The Devil in History: Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century

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Later, as a sociology student at the University of Bucharest, I ignored the official calls to distrust “bourgeois ideology” and did my utmost to get hold of forbidden books by Milovan Djilas, Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Leszek Kołakowski, and other antitotalitarian thinkers. Confronted with the grotesque follies of Nicolae Ceausescu’s dynastic Communism, I realized that I was living in a totalitarian regime run by a delusional leader who exerted absolute control over the population via the Communist Party and the secret police. It was for this reason that I became intensely interested in the occulted traditions of Western Marxism and the Frankfurt School theorists’ attempt to rehabilitate subjectivity. My PhD dissertation, defended in 1980, was entitled Revolution and Critical Reason: The Political Theory of the Frankfurt School and Contemporary Left-Wing Radicalism. From the writings of Theodore W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, I learned about the tribulations of negativity in the age of total administration and inescapable alienation. I read Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, and Antonio Gramsci, and I found in their ideas (especially their early writings) an antidote to the mindless optimism of Marxism-Leninism.

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