On Modern Tyranny: A Critique of Western Intellectuals

Recently, confronted by the renewed repression of intellectual life in the Soviet Union and the rebellious movements in Czechoslovakia and Poland, the following argument has often been repeated in conversation and advanced in the press:

The protest of intellectuals and students in the countries of the East concerns partial demands—greater freedom of speech, a less strict political regime, a more efficient management of the economy—demands which, among us in the West, have become obsolete. The system, that is, the socialist regime, is not being put in question. On the contrary, among us the New Left rejects (in the current jargon the word is confronts) the system—that is, neocapitalism or the consumer civilization—in a radical fashion. Thus the revolt fermenting in the West is more advanced than the basically romantic and 19th-century one, which agitates the countries of Eastern Europe.

This argument deserves to be examined in s...