ABSTRACT
The chief contribution to theorizing the phenomenon of post-totalitarianism made by the Public Choice perspective in its recognition that many interests will be injured in the transition period, which may be expected to organize collusively to resist and thwart market reform. In most of the emergent post-Communist countries, it is inherently unlikely that the reconstruction of civil society can be conducted under the auspices of a democratic regime on the Western model. For the most part, Western liberal academia has responded to the collapse of Communist totalitarianism by proposing market reforms that stop well short of the necessary precondition of a viable civil society, namely, private property in most productive assets. For the task of those emerging from the darkness of totalitarianism is to forge a new social contract among themselves, in virtue of which both totalitarian enslavement and the servile state of the contemporary Western democracies are transcended.
