Of Gorbachev’s Perestroika, Plato’s Noble Lie, the Utopian Tradition, and the Third Sophistic

Upon the success of perestroika depends the future of socialism and the future of the world.

—Mikhail Gorbachev

The empire of Russia will aspire to conquer Europe, and will itself be conquered.

—Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Russians have a singular genius for drastically simplifying the ideas of others, and then acting upon them: our world has been transformed, for good and ill, by the unique Russian application of Western social theory to practice.

—Isaiah Berlin

The erosion and dismantling of Communism and the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe have been explained in various ways. One of the less trodden paths views these phenomena not in an economical and geopolitical but in a cultural and ideological light. (This is the approach of Hilary Appel, for instance, in an effort that leaves something to be desired in terms of historical, cultural, and theoretical depth.) In this essay, I follow a similar direction and suggest that it is rewarding to view Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika and the subsequent infusion of a new, neoliberal capitalist ideology in Eastern Europe from the mid-1980s onward through the combined lenses of two ancient doctrines: first, Plato’s concept of the noble lie as outlined in the Republic—which also means casting a look at the Western utopian tradition of which glasnost, perestroika, and the noble lie are constituents—and, second, Plato’s, Aristophanes’s, and Aristotle’s criticism of the Sophists as pseudophilosophers. Can ancient and modern philosophy, certain cultural narratives that have been in circulation for millennia, and some rhetorical strategies help us to understand better what happens in the present? The reader is invited to peruse this text not as an objective and strictly academic article, but as an essay in the classical tradition of Montaigne—passionate and compassionate intellectual poetry in the costume of scholarship. If for the majority of the Western intellectuals the downfall of Communism is yet another field for rational investigation, for their Eastern European brethren this is an existential problem that is better elucidated in the genre of subjective theoretical fantasy.

Perestroika and Plato’s Noble Lie

The notion of the noble lie is productive because it has been an obligatory part of Western political theory since antiquity. A society that has dispensed with rule through the right of natural force in the name of security and the good of all erects its institutions on laws expressing the common will of the people. The concept of the legislature as an embodiment of the common will rests on the presumption that the laws have been invented by a superhuman entity, which has benevolently bestowed them on a grateful human race. This type of myth is repeated in the biblical story of Moses and the Ten Commandments, Plato’s Republic, Plutarch’s “Lycurgus,” More’s Utopia, Bacon’s New Atlantis, and Rousseau’s Social Contract.

The critical juxtaposition between the philosopher and the Sophist, which is one of the pivots of Plato’s thought, because it defines philosophy by outlining its limits with regard to its Other—pseudophilosophy laying claim to a philosophical status—is instrumental in my essay because it seems that democratic social habitat, ancient or contemporary, is where the Sophistic thrives. Despite the fact that the Second Sophistic has been officially defunct for some fifteen centuries, one could argue that the Sophistic is, nonetheless, with us, and Plato’s criticism of this phenomenon is still pertinent, although we may give it different names. One such designation is ideology. When in A Theory of Semiotics Eco defines ideology as a partial and noncontradic-tory representation of the contradictory semantic universe, a representation that, however, purports to be a full and truthful portrayal of this universe, he, knowingly or not, resuscitates Plato’s opposition of the Forms, which stand for reality and truth, and appearances, which are but a simulacrum and imitation of reality. Transposed in terms of philosophy and the Sophistic, this dualistic metaphysical division becomes the comparison between philosophical dialectic, which speaks the truth, and persuasive...