The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left: The Revolutions of 1989. by Daniel ChirotReview by: Anthony OberschallSocial Forces, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Sep., 1993), pp. 266-268Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2580170 .

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266 / Social Forces 72:1, September 1993

If Mestrovic makes contemporary social thought seem too barren, he makes his preferred sources seem too rich. He usefully draws attention to Durkheim's Romantic motifs. But to balance what he regards as almost uniform neglect of Durkheim's Romantic side, he intentionally overstates his case. For example, although Mestrovic concedes Durkheim's ambivalence toward modem morality, his reading of Durkheim via a pessimistic understanding of homo duplex often obscures the extent to which Durkheim's stance on modernity vacillates between Romantic and Enlightenment themes. Durkheim, like Comte and Marx, seems more comprehensible to me as engaged in extraordinary, albeit unsuccessful struggles to merge Enlightenment and Romantic visions. Sociology continues the struggle today. Diminishing either vision reduces the value of both as well as sociology as a whole.

Schopenhauer and Bachofen pose other problems. Megtrovic wisely sets aside some disreputable aspects of their works, including Schopenhauer's misogynism and Bachofen's empirical claims for his matriarchal myth of the origins of social life. But he never inquires into the systematic implications of these ideas for Romantic social thought. He thereby seems to claim the virtues of his Romantic sources as if their shortcomings had no standing. Furthermore, while Megtrovic demonstrates that fin de sikcle intellectuals cited Schopenhauer and Bachofen, he proposes no strong links from them to Durkheim et al., relying instead upon claims that the themes the earlier pair introduced circulated influentially in circles within which Durkheim and others worked. As a result, when we read that various ideas in Durkheim are Schopenhauerian, or that they exhibit the indirect influence of Bachofen's thought, the interpretations seem no more than plausible (and sometimes implausible) labels. This loose interpretive strategy significantly reduces the persuasive power of the text.

MeRtrovit writes in an insistent, occasionally aggressive voice, with little tolerance for positions other than his own. Early on, he even sets forth the grounds upon which he prefers to be criticized. I have chosen other grounds in writing this review. A renewal of Romantic values and a reconsideration of homo duplex are worthy alternatives to postmodern nihilism. Both deserve better than this.

The Crisis of Leninism and the Decline of the Left. The Revolutions of 1989. Edited by Daniel Chirot. University of Washington Press, 1991. 245 pp. Cloth, $30.00; paper, $14.95.

Reviewer: ANThoNY OBER9CHALLl University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Shortly after the 1989 revolutions, a number of conferences were held to discuss the significance of these events and to explain why they occurred. Conference papers were rushed into print, and a number of books were born, some prematurely. Unfortunately, The Crisis of Leninism is one of them. Some books concentrate on the why and how of the revolutions in different countries and on the problems of democratic transition and the change to a market economy. This one, however, lacks a unifying theme, ranges over the entire globe, is eclectic in thought and method- ology, and leaves much to be desired with respect to substance and interpretation. Presumably the conception of the Soviet Union and East Europe as the last of the colonial empires unraveling in the late 1980s and the moral and ideological vacuum left by decolonization and filled by nationalism should have provided an ap-

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Book Reviews / 267

propriate focus of discussion, but the reader looks in vain for this or any other coherent theme.

With the exception of editor Chirot's insightful essay, the contributors manifest a stubbom refusal to analyze the process of revolutionary change in 1989 in terms of theories of revolution, despite references to the comparative method and various earlier revolutions. For instance, what Stephen Hanson describes in "Gorbachev: The Last True Leninist Believer?" fits the analysis of erratic reformism in a revolutionary situation well known in the works of Tocqueville, Crane Brinton, and other students of revolution, including the danger of allowing political and intellectual freedoms before reformation of the economy. Ken Jowitt's chapter, "The Leninist Extinction," ranges far and wide over the causes of the Soviet collapse and on the unlikelihood of a liberal democratic transition, yet when he provides himself a chance to analyze that transition by comparisons with Greece and Spain, he dismisses them in one sentence. He argues that the post-Leninist world is going to be traumatic and turbulent, but that is hardly contested. Bruce Cuming assesses the reaction in Westem countries to communism's collapse, points out that Asian communism is alive and well, and does not want us to feel good about winning the Cold War since we have many of the same problems (pollution, rust belt, infrastructure) as East Europe and the Soviet Union. In his discussion of the two Koreas, he makes no distinction between the authoritarian regime of the south and the totalitarian one of the north. In fact, he maintains that the South Korean system was much more repressive. One wonders how he might explain the transition in South Korea to a democratic polity. He also believes that some of the extremism of North Korean politics can be attributed to the consequences of "three years of genocidal bombing by the U.S. Air Force which killed perhaps two million civilians" and believes South Korea is one of our "client" states around the world (he does not list the others). I doubt that all this will enlighten readers.

Elizabeth Perry provides a more thoughtful, informed, and balanced view of the democracy movement in China in 1989. Nevertheless it is unclear that her criticism of elitism among the students and intellectuals and of their exclusionary style of protest which served to reinforce preexisting authority relations (i.e., they were undemocratic in pursuit of democracy) is well taken. There were strategic reasons for not mobilizing Beijing industrial workers immediately. Students feared that a mass movement aimed at the party-state would invite immediate repression. There was lots of support by workers and ordinary Beijing folk for the democracy movement, and when the students realized they needed organized worker support, they found that the party had preempted them by threatening the major industrial units with reprisals, such as loss of their wage bonuses. As to peasants, how was a short-lived movement with low organizational capacity to reach out to hundreds of thousands of villages and to people who had been the main beneficiaries of the economic reforms? The strategy of remonstrance, the stress on moral symbols, and the search for allies within the top leadership of the party who would back political reform was not due to a Confucian mentality. It was the only realistic strategy of a movement that had to rely on moral appeals because it could not and did not want to rely on weapons and whose adherents knew full well that they needed reform communists with power to succeed. In the end, despite factionalism and other shortcomings, it was not the elitist mentality that defeated the movement, but the army.

Two chapters by economists Walt Rostow and Nicholas Landry discuss Soviet and Chinese economic transformation strategies and Westem policies needed to

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268 / Social Forces 72:1, September 1993

make them succeed. These authors tread on familiar territory, and their analyses and recommendations are unobjectionable. David Catteo looks at the post-1989 new world order from the point of view of American foreign policy. Seymour Martin Lipset's "comparative perspective on the left" examines why and to what extent socialist and social democratic parties around the world have moved to the right on capitalism, markets, and the welfare state. I was surprised to learn that the Democratic party in the United States is an exception to this trend, since in my experience the Democrats have come to accept the lowest income and corporate tax rates in the West, have no industrial policy, are receptive to immigration, oppose protectionism, and have made their peace with a welfare state that redistributes the most to the middle-class elderly. Lipset makes an argument about the Democrats' radical cultural policies (affirmative action); yet the Democrats favor choice and nonstate intervention on abortion, whereas the Republicans are prolife and favor state-backed coercive moralism.

The only jewel in this collection is Chirot's opening essay, "What Happened in Eastem Europe in 1989?" Chirot provides the why, the how, and the appropriate comparisons with other modem revolutions. He rescues "legitimacy' from neglect in revolution theories, and he does it well. Readers need not agree with him in all matters to lament the fact that most of the contributions fall short of the high standard he has set. Read Chirot, and skip the rest!

The Discourse of Domination: From the Frankfurt School to Postmodernism. By Ben Agger. Northwestem University Press, 1992. 347 pp. Cloth, $42.95; paper, $17.95.

Reviewer: CLIFFORD L SIAPLES, University of North Dakota

Dear Ben: I'm writing with bad news. Social Forces sent me your book, The Discourse of Domination, to review. Now, in general, I like your book. The problem is that they sent the book to me and not some Theory Big Shot, and I've only been leased 750- words worth of the journal's real estate in which to write about it. Given where we've been situated in this particular disciplinary discourse of domination, what I have to say about your book, good or bad, won't matter much to anyone but you and me. Well, so be it.

When I saw that 12 of the 15 chapters had already been published as journal articles, I expected the worst sort of glued-together sampling from your vita. So I was happy to see that you had made the effort to rewrite and integrate these essays. It helped me get past the dreadful feeling that I had gotten stuck reading a career move instead of a book.

I read your book as a testimony to your personal and professional struggle to keep Marxism's emancipatory project, and yourself, alive through the intellectually and politically deadly 1980s. Reading about your immersion in Marxism and critical theory and your subsequent encounters with feminism, phenomenology, and postmodernism, it looks as though we have been down many of the same roads and have much in common - including the need to write ourselves as intellectual heroes into the grand narrative of revolutionary struggle (it's a guy thing).

The first section of the book - where you critique the conservatism of academic/scientific Marxism, the attack on Marxism by the neofunctionalists, and

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