopia was John Rawls,
“Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
This last assertion’s absurdity leaps to the eye, but in spite of that it is today regarded, surprisingly, as an expression of a profound political wisdom.
To see this absurdity, no special insight is needed: an excess of anything is never good. After all, no one will claim that the shortcomings of oligarchy can be removed by extending oligarchy, flaws of tyranny by expanding tyranny, defects
Why then, if we agree that democracy has its weaknesses, would such weaknesses be reduced by having more democracy?
democratic vulgarity, or the cult of mediocrity,
the weakening of social customs and traditions, or the overproduction of legislation, or the omnipresent spi...
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better system was invented, and it happened, conceptually, in antiquity as a result
possible solution of the problem of one-sidedness was to mix the three types.
When Cicero referred to this mixed regime, he used the name “res publica.”
