Authors

Piotr Wciślik¹;  ¹ Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN), Poland

Discussion

Discussing the roots of post-dissident liberalism, the interpreters of 1989 have often cast its leaders as moderates in the revolutionary drama of transition, fending off Jacobin populism. Their role, I argue, is better characterized as pre-emptive Thermidorianism. According to B. Baczko, Thermidorianism is not only the anti-Jacobin moment, but also “the key moment when the Revolution must carry the weight of its past and admit that it will not keep all its initial promises.” While anti-Jacobinism is a commonly recognized feature of dissident thinking, the revolutionary disillusion was equally consequential. Abandoning Solidarity’s promise—to forge into one the civic, political and social entitlements of citizenship—in favor of recognition of incompatibility between “classical” liberties  and social rights after communism, the dissident leaders came to see in the revolution not only a bad historical choice, but an imminent danger, and entered the path of transitional politics of exception, which justified the need to delay the democratic opening not by not only the backlash of the old regime, but increasingly also the consequences of democratic effervescence. While inability to think beyond the imaginary of democracy in constant peril became a hallmark of the liberal centre, it hijacked the political space in which moderate conservatism could have thrived. From this perspective the emergence of its populist nemesis appears to be a chronicle of a death foretold.