Democracy and Human Rights

Abstract

Communist states are widely known for their economic and social achievements such as their generally high rates of economic growth, their low levels of unemployment and inflation, their virtual elimination of illiteracy and their comprehensive provision of health care. There are few, however, who would be inclined to argue that they have made a positive contribution of the same kind to the field of politics, or to the enlargement of human liberty in particular. It had been supposed by Marx that, broadly speaking, once capitalism — the last of the class-divided and exploitative societies -had been abolished, there would be no more need for a separate sphere of political administration, and the state (in Engels’s celebrated phrase) would ‘wither away’ or ‘die out’ (aussterben). In the communist states, however, there has been little sign of a process of this kind (some have unkindly suggested that the only thing that has withered away is the idea that the state should wither away). The communist states, on the contrary, have generally been large, powerful and authoritarian institutions, in which the rights and liberties of the citizen, at least in Western terms, have been systematically repressed; they are generally regarded, not as having inaugurated a new era of freedom, but as having added a new chapter to the history of dictatorship.