Democracy Against Itself: The Future of the Democratic Impulse.

Democracy against Itself.' The Future of the Democratic Impulse, by Jean-Francois Revel (Free Press, 263 pp., $24.95)

JEAN-FRANCOIS REVEL is the French political theorist who took on and vanquished, with a little help from history, the Marxist tribes of Paris. In The Totalitarian Temptation (1976), he asked why so many in the West took a positively obsequious attitude toward the deceit and depravity of Communist regimes. In How Democracies Perish (1983) he attacked vigorous Western democracies for feebleness in the face of a corrupt totalitarianism. Democracy against Itself carries these themes one stage further.

It argues that Western confusion about the very nature of totalitarianism wasted money and lost time in helping Russia come to terms with the disaster of Communism. Mikhail Gorbachev persuaded us that the Russians were just like other underdeveloped societies. All they needed was cash and sympathy in order to grow into free-market democracies. As usual, the troubles of the world were thought the responsibility of the 15 or so capitalist democracies who are regularly called on to save the rest of the world from disaster.

This program was in vain, because the analogy of the post-1945 Marshall Plan turned out to be misleading. We did not recognize that Communist totalitariauism was an "abnormal" political regime of a kind where the state destroys everything in civil society. Nothing is left to build on, Financial aid is no use to people who lack any conception of entrepreneurial skills, who have lost their sense of the rule of law, and have been thoroughly and corruptly atomized.

Mr. Revel's broader target is called "statism." It is the idea that human happiness depends on the political system, and it originated, he suggests, in the French Revolution: "professional politicians love it, since it gives them a privileged role in the forging of mankind's destiny." The opposite of statism is individualism, because it attacks the expanded job description favored by politicians; indeed, according to Mr. Revel, it virtually makes them redundant.

It will be clear that Mr. Revel is a bravura exponent of dichotomies which would in other hands lead to muddle. What is exhilarating about Democracy against Itself is not, however, the theoretical structure that occasionally surfaces, but the vivid account of real events--corruption in the French state, the shifts and devices of the confused Gorbachev as he tried to reform Soviet Communism without actually changing anything, the comedies of kleptocracy in Africa.

Democracy is the heart of the argument: rather like Francis Fukuyama, Mr. Revel thinks that it is now barely possible to resist democracy as the only "normal" way of conducting political affairs. What democracy needs is a set of conditions to be found in all normal societies, including even those (such as Franco's Spain and Pinochet's Chile) which Jeanne Kirkpatrick distinguished as "authoritarian." It is remarkable that the defeated fascist states of the Second World War made a rapid transition to liberal democracy, while such an evolution is proving difficult in the case of nations released from the grip of Communism.

The reason, Mr. Revel argues, is that Communist states were "abnormal" in the sense that Communism battened on civil society like a parasite destined to destroy every active principle within it, leaving nothing behind to serve regeneration. Totalitarianism is, in his view, a political pathology. This is a highly pessimistic view of world politics. Mr. Revel warns us against "the democratic euphoria" which believes that the totalitarian nightmares of the twentieth century were merely an intellectual mistake we have now recognized.

But what lies behind "the totalitarian temptation"? It will never die, Mr. Revel tells us, "for it is inherent in mankind. We can learn from political philosophy not to escape the temptation, but to avoid it." Later he remarks that "totalitarianism is a deadly substitute for man's self-improvement," and in a sentence that deserves to be deeply pondered: "It is unlikely that we will ever be capable of building a world that is qualitatively better than we ourselves are."

This means, I take it, that the collective pursuit of perfection is an illusion from which we will never be free. We are like drunks who must beware of taking even a sip of some intoxicating ideal lest we be carried away. What Mr. Revel does not do is go into the source of this illusion, which I believe to derive from the technological character of our civilization.

The surprising thing is that the technological illusion that the world can be managed peeps out of Mr. Revel's own argument. His account of democracy rightly recognizes that however sensible elections commonly are, they are always vulnerable to a majority's animus against a minority. Hence the importance of human rights in modern democracy. But a Babel of special interests has corrupted the rhetoric of rights. If we avoid this confusion, however, Mr. Revel continues, we shall have as clear a conception of universal rights as those of the classic declarations: rights that stand between the individual and "statist" governments. This leads him to a remarkable conclusion: the next democratizing step must be the recognition of an international "duty of intervention."

Such a duty emerges from historical analogy. International law in our world protects states, not people. It is, Mr. Revel tells us, "at about the same stage as criminal law when a father had the right of life and death over his children." The sovereign state thus appears as the last power left in the world whose treatment of human beings is beyond the law.

A world managed by what Mr. Revel does not hesitate to call "a kind of international democratic police" would no doubt lack many current evils. The difficulties of implementing any such scheme, however, have recently been dramatized by the case of Bosnia. And what if this police force should itself fall into evil hands? We are unlikely, as this admirable writer himself puts it, to build a world better than we are ourselves.

Mr. Revel is a fast man with the charge of fallacy, but here he seems to have slipped into a fallacy of his own. It is one that has had a notable history in political philosophy: the idea that any particular constitution of a state necessarily entails a particular policy. Kant thought republics necessarily favored peace, and Tom Paine that democratic governments would be economical with the money of their subjects. The totalitarian temptation, however, is too smart to be caught in the snares of mere constitutions.