Although the literature on postcommunist transformation is voluminous, scholars continue to debate the character and significance of these transitions. In his book, Harald Wydra adds new fuel to these debates, broadly dismissing what he calls “positivist” approaches or “deterministic accounts” of the collapse of communism (p. 3), and proposing in their stead the use of “political anthropology” as an “experiential” tool for analyzing the twentieth-century history of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Unlike the many political scientists who focus on the institutional foundations of communism and its collapse, Wydra views the entire communist experience as a politics of symbolization and the emergence of democracy as a process of creating and instituting new meanings and understandings. His attempt at synthesizing various frameworks of critical social theory and putting them into a broad historical account of the rise and fall of communism is ambitious and impressive. At the same time, many of his book's central arguments are controversial and questionable.

Wydra criticizes theories of “totalitarianism” for their lack of historical perspective. He also argues that in the literature on transitions, there is often a “democratic determinism” that “reproduces the determinist historicist account of the concept of transition in Marx's philosophy of history” (p. 88), including some of its most unfortunate teleological features. However, his review of the literature on the subject is rather selective. Indeed, he largely ignores or misinterprets many of the most important insights presented by recent studies of postcommunist regime change by such authors as Philippe Schmitter and Terry Karl, Valerie Bunce, Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, Herbert Kitschelt, and Stephen Fish. This is in large part because Wydra denies the very logic of causality in social scientific explanation. Instead, he presents an interpretivist view of the history and politics of the region as an alternative to the very paradigm of causal inference in the study of politics. While this interpretivist move might be welcomed by many scholars (and rejected by many others), its implementation in this book is rather imperfect.

Wydra's major thesis is very simple: The communist regime imposed by the Bolsheviks in Russia and then brought to Eastern Europe failed to produce a self-enforcing political and social order, and traumatized the identities and everyday lives of people across the region. These developments led to multiple instances of resistance, ranging from open revolts and uprisings (such as the 1956 revolution in Hungary or the 1968 “Prague spring”) to a more diffuse rejection of communist symbols and ideology on the level of mass beliefs and behavior. Thus, the communist symbolic politics gradually eroded over time, and new symbols and meanings evolved from underground and at last acquired influence and became mainstream during the collapse of communism in 1989–91.

While it is hard to object such a general account, there are no grounds to say that Wydra's “new” interpretation of these developments is a viable alternative to the “positivist” accounts, much less a superior explanation. Indeed, his assertion that his interpretation offers a superior account leads to multiple confusions in this lengthy book. The first confusion relates to general conceptualization and theoretical rigor. While each chapter begins by invoking general concepts from such social theorists such as Max Weber, Hannah Arendt, Paul Ricoeur, and Erich Voegelin, and so on, Wydra never really explicates these concepts or explains how they relate to one another. As a result, while he discusses many ideas, he fails to apply them as analytical instruments, failing to build a coherent interpretive framework capable of replacing widely criticized “positivist” approaches. Second, although he claims that his interpretation of the history of the region represents thick description and “political anthropology,” in fact the empirical analysis provided in the book is based not upon social history of communism but rather upon textbook-like accounts of major figures, such as Lenin, Stalin, and Tito, or events such as the Great Terror or World War II. Ordinary people and their everyday experiences under communism (which should lie at the heart of his analysis) appear only rather occasionally. It is thus unclear why the verbose historical narrative presented in the book is regarded as anthropology. Finally, even Wydra's treatment of what he considers “critical events” demonstrates his limited knowledge of the history of the region. For example, he argues that Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost was nothing but “constitutional guarantees of basic human and civil rights,” and that the central problem of perestroika was the transformation of economic order and property rights (p. 190). Here and elsewhere, Wydra grossly oversimplifies complex connections.

Yet the search for new approaches to the study of communism and its collapse, and the use of social theory to ground such approaches, are important efforts, and in advancing them, Communism and the Emergence of Democracy should be welcomed. At the same time, the book suffers from its identification with the logic of a “clash of academic civilizations,” counterposing mainstream positivist political science and Wydra's own interpretivist view despite the fact that these different approaches are not mutually exclusive. For example, the politics of identity—which actually lies at the heart of the book—can usefully be analyzed through the lenses of the constructivist paradigm widely used in studies of nationalism and international relations, which successfully combines both positivist and anthropological perspectives. In the end, building bridges between different scholarly understandings, rather than presenting overstated rebuttals of major approaches and literatures, is a sounder and more fruitful way to contribute to the development of contemporary political science.