THE MEANINGS OF 1989

American political theorist Jeffrey C. Isaac in this thoughtful article offers a critical interpretation of the prevailing, often contradictory, viewpoints regarding the revolutions of 1989 and the role of dissident notions of freedom and rights in the dismantling of the Leninist regimes. Inspired by Karl R.Popper’s critique of historicism, Isaac rejects monistic interpretations that assign one single meaning to these events and proposes a multifaceted approach that would recognize the plurality of significations associated with them. The most important element in his analysis is the effort to recuperate and deepen the vision of political life and action developed in the thinking and practice of East Central European dissent. In this respect, his approach is radically different from G.M.Tamás’s and Tony Judt’s visions of dissidents as naive dreamers, deprived of profound connections with the societies they claimed to speak for. Readers should notice Isaac’s plea for an open-minded, nondogmatic vision of democratic politics. Acknowledging the merits of liberalism, he argues that the legacy of what East European critical intellectuals used to call “antipolitics” should not be lightly dismissed. In other words, unlike those who herald the advent of liberal democracy as a nonproblematic accomplishment, Isaac thinks that the new ideas and styles of politics generated in the experience of dissent, including nonparliamentary forms of participation and the ethos of civil society, represent democratic possibilities relevant for the future of democracy in the “East” and the “West” * * * History, as an entirety, could exist only in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.