ABSTRACT
The idea of the ‘self-limiting revolution’ represents one of the major contributions of recent East European thought and action to political philosophy.1 And yet from the outset, from the times of the first Solidarity, this idea was scornfully rejected by would-be radical revolutionaries, largely but not exclusively from the nationalist right. Of course, as long as the geopolitical reasons for strategic self-limitation, rooted in an intact Soviet imperium, continued to apply, it was not fully apparent that a minority of intellectuals and movement militants also promoted a self-limiting radicalism on historical and normative grounds. Given the strategic reasons, there was no apparent need to argue fully a case that would have contributed to ideological divisions within the opposition-divisions that were pragmatically unnecessary.
