ABSTRACT
The independent left everywhere in the world has been in a state of moral paralysis at least since 1917. The commanding personality of Lenin and the unanswerable fact of the Russian Revolution gave Western radicalism a fatal complex of inferiority. Lenin’s policy came in part from his rooted mistrust of gradualism — his belief that it was an elaborate decoy by which the capitalists would dissipate the revolutionary energy of the masses. Stalin added the perception that, if gradualism were to work, it would destroy the pretensions of the Soviet ruling class—and consequently it must not be permitted to work. If the distinguishing moral commitment of the new radicalism is its faith in freedom and the unconditional rejection of totalitarianism, the distinguishing political commitment is its belief in the limited state. The consequences of the unlimited state are so fatal to individual freedom and dignity that the new radicalism has no choice but to work with the limited state.
