The Devil in History by Vladimir Tismaneanu

Author:Vladimir Tismaneanu [Tismaneanu, Vladimir]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Ideology, Utopia, and Truth

Lessons from Eastern Europe

Any social Utopia which purports to offer a technical blueprint for the perfect society now strikes me as pregnant with the most terrible dangers. I am not saying that the idea of human fraternity is ignoble, naïve, or futile; and I don't think that it would be desirable to discard it as belonging to an age of innocence. But to go to the lengths of imagining that we can design some plan for the whole society whereby harmony, justice and plenty are attained for human engineering is an invitation for despotism. I would, then, retain Utopia as an imaginative incentive … and confine it to that. The point where despotism differs from totalitarianism is the destruction of civil society. But civil society cannot be destroyed until and unless private property, including the private ownership of all the means of production, is abolished.

—Leszek Kołakowski (in George Urban ed., Stalinism)

More than in any other period of human history, individuals in the twentieth century were tempted by the promises of revolutionary messianism rooted in grandiose teleological fantasies imagined by prophets who mostly wrote their manifestos during the previous century.1 Or to use the formulation of Czech philosopher and dissident Jan Patočka, the last century experienced the rise of “radical super-civilizations” that sought forms analogous to that of a “universal church.” According to him, they were “geared toward the totalizing of life by means of rationalism; we deal with a yearning for a new center, ‘from which it is possible to gradually control all layers all the way to the periphery.’”2 From both extreme left and right, the quest for an absolute reshaping of the human condition inspired frantic endeavors to transcend what appeared to be the philistine carcass of liberal institutions and values.3 Many Bolsheviks, including Aleksandr Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and quite likely even Lenin found Nietzsche's proclamation regarding the advent of the Übermensch (superman) exhilarating or at least intriguing. This type of influence “touched a deep chord in the Russian psyche that continued to reverberate long after his [Nietzsche's] initial reception…. Ideas and images derived from his writings were fused, in various ways, with compatible elements in the Russian religious, intellectual, and cultural heritage, and with Marxism.”4

In Communism and Fascism, ideology was there to justify violence, sacralize it, and to discard all opposite views as effete, sterile, dangerous, and fundamentally false. In the ideological binary logic (Lenin's kto-kogo, who-whom principle) there was no room for a middle road: the enemy—always defined by class (or race) criteria—lost all humanity, being reduced to the despicable condition of vermin. Stalinists and Nazis proudly avowed their partisanship and abolished human autonomy through loyalty to the party/leader/dogma. The main purpose of revolutionary ideological commitment was to organize the mental colonization (heteronomy) of individuals, to turn them into enthusiastic builders of the totalitarian utopia. In brief, totalitarianism as a project aiming at complete domination over man, society, economy, and nature, is inextricably linked to ideology.5 The ideologies of Communism and Fascism

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