Judging Nazism and Communism

The reason why Minerva's owl was so slow to fly in the Russian case (contrary to its performance after the French events that inspired Hegel's maxim) is that October 1917, unlike 1789, never knew a Thermidor. To be sure, ideological zeal abated after Stalin's death in 1953, but the structures of Party, Plan, and Police that he and Lenin had between them built remained in place until 1991. The heritage of 1917 therefore ossified into the historically unprecedented phenomenon of an "institutional revolution" (to borrow a label from later Mexican history); and its only Thermidor was its demise. Not until the historiographical consequences have been drawn from such a paradoxical outcome can we hope to have symmetrical "databases" for comparing Nazism and Communism.

The Role of Socialist Ideology

YET EVEN IF this empirical goal is achieved, the comparison between Communism and Nazism will always be clouded by their contrasting ideological auras, and these derive from their relationship to that greatest of modern utopias: socialism. Both movements after all claimed that name, and both pretended to speak with a single voice for all the "people." Hence both strove to transcend liberal democracy by submerging the individual in the "collective" or the "communal", whether a fraternal internationalism or a particularistic Volksgemeinscbaft. And this aspiration--presciently diagnosed by Elie Halevy--is surely the lowest common denominator of generic totalitarianism. This concept, therefore, is best considered both as a historical benchmark and as an ideal type, not a literal description of either dictatorship's "monolithic" control of society.

Over and above this bond, however, socialism is relevant to the Nazi-Communist comparison for a still more basic reason: the pervasiveness of its mystique in the moral economy of modern politics. Generic socialism, after all, was the preeminent theoretical project of the 19th century, and its maximal version was the Marxist program of leaping to an egalitarian society through the suppression of private property and the market. This ambition then became the great practical endeavor of the 20th century, whether its adherents settled for the diluted democratic variant of a welfare state or sought complete triumph through a Leninist party-state.

Well, we have just spent a near century finding out that Marxism's perfect egalitarian society does not exist, and that on the far side of capitalism there is only a Soviet-type regime. Thus the Great Collapse of 1989-91 brought not only Communism's fall but that of generic socialism, as well. To be sure, there are still numerous socialist parties and governments in the world, but none proposes to make the world-historical leap out of capitalism. (It is noteworthy, for example, that the anti-globalization surge of 1999--2001 never called itself "socialist.") Still, this second fact has not yet penetrated the contemporary consciousness; and until it does, the specter of socialism will haunt the Hitler-Stalin debate.