Was “Real Existing Socialism” Merely a Premature Form of Rule by Experts?
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2006
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203027837
Abstract
The history of Communism in the twentieth century, if the current orthodoxy is to be believed, was no more than a detour in a process in which history ends in a world of civil societies organized as liberal democracies that increasingly relate to each other following the model of liberal democracy itself, through the rule of law, collective discussion, the general recognition of human and civil rights, and so forth. In this image of world history, the worldwide dominance of liberal democracy is the culmination of a process that appears as a first draft in the Westphalian peace, which gradually spread through time, for example, through the internationalist ideology of Woodrow Wilson. In this teleological image of history, Communism appears as a developmental error, an error produced by an accidental combination of erroneous ideology and special circumstances of delayed development in certain countries that made them particularly susceptible to it.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
Yes
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Was “Real Existing Socialism” Merely a Premature Form of Rule by Experts?, in S. Eliaeson (Ed.), Building Democracy and Civil Society East of the Elbe: Essays in Honour of Edmund Mokrzycki, Routledge, p. 248-261
Scholar Commons Citation
Turner, Stephen, "Was “Real Existing Socialism” Merely a Premature Form of Rule by Experts?" (2006). Philosophy Faculty Publications. 162.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/phi_facpub/162
