Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.

SIR RALF DAHRENDORF is a model European and an immensely distinguished sociologist. In trouble with the Nazis as a youth, he has since moved fluently between the worlds of academia and politics, serving both the German Liberals and as a European Commissioner in Brussels. For ten years, he was director of the London School of Economics. Reflections on the Revolution in Europe attempts to make sense of the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe. He would seem to be the ideal man for the job.

Certainly he shows no lack of courage in adapting the title of Edmund Burke's famous letter of 1790. Burke's Reflections attained immorality partly because he wrote them in a spirit of incandescent rage. Even before the enormities of the Jacobins had been committed, Burke had presciently put together the many small clues which added up to something quite new and horrible in European experience. Mobs with muddy boots had trampled over the corridors of the palace of Versailles, offering insult to Marie-Antoinette, a princess whom Burke had glimpsed as a vision of loveliness 17 years before. Others might think this a trivial matter compared to the condition of the poor. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird," commented Citizen Tom Paine. But Burke wrote:

Little did I dream that I should have

lived to see such disasters fallen upon

her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation

of men of honor and of cavaliers.

... But the age of chivalry is gone, that

of sophisters, economists, and calculators

has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is

extinguished forever.

Well, not quite forever, perhaps. Glory is pretty resilient, and much romance has survived the gritty metaphysics of the Jacobins and their Marxist successors. It would have been possible for Dahrendorf to take a high conservative line and see in the events of 1989 the culmination and collapse of the sterile intellectuality whose arrival in power Burke so brilliantly denounced. Dahrendorf approaches this line in certain respects. Unfortunately, he does so with a bad conscience.

The reason is that he is essentially a man of the center whose message is that the center has collapsed. As a social democrat, he wants to have the vitality of capitalism without "the tide of trash and glitter" which rises inexorably in free societies. But the old politics of the middle way between capitalism and Communism can no longer pretend to be an option.

Mrs. Patrick Campbell once proposed marriage to George Bernard Shaw on the ground that any child they might have would be both beautiful and brainy. But what, demanded Shaw, if the child should have your brains and my beauty? The fear that the newly liberated countries of Eastern Europe might simply add capitalist vulgarity to socialist vice lies behind Dahrendorf's book, couched as an open letter to a friend in Poland, and his main advice is excellent: Throw away this talk of systems, and live in Sir Karl Popper's open society, in which men and women respond pragmatically to the challenges they face. If capitalism actually were a system, he remarks, it would have to be fought, and he is perfectly right. The basic error, of course, results from Marx's view that modern free societies were a concealed oppressive system, to which he gave the pejorative name of bourgeois society."

Had Dahrendorf been more sympathetic to F. A. Hayek, he might have analyzed the error of Communism as a form of constructivist rationalism." The odd thing, however, is that Hayek is sacrificed to the argument as the unacceptable face of liberal theory. He is described as gloomy," his conception of society marked down as "passive," he is seldom mentioned without being put down. At one point, he is even bracketed with Marx as a believer in historical inevitability. Yet Hayek clearly had good reasons for fearing an onset of socialism in 1944, and his belief that the collectivist solution to social problems is an evil is not a belief in political passivity (as Dahrendorf argues) but a rejection of the pseudo-activity of mass politics.

It is true, indeed, that Hayek is excessively prone to system, and that he wants to cordon off the market as a no-go area for politicians. Yet both his arguments and his historical role in the last half-century have been indispensable in sustaining the self-confidence of those who believe in a free society against those who believe in the rule of rational experts. Why is it, then, that Dahrendorf sets Hayek up as the symbol of a special kind of mistake?

The answer, I suspect, is that Dahrendorf is taking out on Hayek his discomfort at the fact that he finds himself closer to conservative positions than he likes. Hence Popper appears as Vergil to his Dante, a philosophical guide through the contingencies of collectivist breakdown. The Popperian tone also favors Kant over Hegel in freedom's philosophical ancestry. Yet it is Hegel whose theory of the relation between the state and civil society provides the most plausible reading of the immense damage that has been done to the peoples of Eastern Europe. Timothy Garton Ash quotes the sour Russian joke that exemplifies the problem: An aquarium can be turned into fish soup. Can fish soup be turned into an aquarium?

Dahrendorfs basic message, then, is absolutely right: there is no middle way between freedom with its vulgarities) and Communist servitude (with its deluding promise of security). But lacking Burke's rage, and being afflicted with good manners, he is reluctant to push his argument home. One feature of the new epoch which pleases him is what Andre Fontaine has called "the reunification of language." It means that we can now talk to each other in a common language. This language in fact is the open academic discourse of the West, whose capacity for grappling with reality has entirely displaced the ideological Newspeak sustained by Marxism. But Dahrendorf eschews such triumphalism.

People read my books [he writes] but

they never commented on them without

calling me a bourgeois author," and

many on this side of the fence found it

necessary to apply analogous epithets to

authors from the other side.

They did? Dahrendorf wisely refrains from exemplification. The ghost of moral equivalence thus fudges the argument here, and elsewhere. It is important for us to be clear that the Communism which has collapsed was false and vile. We must not be intimidated by mischievous people who interpret clarity on this point as if it amounted to saying that we are morally superior as individuals, or that there are no problems in our free societies. I am sure that Dahrendorf would agree that the Marxist collapse makes the deficiencies of Western life even more conspicuous, and perhaps even dangerous, than they were before. It is in provoking thought along these lines that the value of Dahrendorf's Reflections, for all its equivocations, is to be found.