PROLOGUE

There is an odor of righteous vindication in the air. Communism is in disarray around the world. Little wonder then if some influential voices emanating from the capitalist camp have been heard now claiming not just the missile victory and the moral victory, but the economic and the philosophic victories as well. The unmistakable turning point, both in Europe and in China, came in 1989, amid a staggering series of unlooked-for events at once thrilling and terrifying in their intensity. And by the time 1989, that year of living dangerously, had given way to the new decade, American observers of various persuasions, but especially those on the political right, were already to be found confidently casting those events in the categories of free market economic growth and liberal democratic values versus centrally planned economic stagnation and communist political repression. These categories are not by any means entirely without force and relevance, of course. Yet if we insist on viewing recent events primarily in terms so tinged with partisan self-congratulation, we will miss much that can be known and learned.

For, after all, the evidence is exceedingly plain that there is only very mixed enthusiasm, in all parts of the socialist world now undergoing systemic reform, for the social realities of laissez-faire market competition and for the societal norms and consequences of untrammeled individualism.