Paul Hollander: "If being an intellectual involves the possession of expertise and a strong ideological commitment, then it is obviously the intellectuals, or a large segment of them, who run the countries of Eastern Europe. This conception of the intelligentsia differs sharply from the wishful Western theorizing about how the rise of an apolitical technocracy with superior functional rationality might herald both internal liberalization and accommodation with the West, or else the peaceful convergence of the two types of society. Contrary to such hopes, Konrad and Szelenyi point out that in Eastern Europe “economic and technical decisions will always be primarily political decisions and . . . these political decisions will always be correlated with a unitary socialist ideology.”
"Thus the book reminds us that ideology still matters—a proposition which many Western politicians and social scientists have been incapable of taking seriously. It also provides a great deal of revealing detail about the operation of socialist bureaucracies which will disappoint those who believe that there is a better prospect for social equality under socialist one-party systems than under Western pluralistic ones. The authors show how socialist meritocracy, by combining technical skills with ideological commitment, actually provides a more enduring justification for inequality than the discredited values of individualism and the profit motive associated with capitalism."
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