Abstract

The experience of totalitarianism in its initial revolutionary-terrorist phase and later gray and corrupt terminal stage has generated a distinct tradition of political philosophy and theory among East-Central European dissidents. Much of this tradition has been ignored or misunderstood by thinkers who were ignorant of the social context from which it emerged and who had different concerns. Philosophers who consider the role of political philosophy to be the explication of concepts by drawing utopian blueprints for the reconstitution of societies, find the anti-utopian—indeed, anti-political—philosophy of the dissidents incomprehensible. The dissidents, and by implication their writings, enjoyed some popularity during the…