and the Moral Foundations of Democracy
Dr. Daniel Mahoney
David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, has recently written that "in terms of the effect he has had on history," the Russian Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn "is the dominant writer of the twentieth century. Who else compares? Orwell? Koestler?" Yet Remnick went on to add that when Solzhenitsyn's name comes up today in many academic and journalistic circles, "it is more often than not as a freak, a monarchist, an anti-Semite, a crank, a has-been."
The man who more than any other living
figure is responsible for exposing the totalitarian nature of
communism in such masterpieces as The First Circle and The Gulag
Archipelago is accused by some of wanting "new Gulags, new
Ayatollahs." And yet, as Remnick adds, Solzhenitsyn has been
a determined critic of Russian and Soviet imperialism, an advocate
of strong, local self-government, a critic of the extremist nationalism
and anti-Semitism of the Russian demagogue Valdimir Zhirinovsky
(whom he has called "an evil caricature of a Russian patriot"),
and the first to label the post-communist government of Russia
an "oligarchy."
As I point out in my forthcoming book Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
the Ascent from Ideology, the source of these systematic misrepresentations
of Solzhenitsyn's thought can be found in a misunderstanding of
the ideas presented in his Harvard Address of 1978. Solzhenitsyn's
critics have never sufficiently appreciated his admiration for
the West's "historically unique stability of civic life under
the rule of law." Solzhenitsyn's real target at Harvard,
one reiterated in numerous speeches and essays, was never constitutional
government or political democracy per se, but rather the diminution
of "man's sense of responsibility to God and society."
Solzhenitsyn believes that the United States and other Western
democracies are torn between two competing conceptions of liberty.
The first, and traditional understanding of "liberty under
God," upholds that "all human rights were granted on
the ground that man is God's creature." The second understanding,
"anthropocentric humanism," sees man as the center of
the universe.
Solzhenitsyn is, as I attempt to show in my book, a principled
moderate-a critic of all political fanaticism. His hero-the hero
of his great cycle of novels on the Russian Revolution, The Red
Wheel, is Pyotr Stolypin, the prime minister of Russia between
1906 and 1911. A world-class statesman, Stolypin desired reform
with revolution and introduced far-reaching land reform, which
was the scourge of both the revolutionary Left and the autocratic
Right. In his recently published October 1916, Solzhenitsyn writes
eloquently of the difficulties of pursuing a "middle line"
of social development, particularly in an age of ideological politics.
"The loud mouth, the big fist, the bomb, the prison bars
are of no help to you as they are to those at the two extremes.
Following the middle line demands the utmost self-control, the
most inflexible courage, the most patient calculation, the most
precise knowledge."
Solzhenitsyn, then, is no extremist. But, in addition to
having exposed the terrible evils of totalitarianism in our century,
he is a forceful critic of moral
relativism and radical individualism. Together, these emancipate
human beings from the requirements of conscience or from humility
before a "Supreme Complete Entity," that restrains human
irresponsibility. Solzhenitsyn rightly sees that nihilism erodes
a free political order. Liberty must be ordered freedom-liberty
under God and the law. In his view, Russia needs to cultivate
the school, church, and local self-government as the seedbed for
a reconstituted civil society. Some see in this a "reactionary"
nostalgia for an older, religious Russia. Others, such as myself,
see only good sense for Russia and the West alike.
By Dr. Daniel J. Mahoney
DR. DANIEL J. MAHONEY is associate professor of Political Science at Assumption College. He is the author of The Liberal Political Science of Raymond Aron (1992), and the editor and author of an introductory essay to Pierre Manent: Modern Liberty and Its Discontents (1998). His book, DeGaulle: Statesmanship, Grandeur, and Modern Democracy, will be released in paperback by Transaction Publishers in April of this year. His essays and reviews have appeared in First Things, The Wall Street Journal, The National Interest, and Perspectives on Political Science, among other publications. His book, Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology will appear from Rowan & Littlefield in the summer of 2001.