THE GRAND FAILURE
The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1989
270 pp., $19.95
It is most appropriate to consider Zbigniew Brzezinski's provocative book about "the terminal crisis of communism" against the backdrop of two divergent philosophical strains in American, indeed Western, political thought and, at the same time, to see his well-received prophecy as a fulfillment of the "God that failed" writing that burst upon the intellectual landscape four decades ago.
Divergent Strains
From its beginning, the political culture of the United States has been nourished by a continuing struggle between two different ways of looking at history and politics, two streams of thought that have vied for ascendancy. The late theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called these inclinations "rational idealism" and "historical realism," each manifesting itself in diverging political attitudes, expectations, and behavior.
A child of Enlightenment and Social Darwinism, rational idealism in its pure form affirms, the perfectibility, or at least improvability, of man and the possibility, if not inevitability, of progress in history. The diverse schools within this approach are united in their focus on man's nobler nature.
The earlier idealists saw reason as the redemptive agent that would save man and reform politics and eventually inaugurate an era of universal peace and brotherhood. The natural goodness of man, they believed, could be translated into the structure of national and universal politics. Poverty, injustice, and war could be eliminated. Among the voices of rational idealism were Tom Paine, Walt Whitman, and Walter Rauschenbusch, the articulate spokesmen of the Protestant Social Gospel movement. Wilsonian idealism, the manifestation of rationalism in the international sphere, reached its zenith in 1928 with the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war as an "instrument of national policy."
Historical realism, in contrast, emphasizes the moral limits of human nature and history and has its roots in the thought of Saint Augustine, John Calvin, Edmund Burke, and James Madison. Rejecting all forms of religious and secular utopianism--including fascism and communism--the post-Versailles realists have included men as varied as Niebuhr, Carl L. Becker, Winston Churchill, Dean Acheson, and Henry Kissinger. Noting that the extravagant expectations of the Wilsonians were not ratified by subsequent events, the self-designated realists hold that all political achievements are limited by man's dogged resistance to drastic reconstruction. With this recognition of "original sin," they argue that perfect peace, justice, security, and freedom are not possible in this world, though approximations of these lofty goals are not beyond man's grasp.
To the rational idealist, the "impossible ideal" is achievable because it is rationally conceivable. To the historical realist, the "impossible ideal" is relevant because it lends humility without despair and hope without
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