The collapse of socialist regimes constitutes the defeat of the leading form of radicalism in this century. Radical socialist ideology in the West was parasitic on the survival and apparent success, at least in some dimensions, of what was called “really existing socialism, ” the Soviet-type system. The collapse of the system has exposed the fact that it never really succeeded in serving any but a narrow power elite in those societies. The long-run effect of this exposure, I believe, will be the extinction of the major ideological force of our time.

For many commentators, the end of socialism represents simply a victory for “the West, ” for a conservatism that declares the existing systems of Western “democratic-capitalist” states, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan, to be the best possible political- economic arrangement. For me, on the contrary, the end of socialism is an opportunity to reconsider the nonsocialist form of radicalism that was supplanted by the socialist episode, radical liberalism.

By “radical liberalism” I mean liberalism in its classical European sense, the ideology of the American and other “bourgeois” revolutions that held the oppositional high ground before the rise of socialism. We should recall that the original “left, ” the radicals of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, were the French, English, and American liberals.