Books, Arts & Manners: How Communism Fell

The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism, by George Weigel (Oxford, 272 pp., $22.50)

WESTERN OPINION, even among conservatives, remains remarkably confused as to the ultimate causes of the collapse of Soviet Communism. Among the Western liberal nomenklatura, as among Western Sovietologists, there has been a deafening silence. For these embodiments of the conventional wisdom, the Soviet collapse must remain a mystery, since it demolishes every pillar that supports their view of the world. They continue to cling to the Enlightenment, with its animating mythology of global betterment, and similar pieties of secular humanism. For this reason, it is unprofitable to expect illumination on this question from Western liberals, who are now palpably bereft of any remotely coherent world view, and who increasingly resemble the fundamentalist zealots of our age, whose inherited traditions have been shattered by the traumas of modernity.

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John Gray

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The Final Revolution: The Resistance Church and the Collapse of Communism, by George Weigel (Oxford, 272 pp., $22.50)

WESTERN OPINION, even among conservatives, remains remarkably confused as to the ultimate causes of the collapse of Soviet Communism. Among the Western liberal nomenklatura, as among Western Sovietologists, there has been a deafening silence. For these embodiments of the conventional wisdom, the Soviet collapse must remain a mystery, since it demolishes every pillar that supports their view of the world. They continue to cling to the Enlightenment, with its animating mythology of global betterment, and similar pieties of secular humanism. For this reason, it is unprofitable to expect illumination on this question from Western liberals, who are now palpably bereft of any remotely coherent world view, and who increasingly resemble the fundamentalist zealots of our age, whose inherited traditions have been shattered by the traumas of modernity.