At the moment, elites in the East are (somewhat anxiously) keen to build democratic political institutions and free economic markets.  This is also what Clark and Wildavsky advise, because the only successful civil societies we know have both, societies without either are unsuccessful, and there are no known alternatives.

However, if, as this book argues, CPEs have been profoundly demoralized and morally corrupted, and if a successful political economy has normative, moral--one might say civilizational--prerequisites, then post-CPEs appear to lie in a normative gap unlikely to be filled quickly or easily.  This is all the more so since no one, including Clark and Wildavsky, has much to say about how to fill it.

In a critique of Hayek's Constitution of Liberty, Raymond Aron observes that "If society is to be free it must first exist."  Many enthusiasts for free markets have ignored this.  They have much more to say about how a society should operate than about its conditions of existence, since most theorizing about free societies has occurred in robust civil societies, where the question did not arise.  Some free societies, particularly in the West, exist as a result of spontaneous growth over centuries; some--like Japan--because of successful grafts onto, and partial but organic transformation of, existing societies; some--as in parts of Latin America--because real societies with real markets have been freed from despotic rule.  Who, however, knows how the normative conditions of civil society can be generated from this social and moral wreckage, and who is attending to these problems?  How to create an independent, interconnected society from more or less pulverized atoms, as exist in Romania, or the normative bases of civil society from the demoralized CPEs that Clark and Wildavsky describe, whose most distinctive achievement was the corrosion of social linkage and its normative underpinnings?  These are questions presently without answers.

One would, then, like to hear a lot more from Clark and Wildavsky on how to overcome the moral consequences of communism.  They do not really confront the task of linking or continuing the moral implications of their diagnosis into their largely political and economic prescriptions.  Perhaps democratic institutions and markets will generate their own prerequisites, but that is a bootstraps operation of no small dimensions.

When dissidents in communist states stressed the importance of (re-)constructing civil society in the space between state and private affairs--a space which communists had invaded and in large part extinguished--they thought in basically political terms.  Certainly their achievements were primarily political: they established political bodies and linkages outside and against the state.  And they dominated these bodies: Solidarity, almost the only independent organization in Eastern Europe, was not pluralist.  In 1989 the focus of attack in Poland--the communist leadership--collapsed, and the most distinguished elites of "self-organization" took over the existing state.  The society itself was again left without leaders.  Again as before, the society had few crystallized interest groups, few organic channels or institutions for articulating and pressing interests, few "normal" horizontal linkages, and an anomic public sphere with few norms of non-intimate interpersonal behavior other than the deformed ones that Clark and Wildavsky describe.  It did have many complaints--all directed, as before and at the same time, to and against the state.

The new government began a primarily economic "revolution from above"--highly market-oriented--with some real achievements, considerable costs, and negligible social consultation or involvement.  Meanwhile Poles went on trying to survive as before, with less money, higher prices, and a falling standard of living.  Since no one seems to be attending to much else--for example social organization or even cooperative consultation--it is not clear what might undo or defuse the widespread social despair, distrust, and hostile dependence upon the state, inherited from the preceding regime.  But it is clear that it can be exploited.

Clark and Wildavsky are much too intelligent to be confident about anything to do with the future of Poland.  In particular they express justified concern that a restless population in straitened circumstances might fail to recognize the difference between a good new government which promises much but delivers little and a bad old government which promised much but delivered little.  However, they conclude optimistically with a quotation from Czeslaw Milosz.  Asked what Poles might have learned after forty years of communism, Milosz replied, "Resistance to stupidities."  Even that is uncertain.

In the presidential elections of November-December 1990--the first democratic test of an honorable and well-intentioned government, bequeathed a calamitous inheritance, and in office for only a year--its leader, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the Solidarity prime minister, was humiliated.  He gained 18 percent of votes cast, behind Lech Walesa whose program was simply himself in a hurry (no small thing, of course, but not enough and maybe too much).  At least that was a plausible contest.  More distressing was the appeal of an obscure blow-in from Canada whom no one knew and who had nothing to offer except that he claimed to be rich.  He gained a quarter of the vote, twice.

In the course of the past year and particularly in the campaign, all sorts of primitive emotions and attachments surfaced--including anti-Semitic ones in this land without Jews--and many extraordinary things were said.  It was as if a rather confused, angry, hungry, and still sleepy Rip van Winkle--on whom a nasty and debilitating experiment had been conducted between times--had suddenly awakened after fifty years (for the war cannot be forgotten).  Asked his opinion of current affairs and told that, now that he was awake and free he should get on with things, he hankers after old symbols but finds everything daunting, as indeed it is.  It is enough to make anyone nervous, flail about, and want a firm if unpredictable hand.  It is not, however, an ideal recipe for democracy or what Max Weber called "sober, bourgeois capitalism."

That having been said, any pessimism should be measured and restrained.  In hard times and places, pessimists always have more than enough evidence for their views; and optimists easily look unrealistic.  Poland has been such a place for a long time, but in recent years the well-founded predictions of pessimists have repeatedly come undone, while the utopian aspirations of optimists have repeatedly been realized--partly because they believed in them.  And many of those optimists are still at work in Poland today.  The country has suffered hugely over the last fifty years.  It has also accomplished mightily over the last fourteen.  The suffering has been political, economic, and moral.  The accomplishments have been political and heroically moral.  They have not yet been economic or mundanely moral.  Yet in the long haul they need to be both, and at the same time.

Martin Krygier is associate professor of law at the University of New South Wales, Australia.