» Want to continue? Login below:
Which Socialism?
In
the not-so-distant past, when Norberto Bobbio, the Italian political theorist, first asked this question, it was (or so it looks today) relatively easy to answer. There were only two choices: the version of socialism that prevailed in what we might think of as the Long East, which stretched from North Korea across the Soviet Union all the way to Albania, and the version that prevailed in the Short West, from the Bonn republic to the British Isles. There were differences within each of the two blocs, but the socialism of the East was everywhere marked by an authoritarian politics, with totalizing pretensions, and the socialism of the West, whether its protagonists claimed to be reformers or revolutionaries, was deeply democratic. There were leftists in the West—we called them Stalinists—who defended or apologized for the socialism of the East, but the simplest regard for human life and dignity dictated a commitment to the socialism of the West. Bobbio’s strong defense of democracy, like...
