ABSTRACT
Indeed, both Western and communist students of the most recent period often all but reverse the positions of their colleagues working on earlier themes. Western academics, as this book has had occasion to observe, are assiduous in pointing out the self-interested motives which could underlie the rhetoric of past idealisms: the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the liberalism and nationalism of the nineteenth century. Marxist historians, on the other hand, are prepared to condone much human frailty in what they deem ultimately the progressive cause. In the modern period all this changes. It is Western writers who laud the struggles of antiregime elements, showing their movements the same undifferentiated benevolence their ancestors accorded nineteenth century Magyars and Poles; and it is communists who push forward sociological and historical issues, pointing to the revival of bourgeois and nationalist motifs in contemporary dissidence, the role of ambitious technocrats and the uncertain relationship of the intelligentsia and the workers.
