| | I would like to thank Tim Starr for taking the time to specify his objections to my defense of the "Randian model of ideological 'revolution from above'." Unfortunately, Tim starts off by calling Rand's model "monocausal", which of course it isn't, except in the trivial sense that every causal model applies to reality in some contexts and not in others. This is exactly why Rand insisted that concepts are not "universals." Every observation of a fact of reality, the source of the "evidence of the senses" in which every valid concept is grounded, takes place in some specific context. Every concept other than axiomatic concepts, and every proposition other than axioms, applies in some contexts and not in others. This is why, in the article that is now in press in JARS, I argue that scope tracking and avoiding scope violations - that is, making sure that conclusions are not applied outside the contextual scope of the premises from which they are drawn - are required in objective logic based on Rand's epistemology. If a theoretical model could be disconfirmed just by showing that it has finite rather than universal scope, then theoretical knowledge would be impossible, and we would all be doomed to empiricism.
It is true that, as I say in my e-mail signature line, "Context matters. There is seldom only one cause for *anything*." If the Solidarity Revolution had not had the specific contextual advantages that Tim has listed, it would have been suppressed by the Soviet Union just like the Hungarian and Czechoslovak revolutions before it. This is hardly an argument against the applicability of Rand's model - although if it were, it would amount to finding fault with Rand's model for NOT being "monocausal."
To track the scope of Rand's model, one must remember what she was modeling. The "Randian model of ideological 'revolution from above'" is a model of how one creates a new socio-political order based on a new set of socio-political principles. It is not a model of how regimes collapse. Of course the creation of a new order implies the collapse of the old regime, but the reverse is neither necessary nor usual. It is also possible for a socio-political order to be destroyed by losing a war, or to implode from its own contradictions, as happened in Somalia and in the former Soviet Union. The latter was Marx's model for the eventual end of what he called "Capitalism." There is a certain irony when the only regimes that actually collapsed from their own contradictions were Marxist (although not necessarily Marxian) in their own official ideology. But when a regime implodes from its own contradictions, it is not replaced by a new socio-political order. It is replaced by the raw exercise of unprincipled political power. Trying to disconfirm Rand's model in the latter situation is a scope violation, an elementary error in logic.
On to specific points.
Berlin uprising of 1953.
It is the nature of humans to resist oppression, and communist regimes faced unarmed and armed uprisings, in various places, nearly every year since the Bolshevik revolution, beginning with Kronstadt in 1919. The Berlin uprising of 1953 differed from the rest only in that the Berlin Wall was not yet in place, so the uprising was observed and described by American, British and French journalists. Other uprisings of the same kind, but outside the view of the Western press, were seldom reported. For example, a larger uprising in which striking workers seized control of the city of Wroclaw, in Poland, in 1954, went unnoticed in the West.
To conflate such uprisings with revolution is a category error. A revolution is a change of regime, whether short-lived as in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, or permanent, as in Poland. Uprisings are important as demonstrations of popular discontent, but in the absence of prior intellectual and social change, as described in the "Randian model of ideological 'revolution from above'", uprisings do not become revolutions.
Social position of dissidents.
Tim writes that the "exiled Polish dissident intellectuals Reed credits with laying the groundwork for Solidarity are hardly consistent with a 'revolution from above.'" Actually, those Polish intellectuals laid the foundations while at the top of the social pyramid. Oskar Lange was the chief economist of the State Planning Commission, a post whose power was the equivalent of Alan Greenspan and the whole Council of Economic Advisors rolled into one. Philosopher Leszek Kolakowski and sociologist Zygmunt Baumann were heads of their respective academic departments at Poland's top university. Kolakowski's disciple, novelist Marek Hlasko, was the author of the most widely read book, "The Eighth Day of the Week", in the history of the Polish book industry. A year after the publication of this book, he was considered one of the four most widely admired men in Poland. The others were Primate Cardinal Wyszynski; dissident Communist and long-term political prisoner and then First Secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka; and champion bicycle racer Stanislaw Królak. As for becoming exiles: in Poland that raised the cultural stature of an intellectual far beyond anything that could be achieved at home under the regime.
One more note on Hlasko: "The Eighth Day of the Week" appears to have been written after Hlasko read "The Fountainhead", and possibly "We the Living." The idea is: what if architecture student Howard Roark were trapped in Communist Poland? Hlasko was "suicided" by Communist secret services in 1969.
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