In emphasizing the Communist idea, or even more illusion, Furet seeks to understand the extraordinary mystique that Communism exerted, not over Russia, nor over Eastern Europe, but rather over the developed capitalist West. By transposing the subject of Communism from the “agents” of revolution – the proletariat, the Russian people, the Communist party – to those who more or less passively observed its manifestations, Furet strives to solve a great riddle: how could a regime that murdered perhaps three times the numbers that the Nazis murdered, and that plunged a series of great nations into unparalleled misery, have been found so irresistible by so many over such a long period of time? His answer is that the Communist experiment was enacted not for Russia, but for all humanity. Communism, for him, was like a theatrical event in which the visible acts occur on a narrow proscenium while the main work unfolds in the vast reaches backstage. Western audiences, then, were bewitched by captivating performances that diverted their attention from the systematic destruction proceeding out of sight.

Accordingly, very little of Furet’s book concerns actually existing Communisms. For example, he takes the period of Stalinist terror (1929–1953) as the essence of Communism and does not compare it either to the N.E.P. (1921–1928) or to the long series of failed reforms that followed Stalin’s death (1953–1989). He does not consider non-European Communism, for example in China, North Korea, Vietnam, or Cuba. Nor does he consider the perhaps rational appeal of communism to the western working classes. Rather, his subjects are sympathetic intellectual observers of the Communist experiment, such as George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, André Gide, Anthony Blunt, Gyorgy Lukács, or Jean-Paul Sartre, the parades, committees, demonstrations, and leaflets that these supporters sponsored, and, finally, disillusioned ex-supporters such as Pierre Pascal, Boris Souvarine, or Albert Camus. The result is a work whose almost hallucinatory intensity mirrors the hypnotic lure it seeks to dispel.

What was the emotional wellspring that held western intellectuals captive for seventy years? A secret, fantasied identification. According to Furet, Communism expressed in a heightened and hypostatized form a series of utopian wishes – for mastery over nature and for equality among individuals – first unleashed by the French Revolution. Above all, he suggests, Communism expressed one of the most powerful and least conscious of those wishes, namely hatred of the bourgeoisie, a social class viewed as “all powerful in economic terms,” obsessed with money but “devoid of moral principle deep down inside” (16). Communism, Furet suggests, exerted such an appeal because it acted out this hatred, which was suppressed by the bourgeois regimes of the West. Thus, Furet approvingly cites John Maynard Keynes’s explanation of why Cambridge undergraduates found the dreary disasters of the Soviet economy so entrancing: offered “as a means of improving the economic situation [Communism] is an insult to our intelligence. But offered as a means of making the economic situation worse, that is its subtle, its almost irresistible attraction” (154). Just as nineteenth-century youth counterposed the artist to a world obsessed with money-making, so twentieth-century youth counterposed Communism to it. But hatred of the bourgeoisie, Furet contends, was actually self-hatred: “born of democracy, prospering within it, hatred of the bourgeois was only in appearance hatred of the other; it was in fact self-hatred” (14).

If carried through consistently, Furet’s argument would link the destructive forces that made the terror possible to idealizing tendencies without which no reform of society can proceed. Unfortunately, Furet does not consistently carry through his argument. While maintaining that Communism expressed in a distorted and reified form the deeper fantasies and especially antagonisms of the Enlightenment, he does not actually analyze those wishes but rather effectively rejects them. The difference can be grasped when one considers his title, which alludes to Freud’s famous work on religion, The Future of an Illusion. For Freud, an illusion (or fantasy) is not a mistake. Rather, it is a compromise between wishes and reality. The closer one comes to understanding a wish, the closer one comes to antagonisms that block its expression. For Furet, by contrast, an illusion is simply an error. It has to be gotten rid of tout court. For him, no genuine needs underlay the illusion of Communism. Today, he writes, “the idea of another society” is finally and happily “almost impossible to conceive of.” Mercifully, “we are condemned to live in the world as it is” (502). Even so, he was too wise a man to think we would ever be fully rid of illusions.

What gives Furet’s argument its power is that he does not position himself as a neoliberal who rejects all forms of state intervention. Rather, Furet distinguishes Communism from Marx, on the one hand, and from social democracy, on the other, praising Marx and social democracy while condemning Communism. But Furet also stresses that Communism and social democracy had a common source, and this leads to a series of contradictions. For example, by showing how the Bolsheviks, beginning with Lenin, took the French Revolution as their model, Furet locates the Russian Revolution squarely at the emergence of modern democracy. Yet this is precisely the space from which he wishes to exclude it. Arguing that the French and the Russian Revolutions sprang from kindred desires, he insists on defending one and rejecting the other, yet he never explains the differences between them. Arguing that fascism is the child of Communism, he ignores the fact that fascists repudiated the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, while the Soviets believed they were fulfilling it. A consistent working out of Furet’s ideas would entail a more complex approach to Communism, one that connects the tolerance Communism sometimes enjoyed in the West to the near-universal anti-capitalism of the times. In refusing this alternative, Furet reveals himself to be in the grips of an unresolved, although understandable, passion, namely hatred of communism.

This contradiction is most revealing in Furet’s discussion of the Popular Front, understood as the alliance between the democracies and Communism against Nazism, a subject which takes up roughly half of Furet’s book. (Interestingly, it is also at the center of Hobsbawm’s history of the twentieth century). Although he never explicitly draws this conclusion, the logic of Furet’s argument draws him close to the view that an alliance between Nazi Germany and the liberal democracies against Communism would have been as good as the Popular Front. At the very least, he seems to argue that the configuration of forces in the 1930s posed an incomprehensible dilemma and that World War II “had no good outcome, since the only possible victors were deplorable ones – Hitler or Stalin” (472). Certainly, an alliance of the democracies with Nazism against the Communists was urged by many at the time, was implicit in the 1938 Munich Accords, and was recently revived for discussion by perennial right-wing US presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. There is not one word in Furet’s analysis that counters Buchanan’s arguments, and many that buttress them.

However, there was a very real difference between the hypothetical alliance of the democracies with Nazism and the Popular Front, a difference that suggests that the democracies had deeper and more positive connections with Communism than with Nazism. As Buchanan and others have argued, the alliance with fascism would have been based on Realpolitik or national interest. Germany would have organized inter-European economic cooperation and would have “developed” Eastern Europe, including Poland, the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and the Balkans. It would have destroyed Communism, or at least “contained” it within its World War I confines. Germany would have respected the British Empire and the Monroe Doctrine. Germany would have exterminated the Jews. The Popular Front – the liberal alliance with Communism – was equally based on Realpolitik. After the war, the United States gained an “open door” in Western Europe, and in most of the rest of the world. The Soviet Union became dominant in its contiguous lands, especially Eastern Europe.

However, in addition to its Realpolitik dimension, the Popular Front had an idealistic dimension that would have been impossible for an alliance between National Socialist racism and the democracies. Beginning amid the Depression, the Popular Front drew on affinities between social democracy (including the New Deal), on the one hand, and western Communism, on the other. These affinities helped effect a redefinition of liberalism to include promises of social and economic justice based on limiting the claims of capital. The Popular Front also stood for internationalism and for understandings between peoples rather than simply between governments. As a result, nationalism and racism were challenged by a new universalism. These changes, forged during the war, constituted a common fund of moral ideals that remained alive during the postwar period and upon which we are still drawing.

Of course, the “idealism” of the Popular Front obscured a series of compromises such as the British and French attempts to perpetuate their empires and the American collaborations with Franco, apartheid, and the German right wing. Doubtless, the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union paid the most terrible price. The Gulag, which had become a gigantic operation with the deportation of the kulaks and the purges of the 1930s, was swollen by “bourgeois nationalist” elements, “untrustworthy” ethnic groups, and by the millions of Soviet soldiers captured by the Germans or otherwise “exposed to foreign influences.” (Any Soviet soldier captured was considered a deserter.) After the war, Eastern Europe was absorbed into the Soviet orbit. The numbers are still in dispute, but it is clear that millions lost their lives and hundreds of millions lost their freedom. The role of the Popular Front in obscuring these crimes needs to be both condemned and analyzed. But would the world really have been better off had Nazism triumphed during World War II and Communism been destroyed?

While the Popular Front obscured contradictions, its “dream of a common humanity” shaped reform for the rest of the century. It bequeathed to the New Left generation a sense of the moral dimension of politics, either missing or mocked before World War II (as in the repudiation of Wilsonian “idealism”). Furet might wish to repudiate that moral emphasis, but without it the civil rights revolution, the reexamination of the Holocaust, and the identification of Western intellectuals with the Third World would have been impossible. While the dissident and samizdat traditions drew on many sources, the liberalism that triumphed in 1989 – the liberalism of Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor, among others – was a liberalism transformed by World War II, that is, by the Popular Front, as well as by the sixties. It included principles of social democratic equality, international responsibility, and racial equality foreign to early twentieth-century liberalism. No such transformation could have occurred had the democracies allied with Nazism rather than Communism. Paradoxically, then, the same process that reinforced Stalinism and extended it to Eastern Europe also ultimately helped put an end to it.

Furet’s inability to recognize that in a period when monsters stalked the earth, it was still tragically necessary to choose between them, partly reflects the French origins of his thought. Whereas in the years after World War II, there was considerable sympathy for Soviet-style Communism throughout Western Europe, the French Left’s attraction was especially uncritical because overdetermined. The collapse of France in 1940 gave Nazism an absolutely unexpected injection of power and encouragement. As Tony Judt argued in Past Imperfect, the French Communist Party alone “maintained a full-scale clandestine structure throughout the occupation with its own press...militia [and] hierarchy of authority” (159). After the war, the French almost as one people suppressed the memory of their collaboration and bonded with the Communists as résistants. Only the decades of bad faith that followed can explain the extraordinary “shock” with which the French “discovered” the Gulag in the early 1970s. Throughout his book, Furet recurs to the French case as para-digmatic of western weakness and self-delusion but, far from being representative, the French case was extraordinary. What gave it its special character was weakness and self-delusion not in the face of Communism, but rather in the face of Nazism. Thus Furet’s equation of fascism and Communism has an unconscious truth to it.

To conclude, it is an unavoidable fact that the democratizing processes that began with the French revolution (if not earlier) included an important admixture of irrational fantasy and destructive emotions. It is understandable that Furet would seek to preserve the baby of social democracy while dispensing with the dirty bathwater of Communism, but his own stress on the common elements of the two show how difficult that task was – at least at that stage of history. Ironically, Furet’s longing for a post-utopian world is itself irrational. It reflects the ur-utopia of bourgeois society. First appearing as the “heavenly city of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment,” in which politics – the sphere of collective interests, wishes, and impulses – was eliminated, and familiar today in Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” anti-utopian utopias have more in common with Communism than Furet recognizes. Both Communism and the liberalism of the Enlightenment sought to eliminate the conflict, including the utopian longings and defensive hostilities that are an inevitable part of democratic politics. Ultimately, however, we have no choice but to work through those longings and hostilities, which were at the center of so much of twentieth-century history, and whose trajectory is by no means exhausted.