ABSTRACT
In East-Central Europe today they would have, and quickly, a new great transformation from state socialism, or better ‘real socialism’, to liberal democracy and a capitalist market economy. Such a transformation would be every bit as great as that original great transformation, described by Polanyi (1944), which gave rise to a market economy and liberal democracy, in that order, in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Many sociological commentators are disturbed by the excessively high expectations after 1989, among people, politicians and Western economic advisers, of what could be achieved quickly. Using a title that echoes the conservative, Burke, that self-styled radical liberal, Dahrendorf, has argued in his Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (1990) that Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary might get an initial agreement on a democratic constitution in six months, but would need six years before liberal economic reforms showed much benefit and sixty years before both a democratic constitutional order and the social framework of a market economy were safely rooted in a robust civil society. True, he soon backtracked from the rhetorical flourish of sixty years for a civil society-but only to two generations. What de Tocqueville called the art of association is only slowly perfected.
