Abstract

To the extent that, as Hegel remarked, philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, major historical events cannot be fully understood until well after they occur — after reflection has generated new, more adequate categories of analysis. Thus it is not surprising that the collapse of the Soviet system and the fading of the Cold War were initially misread as, e.g., “the end of history” (by naive liberal apparatchiks) or as the dawn of “authentic socialism” (by diehard Leftists, who saw contingent authoritarian encrustations as the only problem with an otherwise sound “really existing socialism”). These apologetic hermeneutical exercises are easy to understand: in both cases the objective is, first and foremost, to relegitimate internalized ideological assumptions by reducing the new to a mere extension of the old. The price one pays, however, is to miss what is really new.