ABSTRACT
This chapter presents arguments that attribute the authoritarian outcome of Lenin's activities to an insufficiency of radicalism at the core of his thought, in his conception of the economic. Weber's definition of the tendencies of bureaucracies to escape and nullify democratic control proved an indispensable and influential source for subsequent theories of the contemporary state. The Weberian model cannot describe the state regime of the Soviet Union. The chapter discusses two sets of themes that our revolutionaries appear to possess in common. First, that involved in Jefferson's concept of 'self-evidence' and the Marxian concept of its own status as a science; second, the possible congruences between Lenin's concept of the commune-state and the American concept of 'public happiness'. It is common in critiques of the Soviet state to attribute its deficiencies to the authoritarian structure of the Bolshevik party.
