The head of a kindergarten is accredited by his or her qualifications to know what is in the best interest of his or her charges. Whether or not Communist party leaders and government functionaries generally have the interest of their country, as they see it, at heart, many of the pluralist critics in Czechoslovakia were by no means certain that they always knew best what that interest was. Above all, they questioned whether the principle itself was the kind on which to base the running of a democratic state, that is, a state in which the adult members were to be treated as citizens. The outcome of this questioning was a search for new bases of political legitimation; the paternalist principle of “teacher knows best” had ceased to meet the legitimating requirements of socialism as a civic order, once this order claimed for itself the status of a democracy.

The chief concern of this chapter and the following two chapters is in essence therefore the question of civic legitimation under socialism. Toward this end they will comment on the language and images that have commonly been pressed into service as a way of legitimating socialism politically. Although, on the face of it, these images have little in common with the idea of a kindergarten, they share with it a profound failure to come to terms with political reality and the reality of politics.