The Full Gaunt

Though reviewing books is a humble enough task, it frequently leads to elevated thinking. As I read these books, it occurred to me that, perhaps, unwittingly, they pointed to the ambiguous legacies of the Enlightenment. One of those legacies is found in the conventional political distinction drawn between ‘left’ and ‘right’; the other concerns the role of the expert.

For most of the twentieth century, politics was structured as a contest between left and right. On the left, liberals and socialists alike claimed to be heirs of an Enlightenment belief that ‘modern society’ was a distinctive social form going somewhere. On the right, nationalist and fascist movements offered a conservative Enlightenment idea. This was embodied in Vico’s account of the organic history of communities and their evolving traditions of faith, myth or language. Framed in this way, what became the left made the running early in the twentieth century. If history was understood as a railway line heading towards an ever-glorious future, Marxists and socialists claimed variously a role as train driver or switchman. For at least three-quarters of the twentieth century, the left assumed the vanguard position. The train on the Long March to Progress was derailed in December 1991 when the Red Flag was torn down from the Kremlin. History, understood as the contest between ‘actually existing state socialism’ and American style liberal democracy, was over.