When, in 1891, the German Social Democratic party was preparing the Erfurt Programme, some of the members urged that it ought to comprise political provisions for the transition from capitalism to socialism. Karl Kautsky, the chief party theoretician, rejected these requests as unjustified, claiming that the time for them was not ripe. What the Czechoslovak pluralist critics of the 1960s came to realize was that, when the time was ripe, socialism had very little to go on, since neither “revolutionary politics,” as taught by Lenin, nor “class struggle,” as portrayed by Marx, proved of much use in the fashioning of socialism as a civic order, as a space for citizenship.

It was this realization that prompted the socialist rethinking that I tried to sketch and reflect upon. Although the rethinking did translate into institutional steps being taken toward opening up communism as a political system, time was too short for these changes to result in the kind of reconstruction that a number of reformers had envisaged. Even so, the extent of what was set in train attests to sources of innovative thought that one understandably could assume to have dried up under things as they were. And it was not only the sheer volume of ideas that was so startling but also the intensity with which men and women from all walks of life took them up and spoke and wrote about them. There probably have been few periods in history in which ideas engaged so many minds in so short a time.