The Legacy of Robert C. Tucker: Marxism, Sovietology, Political Science
an article by Vladimir Tismăneanu / Contributors.ro
On Sunday, the Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies concluded in Washington. During this elite scientific reunion, a debate dedicated to the legacy of a giant of Sovietology and Marxology in the last 50 years, Professor Robert C. Tucker, took place on Friday, 18 November. I was very pleased to announce the publishing of the late thinker’s classical work, “Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx”, within the “Constellations” Collection of Curtea Veche Publishing House, with the support of the Institute for the Investigation of Communist Crimes and the Memory of the Romanian Exile. Benefiting from the remarkable translation of Emanuel-Nicolae Dobrei, Tucker’s volume remains, five decades since its release, a landmark for all those who wish to understand the essence of Karl Marx’s philosophy, the issue of present-day alienation, and the relationship between myth, utopia and revolution within the Marxist doctrine. For Tucker, young Marx was a Hegelian obsessed with the sense of history, living by the belief that he had found Archimede’s point for a definitive explanation of the mystery of human unhappiness. The American thinker quoted Marx himself in order to demystify the hubris of Marxist radicalism, stating that the philosopher, as an alienated part of this world, perceives himself as its unit of measure.
I had the chance to take part in this discussion, together with Bogdan Cristian Iacob, and to offer Evgeniia Tucker, the widow of the great professor, a copy of the Romanian edition. I had also the chance to write for Contributors.ro and 22 magazine, as well as to make posts on my blog with reference to the work of Robert C. Tucker. I will start this article by mentioning interventions in debates. Robert English, Tucker’s son-in-law, professor at the University of Southern California, told me that, from his point of view, the translation of the volume into Romanian is as important as the session dedicated to the author. The debate was moderated by Professor Stephen Cohen (New York University), the biographer of Nikolai Bukharin and the main disciple of the author of “Soviet Political Mind”. To Cohen, who had been teaching with Tucker for 30 years, he was “the most important Western specialist in Russian problems of our times”. Prof. Cohen prompted young researchers or students not to forget that “their present projects are built on their predecessors’ work”. “Robert Tucker was first and foremost an intellectual”, Cohen said. Tucker started as a PhD candidate in Philosophy, at Harvard, where he defended a brilliant thesis, and he used his philosophical preparation to eschew ideological traps. When he started the comprehensive project of Stalin’s biography, which concluded with two volumes, Tucker was not only explaining a personality and a system, but he was also re-evaluating his experience in the Stalinist epoch as well as Evgeniia’s. The author’s biography movingly intersected with that of his work.
Professor Tucker was close to Adlai Stevenson, the Democrat candidate in the presidential elections of 1956. He counselled and accompanied him during his visit to Moscow. Tucker participated in the meeting between Stevenson and Khrushchev. I am mentioning this significant detail, for there are people who deem that political scientists should not have the right to establish such relationships with political figures. Stephen Cohen also remembered how Tucker integrated decisive events of the Soviet political life within his lectures. In October 1961, the professor gave up the announced structure of his course syllabus in order to discuss the documents of the 22nd Congress of the CP of the USSR, an event which triggered the second wave of Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation.
William Taubman, Professor at Amherst College and author of the monumental biography of Nikita Khrushchev, described Tucker as one of the most important representatives of the prosopographical trend in interpreting political phenomena, stating that “Stalin’s biography was in fact a full-fledged history of the Soviet Union and of Bolshevism”. Taubman emphasised the importance of the psychological dimension in analysing political personalities. He insisted on the relevance and the fertility of the psycho-biographical approach. Taubman said that “Robert Tucker restored the concept of dictator to the modern interpretation of totalitarianism”, noticing that the predominant definition of the Cold War years underestimated this element.
Michael Kraus, Professor at Middlebury College and Tucker’s former doctoral student, recounted fascinating moments of the friendship between Tucker and the patriarch of Russian studies in the USA, the famous diplomat and scholar George F. Kennan. In 1946, Kennan was number two at the US Embassy in Moscow, while Tucker was a diplomatic attaché. He helped Kennan with the drafting of the “Long Telegram”, sent to the State Department and transformed, in 1947, into the famous article signed “Mr. X” published in “Foreign Affairs”. This document was the foundation of the “containment” doctrine in the USA’s foreign policy. Tucker and Kennan remained close friends in the next decades (They both lived in the university town of Princeton).
I am mentioning here the recent release of George Kennan’s biography, due to John Lewis Gaddis, reviewed two weeks ago as cover story in “New York Times Book Review” by Henry Kissinger. Kraus defined Tucker as the “follower of a polymorphous methodology” and insisted on the fact that, from the perspective of this distinguished Sovietologist, the personality of the leader was the key to interpreting totalitarianism. Kraus moreover stated that “Stalinism within Soviet foreign affairs was the equivalent of the Cold War”.
For Tucker’s seminars, at Princeton, students had to read books of History, Sociology, Political Science, Philosophy, Anthropology and Psychology, which were essential, in the Professor’s opinion, in order to discover the meaning of the concept of political culture. Tucker’s famous article on dictators and totalitarianism was delivered as inaugural lecture at the National Conference of the American Psychological Association, a singular case when a non-psychologist was invited to deliver a speech of this kind.
During my intervention, I emphasised the legacy in comparative analysis of Tucker’s work for the field of East European Studies. I mentioned my correspondence with this illustrious thinker and the fact that he offered me a warm text of support, which was published on the back cover of my volume “Stalinism for All Seasons. A Political History of Romanian Communism” (University of California Press, 2003). I insisted on the fact that ”Philosophy and Myth”, a volume published in 1961, was to a great extent a work which related to the main trends of the critical Marxology of those years, and therefore could be considered part of Marxist revisionism within the Soviet Bloc (Kolakowski, Kosik, the School of Budapest, the Praxis Group). This was an impressive case of philosophical synchronism from the West to the East. Tucker’s Marx-Engels Reader, published by Norton Publishing House, remains unparalelled for its structure, content and notes.
I concluded by announcing that my book, “The Devil in History. Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the 20th Century” (to be published in 2012 by University of California Press), is dedicated to the memory of Leszek Kolakowski, Tony Judt, and Robert C. Tucker, three thinkers who convincingly demonstrated their intellectual responsibility in the past century.