Thinking the 20th Century

Book

Download a PDF online.

Notes

• Final Act of 1975, by which the Soviet Union and all of its satellite states committed themselves to observe basic human rights. The regimes of course did not expect to have to take this seriously, which is the only reason they appended their signatures. But from Moscow to Prague critics seized upon the opportunity to focus the attention of the regime on its own legal obligations.
• You simply behaved as though you were treating the law, the language of communism, the constitution of the separate states and the international agreements they had signed as though they were operational and could be trusted.
• Such an approach required, of course, acceptance of exclusion from politics as the regime (and many outsiders) might define it. Whether you describe this, in Havel’s words, as “the power of the powerless,”
• crucial asset of Western liberalism was not its intellectual appeal but its institutional structures.
• Invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Brezhnev Doctrine of “fraternal assistance” is so obviously a cover for great power politics
• The good society, like goodness itself, cannot be reduced to a single source; ethical pluralism is the necessary precondition for an open democracy.
• The Trial, where K. says that if we must accept that the law is grounded only in necessity, then lying becomes a universal principle.
• Tim’s book on ThePolish Revolution is a serious work of political analysis. But it is also a deeply engaged book
• Basia took... great trouble to convey to me the importance of the lost world of Polish culture, literature and ideas: lost to the West, of course, but also lost to Poles themselves thanks to the destructive impact of Soviet hegemony
• it was Leszek Kołakowski, important both to my Polish friends and to me, who famously observed that reforming socialism was like frying snowballs
• Jan Gross. The monograph that he went on to publish, on the Soviet annexation of eastern Poland, Revolution from Abroad, is a rare vertical monument on the blasted heath of Sovietology
• Kolakowski - He was best known perhaps for his idea that the cruelties of Stalinism were not an aberration but a natural product of Marxism,
• Kołakowski’s perspective—that Marxism, especially in its heyday, merited intellectual attention but was bereft of political prospects or moral value
• seriousness with which Kołakowski approached Marxism even as he set out to eviscerate its political credibility.
• What was missing in interwar thought of the left and center was any appreciation of the possibility of evil as a constraining, much less a dominating, element in public affairs
• What Blum shares with all of these is the distinctive late nineteenth-century mix of cultural self-confidence informed by a duty to engage in public improvement.
• And so this combination of faith and the very considerable attractions of shared allegiance gave communism something that no other political movement could boast.
• Whether they are born awkward, or become so over time, such men are difficult: they have sharp edges and prickly personalities. Berlin suffered no such defects. This was undoubtedly part of his charm; but over the years, it also encouraged in him a certain reticence on controversial matters, a reluctance to speak out which may, in the course of time, diminish his reputation.
• In the Soviet Union or communist Czechoslovakia, the outcome for two generations of “bourgeois” was decidedly unpleasant, at just the moment when their counterparts in New York or London, Paris or Milan, were elevating themselves to the status of spokesmen for History.
• The bourgeois-democracy association always seems to me a brilliant Freudian adaptation on the part of the Marxists: it means that you can be against the lawyer-father or the banker-father while remaining at liberty to enjoy the privileges of childhood and childish rebellion.
• The notion that what is wrong with bourgeois democracy is the adjective rather than the noun was a truly brilliant innovation on the part of Marxist rhetoricians.
• Arendt’s is, to coin a phrase, the republicanism of fear. In this way of thinking, the foundation for a modern, democratic politics must be our historical awareness of the consequences of not forging and preserving a modern, democratic polity.,
• Not just Arendt and Sartre but a whole generation of European intellectuals were connected to Heidegger, directly or otherwise.
• Martin Heidegger himself became all but unacceptable in the States as a result of his Nazi sympathies
• mass societies in turn reflect a pathological interaction between “mob” and “elite,” a distinctive dilemma at
• the paradox of distributed responsibility: bureaucracy dilutes and obscures individual moral responsibility, rendering it invisible and thus producing Eichmann and, with Eichmann, Auschwitz
• Pluralism accepts the moral reality of different kinds of truth, but rejects the idea that they can all be placed on a single scale, measured by a single value
• Wisdom seems to come from being both an insider and an outsider, from passing through the inside with eyes and ears wide open and returning to the outside to think and to write.
• To understand an event requires the historian to release any one framework and to accept the validity of several frameworks simultaneously.
• I was personally interested (although I never raised the issue explicitly) in how Tony became a better thinker, writer and historian over time. In general, his preferred answer to related questions was that, in all of his various identities and in all of his various historical methods, he was always an outsider.,