review published in Democratization 15 ( 1 ) : 184 - 214 2008 Communism and the Emergence of Democracy by Harald Wydra

Communism and the Emergence of Democracy examines communism and its demise through the prism of social theory and political thought. After setting out a critique of conventional approaches to post-communist democratization, Harald Wydra develops his arguments in four historical chapters reflecting on the Russian Revolution and Soviet communism; the beginnings of the Cold War, the East European dissident movement; and the collapse of communism. A final section explores alternative conceptions of 'democracy as meaning formation'. Much on democratization and the fall of communism, Wydra argues, simply bypasses the lived experience of those involved and the meanings they assigned to social change. In additional to conventional economic and institutional factors, Wydra argues, the staying power and sudden demise of Soviet-type communism must be explained in terms of 'political spirituality'. Even the most apparently rational-bureaucratic forms of rule, he suggests, rely on a Weberian charismatic quality or 'social magic' rooted in essentially religious, mythic appeals, whether overt or secularized. Lacking stable constitutional forms, Communism was a militant civil religion permanently undermined by contradiction between the utopian myth of a unified People and a need to seek out internal enemies to maintain a perpetual state of emergency.