Communist Systems and the ‘Iron Law of Pluralism’

It is now nearly twenty years since Daniel Bell despatched ten theories ‘in search of Soviet reality’. Each of these theories represented, ‘despite some shading or overlap,… a coherent judgement of Soviet behavior’. Considering them side by side, Bell thought, would make it easier to identify their respective merits and shortcomings; and it should also make clear which had ‘“stood up†in explaining events’, and which had not. Bell himself refrained from judgement on this point. In retrospect, however, it seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that none of the theories that Bell identified – nor indeed any of those that have joined them in more recent years – has yet come close to success. Rather, as the scholarly literature groans under the weight of a steadily-accumulating load of models and paradigms, each one more abstruse and more removed from reality than its predecessor, there must be many who would be inclined to agree with Alfred Hirschman that the continued search for conceptual innovation may well have become a positive ‘hindrance to understanding’.