Aviezer Tucker—the author of The Philosophy and Politics of Czech Dissidence from Patocka to Havel (2000) and Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of Historiography (2004)—is one of those political theorists who understand the communist and post-communist political processes of East Central Europe the best. Yet, surprisingly, he uses neither these notions nor the concept of democracy in his recent book. Instead of referring to ideas and ideologies to describe political systems, he is investigating the everyday operations of the oppressive regimes themselves. Tucker returns to Hannah Arendt’s classic (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951), but further elaborates and extends her concept of totalitarianism by differentiating totalitarian from late totalitarian and post-totalitarian regimes. Instead of taking the optimistic concept of “post-communist democracies,” he carefully analyzes the legacies of totalitarianism, and writes about post-totalitarian regimes.

Unlike several historians and political scientists, Tucker states that totalitarianism in East Central Europe did not exclusively belong to the 1950s, but existed up until 1989. For him, totalitarianism dominated the eastern part of the European continent for half century. What Václav Havel and other dissidents called post-totalitarianism in the late 1970s and during the 1980s, for Tucker was still the era of late totalitarianism. Tucker thus reconnects the revolutionary and “mature” forms of totalitarianism by claiming that, despite the decline of ideology and the advance of elite change, the structure of the regime remained fundamentally the same. The well-argued conceptual innovation of “late totalitarianism” belongs to the remarkable novelties of the book. Students of fascism and communism have not been using this notion so far.

Tucker also separates late totalitarian systems from right-wing authoritarian regimes or military dictatorships. He rejects the wave approach of Samuel Huntington, an emblematic approach of transitology, by claiming that presenting transitions as “waves” is by no means a theory, only a metaphor. Moreover, as Tucker insists, it is a misleading metaphor because it puts authoritarian and late totalitarian regimes into the same basket, as if they were similar settings, to justify the universalist ambition of transitology. For him, the conflation of late totalitarianism with authoritarianism “to construct autocracy, a conceptual amalgam of all nondemocratic regimes, is too cumbersome” for any serious analytical study (p. 9).

This distinction helps in separating regimes that exercised extensive low-intensity oppression over the whole population (late totalitarianism) from regimes that exercised narrow but intensive oppression over a small, politically active section of the population (authoritarianism). Authoritarian regimes based their power on the military, while totalitarian regimes relied on the secret service. Authoritarian regimes separated their illegal action from the law, while totalitarian regimes created fake legislation and a legal profession that was fully politicized.

To make these conceptual distinctions explicit was just the first step in Tucker’s discussion of his central topic: the political theory of post-totalitarianism. For he believes that path-dependency, that is, the totalitarian legacy, fully shapes the development of post-totalitarian regimes. Not only does he separate post-totalitarian and post-authoritarian societies but he also rejects the overarching ambition of transition studies that aimed at explaning both types of transition with the same conceptual apparatus. He claims that the uniqueness of post-totalitarianism lies in the lack of structures of solidarity, in weak civil society, and in the shallow democratic political culture. Taken together, these factors hindered these regimes’ development to democracy.

As Tucker argues, in post-authoritarian regimes, transitions were relatively easier because the oppressive institutions of dictatorship could be separated from “healthy” ones, and the former ones could be kept under close control by the democratic forces. In post-totalitarian regimes, on the other hand, democratic forces were much weaker and unable to cope with the informal power and invisible networks of former secret service officers. The problem for Tucker is not so much whether the post-authoritarian transformations are single transitions while the East European ones are double (or triple) transitions, but the lack of agency in the latter case.

Tucker rejects the special importance attributed to elite pacts and roundtable talks in the post-totalitarian condition, as contrasted to the cases of Southern Europe and Latin America. As he notes, only Poland and Hungary completed their negotiated exit from late totalitarianism before the fall of the Berlin Wall. In these two countries the talks were centered on the question of what to do, while in cases which occurred after the collapse of the Wall, negotiators focused on how the changes had to be implemented. Indeed, these two late totalitarian cases (Poland, Hungary) resembled most the Spanish or Portuguese transitions, since these were the least totalitarian countries in East Central Europe. This phenomenon accidentally underlines the narrative of the transition school, which claimed that there was no negotiated exit possible from totalitarian countries. Negotiated transition requires the internal division of elites which cannot be tolerated in a classic totalitarian system. By the 1980s, Poland looked like a military regime, while Hungary was a sort of aging, non-ideological dictatorship. These countries fit less to Tucker’s statement of post-totalitarian peculiarity. But in all other cases, except East Germany, Tucker is right. Processes of post-totalitarian legislation were much weaker, slower than in any post-authoritarian setting, and they were controlled by a new power coalition of late totalitarian elites and their new friends coming from the former dissident circles. Tucker convincingly elaborates his point with detailed discussion of rough and shallow justice (lustration and retribution) in East-Central Europe.

Tucker does not define the changes of 1989 as revolutions because for him the concept of revolution includes the change of the elites. Since elite discontinuity rarely occurred, due to the survival of secret service networks, a power deal was made among the elite groups which led to post-totalitarianism rather than democracy.

In general, Tucker does not hide his reservations about the optimistic and universalist approaches of the transitology school (even if he does not refer to many of its exponents) and he rather favors the more skeptical, path-dependency and area-specific explanations of scholars as Kenneth Jowitt, Stephen Holmes, Jon Elster, Valerie Bunce, Michael McFaul and others. By rejecting the universalist approaches to social change, Tucker implicitly questions the major liberal narratives of the time, exemplified by Francis Fukuyama.

In defense of the universalist agenda, it is important to note that transformations sprung from the collapse of the Cold War global order without precipitating nuclear war. It is better to include former communists as participants in transition than to accept violent conflict. According to the conventional wisdom of the time, incomplete elite change was the price to pay for peaceful regime change. Transition theories celebrated the non-violent character of transformations from Chile through South Africa to Poland and, most importantly, the non-violent collapse of the Soviet Union. Transitology was widely seen as the procedural completion of universal progress towards a peaceful post-Cold War global setting. In this victorious atmosphere, the differences between post-totalitarian and post-authoritarian transitions seemed to be less significant. Tucker is right in recognizing that we were perhaps too quick to overlook the pre-transition differences which could not be eliminated afterwards. Yet, if one sticks to the path-dependency approach, one should pay at least slight attention to the pre-totalitarian legacies as well. But this was clearly beyond the scope of Tucker’s book.

Aviezer Tucker has written an amazingly rich book with countless sharp observations related to both contingent events and more general processes. He displays an insider’s knowledge in several aspects of post-totalitarianism and is not afraid taking the pain in correcting several false judgements, myths, and misbeliefs related to post-totalitarian politics (However, I found a factual mistake: József Antall was not a reformed communist leader). As it turns out by the end, this book is much more than an exercise in political philosophy; it is unusually insightful in offering and reinterpreting explanations in comparative sociology and historiography.