Volume 31, Number 21 & 22 · January 17, 1985
The Charms of Certitude
By Conor Cruise O'Brien
How Democracies Perish
by Jean-François Revel, with the assistance of Branko Lazitch, translated by William Byron
Doubleday, 376 pp., $17.95
Jean-François Revel believes that the democracies are in imminent danger of collapse, because of a failure of will, and of intelligence. According to him, the democracies neither understand the nature of the Soviet threat nor possess the will to resist it. The Soviet system, as represented by this author, combines the grossest incompetence, in the management of its own economy, with the most farsighted logic in the conduct of its foreign policy. The democracies, on the other hand, have combined great success, in economic affairs, with abject failure in the domain of foreign policy. So the Soviet system is doomed through its internal failures, but before it collapses, the logical continuity of its foreign policy is likely to destroy the democracies. As M. Revel puts it, in the concluding words of his fourth chapter, 'Survival of the Least Fit': 'Communism may be a 'spent force,' as Milovan Djilas has repeatedly said. Some might even call it a corpse. But it is a corpse that can drag us with it into the grave.'
Review, 3411 words
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