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Habits of the Heart: Eastern Europe and the Possibility of Democracy
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19785 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1991 |
7,266 Words |
| Author
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Stjepan G. Mestrovic
Stjepan G. Mestrovic is a professor of sociology at Texas A &
M University. His latest book is The Coming Fin de Siecle,
Rutledge, London, 1991. |
Many distinguished sociologists have followed Alexis de Tocqueville's line of reasoning in Democracy in America that each nation's experiment in democracy must be unique to some extent, because it is based on what he called "the habits of the heart" of a people--even though Tocqueville also claimed that some sort of democracy is the inevitable end point for all humanity as it evolves. Emile Durkehim, David Riesman, Robert N. Bellah, Erich Fromm, and Daniel Bell, among others, have followed in the wake of these basic, intriguing assertion. They have referred to Tocqueville's "habits of the heart" as social character, culture, collective representations, or other equivalents, but essentially, they agree with him that (1) democracy, in general, is the eventual, "final" stage of human development; (2) there exist many paths to democracy and many varieties of it; and (3) each people's virtues, which make democracy possible, are also related to each people's vices. In the American case, these vices include anomie, narcissism, and superficiality--traits analyzed at great length by some of the authors already mentioned, among many others.
What about democracy in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? What of these nations' social character and "habits of the heart," and how do these relate to the seemingly new Slavic experiment in democracy? These questions touch on vast controversies, of course, so that the present essay is not intended to be anything but an outline that may serve as the basis for further discussion and elaboration. Nevertheless, the problem at hand is intellectually manageable.
Dinko Tomasic has already addressed the essential problem that concerns us in his Personality and Culture in Eastern European Politics (1948) and The Impact of Russian Culture on Soviet Communism (1953). He and other Slavic authors writing in this vein use Yugoslavia as the vehicle for discussion, even though they make it clear that their intentions are to discuss the commonalties that pertain to Slavic culture in all of Eastern Europe, including portions of Russia. I agree with Tomasic in this regard, despite the fact that notable differences among various Slavic nations exist. The problem is not essentially different from Tocqueville's wide-ranging discussion of American "habits of the heart" despite his admission that these habits vary regionally to some extent.
There is little doubt that the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in recent years is one of the most significant events of the twentieth century. Despite this fact, Western scholarly and popular presses have been reluctant to publish anything on the subject that is not
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