In Praise of Eclecticism

changed fundamentally the nature of modern ideological conflicts. Initially, a seeming consensus emerged that proclaimed the ultimate triumph of the liberal revolution. Later, as cultural-political tensions have not subsided and even intensified, it has become clear that the counterpart to the global democratic resurgence is a search for primordial roots, allegiances, and affiliations. In other words, the postmodern condition does not escape moral and political dilemmas associated with justice, equality, and freedom. As evinced in the works of Norberto Bobbio or Jurgen Habermas, left and right have to be rethought (reconceptualized), to be sure, but they are not extinct as landmarks on the contemporary ideological map. The following pages of this piece propose a very important discussion bearing on the decline of secular theologies and the widespread disenchantment with traditional ideological cleavages. Years ago, Francois Furet noticed this trend toward transcending conventional partisanships, insisting on the relativization of the dominant ideological dichotomies. In spite of his enduring Marxist commitment, Eric Hobsbawm acknowledged the same trend when he wrote about the end of the “age of the extremes.” As Martin Krygier shows in his provocative essay, the search for the “Conservative-Liberal-Socialist” international community of critical intellectuals was a product of as well as a response to the quasi-homogenous totalistic hubris of communism, an avatar of the Hegelian dream of the ultimate coincidence/reconciliation between subject and object. Krygier correctly reproaches Kolakowski’s credo, not for its deliberate eclecticism, but rather its self-limiting modesty, indeed the hesitation to go far enough. Indeed, I agree with Krygier that the world after the collapse of Leninism (and the exhaustion of radicalism in general) is not the simple “triumph of liberalism,” but rather the constitution of a new ideosphere, which is by definition comprehensive, inclusive, and provisional. In fact, this is the hallmark of postmodernity about which Jacques Derrida writes in his Specters of Marx and whose implications are accurately analyzed by Séan Patrick Eudaily in his contribution to this symposium. What has happened in the last two or three decades, as authors like Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort have noticed, is the dissolution of the rigid boundaries of the political and the search for a renewal of political paradigms. As a matter of fact, this is a time in which all conventional visions of immanent (and imminent) salvation have been dramatically questioned. As Hungarian philosophers Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher have pointed out, this is the age of the decline of radical universalism, a time in which a postmodern political condition makes doubtful any attempt to restore redemptive paradigms. Grand narratives, as Jean Baudrillard, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Slavoj Zvizvek have made clear, have lost their emotional and intellectual appeals. On the other hand, new or not so new political mythologies have reentered the scene, first and foremost discourses of ethnic identity that pretend to go beyond left and right and challenge the “conservative-liberalsocialist” consensus as an intellectual universalistic chimera. Leszek Kolakowski’s manifesto was thus prescient in that it announced the advent of a post-ideological and post-utopian age (in this respect, his vision was not that different from some of the New York intellectuals, Dwight Macdonald, Hannah Arendt, and especially Daniel Bell). In his essay, Karol Soltan makes a strong case for the resurrection of the center and looks to Kolakowski’s program of 1978 as a premise for the more recent Western efforts to generate an international communitarian network. In the same vein, whatever one makes of the inner contradictions of the “Third Way” ideology, in its Giddens-Schroeder-Blair form, it is indicative of something new in this project of ideological reconstruction. Furthermore, Soltan notices that the new eclecticism (or ideological moderation) runs the risk of appearing cynical and uninspiring. For Soltan, what matters essentially is to create such a politics of the center that avoids instant categorizations and frozen limitations into anachronistic formulas. If I may interpret his position, he favors the baroque heterogeneity to the classicist forms of doctrinaire orthodoxy. Indeed, this was the deep meaning of Kolakowski’s jesterlike refusal of utopian (socialist, liberal, or conservative) ideals. The “end of history,” the allegedly In Praise of Eclecticism