ABSTRACT
The Eastern and Central European dissidents were ambivalent about Hannah Arendt. Arendt’s thoughts – circulated in the underground press – were a dynamite that detonated the construction of the totalitarian order. Arendt was impatient with Eastern European “tribal nationalism”, which partly stemmed from her conviction of the deeply rooted, dark, obscurantism of the region. Arendt’s favourite examples of the constitutio libertatis were the American Revolution, the Paris Commune of 1871, and the French Resistance to Hitler in the Second World War. A truly liberating revolutionary process would be driven by persuasion, contestation and compromise: the art of Sophrosyne. The sovietized societies were the antithesis of the dialogic strategy: narcissistically wallowing in their wounds, ridden with bigotry and prone to nationalist and anti-Semitic excesses.
