Aviezer Tucker ambitiously offers a “political theory of post-totalitarianism.” Despite the normatively loaded and analytical baggage associated with term “totalitarianism” he doggedly defends his terminological choice, narrowing the meaning application to a state where there is “only a single elite with no competition [and] total control over stratification, entrance to the elite” (p. 7). He takes aim at the “transitology” theorists as partisan optimists who “presumed that democratic consolidation is destiny”—an approach more aspirational than analytical. Tucker, following Ken Jowitt, Valerie Bunce and others, focuses on the legacies of the “forcibly homogenizing” Soviet model as generating path dependencies that, more than 25 years since the fall of communism, are in desperate need of theorization and comparison. Tucker does what contemporary political theorists often ignore: engagement in the recent past in a rigorous, structured and yet not detached manner, attentive to both peril and possibility while addressing first order questions, such as justice and the right ordering of society.

Regime change offered the former elite the opportunity to align interests with rights–as their relative negative (and naked) liberties were always at risk of arbitrary retraction. Such privilege was effectively translated by privatization into ownership and influence. Moreover, constitutional enshrinement of citizenship rights of representation, association, and expression provided no automatic or easy access to the design processes of the new order. This Tucker explains in his chapters on rough justice, retribution, and rectification.

Tucker argues that post-totalitarian justice was scarce, inaccurate, shallow, and, in his terms, rough: necessarily so given the costs and the procedural challenges involved. The reasons why make for depressing reading and reinforce his argument about the impact of Soviet legacies. Judges used to see themselves as civil servants, rather than guardians of their own independence; “reformed” systems remain overburdened with bureaucracy and underfunded, causing delay. Woefully incomplete legal training with scant attention to interpretation and critical thinking was combined with obvious economic motivation to specialize in privatization, restitution, and corporate representation. Only in former East Germany could post-totalitarian justice be deeper and more accurate: after all, West German taxpayers fielded the bill. Various forms of lustration only sloppily met the requirement of retribution, and in the end, historians were more often employed than lawyers, spending their careers in the blame game. As Tucker points out, they are certainly cheaper in the short term.

Given the electoral success of the regional amalgam of right-wing, illiberal, nationalist, and populist parties, historical output has and continues to be mobilized and manipulated in the service of the politics of the present. Meanwhile, no theory of justice can produce fully satisfactory rectification to property theft, let alone crimes involving loss of life, livelihood, imprisonment, or forced labor and their multigenerational consequences on a much wider scale than authoritarian regimes (a generalization surely debatable, given the many and varied cases on both the “authoritarian” and “totalitarian” sides of the nasty government ledger). On privatization, the argument is stronger; every privatization scheme produced outcomes that were zero-sum or negative-sum, resulting in incentive structures to asset-strip, and either concentrate or export capital abroad (or both). Not even a world of cash and a legal culture steeped in procedural fairness would have resolved inherent paradoxes. There were too many winners and losers, all within the larger context of the globalizing logic of capitalism and elite attraction to the neoliberal dictates of the Washington consensus from the 1990s onward. In the end, a major distinguishing feature—both in theory and in practice—for Tucker’s distinction between post-authoritarian and post-totalitarian regimes is the broader (numerically, spatially, temporally) scope of the task involved. Hence, his continual descriptor of choice—rough justice.

The author is to be applauded for the historic sweep of this profoundly interdisciplinary effort, drawing upon, inter alia, democratic, rational choice, and legal rights theories, political economy, and of course political and moral philosophy. His work is rich in literary and cultural allusion, persuasive force, and sidebar humor (especially in the footnotes). One of his great strengths is the systematic effort to situate his theory in broader theories of justice, both general (consequentialist versus deontological) and specific (with respect to property rights, for example). Area studies scholars are not, by habit or training, steeped in political theory, and making sense of Tucker’s argument, no matter how one might dispute his evidence or examples, will be an object lesson for many. That can only be a good thing. In a world of major expertise in minor fields and increasingly narrow specialization in micro history, few scholars are brave or crazy enough to undertake such a project. With practical reason: big history and big theory open one to critique from countless angles regarding what has or has not been covered, or in sufficient depth or accuracy. I suspect that will be the case here too.

Tucker’s analysis is most cogent and compelling in discussing the cases he knows best, especially the Czech Republic. His prose tends to overreach with dramatic flourish. Moreover, the argument stands on thinner ground when he strays from the main effort to examine the “lure of totalitarianism” for public intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida, and Slavoj Žižek. There’s plenty to critique in all three, yet his characterization borders on caricature. He fails to engage them on their own turf, so to speak, within the broader perspectives, debates, and vocabularies within which their work forms a part. The chapter distracts. Finally, although I would like to agree that only dissidents can save us, maybe the object lesson is not to put so much faith in specific individuals. After all, Tucker certainly harbors suspicion of the recurring trahison des clercs, as the penultimate chapter makes clear. Although philosophers and engaged citizens alike should argue the advantages of speaking truth to power, it is the essential space independent from the state—civil society—that both makes possible and is constituted by dissent, and that must be safeguarded above all.