C OMPARATIVE

SOCIOLOGY
Comparative Sociology 10 (2011) 670–690 brill.nl/coso

Sociology and Communism:

Coming to Terms with a Discipline’s Past

Christian Flecka) and Andreas Hessb)

a)
Department of Sociology, University of Graz, Austria
christian.fleck@uni-graz.at
b)
School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Ireland
a.hess@ucd.ie

Abstract
In this introduction we provide a brief overview over the various periods of the
sociological engagement with communism. We argue that the relationship has
often been an uneasy, in some cases even a highly questionable one. However, on
occasion the discipline also produced some decent research on the subject of com-
munism. We conclude that it is still a long way to a proper sociology of commu-
nism worthy of the name.

Keywords
sociology, communism, disciplinary history, Marxism, dissent

The relationship between communism and sociology was never an easy

one. Ardent worshipers of communism despised bourgeois scholarship
and held sociology responsible for pulling the wool over brave working
men’s eyes. In contrast, skeptical sociologists often disapproved of the
voluntarism of Bolshevik revolutionaries and condemned the pseudo-
scientific aspirations of Marxist-Leninist philosophy.
Putting aside the early history of communism from the days of the Com-
munist Manifesto, this issue of Comparative Sociology will concentrate on
and discuss the rise and fall of Soviet-type models of communism and how
they relate specifically to the academic field of sociology. We use the term
‘communism’ as standing for a deliberately created state and a planned
society, ruled by one party and suppressing the formation of opposite

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156913311X599016

 C. Fleck, A. Hess / Comparative Sociology 10 (2011) 670–690 671

parties or their functional equivalents. The term can also take on the mean-
ing of a worldwide social movement of members, organized in various
communist parties (often taking on other names such as ‘Workers Party’ or
‘Party of Labor’ or similar terms which signal an attachment to communist
ideals and aspirations) and maintaining an attachment to the Third or
Communist International.
Additionally, the label ‘communism’ can also be applied to an ideology
that was shared by sympathetic intellectuals in the West, often individuals
who never lived under communism but who nevertheless had some sym-
pathy with its ideas such as its politics and policies of enforced equality. A
fellow traveler attitude of that kind often included the practice of admiring
leaders such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot uncritically. To paint a more
comprehensive picture, we will also be sensitive to the observation that
communism caused a counter-movement of almost equal devotion and
passion, occasionally leading to hysterical anti-communist reaction.
We are restricting ourselves to the period roughly from 1917 (the Rus-
sian Revolution) to 1989/91 (the regime change starting in Poland, con-
tinuing with the since then iconographic ‘Fall of the Berlin Wall’ and the
political events which followed). However, the collapse of the Soviet Union
neither brought history to an end nor communism to a complete stop.
China, North Korea and Cuba are still under communist rule and in some
corners of the world communist or post-communist parties are still around,
holding on to some voting or vetoing power, not to mention the ongoing
attraction that communist ideals hold for certain (sub)populations and
voters – in both developing and developed countries.
It is indeed remarkable that more than twenty years after the revolutions
in Eastern Europe a sociology of communism, worthy of that name, is still
lacking. The present special issue of a journal which is devoted to com-
parative sociology can of course not fill this hole but our hope is to make a
contribution to a more comprehensive sociology of communism by offer-
ing a critical perspective, presenting specialized contributions and thereby
making inroads for what might one day become an important strand or
subfield in sociology.
While we cannot cover all aspects in our issue, we shall nevertheless
formulate some attempts to deal with communism as a subject. How
exactly can sociology contribute to an understanding of communism?
Sociologists could start, firstly, by breaking up the subject into parts.
672 C. Fleck, A. Hess / Comparative Sociology 10 (2011) 670–690

Communism stands for an ideology or a system of thought, something

that usually is the object of study in the sociology of knowledge and/or
intellectual history. By taking ideals and ideas seriously, sociologists can
discuss the various shortcomings of ideals of total equality when compared
to real-life conditions.
Secondly, communism was, and still is, a particular mode of governance
which should be investigated by political or historical sociologists, possibly
focusing more specifically on the role that modernization played in the
conceptualization and developmental role of those parties in power. How-
ever, communist parties were always a particular type of ‘total’ (Mauss
1954:76–7) political organization, and should therefore be analyzed
accordingly. But communism was often more than mere party organiza-
tion. It was also understood as a kind of orchestrated social movement
with a strong international appearance and with some specialized branches.
Interesting in this context are parts of the western peace movement, par-
ticularly those segments which were masterminded and orchestrated from
the offices of the Comintern, Cominform, and other Soviet-dominated
agencies (Laqueur and Hunter 1985; Liebermann 2000).
Thirdly, communist-governed states and their bureaucracies challenged
Western social sciences. From early onwards, particularly in the debate on
the possibility and advantages of a planned economy, communists chal-
lenged anti- and non-communist social scientists triggering debate about
the pros and cons of planning. However planning presupposes the collec-
tion of information. In this context, hypocrisy was never far away when it
came to methodology and measuring. After having first denounced West-
ern-style sociology and its methods as ‘bourgeois’, communist bureaucra-
cies were apparently happy to adopt and apply Western research techniques.
During the 1960s sociology became quite fashionable in Soviet-controlled
Europe; particular elements of Western sociology’s research techniques
were imported and incorporated into the communist countries’ various
research branches. However, these methods rarely made it into university
curricula. This example makes another pattern visible, namely that the
intellectual ‘exchange’ between Western sociology and social scientists in
communist countries was, for the most part, a one-way street.
Fourth, communism as an ideology also affected intellectual and aca-
demic debates in the West. Several cohorts of firm believers populated
universities, editorial committees and intellectual circles. First converting
 C. Fleck, A. Hess / Comparative Sociology 10 (2011) 670–690 673

to and then departing from communism became an enduring pattern in

most capitalist societies, and in some cases it was almost fashionable to do
so. On the other side of the iron curtain, former communist ideologists
sometimes abandoned their party affiliations and became dissidents. Some
of these dissidents voiced some self-criticism while others left their native
country to become firm anti-communists in the West. We should note
here the phenomenon that only very few refugee intellectuals remained
Marxists having left the communist orbit. Some sociological analyses of
ex-communist intellectual circles have been published, particularly after
1989, but examples of prolonged silence or how selective memories can be,
can also be encountered.

An Uneasy Relationship
If we focus on sociology in the more narrow and academic sense of the
field, we only find a handful of really outstanding contributions to the
sociology of communism. Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution sev-
eral European social scientists responded with commentaries and analyses.
For example, the German Sociological Association devoted its Third Con-
ference in 1922 to the topic “Das Wesen der Revolution” (The Nature of
Revolution, Verhandlungen 1923). Two well-known liberal sociologists,
both of somewhat nationalist orientation, tried to rise to the new commu-
nist challenge. The late Max Weber took issue with the Russian Revolu-
tions and how they fitted into the iron cage and bureaucracy scenario
(Weber 1995) while Ernst Troeltsch was preoccupied with communist
ideas and how they impacted on the Weimar Republic (Troeltsch 1994).
Emil Lederer, one of the outstanding social scientists in Weimar Germany,
published several articles on Bolshevism, the Russian Revolution and the
development of the Soviet Union (Lederer 1919); he contributed for
example to the 13th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica entries on
Communism and The Third (Communist) International (Lederer 1926a,
1926b). The polymath Pitirim A. Sorokin discussed Russian contributions
in his Contemporary Sociological Theories (1928) and published not only a
Sociology of Revolution (1925), where he referred to the Bolshevik Revolu-
tion, but also commented on the rise of communism in his magisterial
Social Mobility (1927). However, mainstream American sociology did not
develop any interest in communism and the Bolshevik revolution. The
674 C. Fleck, A. Hess / Comparative Sociology 10 (2011) 670–690

leading textbook of the interwar period, An Introduction to the Science of

Sociology (Park and Burgess 1933), discussed neither of them. Having said
that, some sociologically inspired muckrakers such as Thorstein Veblen in
some of his essays (Veblen 1948) and later in the 1930s Robert Lynd in his
Knowledge for what? discussed the issue of planned societies (Lynd was
under the spell of Roosevelt’s New Deal; see Lynd [1939] 1986).
Mainly due to geographical proximity, Europeans were more inclined to
come to terms with the communist entity. In 1938, Franz Borkenau, him-
self a former Communist Party member, published a study on The Com-
munist International (1938, later republished as World Communism: A
History of the Communist International ). Another high-ranking operative
of Germany’s CP and Comintern, Ruth Fischer, wrote, again after having
severed ties with the party, a highly informative study on Stalin and Ger-
man Communism: A Study of the Origins of the State Party (Fischer 1948).
Both authors made use of what we might consider as sociological analysis,
broadly speaking; however, both figures remained unacknowledged as
sociologists; instead they were mainly identified as historians and/or polit-
ical scientists. The political theorists Erich Voegelin outlined in Die poli-
tischen Religionen (Political Religions, Voegelin 1938) how communism
could be interpreted as a secularized version of a movement consisting of
true believers. He did so mainly by adopting Weberian concepts such as
the role of the charismatic leader.
The closest encounter between communists and Western social scien-
tists happened in 1931 when a Soviet delegation under the leadership of
Nicolai I. Bukharin participated in the Second International Congress of
the History of Science in London. Bukharin brought with him an interest-
ing statement, Science at the Crossroads ([1931] 1971), which was based on
the theories of then unknown Boris Hessen. Furthermore, in London Hes-
sen himself impressed the audience with his paper on the “Social and Eco-
nomic Roots of Newton’s Principia,” ([1931] 1971) which became
recognized as a fundamental contribution to the emerging new specialism
of the sociology of science. However, such convergence remained the
exception. Hessen himself was executed five years later by Stalinist security
police, presumably acting on orders from above. The year after Hessen’s
execution American Marxists founded the journal Science and Society where
some of the debates first presented at the London conference were docu-
mented and where the famous sociologist Robert K. Merton published
 C. Fleck, A. Hess / Comparative Sociology 10 (2011) 670–690 675

one of his earliest articles, “Science and the Economy of 17th-Century

England” (1939).
Otherwise sociologists tried to avoid entering debates with Soviet schol-
ars or Western Marxists. This does not mean that there weren’t any Marx-
ists around – to the contrary. As it turned out, most of them behaved
rather like ‘Barfly Bolsheviks’, i.e. they debated politics, and sometimes
even joined the Party, but they rarely engaged in a profoundly sociological
way with communism or their own inclinations towards radicalism. The
most telling case is that of the group around Max Horkheimer and the
Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung whose Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung
contains several articles on Soviet economy and in whose book series,
Schriften des Instituts für Sozialforschung, a well-argued study by Franz
Borkenau, The Transition from the Feudal to the Bourgeois World View
(1934), appeared. Only through reading the now published private corre-
spondence of the members of the Institute does one get the impression of
ideological proximity of this group of western social philosophers to some-
thing like Leninist revolution. At a later stage such radical political convic-
tions became part and parcel of the speculative ‘philosophy of history’
approach for which the first generation of the Frankfurt School became
famous, and for some of the School it was only a small step from such a
‘philosophy of history’ to predicting history scientifically and recommend-
ing tentatively which side one should sympathize with. This case of the
first generation Frankfurt School is only one prominent example of how
eschatological views of East and West can merge and how even supposedly
critical sociologists can sometimes turn into believers in redemptionist
Marxist politics. The Frankfurt School was by no means an exception;
there are many more examples.
Before the Second World War Marxist and Leninist inspired Weltan-
schauungen were not just limited to the selected few. Naïve speculation and
passionate reaction became part of a fashionable explanation of what was
then considered to be ‘successful fascism’. According to communist party
logic, fascism was the last and final stage of monopoly capitalism that only
a broad coalition of all well-intentioned people could fight. According to
the Leninist theory of organization only a new aspirational Popular Front
could pose a challenge to ‘successful fascism’. However, according to party
logic it needed to be led by enlightened cadres – individuals who, of course,
had to be communists. A derivative of this perspective was the Manichaean
676 C. Fleck, A. Hess / Comparative Sociology 10 (2011) 670–690

interpretation that no one could be allowed to be simply a bystander or

observer. In effect, this turned out to be the most sectarian of all commu-
nist policies. Refusing to join the Front became the same as supporting
fascists. The problem with such logic was that now everybody became a
proto-Fascist – even social democrats and liberals.
The onset of the Cold War didn’t really affect sociology as an academic
discipline that much; however, it had an effect on those sociologists who
saw themselves also as intellectuals. In contrast to what one might think,
the Manichaean worldview referred to above did actually not disappear; it
merely changed its instances. Now capitalism became identical with the
West and communism with the East. Nothing in between was to be
allowed. Since many sociologists – like many other left-of-center intellec-
tuals – didn’t hold capitalism in high esteem, distancing oneself from cap-
italism often meant acknowledging the expanding Soviet Empire as
superior and as posing a realistic alternative to Western capitalism. Several
leading sociologists tried to criticize such block-thinking, but only with
minor success. For example, in 1955 the French sociologist Raymond
Aron published a fierce condemnation of the French left, L’Opium des
intellectuels ([1955] 1957), which in argument resembled in many ways an
earlier 1950 collection of essays by former communist intellectuals, The
God that Failed (Crossman 1950). In the earlier collection none of the con-
tributors had been a professional sociologist, but as the example of Aron’s
publication attests, a similar argument had at least some impact on fellow
sociologists, mainly those who identified themselves as liberal intellectuals.
Between the start of the Cold War and the days of the counter-culture
movement of the 1960s the number of the ex-Communists increased. The
American sociologist Daniel Bell, himself a convinced anti-communist
who always maintained a strong liberal and social democrat outlook, epit-
omized the state of affairs in his 1960 book, The End of Ideology: On the
Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties ([1960] 2000). The title ‘end of
ideology’ became quite popular, but also was detached from the arguments
which Bell originally had presented earlier. One explanation for this odd
success lies perhaps in the rise of the prosperous West and, with it, the
decline of political activism and political engagement; the maturing of
generational and political cohorts and the lack of more distinguished polit-
ical agendas with which a younger generation could identify (such as the
Second World War and the fight against fascism) may also have had an
 C. Fleck, A. Hess / Comparative Sociology 10 (2011) 670–690 677

impact. The lack of proper alternatives went hand in hand with changes in
the academic and intellectual fields, that is, the decline of merely negative
philosophies of history and related pessimistic world views and the simul-
taneous rise of structural-functionalist explanations, particularly in sociol-
ogy. In an age of abundance it seemed that Marxian schemes of social
progress had lost their wider appeal while the Parsonian model of social
evolution argued convincingly that communist controlled Eastern Europe
was in many ways deficient when compared to the blossoming Western
capitalist countries of the period 1960–1973.
Insofar as communism appeared on the sociological radar screen at all,
it was restricted to studying and revealing some of the social consequences
of the (mainly American) anti-communist hysteria and witch hunts of the
1950s. It should be acknowledged that during that crucial period some
outstanding empirical social research was conducted, which helped to
diagnose the devastating consequences of McCarthyism. Samuel A.
Stouffer’s Communism, Conformity & Civil Liberties: A Cross Section of the
Nation Speaks its Mind (1955) showed, for example, that some strata of the
American population expressed less tolerance towards non-conformists
than others. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Wagner Thielens Jr.’s The Academic
Mind: Social Scientists in a Time of Crisis (1958) surveyed various college
and university faculties and showed that even those who had no reason to
be apprehensive seemed cautious, even anxious. These studies and others,
such as that of Marie Jahoda, stressed the ruinous consequences of wide-
spread, even popular, anti-intellectualism during the McCarthy years
(Jahoda and Cook 1952). Popular and high culture joined in the rebuff of
McCarthyism (e.g. Miller 1953).
Edward Shils (1954) went one step further than the previously men-
tioned studies by alleging that the famous Authoritarian Personality study
conducted by Theodor Adorno et al. (1950) had clearly failed to take the
existence of left authoritarianism into consideration. Adorno perceived
this as a vaguely veiled personal threat and decided to leave America before
the potentially harmful revelations appeared in print. His sense of threat
and particularly his preemptive exit seem now to have been somewhat
premature. Although surveillance by the FBI was directed towards left-
leaning and liberal sociologists, later documentation and research (Keen
1999) also shows what several contemporaries had already suspected,
namely that FBI agents were mostly unfit or intellectually simply incapable
678 C. Fleck, A. Hess / Comparative Sociology 10 (2011) 670–690

of putting information into the correct social and political context. Still,
the surveillance or the threat of it caused real and widespread anxiety and
apprehension.
During the 1950s only a few analyses of communist societies by West-
ern sociologists actually caught the attention of non-specialists. Analyzing
the Soviet Union and its satellites was then mainly the business of political
scientists who had practically turned into ‘Sovietologists’, a specialty which,
although well-funded, always remained on the fringes of academic scholar-
ship. Its main proponents were always regarded more as Cold War warriors
motivated by political agendas rather than committed to detached research.
However, a few sociological studies are worthwhile mentioning. In 1958,
with the help of both the Russian Institute at Columbia and the Russian
Research Center at Harvard University, emigrant scholar Herbert Marcuse
published a highly critical study, Soviet Marxism. The study aimed at eval-
uating “some main trends of Soviet Marxism in terms of an ‘immanent
critique,’ that is to say, it starts from the theoretical premises of Soviet
Marxism, develops their ideological and sociological consequences, and
reexamines the premises in the light of these consequences” (1958:1).
Marcuse used an approach very similar to the one Barrington Moore
(1950) proposed when he contrasted official statements with what was
then known about the conditions of everyday life in Russia under Leninist
rule. Moore’s later book, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
(1966) became a classic in the field of comparative and historical sociol-
ogy; in contrast to many other studies it was actually based on the extraor-
dinarily research which he had conducted at the Russian Center at
Harvard.
When the former high-ranking member of Yugoslavia’s nomenklatura,
Milovan Djilas, published The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist
System in 1957 very few Western social scientists took notice. Similarly,
Western sociologists remained remarkably silent about the topic of forced
labor and internment camps which formed part of the Gulag. They also
remained silent about the devastating consequences of Mao’s Great Leap
Forward with its devastating famine and the death of hundredth of thou-
sand Chinese people. Not only did social scientist remain largely silent,
they also remained stumm when their own disciples who became part of
the New Left discovered the class-cleansing ‘advantageous’ effects of Mao’s
Cultural Revolution. Once again, naïve Westerners traveled to China and
 C. Fleck, A. Hess / Comparative Sociology 10 (2011) 670–690 679

brought back eye-witness reports about the glory of the communist revo-
lutions much as visitors of the thirties had romanticized the Stalinist Soviet
Union. A decade earlier former American civil rights activist, NAACP
founder and trained sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois had already fallen under
that spell, as his travel reports, his biographies and a remarkable obituary
of Stalin and memories of encounters with Mao show (for a representative
selection see Du Bois 1995).
The emerging field of professional public opinion research that devel-
oped constantly and which became rather sophisticated and which, as a
consequence, flourished in the West, encountered at first serious obstacles
when researchers tried to apply the same methods to the study of commu-
nist societies, particularly when it came to the role of the public there.
Sociologist Alex Inkeles, who investigated Soviet mass media in 1950,
became immediately aware of the severe restrictions when he learned that
he had to use official data: “If we are to make effective progress in compre-
hending and dealing with the force represented by Soviet Communism,
we are under obligation to make the best of our available resources for
studying that phenomenon. Clearly, one would not seriously attempt to
state what the people of the U.S.S.R. are actually thinking on the basis of
official Soviet assertions on the subject. On the other hand, we have real
confidence in our scholarly studies on the Soviet economic and political
systems, although they are based almost entirely on Soviet sources. It is my
hope that this book will demonstrate that it is possible to achieve the same
degree of knowledge about and insight into a social phenomenon like the
system of mass communication (p. xiii).” The 1956 study of sociologists
Kracauer and Berkman, who filed a report for the Bureau of Applied Social
Research of Columbia University, tried to circumvent such problems by
relying on interviews that were conducted in some refugee camps in Europe
in 1950/51. Inkeles and Bauer followed three years later with an attempt
to study living conditions in the Soviet Union (1959). While both the
Columbia and the Harvard project used data from interviews with refu-
gees from the Eastern parts of Europe, conducted in refugee camps in Ger-
many, Inkeles and Bauer developed their ideas inside the larger conceptual
framework to ‘national character’ formation, comparing their results on the
Soviet Union with earlier and similar investigations on German character
traits. In stark contrast, Kracauer and Berkman (1956) painted an almost
ethnographic portrait of lived experiences in communist countries.
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Recent scholarship demonstrates that Communist regimes discovered

the usefulness of opinion poll techniques relatively early. In systems where
Orwell’s double-speak had become daily practice and one could never
totally be sure about real attitudes, for those in power it was essential to
know what people really thought. Logically then, Communist bureaucra-
cies established specialized divisions for public opinion research, in Poland
for example as early as 1958 (Voříšek 2009:359). A few years later, in
1965, Yugoslavia followed (p. 362). Even in the Soviet Union the Komso-
molskaya Pravda founded an Institute for Public Opinion Research (in
1960), which operated until 1967 (p. 338). Eastern Germany wasn’t too
far behind; in 1967 the Central Committee opened a similar institute to
produce classified studies (p. 346). Czechoslovakia reopened its Public
Opinion in 1967 (p. 363, 384) and in Hungary a similar attempt was
made. In all cases the public opinion pollsters were isolated from academic
sociology and functioned primarily as sources for the communist elite.
This device of secret public opinion research and limited party consump-
tion indicates clearly that whereas pure social science techniques traveled
easily across the Iron Curtain, Western ideas of the public and public con-
sumption did not. Concepts of, and assumptions about, public availabil-
ity, use and consumption tasted too much like capitalist ‘sweeties’;
consequentially, the communist nomenklatura never favored their wide-
spread use.
In 1956, after the crucial 20th Congress of the CPSU, de-Stalinization
began. East-West-relationships improved and scholarly exchanges and
encounters happened more frequently and continued over a sustained
period despite regular backlashes. Students from communist countries
received fellowships from the Ford Foundation and other institutions to
study abroad. Sociologists from the Soviet Union and Soviet-controlled
European countries joined the International Sociological Association
(ISA). Jan Szczepanski, a Polish sociologist, was elected ISA president from
1966 to 1970, and in 1970, for the first time, ISA’s World Congress of
Sociology took place in a communist country, in Varna, Bulgaria (Platt
1998). Despite such official links, critical analyses of communist societies
from those who lived in them continued to be produced mainly by outsid-
ers, dissidents or other nonconformists who often became victims of state
repression after their books appeared in print (and when we say ‘print’ here
we mean mainly foreign publishing houses). Maybe one great exception
 C. Fleck, A. Hess / Comparative Sociology 10 (2011) 670–690 681

was the so-called Budapest School, a network of social scientists and social
theorist that gathered first under the auspices of Budapest Academy and
that consisted mainly of disciples of the late Georg Lukács. Although a
lifelong committed communist, Lukács himself had voiced some serious
criticism that was certainly known to and circulated by his circle (Lukács
1987). Particularly in the 1970s and early 1980s the less austere environ-
ment of Hungarian ‘Gulasch’ Communism produced a number of critical
studies (for a representative sample of their work see Lukács, Heller et al.
1975).
However, by the mid-80s all official links with either the academy or the
Party had been severed, which produced an even more critical outlook of
‘actually existing socialism’. Particularly enlightening were the critical
observations of two dissidents, György Dalos (1982 and 1986) and Miklos
Haraszti (1975 and 1984). As happened with these two writers but also
with a good number of other Eastern European dissidents, the critical lit-
erature was bootlegged and sent back into the country of origin where it
became part of the Samizdat. Other Samizdat editions, such as translations
of Western sociological publications, served various underground study
groups. Sometimes Samizdat publications would become famous. In 1964
Jacek Kuroń and Karol Modzelewski published an Open Letter to the Party
(1972), appealing to the party and arguing for radical reform, such as abol-
ishing the system of party domination, for example. This critical pamphlet
was widely distributed and read underground. Furthermore, it had a mobi-
lizing effect when it became popular amongst students during the 1968
protest movement. Another example is that of Andrei Amalrik who became
well-known in the West for his prophetic essay Will the Soviet Union Sur-
vive Until 1984?, published in 1969 in Amsterdam, first in Russian and a
year later in German and English (1970). Amalrik had spent years in Sibe-
ria before publishing his devastating prognosis about the future of the
Soviet system. He was again imprisoned after its appearance. A third
prominent example is the publication of Intellectuals on the Road to Class
Power (1979), written by György Konrád and Iván Szelényi, both well
known in the Hungarian academic world. After the manuscript had been
published in the West both were arrested. Szelényi was expelled from Hun-
gary. Konrád remained in Budapest (later he would became one of the
leading voices of the opposition). Finally, there was the case of Rudolf
Bahro. Bahro became a famous GDR dissident when his manuscript The
682 C. Fleck, A. Hess / Comparative Sociology 10 (2011) 670–690

Alternative in Eastern Europe appeared in a Western publishing house in

1978. After his arrest and later release he was forced to emigrate to the
West. Originally an academic, he always showed a strong interest in poli-
tics and became well known in Western Germany for being one of the
founders of the Green Party.
After the implosion of communism a lot of funds were made available
to study the transitional period in various countries. This was in part to
compensate for past shortcomings of both Western and Eastern social sci-
ences. Germany was particularly interested in such research since it was the
only country which combined both systems. The so-called transformation
research by the Kommission für die Erforschung des sozialen und politischen
Wandels in den neuen Bundesländern (Commission for the analysis of social
and political change in the new Länder, Weidenfeld and Korte 1999) pro-
duced, with the benefit of hindsight and pretty much ‘after the fact’, almost
an entire library of sociological explanations as to why the system had been
close to collapse for a long time. More modest attempts by single authors
often offered better insights into the worldviews of sociologists working
under communist rule (Keen and Mucha 1994; Himmelstrand 2000).
Despite such well-intentioned attempts at late academic reconciliation,
the East and West continued to follow separate trajectories. While they
could no longer ignore each other, it became clear that mutual knowledge
had been deficient for years. Developments inside the small communities
of sociologists in communist countries remained ignored by Western
sociologists.
While a continuous stream of ex-patriots from communist countries
had arrived in the West, they had not always been welcomed. Some were
recognized by their fellows in the West as was the case with Leszek
Kołakowski – but often only after lengthy odysseys. After his expulsion
from Poland in 1968, Jürgen Habermas tried to get Kolakowski the vacant
Adorno chair. However, leftist students at Frankfurt protested successfully
against the recruitment of a critic of Marxism. After several visiting profes-
sorships in Canada and the U.S., Kołakowski finally became a Senior
Research Fellow at All Souls College in Oxford. He remained there until
his death in 2009. His major three-volume book Main Currents of Marx-
ism (1981) is a classic reference work. His compatriot from Poland, Zyg-
munt Bauman, who had been kicked out of the University of Warsaw the
same year as Kołakowski, followed a very different trajectory. Bauman
 C. Fleck, A. Hess / Comparative Sociology 10 (2011) 670–690 683

stuck very much to Marxist ideas even after he had become a professor of
sociology at the University of Leeds. During his later years he transformed
himself into a post-modern theoretician, which brought him tremendous
applause and celebratory acclaim from several cliques of adherents in cul-
tural studies and other branches of postmodern thinking. In 2007, when a
Polish-German historian disclosed Bauman’s past as an officer of the Kor-
pus Bezpieczeństwa Wewnętrznego (KBW, Internal Security Corps) he was,
to say the very least, extremely economical with the truth and in respond-
ing to the revelations. His admirers did not seem to care anyway. Having
become firm believers of the new prophet they were apparently indifferent
to Bauman’s participation in the communists’ oppression of their oppo-
nents in Poland after the Second World War.
The Bauman case is telling for several reasons. First, it comes as a sur-
prise that someone who argues on moral grounds kept silent about his own
involvement in Stalinist cleansing operations. Second, when seen in his-
torical context, Western double standards can sometimes be baffling in
both academic and intellectual circles. Just to illustrate a few examples:
Herbert Marcuse was once accused of having served as a CIA-agent due to
his service to the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) during WWII (Der
Spiegel, Nr. 27, 1969). Similarly, intellectuals who named and shamed
friends and colleagues during McCarthy hearings in the 1950s were dis-
credited by former friends and comrades. When it was revealed that the
Congress for Cultural Freedom was secretly financed by the CIA anyone
who had been affiliated with this anti-Communist movement but did not
care to know about its secret financial sources got into trouble and was
inquired about his or her misgivings. Finally, if we compare the handling
of the past of former Nazi party members, most of them having commit-
ting hate speech crimes at the most, the indifferent and nonchalant reac-
tions towards the Bauman revelations must strike any critical observer as
either involving double standards or as defending hypocrisy publicly.
Whereas Bauman probably was involved in arrests, deportations and
maybe even complicit with killings, so far most Western communist or
ex-communist intellectuals have revealed deviance of the “captive mind”
type only (Miłosz 1953). Even worse, up to now not one Western social
scientist has published a self-critical memoir of his or her Red past. Chang-
ing political and party affiliation seems to count for very little when com-
pared to changes in philosophical or theoretical outlook and orientation.
684 C. Fleck, A. Hess / Comparative Sociology 10 (2011) 670–690

Given all the culture of omnipresent self-references and sharing of this and
that with every Tom, Dick and Harry, the all-encompassing silence and
hypocritical stand about changing political affiliations and/or its relegation
to the private (i.e. must be kept secret and personal) sphere is worrisome,
particularly for social scientists whose profession it is to deal with such
attitudes in a critical way. Whatever happened to the much celebrated self-
reflexivity?

More Lessons from the Past

Returning finally to the tentative list of perspectives mentioned earlier in
this introduction we can now at least point towards some patterns which
an inspiring and critical sociology of communism could follow or pursue
further. It should not come as a real surprise to note that the most intensive
debates about contributions to sociology stemming from communists
happened to be in the field of sociological theory, particularly in the field
of so-called meta-theoretical reasoning or Weltanschauungen of social sci-
entists. From very early on Marxist theoreticians got some resonance in
academic sociology. Eduard Bernstein, Otto Bauer, Karl Korsch, Georg
Lukács, Karl Renner, not to mention Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
were accepted as discussion partners in the early days of sociology. Sociolo-
gists such as C. Wright Mills (1963), Tom Bottomore (1978) and Donald
Levine (1995) have devoted entire chapters to the Marxian tradition in
sociology. One of its more innovative thinkers, Antonio Gramsci, came
into sociology belatedly but continues to be held in high esteem even after
the high days of Marxism were over. Gramsci has recently and maybe
somewhat belatedly been assigned a seat beyond the 150 outstanding
thinkers in the tradition of the social sciences because of his enduring
“intellectual influence, visibility, and impact” (Smelser and Baltes
2001:xxxv). In the course of the 20th century, Marxism and critical thought
inspired by the Marxian legacy have become legitimate residents in the
intellectual tradition of sociology (Kaesler 1999).
Despite or maybe because of the absorption of Marxist thinking, socio-
logical forecasting failed with regard to the implosion of the communist
states. The social sciences’ ‘Black Friday’ (Klaus von Beyme) was maybe
more likely to happen because they perhaps simply did not try hard enough
to analyze the Soviet system as a fait social. Neither the type of domination
 C. Fleck, A. Hess / Comparative Sociology 10 (2011) 670–690 685

exhibited in communist countries, nor its bureaucratic face, nor its role as
a social movement has caught the systematic attention of sociologists.
Forced labor, terror and surveillance by the KGB, its extended network
brotherhood elsewhere, and the Gulag Archipelago were almost exclusively
dealt with by literary writers such as Arthur Koestler (1941), eye-witnesses
like Margarete Buber-Neumann (1949), Alexander Weissberg-Cybulski
(1951), Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1974), Nadeshda Mandelstam (1999),
Varlam Shalamov (1995), and Vasilij Grossman (2008). There was no
equal output of a sociological nature – sociology’s maxima culpa.
Maybe sociology is more short-sighted or historically increasingly
impoverished, or maybe the discipline was historically more a Western-
centered discipline than is usually acknowledged. For example, the actions of
communists in Western countries caught the attention of sociologists more
than did the crimes committed in the East. An outstanding example is still
Franz Borkenau’s eye-witness account of the Spanish Civil War, which
explicitly condemned the harsh Stalinist policies against syndicalists and
anarchists (1937). In the United States, Lewis Coser (together with literary
critic Irwin Howe) wrote a critical analysis of the history of the U.S. Amer-
ican CP (1957). In 1957, Karl A. Wittfogel, who like Borkenau had been
a party member himself, painted an even more comprehensive picture of
Soviet domination, referring to it now simply as ‘oriental despotism’.
In contrast to what we have described here as the limited sociological
views and accounts of communism, it seems other disciplines and histori-
cal accounts were better tuned in; also in some countries and national
debates these disciplines seemed to be doing better than others. Flawed as
it may have been, the totalitarianism debate in politics (Arendt 1951,
Friedrich and Brzezinski 1956; Fraenkel [1964] 1991), and the debate
about the nature of dictatorships in history (Furet 1999, Kershaw and
Lewin 1997, Kershaw 1998) at least raised the level of awareness. Sociol-
ogy, in contrast, seems a long way away and has maybe even a longer
way to go. Bizarre as it first may sound, the famous German Historian
Debate of the 1980s may turn out to be holding a few lessons for the
future. While a sociologically inspired philosopher, Jürgen Habermas,
started the debate, he had, apart from well-founded moral arguments, very
little to offer. There seemed to be some speculative thinking adequate to
deal with such extremes as National Socialism, mainly based on contribu-
tions from the first-generation Frankfurt School, but in the end Habermas
686 C. Fleck, A. Hess / Comparative Sociology 10 (2011) 670–690

did not mention one sociological contribution that dealt comprehensively

with the Shoah. At the same time Stalinism and Communism were liter-
ally crowed out by referring to the monstrous singularity of National
Socialism – a serious omission as it turned out in retrospect. Not that soci-
ology has tried harder since then. A few sociologically informed studies
have dealt with the final decades of communism (Zavslavsky 1982, Cohen
1985, Segbers 1989, von Beyme 1994) and the fall of the Berlin Wall and
the transition which followed it produced another wave (Joas and Kohli
1993; Offe 1996; Elster, Offe, and Preuss 1998; Eyal, Szelenyi, and Towns-
ley 1998), yet we still have a long way to go to achieve a sociology of com-
munism worthy of the name. Again somewhat late, some attempts have
been made to use the distinction between civil and uncivil society in the
context of the rising discontent and, in some cases, open resistance against
the late socialist state (Keane 1988; Goldfarb 1991; Cohen and Arato
1992; Margolina 1994, Isaac 1998; Alexander 1998; and Outhwaite and
Ray 2005), yet whether those neo-Tocquevillian conceptualizations will
also survive the long transition period from communism to some form of
democratic rule and market economy, nobody knows.

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