In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Introduction Communism, Society, and History M ost of the chapters in this book were originally written as essays in what was to be a monograph on the relevance of historiography to sociological theory and of sociological theory to the humanities. It presupposed a definition of sociology as the study of the social, or collective, aspect of human affairs, where that aspect was seen as necessarily connected to the study of political movements and other noninstitutional, or “informal,” critical activity. Many were written in the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union and were concerned with how the events associated with the breakup were being discussed in the United States, especially by those committed to progressive values and those intellectuals who had become disappointed in what they thought of as the Left according to one of two hypotheses. The first says that Communist ideology and practice are distortions of progressive ideals and need to be purged if those ideals are to have a fair hearing. The second says that they are endemic to the Left, thereby providing a sufficient reason to repudiate or at least marginalize it at virtually any cost.1 What Theodore Draper has referred to approvingly as “professional anticommunism” had its roots in either the history of the internal politics of “official communism,” in which Draper had once been intensely involved, or the official politics of the Cold War.2 The first approach denied the legitimacy of “protest” in favor of “dissent” and insisted on an orientation to “social problems” within the limits of institutional politics rather than on a more generalized politics responsive to the contradictory structural features of society such as the relationship between socialized production and the privately controlled disposition of wealth. Resistance to institutional politics was thought of as irrational, an expression of youthful idealism, hypocritical or otherwise dishonest, or bordering on the fanatical.3 The emphasis on institutional politics invoked such values as rationality and civility, thought to have a universal core of meaning regardless of how the words are momentarily defined. These were said to be uncontaminated by the Left ideologies that had promoted misleading and, given the progress of society under liberal democracy, potentially dangerous ideas such as exploitation, classes, and class struggle. The appeal of those ideologies was presumably based on a belief that was essentially utopian, namely that socialism is the rational completion of the capitalist revolution insofar as it is aimed at reinforcing the conditions of abundant production brought about by capital’s historic socialization of labor. What was thought to be utopian about this was the implication that it is necessary to transform the relations of production from an emphasis on the private exercise of power based on wealth to an emphasis on societal authority over those means of production that have to do with the reproduction of society. From this point of view, the Left was seen as unrealistic; at best, it expresses values that, while admirable, are distorted by attempts to short-circuit the natural historical process by which, alone, they are capable of realization under the conditions of democracy. Leftists were advised, in the name of reason, to work within the context of a two-party system in which ideologies had become increasingly irrelevant and that provides the basis of a stable, self-perpetuating, and intrinsically progressive, polity. To do this required eliminating any connection to their radical past. It seemed evident to the critics of the Left that progress in America depends on affirming its institutions, and that, by the end of the 1950s, the constitutional protection of dissent provided a reliable foundation from which to work rationally and effectively for social change. While this position may have been defensible on its own grounds, it effectively proposed an abandonment of further inquiry, other than selfcon firming accounts, into the possibility that a rational basis exists for the persistence of radicalism. Consequently, research turned toward psychological explanations that focused on attitudes, beliefs, and the family backgrounds of activists. An elaborate defense of this position by prominent scholars, including Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, and Talcott Parsons , doubtless contributed to a drift to the Right among many radical intellectuals who lived through that period, over and above the revulsion with Stalinism. The latter might have accounted for a growing antipathy toward the Communist Party USA, and toward the Soviet Union as a model. But only a general analysis, coupled with fears not obviously connected with of...

Share