Forced to Be Free

Editor's Note

Why are intellectuals — those whose thinking is supposed to be most refined — so susceptible to totalitarianism? Roger Kimball argues it is an inevitable result of the direction much Western political thinking has taken from Rousseau onward.

Responding to Shelley’s declaration that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” W. H. Auden tartly observed that it wasn’t the poets but the secret police that carried out such covert “legislation.”

I think Auden was right. And his disillusioning remark offers one point of entry into Ryszard Legutko’s reconsideration of Czesław Miłosz’s The Captive Mind.

Legutko says that the question Miłosz sought to address in his 1953 book was why such a large proportion of the Eastern European cultural elite flocked to support the “unquestionably inhuman, mendacious, savage, and murderous” regime of Soviet totalitarianism. That was certainly part of what Miłosz was about in that curious and often convoluted book. But The Captive Mind is not only a book that seeks answers. It is also a journey that seeks absolution.  

Miłosz himself had fallen prey to the totalitarian temptation he anatomizes. Hence his explanation is also a search for expiation.

As Legutko notes, the appeal of totalitarian ideology has two distinct but interrelated aspects, the utopian and what he calls the “mundane.”

The utopian side is on view wherever socialism holds sway. What is socialism? In part, it is optimism translated into a political program. Until he took up gardening, Candide was a sort of proto-socialist; his mentor Pangloss could have been one of socialism’s founding philosophers. 

Socialism is also unselfishness embraced as an axiom: the gratifying emotion of unselfishness, experienced alternately as resentment against others and titillating satisfaction with oneself. 

The philosophy of Rousseau, which elevated what he called the “indescribably sweet” feeling of virtue into a political imperative, is socialism in ovo. “Man is born free,” Rousseau famously exclaimed, “but is everywhere in chains.”

That heart-stopping conundrum — too thrilling to be corrected by mere experience — is the fundamental motor of socialism. It is a motor fueled by this corollary: that the multitude unaccountably colludes in perpetuating its own bondage and must therefore be, in Rousseau’s ominous phrase, “forced to be free.”

This is where the “mundane” side of the totalitarian temptation comes in. The starry-eyed aspect of socialist thinking did not preclude a large element of steel. The French Revolution was the nursery of both sides of socialism. It was then that the philosophy of Rousseau emerged from the pages of tracts and manifestos to strut and fret across the bloody stage of history. The architects of the revolution invoked Rousseau early and often as they set about the task of “changing human nature,” of “altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.”

This metamorphosis does not come easily. Human nature is a recalcitrant thing. It is embodied as much in persistent human institutions like the family and the church as in the human heart. All must be remade from the ground up if “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” are at last to be realized.

Since history (the revolutionaries thought) is little more than an accumulation of errors, history as hitherto known must be abolished. The past, a vast repository of injustice, is by definition the enemy. Accordingly, the revolutionaries in France tossed out the Gregorian calendar and started again at Year One. They replaced the Genesis-inspired seven-day week with a ten-day cycle and rebaptized the months with names reflecting their new cult of nature: Brumaire (fog), Thermidor (heat), Vendémiare (wind), etc. A new religion was born, as imperious as it was jealous.

It is significant that the socialist mentality is usually also an atheistic mentality, where atheism is understood not so much as the disbelief in God as the hatred of God — an attitude as precarious logically as it has been destructive in practice. There is an important sense in which religion as traditionally understood reconciles humanity to imperfection and to failure. Since the socialist sets out to abolish failure, traditional religion is worse than de trop: it is an impediment to perfection. (“Criticism of religion,” Marx said, “is the prelude to all criticism.”)

In 1793, the churches were closed to worship and ransacked for booty. The anti-clericalism that had been a prominent feature of revolutionary sentiment grew increasingly vicious. Hence the fashion for so-called “revolutionary marriages” in which priests and nuns were tied together naked and drowned.

Rousseau was always going on about establishing the “reign of virtue.” His far-seeing disciple Maximilien Robespierre spoke more frankly of “virtue and its emanation, terror.” It is one of the great ironies of modern history that socialism, which promises a more humane, caring, and equitable society, has generally delivered a more oppressive and mismanaged one. I like Miłosz’s amusing idea of “the Hegelian bite.” But Legutko is surely correct that whatever spurious aura of dialectical inevitability it entails, “it was not Hegel who bit but Stalin, Beria, the KGB, and their accomplices in each of the communist countries of the Soviet bloc.”

Legutko is also correct that “the totalitarian temptation among intellectuals turned out to be so strong that it not only survived communism but, in recent decades, has shown a clear upward trend, both in terms of the number of those affected and the increase in repression against the opponents.” Indeed, as the philosopher David Stove observed, “bloodthirstiness” is a regularly central ingredient in the metabolism of the totalitarian temptation. It survives the eclipse of Communism so-called because the intoxicating emotion of virtue that fueled Communism does not require the sanction of Marx or Engels, Lenin or Stalin, to fester and to spread.

What Legutko calls the “Neo-New Faith” of political correctness has harnessed that emotion of virtue and redistributed its lust over a new roster of issues: not the proletariat, but the environment, not the struggling masses, but “reproductive freedom,” LGBTQ rights, the welfare state, the Third World, diversity training, and an end to racism and xenophobia, the entire, shifting menu of “woke” passions.

Legutko ends with the tantalizing suggestion that rejecting the latest incarnations of the totalitarian temptation (“wokeness,” political correctness) is “essentially a matter of taste.” Weaponizing the aesthetic dimension of experience to act as an antidote to utopian impulses will not do the job by itself, he admits, but “it is a natural first step, after which other steps are sure to follow.”

Legutko’s invocation of taste and aesthetics might seem odd in this context, but I think he is on to something. When Hannah Arendt turned her attention to Kant’s political philosophy, her main text was the first part of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, in particular his analysis of taste and the essentially disinterested nature of aesthetic experience.  This takes us to the heart of Kant’s political philosophy because the operation of taste highlights our essential sociability, what Kant called a sensus communis, “the idea of a sense common to all” whose cultivation leads to a civilizing “enlarged mode of thought.” In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Friedrich Schiller picks up on these hints from Kant and offers something like that “natural first step” of which Legutko speaks.

There is much more to say about the relation between aesthetic experience and the protean invitation to nowhere that is a prime motor of the totalitarian temptation. Another name for that seductive phenomenon is “kitsch.” I will end here, noting that I offer some additional thoughts in an essay called “Notes Toward the Definition of Kitsch” in the Spring 2025 issue of Modern Age.