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Ryszard Legutko

The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies Hardcover – April 19, 2016

by Ryszard Legutko (Author)

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Ryszard Legutko lived and suffered under communism for decades—and he fought with the Polish ant-communist movement to abolish it. Having lived for two decades under a liberal democracy, however, he has discovered that these two political systems have a lot more in common than one might think. They both stem from the same historical roots in early modernity, and accept similar presuppositions about history, society, religion, politics, culture, and human nature. In The Demon in Democracy, Legutko explores the shared objectives between these two political systems, and explains how liberal democracy has over time lurched towards the same goals as communism, albeit without Soviet style brutality. Both systems, says Legutko, reduce human nature to that of the common man, who is led to believe himself liberated from the obligations of the past. Both the communist man and the liberal democratic man refuse to admit that there exists anything of value outside the political systems to which they pledged their loyalty. And both systems refuse to undertake any critical examination of their ideological prejudices.

Print length

200 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Encounter Books
Publication date

April 19, 2016
Dimensions

6.5 x 1 x 9.5 inches
ISBN-10

1594038635
ISBN-13

978-1594038631
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ryszard Legutko is a professor of philosophy at Jagellonian University in Krakow, Poland, specializing in ancient philosophy and political theory. His most recent book is on the philosophy of Socrates. He has served as the Minister of Education, Secretary of State in the Chancellery of the late President Lech Kaczynski, and Deputy Speaker of the Senate and is active in the anti-communist movement in Poland. He is currently a Member of the European Parliament, Deputy Chairman of the Parliamentary Group of European Conservatives and Reformists, and a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Encounter Books (April 19, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 200 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1594038635
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1594038631
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1 x 9.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #840,616 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,498 in Democracy (Books)
- #1,673 in Communism & Socialism (Books)
- #2,551 in Political Commentary & Opinion

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Graham H. Seibert

The eerie parallels between communism and liberal democracy – and the ways both threaten your freedom.

Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2018

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Ryszard Legutko was born in 1949 in Poland, a couple of years after its status as a Soviet satellite had become recognized by all. He enthusiastically supported the first Solidarity movement in 1980, when he would have been in his early 30s. It was fueled by strong sense of patriotism, history, and Catholicism. The second Solidarity, coming in 1989 just as communism was falling, was not passionate about any of these three. It was more like Western liberal democracy.

Legutko noted with disappointment that communist officials transitioned easily into government positions in the new Poland. Very little effort was made to call even the ones who had committed major human rights abuses under the Communists. Good Communists made good liberal Democrats, by and large.

That is the thesis of the book. Although communism was vastly more ruthless, liberal democracy has an uncomfortable amount in common with it. The parallels merit investigation. Legutko outlines the correspondence in the realms addressed by his chapter structure
History
Utopia
Politics
Ideology
Religion

I note here a few thoughts that struck me as particularly noteworthy.

The idea that you were born with dignity is new. The traditional concept was that you require dignity by the way you behave in life. An innate "human dignity" possessed by all men is a new idea.

The idea of "human rights" that one acquires by simply being born is likewise new. The old notion with more one of quid pro quo. You get proportion to what you give. Nothing is free.

The way in which the concept of happiness" has morphed into pleasure is another of Legutko's topics. At the time the founding fathers wrote into the preamble to the Constitution "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" philosophers in Europe were still carrying on the question of the meaning of life that started with the Greeks. The worthwhile life was one which included virtue, service to the community, family, learning, and achieving to one's limits.

The historical notion of happiness has morphed into mere pleasure. Legutko points out that pleasure is fleeting. Even the most sublime, sex, is episodic it cannot be sustained at a constant level. Happiness is something more profound, the satisfaction of a life well lived. Modern man has lost sight of that. Legutko writes of anthropological minimalism," which means reducing man to mere appetites.

He writes that not even communism was able to politicize sex. Liberal democracy has done so with a vengeance. It has granted special status to women and gays – Legutko didn't mention transsexuals, though he should have – that give them power and privilege over history whites.

Communism and liberal democracy are creatures that must continue to grow. They must push their tentacles ever deeper into society. Schools, universities, the workplace, volunteer organizations and even families have been relentlessly politicized. The state has granted itself power to ruthlessly suppress what it doesn't like. Not mentioned but typical are Germany and Sweden forbidding homeschooling; forcing grade schoolers to shared toilets with transsexuals; forcing Christians to support abortion and birth control.

The ostracism that the politically incorrect face has become more and more severe. In Europe you can be jailed for questioning how many died in the Holocaust or whether or not ongoing Muslim immigration is a good idea. These examples are mine – Legutko tends to speak in generalities.

Legutko has rather obviously, one supposes consciously, omitted several lines of arguments from this discussion. One such thread would be cultural Marxism. He makes one mention of the Frankfurt school and two to Herbert Marcuse in about the 1950s but that is about it. He makes no mention of the ethnicities of those who worked most doggedly to undermine the traditional Christianity of the United States and Europe.

Legutko does not address declining fertility. The dogmas of liberal democracy that people doing almost everything except bearing children and raising them to be like their ancestors. In an evolutionary sense liberal democracy is bound to fail. It simply does not reproduce itself.

Legutko likewise does not discuss economics. In its failure to reproduce itself, liberal democracy is not producing taxpayers to fund the generous benefits that the voters have awarded themselves. The entire developed world is creaking under unsustainable debt as I write. The impending collapse of the current financial order will certainly present the liberal democracies with some vast challenges. It is quite likely to even undo them.

It has been a quarter of a century since communism fell. Though few saw the total collapse coming, the sclerotic nature of the decrepit communist society was a topic of common discussion. The sclerotic nature of the economy of Japan has been a topic of discussion for 30 years now. The similarities between Japan and Europe have been well noted. We should not be surprised if a financial catastrophe on the order of the Great Depression washes over the liberal democracies and forces a return to more sustainable, traditional values.

Here are some interesting passages from the book:

"… liberal democracy, as it has developed in recent decades, shares a number of alarming features with communism. Both are utopian and look forward to “an end of history” where their systems will prevail as a permanent status quo. Both are historicist and insist that history is inevitably moving in their directions. Both therefore require that all social institutions—family, churches, private associations—must conform to liberal-democratic rules in their internal functioning. Because that is not so at present, both are devoted to social engineering to bring about this transformation. And because such engineering is naturally resisted, albeit slowly and in a confused way, both are engaged in a never-ending struggle against enemies of society (superstition, tradition, the past, intolerance, racism, xenophobia, bigotry, etc., etc.) In short, like Marxism before it, liberal democracy is becoming an all-encompassing ideology that, behind a veil of tolerance, brooks little or no disagreement."

"Both communism and liberal democracy are regimes whose intent is to change reality for the better. They are—to use the current jargon—modernization projects. Both are nourished by the belief that the world cannot be tolerated as it is and that it should be changed: that the old should be replaced with the new. Both systems strongly and—so to speak—impatiently intrude into the social fabric and both justify their intrusion with the argument that it leads to the improvement of the state of affairs by “modernizing” it.

"Having armed himself with rights, modern man found himself in a most comfortable situation with no precedent: he no longer had to justify his claims and actions as long as he qualified them as rights. Regardless of what demands he would make on the basis of those rights and for what purpose he would use them, he did not and, in fact, could not lose his dignity, which he had acquired for life simply by being born human. And since having this dignity carried no obligation to do anything particularly good or worthy, he could, while constantly invoking it, make claims that were increasingly more absurd and demand justification for ever more questionable activities. Sinking more and more into arrogant vulgarity, he could argue that this vulgarity not only did not contradict his inborn dignity, but it could even, by a stretch of the imagination, be treated as some sort of an achievement. After all, can a dignity that is inborn and constitutes the essence of humanness, generate anything that would be essentially undignified and nonhuman? The dignity-based notion of human rights was thus both a powerful factor to legitimize a minimalist concept of human nature, and its legitimate child. Moreover, it equipped modern anthropological minimalism with the instruments of self-perpetuation, the most efficient instruments of this kind ever devised in the history of the Western societies."

"The conservatives, who, in principle, should oppose the socialists and liberal democrats, quite sincerely argue that they, too, are open, pluralistic, tolerant, and inclusive, dedicated to the entitlements of individuals and groups, non-discriminatory and even supportive of the claims of feminists and homosexual activists. All in all, the liberal democrats, the socialists, and the conservatives are unanimous in their condemnations: they condemn racism, sexism, homophobia, discrimination, intolerance, and all the other sins listed in the liberal-democratic catechism while also participating in an unimaginable stretching of the meaning of these concepts and depriving them of any explanatory power. All thoughts and all modes of linguistic expression are moving within the circle of the same clichés, slogans, spells, ideas, and arguments. All are involved in the grand design of which those who think and speak are not Legutkos but with whose authorship they deeply identify, or—in case of doubt—from which they do not find strength or reasons enough to distance themselves."

And some worthwhile quotes from other writings:

"The EU’s elites are unbending in their belief that “one has to be liberal in order to be respectable, that whoever is not a liberal is either stupid or dangerous, or both. the elites of the West, including those of the United States. Being liberal is the litmus test of political decency. This is today’s orthodoxy. If you criticize it, or you’re against it, you’re disqualified.” The world has shrunk and the liberal paradigm seems to be omnipresent.”

“A liberal is somebody who will come up to you and tell you, ‘I will organize your life for you. I will tell you what kind of liberty you will have. And then you can do whatever you like.’ ”

“We often say, half-jokingly and half-seriously, that now Poland may become a country to which people will defect”—people “from France, the Netherlands or Britain.”

This is a five-star effort. There are many more gems in the book than one can possibly cite in a review.

65 people found this helpful

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Peter N

Firsthand Reflections on Similarities of Communism and Liberalism

Reviewed in the United States on February 16, 2020

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Legutko, who experienced the transition from communist rule to EU-liberal rule in Poland, first hand, reflects on the numerous similarities.

Legutko concludes: “Contrary to what many people think, the modern liberal-democratic world does not deviate much, in many important aspects, from the world that the communist man dreamed about and that, despite the enormous collective effort, he could not build within the communist institutions. There are differences, to be sure, but they are not so vast that they could be gratefully and unconditionally accepted by someone who has had firsthand experience with both systems, and then moved from one to the other.”

Firsthand similarities are detailed and compared, under both systems, in the areas of: (1) Historical “inevitability;” (2) Utopian aspirations; (3) Political practices and policies; (4) Ideological philosophies; and (4) approaches and attitudes towards Religion.

Legutko would not be surprised that the communism of Bernie Sanders is so easily adopted, accepted and endorsed by American Democrat-liberals: “What happened in the liberal democracy did not result from the absence of culture, and there was nothing natural about it; nor did it come from outside of the realm of civilization. In that, it differed from the vulgarity of the communists, who, before they captured power in Poland, had lived in environments practically unaffected by Polish culture. Having been long exposed to the Soviet influence, they felt an intense, instinctive antipathy toward the West as such, not knowing exactly what it was, and in particular for all forms of civilized conduct and propriety, which they thought both decadent and perfidious. The new barbarians of the liberal democracy, on the other hand, were products of the West, which at a certain stage of its history turned against its own culture; the respect for its achievements was gone, replaced by contempt, the rules of civility and propriety derided. To put it simply, the vulgarity of the communist system was precultural while that of liberal democracy is postcultural.”

Very interesting and worthwhile presentation, but I was left with the question of whether, or how, to confront the vulgarity of the new barbarians.

10 people found this helpful

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Will Martin

Liberalism is destroying the pluralism on which much of its philosophical legitimation rests.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 25, 2018

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The striking claim in Ryszard Legutko’s ‘The Demon in Democracy’ is that both communism and liberal democracy share essentially the same central ideology, namely an unquestioned commitment to social improvement and unravelling of historic injustices, with a concomitant attitude of de-legitimation and derision towards historical culture. As Legutko acidly comments, liberalism no less than communism identifies opposition to its prevailing ideology as either maverick or heretical, to be either dismissed or eliminated via a pervasive politicisation of culture and society.

A powerful idea at the heart of Legutko’s book is that liberalism is actively destroying the pluralism on which much of its philosophical legitimation rests. He echoes what Patrick Deneen has recently written in ‘Why Liberalism Failed’, a central contention of which is that liberalism actively undermines its own cultural foundations. Both writers look back to Tocqueville who early on saw the dangers of conformity, simplification and sentiment which liberal democracy would give rise to.

It is a commonplace today that communist societies were totalitarian and monochrome, and that obedience, conformity and thought-policing were intrinsic to them. Legutko’s argument is that liberal democracies are increasingly not so different. Whereas communism openly avowed the need to destroy all pre-existing culture and recreate ‘citizens’ in a new model, devoid of arcane inheritances from family, church or any other pre-existing ‘structure’, liberalism feigns a conversational plurality in which it promises to pay respect to different identities, values and inheritances, with an offer to minimally arbitrate or facilitate between them. But liberalism has increasingly come to see culture and values as a key battleground and is no longer content to mediate a pluralistic demos, but rather seeks to refashion it.

The demos has always been problematic for liberalism, and indeed the electoral franchise was restricted for so long precisely because of uncertainty over where genuine ‘democracy’ might lead. To their great relief, the great ‘democratising’ conservative leaders of the late 19th. century, like Bismarck and Salisbury, saw that extending the franchise did not inevitably lead to leftism and a wholesale attack on privilege, but that there was a significant conservative ballast even amongst those apparently least privileged. In the social and political turmoils in the aftermath of the First World War and the Russian Revolution this conservative ballast not only resisted socialism, it also leant support to Fascism, to the stupefied chagrin of the Frankfurt School and other Marxists. The problem of ‘deconstructing’ this conservatism inherent in the demos became the central project of the intellectual left throughout the 20th century.

The latent conservatism in any demos could be said to lie in two principal areas: defence of privilege and resistance to change. As the current intellectual fashion of ‘intersectionality’ highlights, privilege and underprivilege exist across different dimensions, and in the right circumstances the coalition of ‘privileged’ can be very large indeed, especially when the whole social structure is in play. Indeed, it was precisely the realisation of this that made communists so vociferous in their counter-revolutionary brutality: the more evident their radicalism became, the bigger became the conservative coalition that tried to resist them.

While resistance to change is partly also motivated by defence of privilege, it is more importantly generated by scepticism that is properly suspicious of the political process, and particularly all political ‘ideology’. A fundamental insight that has recently been rehearsed by, for instance, Nassim Taleb’s ‘Anti-Fragile’ and Jordan Peterson’s ‘12 Rules for Life’, is that it is a difficult and primarily experiential task for a human being to gain understanding in the world. There is a lot of opacity, which trial-and-error, with real exposure to consequences, is much better at helping us to understand than ‘reading’ or thinking. The place one takes in the world depends on a matrix of one’s abilities, access, luck, and above all on the moves and trade-offs one has made in one’s life. Resistance to change is partly resistance to having all of those moves thrown into question by a radical re-writing of the game. But more than anything, purposive engagement with life teaches humility about all simplifications, all rationalistic ‘impatience’ that wants to get quickly from an A to a B. Any move in the game has repercussions, often impossible to foresee. It also gives rise to a grounded, nuanced perspective, which when socially aggregated sums to genuine distributed knowledge that, in Hayekian terms, is much greater than the sum of its individual parts. A demos that is properly experienced and invested in life, and appreciative of the subtleties and difficulties in each and every achievement, is the ideal demos in which liberal plurality is theoretically founded.

Contrary to this experientially embedded plurality, Legutko argues that the ideology that rules liberal democracy no less than communism is simplistic, leftist and utopian: a belief that society really can be made much more just, that intellectuals and politicians will lead the way, and that the public needs to be refashioned and led. Whether an intellectual-led utopian political programme could be brought to fruition, or indeed, if it has any meaning at all, is a profound question that has haunted the world since the middle of the 19th century. The list of depressing communist experiments has slapped down the naive but insistent optimism that characterised leftists in the first half of the 20th century, but has not ended the question by any means. Legutko’s is a sharp counter to a Fukuyama viewpoint that saw liberalism and communism as alternative systems, one of which proved superior to the other, hence ‘ending’ history: rather, he argues, liberalism contains the same central problem as communism, and we are far from being at the point where liberalism is fully played out.

Legutko’s characterisation of the ideology of both liberalism and communism as essentially simplistic and simplifying echoes a central idea of René Girard, who saw communism as nothing more than a deviation of Christianity: all that is going on in leftist politics is the progressive ‘uncovering of the victimological principle.’ Girard saw Western culture, because of the centrality of Christianity in its evolution, as doomed to endless self-criticism in which each generation would look back aghast at the ‘injustices’ of the generations that preceded them. Only the utopian eschatology baked into the Enlightenment saves the West from dizzyingly falling sick with its persistent relativism, as it is able to convince itself that all this criticism is an advance of ‘progress’. The centrality of this eschatology in the cultural self-perception does much to explain the need to ridicule and delegitimize history.

Suspicion about what this dominant leftist ideology really amounts to is harboured by many people and is a powerful source of conservatism. But whether a leftist ideology of ‘restituting injustice for all victims’ might be chaotic or meaningless - that injustice might spring from difference before it springs from power - does not constrain it from having substantial mimetic force.

Legutko’s pessimism is precisely that this mimetic idea, of ‘eliminate all injustice’ not only has taken hold of intellectual and political elites in liberal democracies, just as it did under communism, but that it is burrowing into the demos to undermine and destroy real culture where there exists actual wisdom and practical knowledge. The Christian West has always been perplexed by the deeply existential empathy of the core message of the gospel and the impossibility of fashioning a practical politics out of it, and theologians wrestled for centuries with the problem. The practical religion of the Church, and similarly the what one might call neo-Christianity of Jordan Peterson, attempts a fusion of virtues like individuality, responsibility, restraint, love, duty, and above all an embracing of difficulty and an acknowledgement of incommensurability of values, which tries to give due weight to the challenges of individual life, prosperity and social order, as well as charitable empathy. Extending beyond theology, Western culture also discovered the ‘politico-philosophical goods’ of, among others, tolerance for difference, respect for individual autonomy and decentralisation of property, power and agency. And as Legutko points out, these goods often have their roots in conservative and classical rather than in modernist or leftist thought.

The peculiar danger that liberal democracies are experiencing is that education in these virtues, and appreciation of these philosophical goods, is being flattened, eroded on the one hand by a docility-inducing culture of consumerism and gratification, and on the other by the political assault on history itself, and the characterising of all historical culture as oppressive and blindly unperceptive. Liberalism has entered this remarkable period wherein the educated public belongs almost exclusively to a professional precariat class, whose identities of community, religion, social class, and increasingly, nationality and gender, are being persistently flattened, to leave, as Patrick Deneen has recently written, political affiliation as the new and only signifier. Social media and political accelerationism have turned this once private thing into the litmus test of social acceptability. Evidencing the correct platitudes of political affiliation for social and career favour has displaced the ‘responsible activity’ of how one comported oneself in the world - one’s personal ethics of courage, fidelity, honesty, self-sufficiency and practical altruism - which used to be the currency of social virtue and which has become ‘privatised’ and, as Deneen says, off-limits to opinion as long as merely law-abiding.

Accelerated liberalism which is inebriated with the mimetic ecstasy of ‘persecuting the persecutors’ and uncovering ever more victims is not, any more than communism was, leading to any kind of utopia, however gratifying the victory over each latest injustice. The political order, and the mythical ‘social contract’ that underlies it, is not a rational, transparent or inherently virtuous thing. One could subscribe to Girard, who saw that sacrificial injustice is intrinsic to the social order, or to, say, Jean Baudrillard, who saw that the social bond is not simply one of shared interests, identity and co-operation, but rather is multi-faceted and tactical, with as much competition and distance as alliance and closeness, “a pact which is the contrary of the social contract, a symbolic pact of allurement, complicity, derision.” Every move which ‘rescues’ a victim is a shift in the tactical alignment of the ‘pact of allurement’ which constitutes the social bond.

Accelerated liberalism operates by a sleight of hand that focuses only on the rescue of the victim and ignores the impact of the move elsewhere. Often a ‘victim’ is a collateral casualty in a cultural discourse, or tactical disposition, which has evolved to provide a solution or at least an equilibrium to a certain social phenomenon. For instance, ‘traditional sexual morality’ regulated a complex interaction of sexual feelings, family-formation and paternal authority, in which ‘freedom of sexual expression’ was a collateral casualty. In old cultures, there existed interstices wherein there could be derogations from the ideals of cultural morality, albeit always carrying the risk of scandal, but uniform obeisance was always seen to be ideal rather than credibly practical. While liberalism shows an ever more hysterical intolerance to the injustice of any one ‘collateral casualty’, by its simplifying monomania it externalises the collateral costs which emanate from the moves made to assuage its victimological obsessions. In an obvious contemporary example, liberal public policy debate seems incapable of acknowledging the fundamental exclusion and privilege on which all nation states are based, and instead plays a fantasy politics in which an indefinable number of refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants can be ‘accommodated’, because drawing attention to the collateral effects is branded as scaremongering or ‘alt-right nationalism’.

But the social contract is a finely woven cultural object and dismissing as ‘illegitimate’ any objection to what liberals determine should be its reconfiguration, above all when the liberal ideology seems to contemplate no visible limit on the horizon, is to threaten to destabilize the deeply invested tactical alignments which it is based on. Populism is arising now through a growing, ever more widely held conviction, that liberal ideology, and the moves it is making within the culture to police speech and opinion, can only be countered by a brusque, even brutish, refusal to respect its pieties. As Deneen has written, elite liberals have converted meritocracy into a citadel of privilege for themselves, and yet actively embrace an ideological rhetoric that attacks every privilege but their own, an incoherence that invites sceptical derision rather than engagement on its own terms.

Islamic communities in the West paradoxically offer islands of resistance to the liberal mimetic onslaught, just as Legutko says rural Catholicism did in communist Poland. René Girard said fascinatingly of religious fundamentalists who, despite defending ideas which he deplores, that “their revolt looks more respectable to me than our somnolence. In an era when everyone boasts of being a marginal dissident even as they display a stupefying mimetic docility, the fundamentalists are authentic dissidents.” The immunity of followers of non-Christian religions from the victimological zealotry of the liberals is fascinating to observe, and shows the importance of properly maintained traditional practice as something that can resist mimetic cultural despoilation. But the tactical dispositions matter, and a liberal politics that refuses to consider the importance of what size, for instance, an Islamic minority should become, or what the consequences might be of how much or little integration with wider society it undertakes, willfully ignores something that the demos know matters very much.

Populism is arising because liberal elites are in thrall to a simplistic ideology of a utopian elimination of all injustice yet see themselves as technocratic philosopher kings, who take it upon themselves to silence troublesome parts of the discourse. Indeed, Legutko excoriates the European Union as being the technocratic project par excellence, with practical insulation from the demos its fundamental feature . John Gray has recently commented despairingly, and fearfully, how communist ideas have returned to respectability, something which should be inconceivable given the history of the 20th century. What is evident is that accelerated liberalism offers little protection against this. By its delegitimation of history, its attempted evisceration of the constellation of undertstandings that make up conservatism, and also from what Legutko calls its logic of minimalism - its opting for ease, convenience and gratification - it’s demos is easily swept up in mimetic contagion, which is fertile ground for a left populism of its own.

18 people found this helpful

Lutatius

An excellent study of the steady increase in the totalitarian tendencies ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 30, 2018

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An excellent study of the steady increase in the totalitarian tendencies of the liberal elite governing the West. The comparison with communism is particularly instructive and genuinely worrying. A distillation of critiques of the dominant ideology which should be read by as many people as possible. It summarises several years of reading! And it is very well written. Highly recommended

6 people found this helpful

JJ

A stunning and beautifully written book with an important message

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 29, 2019

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This is one of the most intelligent and enjoyable reads in a long time. The author talks about a glimmering awareness that the hard-won Polish liberation from communism had led them into a different sort of difficulty. They discovered that the Brussels machinery was sympathetic to ex-communists and hostile to anti-communists. The book is a very careful uncovering of why this state of affairs exists.

I enjoyed the book because my own political journey has included time in communist countries, from the time the Soviet Union broke up. I too have had the glimmering awareness that the melding of a 'European' people in a Union is not so different from the melding of a Soviet people. It's achieved with trickery more than invasion, and therefore is harder to intuit. This book is very worthy of close examination - the author explains why he has concluded very similar political algorithms lie behind both projects.

2 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

The best of its kind

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 6, 2020

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I have been asked to suggest a book that could function as “Traditionalism 101” but always failed to come up with an answer. Definitely the quasi-mystical teachings of Guénon were not it, and Roger Scruton’s works always came across as way too dry. So... this is it, a mandatory reading for Conservatives, anti-PC/SJW and Traditionalists. The fact that this author has experienced Communism first hand gives it an added credibility witch is perhaps lacking from American authors.

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Bernard Hull

A help to serious thought

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 20, 2020

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For those who are prepared to think seriously about essential issues of what is taking place in our world. This book is welcome and written by someone well qualified having been born and raised in Central Europe in communist days. Not merely an idealistic theoretician. The minds held captive by materialism seldom seem to think or welcome any challenge to the direction things are taking in the ‘free’ Western democracies.

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